Anthony Main is the secretary of Unite Australia, a union for young fast-food and retail workers drawing inspiration from Unite New Zealand but operating in different conditions.
Because of the huge distances in Australia, the labour movement there is more decentralised than in Britain. A union can be left-wing in one state, right-wing in another.
Unite Australia operates in Melbourne, where the unions are generally stronger, more combative, and more left-wing than elsewhere in Australia (and the political left is stronger than in other cities). Its initiators were the Socialist Party Australia, a group linked to the Socialist Party in England and Wales and mainly based in Melbourne.
Anthony Main spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity.
We started Unite as a campaign in 2003, and then about two years ago we cranked it up a bit and moved it on from being just a campaign to a formal membership-based organisation.
When we first started it, it came from a small group of people in the Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party alone - literally, a handful, in inner-city Melbourne. Once we stepped it up, we tried to build it a bit broader, and we gathered around us another handful or so of good activists that would regularly contribute to the work. There was a larger periphery, in the dozens, of people who will help us on a regular basis.
It was a smaller initial nucleus than Unite New Zealand. Initially we were a campaign trying to raise issues of low pay and casualisation, and encouraging young people to join their respective unions. That was pretty straightforward.
We did naming and shaming dodgy bosses, and other media-friendly campaigns, to try to gather young activists around us. We organised a couple of rallies and pickets, that sort of thing.
From that we got approached by workers in a couple of shops whom we assisted to unionise. We had some small successes of that sort, but in the main we were just encouraging people in their ones and twos to join their union and raising issues at a political level.
We had a bit of a setback in 2004 when we helped some workers organise a Borders bookstore in Carlton [in Melbourne]. In those days our position was that workers should join the appropriate existing union. The union in retail, the SDA, is very right-wing.
The SDA signed up the entire shop, and they sold out the entire workforce. What the workers in that particular shop wanted was a collective agreement and penalty rates [higher hourly rates for weekends and evenings], since the shop's open late nights and weekends.
The union leadership went behind the workers' backs and said to Borders that they would sign a collective agreement without penalty rates if Borders would give them a closed-shop agreement throughout Australia.
We'd kicked the doors down for them, and they'd gone in and signed a rotten deal. We then had to campaign against the SDA to make sure that agreement didn't go through. We went to the Industrial Relations Commission to tell them that the workers had not endorsed the agreement, so the IRC knocked it on the head, and we told the SDA they had to come up with a better deal. The SDA put it in the bottom of their in-tray and forgot about it, and now all those workers have either left the shop or left the SDA.
We pulled a few of them around the Socialist Party, and that's all well and good, but at the end of the day we did not end up with a union agreement in the shop. We showed that you can win victories by fighting in retail, something that has not really been done in Australia for a long time, but workers were tearing up their union cards in front us and saying: "You told us to join this union, and now they've shafted us".
We had to reassess. If we were telling people to join the established unions, and that was what would happen once we got a dispute off the ground, what do we do? The class struggle was a very low level. There's not much going on here.
When the coalition [conservative] government introduced WorkChoices [new anti-union industrial relations laws, in 2006] we got legal advice and had a look at it.
We saw an opening there for us to continue what we had been doing with Unite - all the political campaigning and so on - but also encourage people to join Unite more formally. There were loopholes in the legislation which allowed what they called "bargaining agents" to represent workers. A bargaining agent can be an individual, a law firm, or an association like Unite: we had the right to represent workers in the [Industrial Relations] Commission, to negotiate agreements, and to deal with individual grievances.
We took the idea to a few of the left-wing unions. Some of them really liked it; some of them gave us a bit of support; we raised enough money to get ourselves an office and pay for a full-timer. We paid for me to work full-time for Unite for the first six months.
We had a plan to raise membership sufficiently that the income from dues would pay for the full-time organiser's wages. That didn't happen in the first six months, so we had to accept a bit of a setback and go back to running the organisation on a volunteer basis.
At the same time, all the unions, including the left unions, were totally taken up with the idea of re-electing the Labour Party [to federal government], We were finding it harder to get the support we needed within the movement.
