National
Ranks of Labor’s true believers thinning
IN 1990 just over 40 per cent of employees were members of a trade union.
That number now is less than 20 per cent. For a Prime Minister who was elected president of the Australian Union of Students and was a partner at labour law firm Slater and Gordon, Julia Gillard must feel as though her base is slipping.
Labor and the trade unions are generations removed from the ethos and numbers of the maritime and shearers’ strikes of 1890. They are generations removed from the first meeting of the Australian Labor Party, held under the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine, and the NSW Trades and Labor Council sponsored Labor Electoral League in Balmain in 1891. These are proud traditions, but about as relevant to today’s politics as the Queen’s speech.
And there is more bad news to come on the union front. The bastion of trade unionism for some decades has been the public sector. The sale of public assets and the outsourcing of various service and IT functions means the prospects for organising in the public sector are declining.
In 1990, an astonishingly high 67 per cent of public sector workers were members of a trade union. That figure today is less than 45 per cent. In the same period, little more than 30 per cent of private sector workers were members of a trade union.
Now, the proportion is less than 14 per cent.
Indeed, the proportion of public sector workers among trade union members has declined somewhat. In 1990, the proportion of public sector trade unionists to all trade unionists was 45 per cent. Now, the proportion of public sector trade unionists to all trade unionists is 43 per cent. This change in the proportion of trade unionists is driven by the relative decline in the size of the public sector workforce.
In 1990, the public sector workforce was 27 per cent of the total workforce. Now, the public sector workforce is less than 18 per cent of the workforce.
The sale of public assets by Labor and Coalition governments, the big one being the sale of Queensland Rail by a Labor government, will drive public sector union numbers down further.
Union numbers will not be enhanced by the recent announcement by Prime Minister Gillard of her desire to see principal teacher selection in state schools. Although not as radical as the headlines suggest, it has the potential to change the culture of unionism in the state schools’ sector to reflect that of the independent sector.
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Implications for Labor in the long term could be severe. It may be left with emergency workers – police and fireys – at the heart of the trade union movement.