====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Paul Flewers: >>One of the most worrying things I found when trying to recruit people to the union in my last job -- administration work in a university -- was that many people under 30 had no idea of what a trade union was and what its role was in the workplace and more generally... Have list members had similar experiences in other countries?<< This roughly accords with my experience in the higher education sector particularly spending several stints of casual work around 1999-2002 on my campus helping the union branch in recruitment drives. But the consciousness around the question was very much related to specific structural changes, particularly the massive growth in casualisation, up to around half the workforce on many campuses such as this one. Many would be more or less supportive but weren’t that motivated in joining if they were only there for a year’s research contract or didn’t even know if they’d be in the following week. And of course casualisation was associated with younger workers. Joaquin’s points on this thread about imperialism are quite irrelevant because union density decline is much more to do with more recent processes, i.e. neoliberalism. Australia was just as imperialist in 1983 when union density was 50% as it is today when it’s slipped below 20%. Related processes of tariff cuts decimating (highly unioinised) manufacturing, the concurrent growth in (lowly unionised) service sectors, privatisation or corporatisation of public enterprises, contracting out, casualisation, the conversion of real jobs to self-employed contract work, etc, have all hit union membership. The rapid decline in Australia happened from when the Labor government’s social contract was introduced in 1983, and it’s been a slow drift since. The union tops are of course on the whole hopeless but at least there’s a general recognition that being completely tied to a Labor government and incorporated into the state apparatus isn’t a good idea, and a turn fromn the 90s from a “services model” to an “organising model” (apparently based on the US public sector union’s methods) which was some improvement. Those unions which have taken the latter most seriously, such as the nurses which have made a serious effort to develop workplace reps, have grown. The former academics union made a serious turn from the 90s to “industrial” unionism and grew rapidly among admin staff, although it has been stagnant in membership in recent years. Some list members would know of a successful response to the new economy in the form of the New Zealand Unite union http://www.unite.org.nz which, from a tiny base a few years ago, has organised thousands of young casual workers in fast food, cinemas etc., and in which socialists have played a leading role. The CWI group in Melbourne has taken the name and the general idea but while they’re carried out some creative and worthy actions, without being an officially recognised and supported union this Unite is more of a local action group. As far as I can see consciousness as opposed to membership has actually held up quite well in this context. A number of union-sponsored surveys have shown a lot of people would join unions if they knew how or which one or if their employment was more secure. General social surveys that have asked similar questions since the 80s show people are on the whole *more* pro-union, anti-big business, anti-deregulation and anti-privatisation than people were in the early 80s (with quite a noticeable jump in these regards between surveys taken in 2005 and 2007 in the context of the high profile campaign against the former government’s anti-union laws, although membership only rose slightly). This suggests to me that the former “closed shop” which existed in some industries, while we would have defended as it was removed in the 80s, led to some actually anti-union union members and complacency by many unions in winning workers to basic consciousness. Some time in the first part of the year I’m doing a talk for Socialist Alliance in Melbourne on “class today”, for which I’ll update an outline I did for my PhD a few years ago of such structural and attitudinal changes, and I’ll post that on our blog and notify this list when it’s done. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
