President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Sharan Burrow, recently said that that is “no question” that climate change will eventually become a standard clause in a union log of claims (a claim is something that a union would bargain to have included in a collective workplace agreement).  Ms Burrow said “We are confident you can reduce energy and water use by enormous amounts just by looking at the nature of the work practice…we also think you can generate healthier workplaces … and the nature of the working environment’s design.  “We know that we have a long way to go by way of recycling and the products that are used can be examined for their energy efficiencies.” (The Australian, March 06).  

Ms Burrow’s comments show how labour rights are increasingly seen as being connected to ecological sustainability.  I have mentioned previously in this blog that the old dividing lines between what was good for the environment and good for jobs is becoming blurred – and probably on the way to disappearing for good. Each shares a common struggle for justice, and a sense that ethical obligation – be it to a person’s employment conditions or conservation of the environment – should override commercial interests, which until now have reigned supreme over the rights of both the worker and the natural environment that is everyone’s birthright.  

The Global Labor Strategies blog has recently published a revealing series on the Greens Job Alliance, and I highly commend it to all of you. This series highlights how the ACTU step is significant but only one of the first in an emerging trend. I would expect to see unions and environmental organisations campaigning for “green jobs” – the provision of decent jobs for the Herculean task of transforming the economy onto an ecological sustainable foundation. What we need to see next though is an historic conference between the Union movement and the Green movement in Australia. The “Good Jobs, Green Jobs: A National Green Jobs Conference” will be running next week, March 13-14 in Pittsburgh, USA. The Blue-Green Alliance, a partnership between the Sierra Club (an environmentalist organisation) and the United Steelworkers, is organising the conference. There is no reason why we cannot hold a similar sort of conference here where we could aim to build closer inter-personal links between the movements, and come to agreement on some specific policy targets.  

It seems to me that after a generation of being whipped by global capital the necessary task of greening our economy is not something which can be off-shored. It has to happen right here and the sooner the better. If we are prepared this emerging sector could become the base of union power in Australia for generations to come.

Dr Carla Lipsig-Mummi published a very interesting article in The Age recently. Lipsig-Mummi clear identifies the importance of trade unions in effectively tackling climate change. Trade unions are source of people power which can be leveraged to force companies to introduce environmental best practice. However, the story of conflict between environmentalists and trade unionists in Australia has to this point been needlessly acrimonious. The Forestry Division of the CFMEU and anti-logging campaigners have been in constant trench warfare in Tasmania for the last generation. Social conscious union organisers deride environmentalists as hippies, while environmentalist activists are conditioned to see unions as part of the problem. Logging in Tasmania though is as much about the role and influence of capital in public life. The image reflected, however, is an Australian political culture where environmental protection and the creation of decent jobs is a zero-sum game.

The first signs are beginning to emerge that we are moving past this juvenille division between the two camps. Recently the CFMEU has been pressuring supermarket retailer, Woolworths, about the green credentials of its Select brand of toilet paper (manufactured in China). The CFMEU has successfully challenged the sustainability of the product, forcing Woolworths to change its labelling of the product, and commence looking for an alternative supplier. It is particularly significant that such an environmental push has come from the green movements union bogeyman; the CFMEU.

 Some of our green comrades may simply write off the CFMEU’s conduct as comparable to any corporation; green only when it suits their immediate interests. I am not privy to the inner-workings of the CFMEU but it would be reasonable to suggest that the Woolworths campaign has been pushed partly due to securing the economic security of its members. However, there is something deeper going on.

The trade union movement and the environmentalist movement make essentially the same criticisms of the way that our politico-economic system currently operates. One of the fundamentals of unionism is that people deserve respect at work. People cannot and should not be commodified like goods such as apples and oranges. A free and floating price on labour would result in untold harm to workers, their families and the communities in which they live. Neither should people be treated like mere thinking machines which are ordered around in a totalitarian manner in the workplace. A person deserves respect and dignity everywhere in their life. In short, wage labour is not an article of freehold property which the owner can utilise and dispose of at their leisure.

