Explainers

Was 2023 The Year of The Union?

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Margot Robbie on the picket line for the SAG-AFTRA strike in September 2023

Looking back, 2022 felt like The Year of the Strike. We saw major industrial action from rail workers in NSW and the U.K; strikes from just about every unionised workforce in Australia, from teachers, hospital workers, airport workers and bus drivers; media coverage of organised worker wins against the big bad corporates of Apple, Amazon, Starbucks. In my end of year recap, I wrote that “public sentiment has been mostly supportive… so we’re expecting to see even more industrial action next year as workers demand a better deal from corporations not passing on the profits that they have generated.”

Then came gas worker strikes, historic university staff strikes, Victorian dairy worker strikes and – the most influential of all – the double whammy of Hollywood writers and actors collectively withdrawing their labour from production studios for an extraordinary 148-days.

It was that last story I was sure would tip the scales, putting labour dynamics and the concept of worker exploitation in familiar entertainment terms that most people can understand. Everyday people were donating to strike funds, refusing to talk about ‘struck work’ on their social channels, and rushing to support the independent productions who agreed to both the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild terms.

As public support for worker organisation continued to grow (on Zee Feed’s corner of the Internet, at least), the economic conditions kept getting worse – especially for young people. The outrage was tangible and it felt like something significant had shifted. Did 2023 become The Year of The Union?

If you look at the numbers… not quite. As of August 2022, only 12.5% of all Australian employees were members of a trade union. This is down from 19.5% in 2010, and a huge drop from 1988 when 43% of all workers were part of a union. Union membership among young people is particularly low – in the Gen Z cohort, only 2% of workers aged 15-19, and 5% of those aged 20-24 are members. Interestingly, since 2012 there’s been a higher proportion of women members than men. 

Why had young people’s excitement not translated to a boom in membership like I’d expected? Wil Stracke, Assistant Secretary at the Victorian Trades Hall Council and a popular educational content creator on TikTok, explained we are much, much further back in the recruitment cycle than I thought. “I’m of the generation that you arrived at a workplace and you just joined the union. But then neoliberalism came along, the rise of individualism, and there was a drop in understanding of the role unions play.” 

It’s a diplomatic way of explaining Australia’s John Howard era – the Prime Minister and time period that many of today’s biggest, most destructive economic, social and environmental problems can be traced back to. Part of the Howard legacy (alongside the children overboard lie, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and significantly raising your uni fees) was the WorkChoices legislation, which stripped workers of many rights and heavily restricted union operations.

“Now there is a generation of young people coming through facing a whole lot of things, like climate change, that require large, collective solutions. They’re more hooked into the idea that they can’t just forge their way on their own. So while they don’t know what unions are, necessarily, they do understand the idea of collective power,” Wil says.

It makes sense that foundational and educational content online is resonating with young people. The curiosity about what does and does not break WGA and SAG-AFTRA rules; our explainer on the difference between a strike and a lockout; Wil’s explainer about the ‘no’ campaign in the women’s suffrage movement. She says it’s great to see people get behind the big picture stuff, but giving them reasons to actually join a union is a more specific task. And we’re not quite there yet.

“There was a period of time where being a trade unionist was a little bit of a dirty word… Now there’s more people who think ‘I don’t understand trade unions, but I think they do good work,’ or ‘I kind of get this idea.’ It’s up to [unionists] to talk to people about not just the big picture, but why every individual worker should join, what it will actually do for you in your workplace, for your life, your family and community.” The solutions, and how unions help to achieve them, need to be explicitly spelled out. 

These conversations must happen on the ground, worker-to-worker, and cannot be blasted out to a general audience on social media. It’s not a quick or easy task, which is partly why our collective anger has not translated to boosted membership. Unions are still restricted by legal and legislative barriers, although Wil says the political mood has shifted.

“[The corporate sector] responds more to political currents than to community currents. When there is a Liberal government we don’t hear from people for a very long time, and then when a Labor government gets elected, all of a sudden there are people ringing us. Suddenly you’re included in conversations.” 

Tripartism, the premise of the whole thing, is simple – the union negotiates with the employer on behalf of its workers, and the government sets the rules that ideally keeps the playing field even. But other countries do a much better job of protecting that dynamic than Australia is (right now). 

@wilstracke Trickle down economics isnt working! #auspol #trickledowneconomics #inequality #wealthinequality #rich #poor #lowpay #union #changetherules #changethesystem ♬ original sound – Wil Stracke

I was utterly bamboozled to discover that most countries in the European Union have board-level employee representation laws. Companies over a certain size are legally required to have board members that are elected by the employees, to represent the workers interests when executive-level decisions are being made. It is so simple!

There is some movement, but it’s far from guaranteed. The Labor government has proposed industrial reform, in a huge 278-page bill. The Liberal party is opposed (because of course they are) but their opinion does not matter, the Greens supported it in the lower house. It’s now in the Senate, where independent Senators David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie want it split into smaller chunks so they can pass the ‘easy’ bits and continue to negotiate on some of the more complex elements. No guarantee that worker protections will pass, but at least it’s being discussed – which is more than we’ve had in the past decade.

Clearly, my prediction that 2023 would be a turning point for unions was wrong. Or at least, premature. Wil remains patiently optimistic that the mood is indeed shifting and change is brewing. “I’m angry as about where we’ve ended up. But rage without a sense of what some solutions might be is the most demobilising force. So I think we have to be relentlessly positive about our ability to create a world that is better.”

She tells me the energy, curiosity and eagerness to be informed she sees from young people is so powerful it takes her breath away. Are they ready to move from awareness of collective action to the next phase of the journey, union education? Maybe next year. 


Smart people read more:

Unions do hurt profits, but not productivity, and they remain a bulwark against a widening wealth gap – The Conversation

Economist Alison Pennington Explains Why Neoliberalism Has Fucked Your Life (And How We Start to Fix It)

Gen Z is the most pro union generation alive. Will they organize to reflect that? – NPR

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