More recently, we've raised a bit more money, and put another part-time organiser on - she's working three days a week.
Having a full-time professional team there to go out and recruit and build the membership is very important.
The problem with getting that is mostly the objective situation. When there were the massive rallies in Melbourne against [conservative prime minister] Howard and WorkChoices, our phone was running hot. When the ACTU [equivalent of the TUC] moved the campaign towards one to re-elect the Labour Party, we noticed that fewer people contacted us.
When there were thousands of people on the streets, what we were doing was very attractive; but when the ACTU campaign went quiet, we noticed a downturn in the levels of interest we got.
The advantage that Unite New Zealand have got is that it's very, very easy there to register a union. We're a union, but we're unregistered.
In a nutshell, we don't have an official right of entry to workplaces.
Registered unions here have a right to go in and talk to the members, with a few restrictions - we don't have that.
I went to New Zealand and spent some time working with Unite there.
It is not as easy as you might think. The right of entry is a bit of a lever for recruitment, but it's not the be-all and end-all. They can still find it hard to recruit, even with that right.
If you're dealing with retail and fast-food, these places are open to the public anyway, so you can walk in and talk with the workers. And when I went out with Unite organisers in New Zealand, quite often when they went into shops, even though they had the official passes, the boss would say to them: "The workers are too busy now. You'll have to come back".
My understanding of why this organising has taken off in New Zealand, and not so much in Australia, yet, is that during the 1990s the New Zealand labour movement faced severe neo-liberal attacks. That happened ten years ago. The formation of Unite came as part of a wave of opposition to that. That type of opposition hasn't happened yet in Australia. In Unite we're in advance of any generalised opposition.
The most difficult thing is the objective situation, the low level of class struggle. One of the advantages of having Unite, even if our reputation far exceeds our membership, is that we're quite well known, we're always in the media, and we've been able to get into schools. I'm constantly being invited to speak in schools, so we do feel we're doing some cutting-edge work. But the type of questions we get in schools are: "what's a union?", "what do I join a union for?", "is it ok that I get paid $4 an hour?"... it's such a low level of consciousness, especially among young people.
In New Zealand, they've done some fantastic work to raise that level of consciousness. Unite is a household name there, almost, especially among young people. It is seen as pretty hip and trendy - the people who organise all the colourful demonstrations.
That's going to come in Australia. The class struggle is going to increase. When it does, minor problems like the right of entry will be pushed aside, once we've cracked a couple of shops and won a couple of victories.
Matt McCarten of Unite NZ said to me: "The main thing we did, we broke a couple of shops and won a couple of victories". That's what we need to prove ourselves. At the moment, we've got a very good idea, but we haven't actually proven ourselves to the people we want to recruit.
The biggest criticism you could have of Unite Australia is that maybe we overstated the opportunities when we decided to step things up and set ourselves up as a union. But there were loads of people around, including all the leaders of the left unions, who thought it was a great idea, and they're still supporting us, though not to the extent that we would like.
As soon as we can prove ourselves, even on a small scale, that will enable us to get much more support and to raise the membership.
For the present, the campaigning - the leaflets, the rallies, the naming and shaming, the petitions - is probably the main part of our work. We do have a union membership, but it is mainly ones and twos in different shops, with a high turnover, and the main thing we do with those members, at present, is sorting out individual grievances, helping people to negotiate individual contracts [heavily promoted as an alternative to union collective agreements by the conservative government, and now quite widespread], helping on health and safety issues, etc.
We've not yet been able to get beyond two, three or four members in a shop, and to fully organise a particular shop and win a dispute with the employer.
There is a complicating factor here with the established union in retail being the SDA. They are not affiliated to the Trades Hall Council however [the state equivalent of the TUC]. We have been able to get some support from other unions by saying that there are about 1.5 million workers in retail in Australia. The SDA has about 200,000 members. That leaves 1.3 million workers for us to go out and recruit. We're not trying to poach members from the SDA.
We advise our organisers not to go into SDA closed shops.
