Union leaders in Australia say they should be looking to their peers in the United Kingdom and United States, where worker-led organised labour is having a “moment”, to boost memberships as local private sector take-up sinks to a record low.
Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals private sector union membership has shrunk from 956,200 in 2016 to 779,700 in 2022. The fall accounted for a 20% drop across the private sector and leaves union membership at just 8% of the workforce.
United Workers Union national secretary Tim Kennedy said that although hostile anti-union legislation was likely to have affected membership numbers, the movement as a whole could do better to centre worker-led action and reach youth in the workplace. He pointed to the success of Starbucks baristas and Amazon workers in the US.
“These are young people, people who understand that if you look after each other collectively and you take action collectively, you can actually change things,” Kennedy told Crikey.
“You look at the UK, where you actually had such a heavy load of austerity for over a decade, that people are really on the bones of their arse, with nothing left to lose, and unions are standing up with them and supporting them.
“So I think where those two Anglophile-type nations go, Australia generally follows. And I think unions would be well prepared to [see] that the union movement has life when it lets workers collectivise and take action around the issues that are important to them.”
In October 2021, Time magazine declared US labour unions were “having a moment”. Like Australia, the US had seen decades of declining rates of union membership, which according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2020 accounted for just 10.8% of the workforce.
A number of forces, including rising corporate profits, the safety burdens shouldered by frontline workers through the thick of the pandemic, inflation and, of course, the arrival of the Biden administration in the White House, proved vital to the movement’s resurgence in 2021.
But it was the following year that thrust the US labour movement into the centre of world news bulletins globally. A wave of campaigns, in large part led by young workers at Starbucks, Google, Activision, Trader Joe’s, Amazon and Apple saw collective action force large corporations into bargaining negotiations, even if they weren’t always fruitful.
Josh Cullinan, secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, has been a beneficiary of the labour movement’s resurgence in the US, and deployed similar tactics in Australia.
Last September he helped retail workers at Apple around Australia secure a protected action order with the Fair Work Commission after overseeing store-level organising. The order offered them a smattering of strike options which, come Christmas, were leveraged to force Apple to the bargaining table over an eight-year-old “zombie” agreement.
He believes one key failure of the union movement to attract private sector members over the past six years has been its inability to effectively penetrate workplaces, and coordinate highly targeted, grassroots campaigns that deliver “value”.
“So you’ve either got them massively dense and doing quite well with delegates — your nurses, the teachers — but a lot of the other unions talk about campaigns, and they’re disconnected from the reality of workers,” Cullinan told Crikey.
“And so when those unions move away from those localised, local base campaigns, it might get the media’s attention, it might make good meme-based social media stuff, but the reality is workers join unions because [of something happening in the] workplace, not because of a promise.”
He suggested that the pandemic was also a missed opportunity for unions to deliver value to their frontline members, and show non-member colleagues that joining their union would deliver value.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, total trade union membership in 2020 accounted for 14.3% of the workforce, only slightly down on the 14.6% recorded in 2018.
In August 2022, the ABS reported that this number fell to 12.5%. At the time, only 2% of workers between the ages of 15 and 19 were union members, as were 5% of workers between 20 and 24.
Kennedy admitted the movement had work to do on doing away with the “top-down” approach of old, but rejected the idea that unions hadn’t done enough to deliver value to members throughout the pandemic.
He pointed to the UWU’s track record — across key industries such as early education, aged care, cleaning, supply chain and manufacturing — where leaders and delegates were “front and centre”.
“We were one of few unions that made certain that workers were supported when they walked off the job along the supply chain — we had a lot of instances where we didn’t think it was safe,” Kennedy said.
“There was a very important case when the industrial laundries in Dandenong, where we didn’t have huge union density, and there was a lot of fear there. But we supported those workers in stopping work.”
Confident of the movement’s performance, Kennedy said its future will instead depend on resourcing. He remains hopeful that the government’s new multi-employer bargaining framework could help stem bleeding membership, but that unions should start charging non-member workers who benefit from workplace agreements negotiated on their behalf.
“It’s very expensive, and collective bargaining is a public good. And I think there’s a real tension here in that having multiemployer bargaining put together is saying, ‘We want to change things.’ But it doesn’t really deal with the reality,” Kennedy said.
“[The conditions are] not the same as when we started collective bargaining, when we actually had high union density, and we had a way of sharing the cost sustainably.
“And so I think one of the things we’re going to have to work out is, how do we make certain that collective bargaining as a public good that it is, works in a way the government wants to move wages, but also in a way that is effective in a longer-term sense.”
Are you in a union? If so, why did you join? If not, why not? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
