Australian unions contract out recruitment of members

[Hannah Bell]

In a remarkable demonstration of contempt for their own members, a number of trade unions in Australia are outsourcing recruitment to a commercial agency, Work Partners, in an effort to bolster their declining membership base.

In the past, workers not only joined and built unions but they actively defended them against the attacks of employers and the state. The turn by unions to private recruitment agencies reflects the irreversible degeneration of these organisations and their remoteness from the concerns of ordinary working people.

In recent decades, union membership in Australia has plummeted as workers, disenchanted by repeated betrayals, left in droves. Younger workers rightly viewed the unions as alien to their aspirations and shunned them.

As a result, total union membership has more than halved from 40.5 percent in 1990 to just 18.9 percent in 2008. In the public sector, membership fell over the same period from 66.8 percent to 41.9 percent. In the private sector, it plunged from 30.8 percent to just 13.6 percent.

In the 1980s, the unions responded to the globalisation of production by abandoning any effort to obtain limited concessions and seeking instead to make corporate Australia “internationally competitive”. Under their Accords with the Hawke-Keating Labor governments from 1983 to 1996, the unions functioned as industrial policemen to break the resistance of workers to Labor’s pro-market program. The unions have played the same role under the Howard Coalition government that came to power in 1996 and now the Rudd Labor government...

The impact for the working class has been devastating. Large segments of manufacturing industry have been wiped out. Full-time jobs have been increasingly replaced by poorly paid and uncertain part-time, temporary and contract work. Outsourcing and the use of contact labour have become ubiquitous throughout industry and services. The unions have not only presided over, but profitted from these processes. The Australian Manufacturing Union and the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, for instance, have both operated their own body hire companies...

The unions’ use of Work Partners is not primarily motivated by the prospect of extra membership dues. As membership has plunged, the unions have established a different financial base—including superannuation funds and investment portfolios—through their relations with government and the corporate elite.

In fact, as the Australian Education Union indicated, it is prepared to forego the equivalent of a year’s dues in order to increase the number of members on its books. The main concern of the unions is to ensure their place in the industrial relations regime—if membership drops, the unions risk being sidelined altogether.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/unio-m13.shtml

[snot]

1. This is impt.: we must understand what went wrong with

the main force we managed to muster against the oligarchs.

In this instance and others.

Were union leaders corrupted and co-opted?