Chris Browne asks if unions are becoming even more irrelevant than they already are.
I stumbled across this article today detailing how some unions are outsourcing recruitment. It seems that even the union movement now can't figure out exactly what it is they are trying to sell to workers, so they outsource it to professional marketing firms instead.
I wasn't aware at the time (like 99% of other 15 year olds entering employment for the first time) what a union was or why the form was there amongst the others. A kind representative of the SDA Union was present to tell us that it was best if we all sign it. So we did.
A couple of months into the job I realised that I was receiving no benefit from being a part of a union whatsoever. This conclusion was reached without any political prejudice or preference; I just wasn't getting anything for my money.
Following an excruciatingly long phone call, the union said that they would stop taking my money and cancel my membership. Well, they didn't. I phoned back about six weeks later to follow this up and hit a brick wall on the other end of the line. I finally managed to convince them to stop taking my money by issuing a very hollow threat of legal action against the union if they continued to take membership fees.
About four years later I found myself in a similar situation at a major retailer when taking up a summer job. I was wiser that time and was the only person in the room of 16 people not to sign the form. Most of the others were starting their first jobs in exactly the same situation I was in some years earlier.
Unions claim to have membership levels in the hundreds of thousands, but how many of those are actually aware that they are members? How many have been fooled, coerced and now targeted by marketing firms into joining the union movement? My guess is that it would be well into the tens of thousands, if not considerably more.
I will pay credit where credit is due, however. The Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes said that his union doesn't use recruiting firms because you can't "outsource core union work".
When the rest of the unions realise that their primary duty is to represent workers and not target them maybe they will be able to attract members in their own right without employing third-party recruitment firms.
As for me, I'm never joining a union. Following my experiences with the SDA and my political views that have developed since, I simply will not join. That's not to say that unions don't have a place in the modern Australian workforce. But if they are to ever regain some semblance of relevancy they need to redefine the way they operate and practice what they preach: protecting the interests of Australian workers. That is something we haven't seen in a while.
Chris Browne is Editor-in-Chief of Menzies House.