From an ecological perspective on the other hand our environment should be accorded considerable respect too. Nature is too something which should not be left to the mercies of the capitalist system. A system of private ownership which requires constant economic growth for stability is ultimately detrimental to ecological sustainability. There comes a point in an enclosed system where the consumption of resources  and the resulting pollution can no longer be sustained. There are just not simply the resources left to support the economy.

 The capitalist system places working families on treadmill of acquisition, consumption and debt. Simultaneously exploiting workers and degrading the environment. While, the eternal debate goes on as to whether this can be fixed with reform or it requires a completely new politico-economic system is another matter. The point I am trying to get at is that the union movement and the green movement are really manifestations of the one counter-hegemonic movement. Each working together will assist the other.

The challenge is to take this common foundation and make tangible policy. My Sustainable Development Investment Bank is such an example, and the LaborStrategies blog also has a lot great material about the creation of green-collar jobs. What about you guys, do you have a different opinion about the relationship between the union movement and the environmental movement?

Reports from LabourStart today highlight the imminent creation of truely international trade union, with Unite, which has 2 million members in the UK and Ireland, and the Unites Steel Workers, which represents 1 million workers in the USA, Canada and the Carribean, announcing their plans to merge. One cannot help but compare the formidable prospect of a 3 million strong trans-Atlantic union with the sorry state of union fiefdoms in Australia and New Zealand.

It is time for the trade union movements in both Australia and New Zealand to shape up, and understand the very simple concept that most global corporations see each nation as a sub-region within the Asia-Pacific area. In fact, it is quite common for the one HR department to cover both nations. To this end I would advocate for a simple idea; the NZCTU and the ACTU should unite to form the ANZCTU. Furthermore, the leadership of this regional congress should actively encourage the merging of trade unions with overlapping coverage in each jurisdiction, and/or the formation of meaningful and strategic alliances between trade unions in each nation. The commonsense of this simple proposal is only made clearer when we have a look at similar examples in the UK and Ireland, and the USA and Canada. The TUC is the union movement peak body which covers both Irish and UK trade unions. While the AFL-CIO (excluding Change to Win for the purposes of this piece) is the peak body for trade unions throughout North America.

Capitalising on a very anti-worker Tory government in New Zealand the bosses had the luxury of practicing and refining their union busting techniques until they had the opportunity to inflict this on an Australian union movement grappling with the demise of protectionism. We cannot ever let this happen again. It is time to realise that for major global corporations the existence of Australia and New Zealand as separate sovereign nations is nought but an historical accident of the late 19th century. A mere legal technicality that really does not change the way they conduct their business. It is time to get over our tendency to jealously guard our little union principalities and confront the new economic reality. Our union movements need to fight as ANZACs to secure justice and dignity for working peoples in our little area of the world.

Over to you guys. Do you think we should merge the peak bodies? Furthermore, which trade unions should merge with each other?

Unite’s Working Students Campaign (‘WSC’) is a positive and innovative development which can be built upon and improved by the Australian trade union movement with the leadership of the ACTU. Many organisations are working very hard to organise young people, for instance the Youth Unionist Network in Victoria, Unite (Australia) in the fast food and retail sectors, and the work of the National Union of Workers in market research. However, what each of these efforts lacks is the ability to comprehensively organise young workers across many industries.

So one important way in which we can improve upon the WSC is to have it run through the ACTU to incorporate as many different trade unions in the campaign as possible.  I think this is vital because it would be the breadth of any campaign that is critical to success; any campaign would be about organising a new generation of activists and members.

