State of the unions: industrial muscle in 2011
Alicia Wood
November 2, 2011 - 1:08PM
While the Occupy movement is standing up to greed, there's a body of opinion that unions are muscling up again.

Take the language used in the Qantas dispute by Steve Purvinas of the aircraft engineers' union, who promised to "bake them slowly", to "sort out" the airline's chief executive Alan Joyce, while urging travellers to look at airlines other than Qantas.

So how relevant and how popular are unions in Australia?
For many Australians, the image may be of burly blokes in singlets; men in the electricity, construction and transport industries. You either joined or you were a scab.

When an industrial dispute collapsed into the grounding of the entire Qantas fleet this week it was probably this image - and the dogs and barbed wire of the waterfront dispute a decade before - that formed in the mind of a country watching on.

Unions have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. But it is not clear they have changed enough to survive.

The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that of 9.8 million employees in the country - only 18 per cent are trade union members.

Further analysis by the ABS shows that 41 per cent of public sector employees are union members, but in the private sector it is only 14 per cent.

Professor Mark Wooden of the Melbourne Institute said this is still significant – the raw numbers mean there are about two million union members in Australia.

"This means that of Australian employees, one in five is a trade union member," Professor Wooden said.

Ask any union representative, and they will tell you that the one in five enjoys benefits of membership - most pertinently, an average weekly wage that is around $100 higher than non-unionised workers, according to the latest ABS figures.

Dr Shae McCrystal, a senior lecturer in employment law at the University of Sydney, said unions still perform similar roles as they did 30 years ago. But they have had to become more professional in their dealings with employers.

"They have had to do this to be effective advocates," Dr McCrystal said.

"Because of the changing patterns in the workforce, unions have had to shift their focus away from full-time workers to make sure they are representing temporary, casual and part-time workers. This is a very significant challenge, and has been met with varying degrees of success."

Executive director of the Sydney Institute, Gerard Henderson, said that the Qantas dispute shows some unions exceeding their reach. In his view, these unions are not rising to the challenges of a changing workplace and a global economy.

"Unions cannot protect wages and conditions if the company goes under. The idea that a union can stand against flexibility is just not going to work," Mr Henderson said.

"What unions should realise is that there is a limitation on what they can do. This was a dispute that wasn't over money, it was essentially over secure employment. This is a mythology. No-one enjoys that now," Mr Henderson said.

Unions NSW secretary, Mark Lennon, said unions did not stand against the ability for a business to be competitive.

"What we are trying to ensure is not that we ignore what is happening around us in the world, but that the needs and concerns of working people are given due consideration."

Mr Lennon said that part of this, was engaging the public with campaigns.

The first, and most effective of these was, he said, the Your Rights at Work campaign.

As a result of this campaign, public sentiment weighted with the unions and reminded people of why they are still relevant, he said.

But John Lloyd, director of the work reform and productivity unit at the Institute of Public Affairs, said unions now had more privileges than their "dwindling membership" justified.

He said unions should not have the right of entry into a workplace, and that this was "out of step with their representation".

Mr Lloyd was the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner (ABCC) for five years, appointed by former Prime Minister, John Howard.

He said that he has seen unions exerting undue pressure on employees and employers alike.

"The most notorious industry for this is the building industry. The ABCC has taken quite a number of prosecutions against unions for putting pressure on employees or on contractors to ensure employees are union members.

“It is a right of everyone to choose to join or not to join."

Tara Moriarty, the secretary of the Liquor and Hospitality division of the United Voice union, said examples like this ignored a large sector of the union movement.

The workers Ms Moriarty represents are primarily women who work in the hospitality industry.

"We're not a particularly militant union, and there is nothing wrong with being militant, but from our perspective you don't have to be militant to be effective," she said.