- The Guardian
- Issue #2187
Here’s a May Day riddle for you. What’s dead, but still kicking goals? The answer is not your favourite football team, if you follow one that just limps through the season. It’s unions. They’re the largest united expressions of the organised working class. Unions kick goals for workers every day. If you do any sort of work for pay, unions are helping you personally right now. Unions are written off and ignored with the monotonous regularity by most Australian media.
Union membership is way less than it used to be, but unions still have numbers our hollowed-out political parties would kill for.
Unions are essential for keeping conditions Australians take for granted. When past union triumphs are mentioned, it’s tempting to think they’re all in the past. Tempting, but wrong. Good conditions like pay, holidays, overtime, safety at work don’t keep themselves. Employers flout these things all the time, and are pulled up, not by the Australian government, but by union members and organisers. Even conditions like weekends and overtime that we think of as part of the furniture of daily life are constantly chipped away at by employers and business lobbies. Just look at the recent spate of wage theft cases – from George Calombaris to the nation’s universities.
Unions kick goals on wages and conditions all the time. There’s also constant union action on safety at work – there’s no point getting decent wages if you don’t come back from work alive, or if your work injures you and scars your home life. It’s unions that put in the hard yards on workplace safety, and employers and their lobbyists that push back on that safety under the guise of opposing ‘red tape’ or ‘overregulation.’
Unions also make Australia more democratic, by fighting for the interests of working people. Without unions, we live in a world in which we can vote for who goes to parliament once every three or so years, then go home, and get up to go to a job where the boss can do whatever they like to us. Unions push for what matters to the majority of Australians in real time, every day.
None of this means you just join and all will be well. Unions can have problems, like any organisations. They can be more or less democratic. Some union leaderships take advantage of an alienated membership and discourage member involvement in union affairs, handing down pay deals without involving members. Some unions seem captured by Labor Party careerists, who care more about getting a safe seat than in making their union effective for members’ interests.
Unions are still feeling the after effects of the 1983-1996 Accord, a class-collaborationist deal that the union movement made with a Labor government. The Accord had benefits, but also barred unions from actively seeking wage gains from employers, and disenfranchised union members. Class collaboration doesn’t work because workers and employers have opposing interests.
So, just as the safety and wage conditions we have can’t be taken for granted, quality unions have to be fought for. This paper is proud to report on union wins. We’re also proud to report on grass-roots groups that work hard to make unions more democratic and effective for workers’ interests.
This May Day, make a May Day resolution to get into your union. Show up! Every extra member makes a union more effective, and member efforts can make a union what it should be – a fighting force for the working class.