Another way in which we can improve on the campaign is work together with the student unions. Under the former Howard Government student unions were assailed by many university reforms, most notably voluntary student unionism. Again, the trade union movement in general has an opportunity to turn one of the victories of the neo-liberal agenda into a launching pad for progressive gains for working people. This can be achieved through combining union membership in at a tertiary level with union membership in the workplace. The idea would be that when student workers join a student union they have the additional benefit for a nominal amount extra to get workplace representation and assistance. This would become an important benefit of student union membership. By working together in a symbiotic manner both student unions and trade unions become stronger. Imagine thousands of students from Melbourne University and RMIT protesting outside an unethical employer of young casuals in Melbourne’s CBD. Adopting Unite’s framework of ’student workers’ gives extra meaning and breathes new life into the collective struggles of student unions and trade unions.

What about everyone else, do you have any additional ideas about how to improve upon the WSC and make it relevant for Australia?

The Unite, the largest United Kingdom trade union, is campaigning directly to organise thousands of student workers across tertiary campuses in the UK. The Working Students Campaign (‘WSC’) is an innovative way of  organising a new generation of workers, and is something that should be implemented by the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The campaign basically involves allowing students to join Unite on-line for £10 per year, and organising students into campus societies who can campaign for respect, rights and better conditions in the workplace while using the collective resources of Unite.

The WSC is an important organising campaign on many levels. Firstly, it follows one of the basic truisms of union organising; the more people you ask to join the union, the more members a union will sign up. One of the reasons many young people do not join unions or have a limited understanding of the role of trade unions is that no one has asked them to join or explain the principles behind trade unionism. It is the duty of unions to make the effort to sign up new workers, especially younger workers, not make the assumption that workers will find them out and join. The WSC means more people are asked to join the union, and so more people end up joining. Pretty simple, but so far this does not distinguish the WSC from any organising campaign.

Secondly, the target demographic of the campaign is strategically important. Without new young people joining a trade union then the days of our movement are limited by mortality. The ongoing strength of our movement depends on organising new members, training new activists, and passing on the leadership of the movement to a new generation. So perhaps there is merit in targeting industries where there is a higher ratio of younger workers such as retail, fast food, call centres etc. This is important but in itself insufficient as without an already established activist base such campaigns would be precarious at best. Thus students must also be accessed off of their work sites, and given the broad-based nature of tertiary education, campuses are a vital place to organise students.

Campuses have the advantage of being a place where students feel comfortable and have the space in which to talk and listen without worrying about the watchful eye of the employer. The casualised nature of much student related work means that organising students through the campus disconnects union membership to the particular job or jobs they may be working at any one point in time. The student joins at the campus and remains a member for the length of their studies. This in itself cuts out the problem that organising young students can often feel like attempting to round up grasshoppers. The other advantage of the WSC is it taps in to a students sense of identity a lot better. Very often young people are not going to primarily identify as a casual fast food worker, but perhaps instead as a student, or better yet a combination of a few different aspects of their life. With a well-designed website, accessible membership fees and a recognition of this diversity of identity the WSC campaign is able to tap into a young person’s sense of being a ‘working student’.

Overall this is a highly sound strategy which involves turning one of the negative aspects of the neoliberal agenda into a positive for progressive activism. Cut-backs to higher education have led to students bearing a greater burden of their own educational costs, as well as sometimes supporting themselves through their studies. There is a core group of working students now waiting to be organised.

In the second part to this post will look at how this campaign can be adapted to the Australian context, and also improved.

George Monbiot, British journalist and activist, advocated recently for fundamental reform to political donations in Britain (“Death of the Noble Idea“, The Guardian 5/2/2008). The political malaise which Monbiot touches upon is also present within Australia; political parties are desperately reliant on corporate donations. In fact, recent figures published by the Australian Electoral Commission indicate that the ALP received $14.9million in donations for the 2006/07 financial year.

