Australian Financial Review 20.09.03
Knock, knock
Marcus Priest
How unions are getting attention
By taking a page out of the Amway training manual, some unions are seeing membership go through the roof.
It is very rare for workers at the dusty mining camps in outback Queensland to see any unfamiliar faces at the bus stop to the mine site first thing in the morning. So back in May the stranger stood out. The unexpected visitor turned out to be a union official trying to sign up new members.
“You normally know if they are a worker because they are in fluoro orange with fluorescent stripes for mining, but Bernie was just there in his blue CFMFU shirt.” said Coppabella mining worker Fiona O’Brien.
O’Brien and her mates work for mining contractor, Roche Mining, which operates Coppabella coal mine in North Queensland for Macarthur Coal.
Like many contracting companies, union membership at Roche was low — below 10 per cent — and O’Brien was initially hostile to the approaches by Bernie Farrelly from the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.
“I was a little bit rude to him,” admits O’Brien. I said ‘Look I’m not interested in the union’”.
But within four months membership had soared spectacularly to over 60 per cent and O’Brien is now a CFMEU delegate and sounds like a true believer. The story demonstrates how union recruitment strategies are changing. The increased tendency for companies to take contract labour has decimated union membership for the likes of the CFMEU. Now they are fighting back with missionary zeal — door knocking, cold calling, pamphleteering, and working friends and family to sell the gospel of unionism to non-unionists.
And, as at Coppahella, they are succeeding, and on two fronts. Not only are they rebuilding membership in old union strongholds but they are making headway in new industries.
At Moet in regional Victoria. the Community Public Sector Union has gone from zero union
membership at a all centre run
by TeleTech, to over half the workforce, using similar tactics to the CFMFU at Coppabella. Yet as they pull the members in the front door, unions must also fight a rearguard action. Their
existing membership base continues to be threatened by companies restructuring workplaces, offering redundancies and preferring to contract out their labour.
The sectors with the greatest decrease in union membership finance, manufacturing, mining and communications — have concurrently had the largest increases in casual employees. In a three-year period between 1999 and 2002, communication sector union membership declined from 48 percent to 32 per cent, mining declined from 35 per cent to 29 per cent, manufacturing declined from 32 per cent to 27 per cent, and finance declined from 27 per cent to 18 per tent.
At Qantas, union membership has always been high — close to 100 per cent — but even there, unions are fighting the threat of outsourcing and pressure to increase the number of fixed term and casual workers. It’s a battle many Qantas workers feel they are losing.
Two weeks ago, unions in the Qantas engineering division held a weekend meeting in one of the workshops at Sydney Airport to update their members about management’s continuing moves to outsource maintenance and fitouts to a company in Victoria. It was the first time workers in the division had met since a round of redundancies had scythed through the workplace early in August. One worker could not believe the shrinkage
Four to five years ago, the shed would have been completely full, now the total number of workers wouldn’t have even been one third of the number of sheet metal workers we used to have, said the engineer who has worked at Qantas for 15 years.
Everyone was just looking around and took stock of how few of us were left.”
Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon has outlined plans to have 25 per cent of the company’s workforce made up of casual, labour hire and part-time workers. But he has denied any intention to “casualise” the workforce. Instead this will come through natural attrition and employment growth when the aviation sector picks up
But Dixon’s bottom line is that he wants a non-standard workforce to cater for the peaks and troughs of demand. Earlier this week, members of the Transport Workers Union rejected a deal with Qantas which would have placed tight limits on the way in which they could employ non-standard workers, because it involved signing on to a public deal which would have handed Qantas a huge symbolic victory against unions in the battle to use non-standard labour in Australia From 1984 to 2002, casual employment increased from 16 per cent of employees to 27 per cent, with greatest numbers of casuals in retail (45 per cent) and hospitality (56 per cent). In the same period, the use of labour hire has increased rapidly, especially among larger businesses. In 2001, 160,000 worked for labour hire companies.
Even the companies earning their living from contracting out have themselves begun to contra out their own staff.
Faced with a downturn in the communications infrastructure Sector two years ago, one of Australia’s largest labour hire companies Skilled Engineering. cut its number of permanent employees by offering them the opportunity to become subcontractors to Skilled.
Said Skilled chief operating officer Greg Hargrave: We needed to variabilise our fixed cost base.’’
Australian Centre forr Industrial Relations Research and Training (Acirrt) deputy director John Buchanan translates this as passing the risk, obligations and burden of an employment relationship on to an employee.
It is the ability to discard bits and pieces of the conventional obligations of the employer role that renders fixed-term employment casual employment and dependent contractors attractive to many employers,” Buchanan and his colleagues at Acirrt say in their book Fragmented Futures.
The only sector which has maintained stable union membership while seeing a large increase in the number of casuals is construction Between 1999 and 2002. it remained around 25 per cent to 26 per cent. Yet even in the construction sector casuals made up a third of all workers.
Among the reasons that construction unions have remained so strong is their ability to negotiate industry-wide conditions through so-called “pattern agreements” rather than negotiating genuine enterprise agreements. Critics argue pattern agreements drive up labour costs and are inflexible. And many of the agreements require employers to only use subcontractors which have deals with unions.
This is why a key objective of the legislation for the construction industry released this week by Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Abbott is aimed at preventing pattern agreements and practices which may be considered to be anti-competitive. The commonwealth code of practice in the industry also requires companies not to have agreements with unions that force the employer to use subcontractors with union agreements if they are to win commonwealth funding.
‘‘The nature of the industry means that the existing remedies against pattern bargaining don’t work, Abbott said this week.
“The whole problem is that the construction industry is unique. All of the things which operate in other industries to ensure that the workers get a fair go and the owner-managers get a fair go tend to be absent because it doesn’t have equally matched employers and unions and it doesn’t have a culture of give and take.”
The kind of industry-wide negotiations that construction unions have is the envy of unions in other sectors. In the communications sector, unions have only just managed to achieve an industry-wide award setting of minimum conditions in the contract call centre industry. Those unions are now attempting to rope individual contract call centres into that award.
The award capped off a successful 18 months for unions in the call centre industry. Union membership in call centres started at a negligible level.
But grassroots union drives by the Community Public Sector Union and the Australian Services Union has now given them a strong foothold in some call centres
For her recruitment campaign at a TeleTech call centre in Moe, Victoria, the CPSUs Gail Drummond won the ACTU’s Organiser of the Year Award. Moe is symbolic of the challenges that now confront unions: it was formerly a strong union town with workers in the mining and power industries. But with closures in those industries union membership plummeted.
But in 12 months, Drummond built the membership at TeleTech from zero to 50 per cent, She achieved it through an approach straight from the Amway training manual.
“We look after Centrelink, ASIC, ATO and other agencies, and I had been in contact with our delegates there and asked if they had friends family who worked in the call centre and we did get a few contacts through that way.
‘‘The people who I got in contact with then arranged meetings in their homes and bought along non-members.
Drummond and her colleagues also searched electoral records to find the addresses of the people she had been told worked at TeleTech. They then went and doorknocked those people.
According to Drummond, the union now has TeleTech running scared.
“They don’t know what we have got or how many we have got’’ says Drummond,
TeleTech may not admit to being scared but they do say they are angry.
“We have had 35 written complaints about tactics used and it being an invasion of privacy,’’ a TeleTech spokeswoman said. “We think it is an inappropriate tactic.’’
Drummond says, that she is doing no more than using publicly available information to contact people. Ironically that is exactly what call centres often do.