When we go into shops, sometimes we get managers yelling at us or calling security right away. It tends to depend on the manager on the spot, rather than a policy of the whole chain.
Sometimes workers are very friendly, but it also happens that you get workers immediately starting to look round and saying: "I hope my boss doesn't see me talking to you".
Most of our success in recruiting has not come from that sort of cold-calling. We still do it, because we want to show to people that the union is visible and active. But the main place we recruit people is on the university campuses, through the stalls, in the cafes, during freshers' fairs. Pretty much all university students are also workers.
We also target high schools. We hit rock concerts a lot. If we can't get inside, we go outside, but usually now we get invited to go inside and be one of the market stalls there. We're the only union that does that.
That's very successful, especially in the first few hours we're at a concert.
It's hard to recruit workers in the workplace because of intimidation and the low level of consciousness. We've got to go to workers in the environments where they feel more comfortable about talking to us - on campus, in the high schools, in skate parks, at concerts. It's not 100% easy, but it works better than cold-calling workplaces.
The slightly older students, early 20s, tend to be a bit more aware and receptive, because they've had one or two jobs, and they've had their fingers burned. They've started to realise that things aren't right. The 15 or 16 year olds are usually more difficult, because they're very excited to have a job. The job brings them a bit of money in their pocket, and they're not too worried about low wages. But it's mixed.
We've got some very, very good 17 year old high school students who not only are members and try to organise their workplaces, but also go round other shops in the area, leafleting, and talk to their mates in school to try to recruit them.
The four key issues we've raised are low pay; casualisation, irregular hours; youth rates; and individual contracts. The fifth issue, we've found, is health and safety, mainly bullying in the workplace. We've got a whole range of literature on those issues.
The key issue for us, I think, will be low pay. The minimum wage is low; on top of that you've got youth rates; and on top of that you've got a whole range of employers who are not adhering to the law at all. We have kids telling us they're paid $5 an hour, when the minimum wage is about $13.50 an hour.
We've worked with people to give them advice on individual contracts. In retail, the majority of new starters are asked to sign individual contracts. We explain the rules: you can't be forced to sign it, you have to have time to read it, if you're under 18 your parents have to have a chance to read it, and so on. At the same time we advise them that they should be talking over the issues with their workmates and getting together to win something better collectively.
I come from a manufacturing union background, and the gains we've been able to make on health and safety are pretty minimal compared to what unions have been able to win in manufacturing. Our main focus has been on bullying. We've used statistics from government departments about bullying, and campaigned on the basis of: "know your rights; you don't have to put up with it".
We've had a lot of cases of workers being sexually harassed by their bosses, and we've given advice and support to those workers. Often it's a tough one, when you have young women workers harassed by older male bosses and they don't want to take it further.
Our comrades in Britain says it's not the same there. There are undemocratic unions in Britain, but they think there's still space to intervene, and it would be counterproductive to set up rebel unions.
In general, it's not our policy to go round setting up rival unions.
It's a matter of the peculiar situation in retail here, with the SDA, coupled with the legal openings created by WorkChoices, coupled with the campaigning work we'd already done around the issues. And I think the legal situation for trade-union organising is more difficult in Britain than it is here.
We have made an agreement with the Liquor, Hospitality, and Miscellaneous Union [LHMU] that we won't attempt to recruit anyone from places that sell liquor - pubs, clubs, bars, hotels, the casino.
They were happy with that, and they said it was ok for us to go to organise cafes. I get lots of phone calls from young workers in pubs who want to join, but we have to tell them to go to the LHMU.
For the last couple of years we've been trying to develop a relationship with the more progressive student unions here, like at RMIT University.
Some of the universities have ten, twenty cafes on campus. We talk to the student union about the workers' conditions, and suggest working together to organise these places.
I've had some good results. At present I'm trying to get a dispute going with one of the cafes at RMIT. The difficulty has been the lack of continuity in student politics with leaderships changing every year.
Our new part-time organiser has been mainly working on the universities, getting clubs set up on campuses, working on the dispute at the cafe at RMIT...