It is not surprising that New Labor and the ALP share such an unhealthy reliance on the corporate dollar. After all, it was the breakthrough centrist Hawke/Keating governments which served to inspire Blair’s New Labor Project. In fact, George Monbiot’s account of New Labor Minister, and former anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain receiving money from a major backer of the former South African apartheid regime echoes the sorry tale of former rocker and environmental activist Peter Garrett approving the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill. We should not blame either Peter, it seems the behaviour of each of them is indicative of a sick political system which turns committed activists into political sell-outs. Personally, I would hate to see what would happen to me if I had to be a parliamentarian within such a system. Peter Garrett is a highly intelligent man with strong political convictions, and his actions as Environment Minister should serve as a warning to us all about the political system we live in.

Fundamentally though this system of political funding is undemocratic, and therefore, anti-union. Why? Because under the present system capital buys political influence and the power of the managerial class is based on the ability to utilise money. However, the ultimate source of union influence and power is people power. Unions are a measure of how democratic any society. As a general rule, when trade unions are under attack then democracy at large is also under siege.  I believe that it is no coincidence that the decline in union numbers and density over the last couple of decades has coincided with a decline in overall political participation.

This tells us that aside from supporting the key union values of solidarity, democracy, prosperity for all and equality, there is a degree of strategic self-interest in the union movement making campaign finance reform a key political issue. One of the oldest pieces of military wisdom is that you fight your opponents on the territory which best suits your troops. Well fighting the establishment in a political arena where major political parties are reliant on obtaining the corporate dollar for ultimate success is similarly ludicrous if we can avoid it. If political parties need financial support from a large pool of people rather than a smaller cartel of large donations then the trade union movement will have achieved an important victory.

George Monbiot is right campaign finance reform is a matter which relates to the health of our democracy. With the Coalition currently smarting from being abandoned by the corporate dollar for the ALP, and with electoral laws and political party disclosure being on the parliamentary agenda this is an opportune time for the Australian union movement to place a cap of $1 000 donation any legal individual and related parties can donate to a political party in a given financial year. Where democracy flourishes so to do unions.

What do you think? Should campaign finance reform be made a union matter?

All round web guy for the trade union movement, Eric Lee (www.labourstart.org) has written a blog piece about some of the drawbacks of the internet for organising. You can read the piece here at his blog.

I really respect Eric Lee and like the work he is doing, however, I would like to make the point that while the internet is tactically mixed for the union movement, strategically it is a gain.

Eric Lee rightfully points out that the “old strategy of blacklisting…has now become infinitely more effective thanks to the net.” In a sense unionbusters can use the internet as a more effective tool for something which happened prior to the invention and widespread use of the net, gaining information about unions, union activists and potential organising campaigns. The union movement must be extremely careful to protect sensitive information. However, all that has changed is that the internet can now be used to do the same thing in a more efficient manner. It is also possible that the relative ease of gaining information off the net may overtime blunt the other investigative tools that union busters used to use. This point though is pure speculation.

For the union movement though, not only is the internet a useful communication tool which presents tactical advantages in used in the right circumstances, it is transformative. The internet has the power to bring together a truely global labour movement, a movement which is being born through the crisis and struggle of existing national and regional labour movements. Every day I log onto LabourStart and I am immediately connected to the various struggles and campaigns of the movement in various locations around the world.

The other aspect of the internet is that it can serve as a relatively low-cost way for an ongoing dialogue about unionism and the public life in general. It has the capacity to bring together a community of minds who can debate, argue and come to agreed positions in way that the earlier mediums could not. Books, newspapers and televisions are one way mediums where there is a producer and a receiver who takes in the information being presented (with television being perhaps the most passive of the three). The internet, however, can bring together people to participate in a two-way constructive dialogue. This does not mean that we should be uncritical of the exisitng status quo of the internet. Commercial interests abound as the recent case of union organiser, Derek Blackadder, being temporarily banned from Facebook highlights. It is now more than ever though easier to create our own space. The internet, when combined with real world activism, has the potential to draw the union movement into a cyclical process of questioning and acting, with each component enriching the other. It also draws us back to our core value of solidarity (touch one, touch all), through the net we connect.

So is this just a load of bull$%^? Is the internet simply another site of corporate control or a necessary condition for a truely global labour movement?

