What’s wrong with Australia’s youth that they won’t join unions?
Education and generation Perhaps its education. Us young’uns have been forced into uni by well-meaning working class parents with a dream of success. We believe that our own hard work will pay off - landing us in a cushy job far away from the lifestyle we were born into. We believe we will “do better than our parents did”.
Yeah right. How many woking class kids actually do make it by going through uni? How many are left at the end with a profound understanding of Focault, not enough marketable skills and a HECS debt the size of a barn? At 23, we graduate to the cold-coffee reality that we’re actually competing against those 16 year old ‘loser’ school leavers for low-paid, low-security jobs. But we dream of the big time.
We dream and believe, no doubt spurred on by the fantasies of grandparents that any lack of success is brought of our own laziness and not systemic bias against the working class. We conveniently forget the feeling of fate that our parents have about work - born into an industry, die in an industry. The spectre of casual employment and re-skilling for a new career every 10 years can seem like novelty compared with 40 years in a coal pit. It might look glossy from the outside, but the choices are just as limited. Confusion and politics Why don’t we join unions? I didn’t for a long tim, simply because I found it difficult to. It took me hours on the phone and internet to track down what I thought was the “right” trade union for my industry. I contacted the organiser (the now-famous Sally McManus), but coverage disputes that I didn’t understand soon put the coolers on that. While I was passing out ASU membership cards in the toilets (in fear of my job), the NUW was planning to extinguish ACNeilson as their ‘prime site’ by involving my company. A glossy organiser came to give us the pep-talk, pass out her membership cards, and promptly dissapeared. She called me (the only person to furnish contact details) to find out what the issues are, and never contacted me again. Great.
Lack of support targeted at youth Maybe unions have so much trouble organising young people because they don’t support them, don’t follow up, and condescend to all the members. Members can’t really be expected to keep tabs on political machinations of bureaucratic trade unions, can they? But if you’re not in the loop, then you’re behind the 8-ball immediately. You’re just a member, no-one’s going to explain anything to you. Well fuck that for a joke. I’m a university-educated woman! I might be working a shitty $17/hour job, but that just means I can read Zola after my dipshit manager tells me I can’t decide when to take a toily break.
Activist chic and Organising Works When I was trying to be a union delegate, I mostly tried to talk to people, asked them to join the union and gave advice about interpreting the EBA. I also produced an inter-union magazine for workers in my industry. I was nothing special, but I think I did some good. There are the lucky few union activists for whom the whole thing doesn’t matter (becuase they fall back on their parents) and that’s when they can take the risks that make them shine. Those are the stars that organisers look for - those are the sought-after activists who get careers in organising. Good for them, but what about everyone who just want to not get screwed at work?
Organising Works was/is a union program to try and get more big-brains into the union hierarchy. The practical outcome has been to stack union branches with people who have little or no idea what its like to actually work. They work, sure. But they usually get more than minimum wage, are educated, and don’t have to live with the fear of being sacked at any moment. If they see the desperation of the working poor at all, they see it from the outside as a sympathetic observer. But they don’t experience it for themselves. Going traight from parent-supported university, they can’t know what its actually like have a $2 food budget for the week, or the nauseating panic that sets in when you have to pay the electricity and the phone in the same week that your shifts are getting cut back because the supervisor doesn’t like you anymore. They don’t know what its like to not have friends because you can’t afford to socialise at the pub.
Teetering on the financial and social edge is something most union organisers can only have nightmares about. Most of them just stare at the floor in a well-meaning way or crap on about their veneration of the ‘working class’.
Hierarchy and failing to actually challenge society Unions fail to actually challenge society, even though secretly lots of unionists are against capitalism. The anarchist youth who are politically switched on are likely to join unions, but not pay a very active role in them because they realise the extent that they are simply kowtowing to the current system of capitalism and going through the motions of struggle without achieving any lasting outcomes (like the new society!).
Unions are organised hierarchically. Sometimes the people in the hierarchy have “stepped up” from working in industry (which they mythologise as being tough). These people aren’t going to go back to idustry easily - they’ve made better lives for themselves out of being organisers and politicians. They will defend those cushy positions in the hierarchy by forming factions and posses. Is this conducive to a flow of talent? Is this conducive to lively debate and individuality? No.
The Organising Works graduates are much the same. They’ve been brought in from their university politics stints (where the stakes are so small) and under the wing of whatever canny manipulator needs bolstering or a spare stalking man. Whenever some disruption occurs, the balance of power shifts and heads start to roll.
These pathetic power-parasites don’t challege society. They ape the worst abuses of capital at such a paltry level that it makes me ashamed.
Sexism and racism Unions are the stronghold of white Australian manhood. Sure, the educated aspiring middle-class types are slowly challenging. However, you don’t have to dig far into the history of the Australian union movement to find actual union rules which exclude Chinese workers. The cultural effects of an exclusive white male preserve are still strong. Change comes slowly. The lack of openness to difference (political or social) makes it difficult to want to spend any time working as a union delegate.
