HOW UNIONS UNITED TO CHANGE AUSTRALIA'S LABOUR LAWS

Text / Jeremy Vermeesch

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Even anti-labour strategists have acknowledged that the Your Rights At Work campaign, coordinated by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), played a major role in the loss of the 11-year-old conservative Liberal government of ousted prime minister John Howard, delivering national power to the Australian Labor Party (ALP) for the first time since 1996.

Tactics in the campaign (previewed in Metal World No. 3, 2006) included detailed opinion polling and public message development, unparalleled commercial advertising, four mass public rallies, the mobilisation of union members and community campaigns in 24 marginal conservative-held electorates. Contemporary media including websites, email, mobile phone SMS messaging and automatic "phone trees" were widely used.

While the campaign was triggered in 2005 by the former government's introduction of union-busting legislation known as Work Choices (which took effect from March 2006), senior union leaders say its success had its origins in the gradual erosion of workers' rights and job security over more than a decade, particularly through individual contracts.

The Labor Party's victory also came despite the former government spending around A$200 million (US$187 million) on advertising to promote its new industrial laws, as well as major employer groups' TV advertisements portraying unionists as threatening thugs.

At the Australian federal election on November 24, 2007, voting swings against the conservatives in electorates targeted by the union campaign were around 3% higher than the national average swing of 5.4%. Extraordinarily, for only the second time in Australian history, the then prime minister (Howard) lost his own seat in parliament.
A union exit poll on election day found eight out of 10 Labor voters said the workplace laws were a major priority in their decision, while a News Corporation newspaper survey showed 52% of all voters said it was a priority issue.

In claiming victory on election night, new Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd acknowledged the role of "the great Australian trade union movement". Howard's replacement as Liberal leader Brendan Nelson soon after declared that "Work Choices is dead".

The campaign was led by ACTU and International Trade Union Confederation President Sharan Burrow and former ACTU Secretary Greg Combet, who was voted in as a Labor member of parliament at the election.

The ACTU funded the campaign through a special A$5.50 a year levy per member from unions, providing more than A$20 million (US$18.7 million) for advertising. No decision has yet been made on whether to continue the levy after it expires in July 2008.

TRADE UNION UNITY
Union leaders agree that the success depended on a combination of unity, sophisticated advertising, activation of members and community campaigning - particularly in former conservative-held electorates which the Labor Party won at the election.

Australian Workers' Union (AWU) National Secretary Paul Howes said the campaign "redefined the issues in the lead-up to the election" after a period when "the labour movement really was at its lowest ebb".

"I think the important lesson out of Your Rights at Work was that we were actually able, in a very short period of time, to redefine the national debate, and to focus the debate onto workplace relations, which really hadn't been such a significant issue in Australian political and social life since 1929," Howes said.

"The campaign wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't for the fact that the union movement was united in a way that (it) has never been before," he said. "That's now led to a new spirit of cooperation."

Apart from the 24 ACTU-targeted seats, the AWU additionally supported the successful election campaigns of its former national secretary Bill Shorten (who won a Labor-held seat in Melbourne) and former industrial officer Yvette D'Ath (who won a Queensland seat from the Liberals).

"What that involved was dedicating a huge amount of our money but also our resources and our people. . . we also viewed this as a real opportunity for us to activate our membership politically, to having every single union member in the country viewed as a soldier in fighting this war and to win that election," Howes said.

Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union (AMWU) National President Julius Roe said the victory depended on "careful planning and good leadership by the ACTU in conjunction with key union leaders, and a strategy which combined industrial, political, communications and community activity."

"The key factor was the way in which we initially undertook a major exercise to educate thousands of rank and file union delegates and officials, and then secondly sought to educate the public through an advertising campaign," Roe said.

"Also important were the four nationwide days of action, in which we managed to mobilise huge numbers of workers on the street, and where - in the manufacturing industry - virtually the entire industry closed down because our members all walked off the job, even though it was illegal to participate in the mass rallies. It created a lot of public attention, and also sent a very strong message to employers."

"That reduced the extent to which employers were able to destroy our organisation, because the Howard laws had the potential to destroy union organisation through crippling fines and the dismissal of union activists," Roe said.

"The other key aspect was the development of the community level campaign where we put full-time activists to be employed in each of the marginal electorates. What was unprecedented in this campaign was the extent to which every union was united in a common strategy," Roe said.

CEPU National Secretary Peter Tighe said there "was an element of peer pressure" in developing that unity, requiring some unions - particularly those not affiliated with the ALP - to be encouraged to support what could be seen as a partisan strategy.

"They had to be convinced that this was about the survival of the trade union movement and ensuring members had a system to collectively bargain, that this was not a political campaign as such, it was an industrial campaign with a political focus," Tighe said.