The great thing about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s planned summit is that it represents an opportunity for the trade union movement to shape the politico-economic landscape of Australia. An opportunity which has not been present for at least a generation. I have a policy proposal which combines workign rights with our ongoing sustainability, prosperity, and empowering the most disadvantaged within our community. I call it the Sustainable Development Investment Bank (SDIB).One of the greatest ongoing challenges Australia faces is securing our economic prosperity on an ecologically sustainable foundation. At the same time, despite almost a generation of uninterrupted economic growth there remains groups within our society who have been left behind. The market has failed to provide social equity, or its own ecological sustainability. For instance, the average income of those in capital cities remains 16 per cent higher than those in rural areas, while the poorest 20 per cent of Australian households account for 1 per cent of all household net worth. Further, we hardly need reminding of the disgraceful disparity in living standards between Aboriginal Australia and the rest of the nation. Yet at same time ecosystems are being degraded as species go extinct at an unprecedented rate, resources are depleted and global sinks such as the atmosphere are thrown out of balance. The SDIB is a policy designed to overcome these twin challenges. It is an institution designed to re-direct capital flows for the purpose of securing a prosperous Australia that is both just and sustainable. The SDIB would be in a position to create opportunities for decent work for marginalised Australians, while shaping the market so it becomes ecologically sustainable.

While there are many private sources of capital which can be used to initiate enterprise within our society, such as bank loans, marginalised groups and communities often do not have access to such sources. The central function of the SDIB would be to grant capital to applicants with meritorious enterprise proposals as judged against a sustainability threshold. It would run as an independent statutory body redistributing capital to either new enterprises or certain enterprises looking to alter their business model to fall in with sustainability guidelines.

The sustainability threshold is measured with respect to three key areas; the environment, the community and the ongoing financial viability of the enterprise. The environmental key indicators would include whether the enterprise will contribute to solving a known ecological problem, whether the enterprise will utilise environmental best practice, and an assessment of the wider ecological impacts of the enterprise. Indicators to be considered in relation to a proposal’s benefit for the local community would include whether the enterprise creates decent work, as measured by International Labour Organisation standards, the socio-economic status of the community where the enterprise is located, and an assessment of the overall impact of the enterprise within the target community. Where an enterprise proposal had particularly strong environmental or community benefits but did not negatively affect the other categories then such applications would also be considered.

Using the above criteria the SDIB would be in a position to fund a diverse range of enterprises which would facilitate a just transition to a sustainable future. One of the proposals could include training young people in regions where youth unemployment is high, such as Wollongong, to ‘green’ retrofit building stock in an area like Sydney in order to combat global warming. Another may be the creation of a national Aboriginal artists’ cooperative to market Aboriginal art for a just return for the artist and their community.

The SDIB could also prioritise projects designed to assist communities that would otherwise be disadvantaged by the change to a carbon constrained economy. In such cases, SDIB grants could be used to fund the creation of alternate decent work in areas where the local economy is driven by environmentally damaging industries. For example, the SDIB could fund the establishment of a wind-turbine research and manufacturing facility in the Portland region of Victoria.

Funding is critical. The SDIB would initially be funded by a temporary Sustainability Levy which would consist of an additional 1% tax on the profits gained from exploiting Australia’s mining resources. In the March 2007 quarter the Australian mining industry generated a profit of AU$11.535b; the Sustainability Levy, had it been in effect, would have therefore generated AU$115.35m for the quarter. It would also be possible to supplement this Levy with an obligation on all SDIB funded enterprises to pay a minimum 1% of all profits back to the SDIB until such time as the initial grant plus interest has been repaid. Placing an obligation on profitable community enterprises to pay back the cost of the grant plus interest would also have the additional advantage of mitigating the risk of failure common to new enterprises. Furthermore, in order to phase out the SDIB’s reliance on capital generated from non-renewable sources, a proportion of each funded enterprise’s tax liability could be set aside for the SDIB instead of going to Treasury.

This scheme provides a radical rethink of the relationships between the market, the state and the community, and would therefore be an effective and inclusive way in which to address the market’s equity failure. The SDIB would transcend the ongoing debate between welfare and responsibility, between supporting the needs of people and giving them the freedom to build prosperous businesses. It would give targeted communities the ability to achieve real prosperity in a way that enhances individual creativity and freedom. SDIB grants would also act as an incentive to increase the financial value attached to ecological sustainability. Furthermore, the creation of a new generation of enterprises would engender a widening of Australia’s export base. New and sustainable high-value, low-volume exports would go a long way to ensuring our nation’s prosperity once the mining boom subsides.

Ecological crisis is a reality. There is only a limited period of time in which we can continue to draw on our non-renewable ecological capital. At the same time, it is ethically unacceptable to live in a time of unparalleled wealth while continuing to leave behind important sectors of Australian society. The SDIB is about building a just and sustainable Australia, a place where jobs can be created without eroding fundamental working rights, and a place that we can pass onto the next generation in better shape than when we inherited it.

 Do you think is feasible way of building up new green-collar jobs and/or jobs with justice? Feel free to add your own ideas. I have the footnotes to this blog if any one wants them.

One must wonder how Julie Bishop, Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Opposition Spokesperson for Industrial Relations and Mining Interests, felt about the Liberal Party strategy paper on IR. Ms Bishop is known to be an anti-union IR hardliner yet her party is now seriously considering making Forward with Fairness a bipartisan keystone of Australian politics. The very fact that it was leaked to the Australian highlights the discension within Coalition ranks about how to deal with the extremist policy. However, the moderate element of the Liberal Party’s struggle to retain political relevance represents a real opportunity for the union movement to shake itself of the ALP headlock. The ALP now rides ascendant over the Australian political landscape, and the simple reason is that since the Coalition drifted to the nuttier end of the political compass, the ALP is rightly seen as the mainstream and moderate reformist party. This rot is the legacy John Howard has bestowed onto his beloved Liberal Party. On the other side, the ALP has made full use of the Coalition’s exit stage Right to lock in the support of the trade union movement. While I do not subscribe to the more alarmist commentators’ prediction that the 2007 election was an existential battle for the survival of unionism in Australia, it certainly would have been a very bleak few years had the Howard Government been returned. The ALP, knowing that the unions were fully locked in support, courted the Australian managerial community. The managerial community responded with large monetary donations in return for the ALP pledging to retain  significant elements of the retrograde WorkChoices policy, while at the same time promising the managers a staggered introduction of the rest of the Forward with Fairness policy platform. We in the proud trade union movement have effectively been left to choke on our wheaties as one significant concession after another was given to the managers.

We were not the only ones watching with disgust as the ALP and the managers started their love affair. Another group was seething as they found their ex-partners cheating with the enemy; the Coalition. The sense of anger and hurt that the managerial community had abondoned the Coalition for the much more electable ALP is palpable within the leaked strategy papers. The Coalition has been burnt by its former lover. As such the paper advocates dropping the incessant attacks on trade unions, accepting the Forward with Fairness policy, and argues for the Coalition to meet with trade union leaders.

This is where the opportunity for the trade union movement lies. For too long the ALP has courted the managerial community and kept the unions onside by being less extreme than the Coalition. However, all of this is about to change. I cannot really believe I am about to write this but, trade union leaders should meet with relevant Coalition representatives as it will break a part of the dynamic which has allowed the ALP to dominate the trade union movement. In meeting with Coalition representatives the union movement needs to secure Forward with Fairness as Coalition policy, because this is really where Forward with Fairness belongs, as the policy of a right-wing government that the union movement can live with (for now). This will give us more hand to build strategic leverage over the ALP.