In addition to the ACTU levy, the CEPU introduced a A$1 a week special fee for members, and spent nearly A$5 million (including more than A$500,000 in donations to the federal ALP) on the strategy. This included backing the successful election campaigns of former CEPU organisers Mike Symon in Melbourne and Jim Turnour in Queensland.

The CEPU's electrical linespeople erected billboards on power polls around the country, despite the objections of many conservative local government authorities who were powerless to remove them because of safety laws.

COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY
Essential Media Communications (EMC) was hired by the ACTU and AMWU to develop the communications strategy for the campaign in 2005 - some two-and-a-half years before the federal election, and EMC Director Tony Douglas says starting the campaign early - even before the laws were introduced to parliament - was important in its success.

He points out that workplace relations then was not even in the top 10 political agenda items according to public opinion polls, but by the 2007 election was the second most important issue (second only to health care), and also the main vote-switching issue.

Douglas says controlled focus group polling of average workers in 2005 was critical in developing an understanding of the target audience - who overwhelmingly identified themselves as "working people" or "working families". At the time, the Labor Party leadership was instead referring to "middle Australia".

"For a lot of people earning under A$60,000 a year in Australia, when you put terms like 'middle class' to them, they thought that was doctors and lawyers," Douglas said. The research also showed that nearly all average-income workers regarded themselves as "just keeping their heads above water".

"We knew that we were connecting with at least 80% of employees, and therefore the most important group in the electorate, and we knew that their economic situation, while not disastrous, was a bit fragile and vulnerable," Douglas said.

Despite "a lot of pressure to run the campaign around the idea of fairness", Douglas said EMC's studies showed working people found the concept of fairness to be "relative and subjective" and "didn't relate to it that well".

"But when we talked about rights, rights were concrete and ascertainable - things you had under law that were being taken away. And so the frame of rights was central to how we prosecuted this campaign: that you have rights to be treated fairly in the workplace and these are based on law and they are being taken away," he said.

The research informed EMC's eight TV commercials for the campaign, which began in 2006 with advertisements exemplifying the vulnerability of a working mother threatened with dismissal over last-minute roster changes and a working man aged over 45 forced onto an individual contract that cut his conditions.

Polling showed that before those first two TV commercials aired, about 35% of people knew something about the new industrial laws, but after the advertisements ran this increased to 77%. Similarly, opposition to the laws increased from 38% before the advertisements to 64% afterwards, a position that stuck for most of the campaign.

The second phase of advertisements targeted particular aspects of the legislation, especially how the new individual contract system "took away all the powers of workers and their rights", Douglas said.
A poll in March 2007 found 69% of voters agreed that individual contracts gave too much power to employers, and 71% agreed that "collective bargaining gives power back to workers, which is a good thing".

In terms of changing votes, EMC estimated that of the 37% of Australian so-called "battlers" on lower incomes (median annual salary of A$40,000-A$45,000), about half identify generally as ALP voters, and about one quarter identify as Liberal voters.

"It's that quarter of Liberal voters that deserted them (the Liberals), and all the Labor identifiers voted ALP this time, whereas a significant proportion were in fact voting Liberal at previous elections," Douglas said.

The key "vote-shifters" were among working people with children at home, aged between about 30 and 55 years-old, he said. Kevin Rudd adopted the term "working families" and used it relentlessly during the election campaign. "Micro-targeting" of particular groups, including parents and grandparents not directly affected by the laws but concerned about their children and grandchildren, was used in subsequent TV commercials, such as one featuring three generations of a family.

Finally in 2007 the TV campaign "tarnished the Liberal Party brand" by associating the new laws with the interests of big business. A humorous TV and radio advertisement portrayed male bosses in a boardroom celebrating their executive bonuses at the expense of employees' pay and conditions.

Polling of members of 10 unions since the election showed the "clear cut" success of their internal communications campaigns, with an average shift of around 12% in members' votes from Liberal to Labor, meaning around 70% of members were voting Labor and only 8% to 10% voting Liberal.

Paul Howes said polling of AWU members showed that at the previous election in 2004, almost 40% of voted Liberal, but at the 2007 election, around 88% voted against them.

GRASS ROOTS CAMPAIGN
CEPU training manager Jacqueline King was the Community Campaign Coordinator in the conservative held seat of Bowman, near Brisbane in Queensland, where the campaign won an 8.86% swing against the government - just a handful of votes short of victory, and above the average statewide swing of 7.53%.

She said it was vital "to actually cut straight through to the community" - including to non-union members and even non-working people - firstly through the media advertising and secondly through the grass roots campaigning.