While the Coalition feels burnt by the managerial community, and assuming some sort of line of dialogue is established, the union movement should use this opportunity to push for electoral finance reform. Presently, capital has too much power and leverage over the electoral process. The major parties require too much funding from large businesses to undertake effective election campaigns, and that is a bidding war the unions will never ever win. However, if the power of capital was blunted and people power was enhanced this will favour the union movement. After all, it is people power which is the foundation of union power. Expanding real democracy within the Australian political system will assist in organising Australian workers. The healthier the democratic nature of a society the stronger the trade union movement is.

The union movement needs to declare a cease fire in our ongoing war with the Coalition. With hostilities at our right flank temporarily ceased this will allow us to concentrate on the Rudd Labor government in the middle.

Do you think trade union leaders should also meet with Coalition representatives? And is the ALP too friendly with the managerial community? I deliberately do not use the term business as it inaccurate. Workers are an important component of a business, and to say business where one actually means the bosses, is to give over the legitimacy inherent within the term ‘business’ to a class of people who are in reality only a component of the wider enterprise.

Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), was recently reported advocating setting up a portable long service scheme. Personally, I would be in favour of such a scheme, however, the way in which Mr Howes announced the scheme, and also the way in which it was reported serves the union movement two constructive lessons.First of all, I doubt if Mr Howes exhaustively consulted his membership before announcing the portable long service scheme (someone is welcome to correct me if I am wrong). I suspect that the first many AWU members, delegates, and even possibly officials learned of this proposal was when his press club address was reported in the national media. Through doing so Mr Howes fell into the trap of the stereotypical ‘union boss’; announcing something from down on high. This is particularly dangerous because it undermines the democratic heart of a union. The fact that Mr Howes also unilaterally indicated that the AWU would be prepared to trade off wage increases to establish such a scheme only underscores the point further.

I suspect that there are a great deal of AWU members who may feel that such a scheme is not even one of their top priorities at the moment, and that it would not warrant a wage sacrifice. In short, advocating new employment conditions = good idea, doing so in a blatantly undemocratic manner = bad idea. Mr Howes comments serves as a reminder that perhaps the most important aspect of being a union activist (be in on the shop floor or as an official) is to listen. Discussing priorities in advocating for new employment conditions serves as a good way for the officials and delegates to get in touch with the membership. The AWU would have been better off launching a formal round of on-site and off-site meetings for as many workplaces as possible to consult with members about their industrial priorities. From this initial round of consultation the AWU could have put together a short list, which could have been circulated back on sites, where the membership could have then formally voted on their priorities. After such a democratic process Mr Howes could have then addressed the media from a position of high legitimacy.  And any members who may not have prioritised portable long service leave would then at least have the comfort that the AWU listened to them and went with the democratic majority. It is called leading through asking questions and listening, and this process will be integral to organising the Australian workforce. As an interesting aside, it may have perhaps been unwise for Mr Howes to indicate what the AWU would sacrifice for establishing such a scheme. Dropping your pants before you reach the bedroom is not really negotiating from a position of power, however, at only the age of 26 it is hoped that Mr Howes could learn from such a tactical error over time.

The other thing that Mr Howes announcement tells us about is the Australian media. Have you noticed that Mr Howes seems to be everywhere lately since Bill Shorten was elected the member for Maribrynong? Whether it be in LA on the Writer’s Guild picket line (again solidarity is in important but the writers strike may not be the most burning priority for the members of Australia’s largest blue-collar union), on Today or giving the Press Club Address in Canberra, Mr Howes appears to be popping up at a lot of places. This tells me that many in the mainstream media are basically lazy. Mr Howes has been touted as the next big thing within the union movement and many within the media have simply accepted this. With no disrespect to Mr Howes, but the Australian union movement has many eloquent representatives who do not seem to be getting their message across.

So, am I being too harsh on Mr Howes by seeing his announcement as a strategic error?  Do you know other union leaders who should be getting more air time and propagating the basic values of trade unionism?

As an aside the Australian published a very interested leaked Coalition memo about Labor and IR today. Watch this space as I will be blogging about its ramifications in the next couple of days.