"I wanted to promote just local people who were there...and I think that was one of the key strengths in the end, with local people taking responsibility for their issues, it was their campaign," she said.
People who would normally not be involved in politics were motivated by the extremity of the Work Choices laws, which were "really starting to bite in many non-union and low-paid areas, such as casuals and young people, and overwhelmingly the thought of 'is this what our children and grandchildren are going to inherit'" was important, King said.

Her campaign involved extensive door-knocking, leafleting, community meetings, alliances with Aboriginal elders on nearby Stradbroke Island, market and roadside stalls, protests outside the local politician's office, family picnics, fun days, street theatre, local newspaper advertising and lobbying of other organisations - "anything that would give us visibility," she said.

"I had a grandmother involved whose 16-year-old granddaughter was ripped off and she had no way of expressing that anger until we started advertising locally and holding community meetings," King said.

King stressed that the campaign was not a typical political exercise because its objective was to replace the Work Choices laws with fair legislation, not simply to elect a Labor Government, and local volunteers were now looking for leadership.

LESSONS FOR UNIONS
Sharan Burrow said the main lesson from the campaign was "the old adage that 'united you win'".

"If you can focus on one single ambition, be disciplined enough to direct your resources to that ambition until it's won, and do the research around strategy and appropriate communications for the audience that you need to reach, then the campaign will succeed. The difficulty unions have is that there is so much work, so many issues, and so many individual interests that our capacity to focus becomes dissipated," Burrow said.

Tony Douglas said, "unions can, if they use these kind of (communication) techniques, shape the political environment and the political agenda in their countries."

"These techniques now need be thought of as central to the work that unions do, not just an add-on at times of stress when you're under attack, but something that you can use positively to shape the future of your societies and deliver benefits to your members," he said.

Paul Howes urged "other unions from across the world to take note of what we did and to come over here and see how it worked, because it built our power and our ability to affect the national way of life so incredibly and so quickly."

Julius Roe said that, "even in the most difficult circumstances, when you have legislation that's designed to destroy the trade union movement, fighting back does make a difference, and it is possible to defeat neo-liberal ideas and neo-liberal political organisation."

"Effective campaigning does mean you have to go beyond just the industrial aspect in the workplace, and have to look at the use of the media and developing alliances with the broader community, as well as mobilisation of the members and industrial action. A modern campaigning method is essential," said Roe.

Peter Tighe also stressed the importance of building an industrial strategy into a broader political campaign, including by tapping into the social justice priorities of other groups in the community, including churches of all denominations, charities and activist organisations.

The New Zealand trade union movement is already heeding the lessons of the Australian success, with the CEPU sending a staff member to work with the NZ Council of Trade Unions on their campaign for the national election later this year.

THE NEXT STEP
The ACTU has decided to resume a commercial media advertising campaign to ensure the new Labor Government introduces new laws that protect workers' rights, particularly collective bargaining.

While the Government has legislated to phase out statutory-based individual contracts, unions want to ensure its substantial labour legislation scheduled for next year also restores unfair dismissal laws, abolishes the construction union watchdog (the Australian Building and Construction Commission) and enshrines International Labour Organisation Conventions on the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association, including by restoring union rights to organise, negotiate and take industrial action.

Peter Tighe said the Rudd Government should not yield to pressure from some employer groups to limit the scope of workplace bargaining to defined conditions, but rather leave it open to workers to decide what was relevant for them.

"We'll never do politics again quite the same way, we'll always have an independent voice and we'll always have a conversation now with Australia about the issues that matter to working families," Burrow said.

"We won't do industrial campaigns the same way either. While the old tactics of collectivity and resistance where necessary are critical, they need to be managed in a much more integrated and sophisticated way."

Australian unions will also use lessons from the campaign to help rebuild membership levels, including through the proposed idea of Unions Australia as a national membership centre that could maintain members as they change jobs or industries.

"Every week there are tens of thousands of new union members recruited, but when they move from job to job or from industry to industry, then of course we have to go all over the process again. It should be our job to find the union for the working person - not their job," Burrow said.

Tony Douglas estimates that Australian unions would achieve real membership growth if they could reduce "the churn factor" (from high levels of labour mobility) by between 30% or 40%.

He recommends a mass media campaign "to fill the information gaps about what unions do, to make stronger, idealistic and values-type connections between unions and people."

"The unions themselves have to look at new approaches to actually going out face-to-face recruiting to get people to sign on, but it's pretty clear from the polling that people don't understand what union covers their work, think they're not relevant, and don't understand what unions do - and many are never asked to join," Douglas said.
Paul Howes said the focus of the union movement should now be on increasing membership by building on the Your Rights At Work campaign's earlier themes of "worth fighting for" and "worth voting for", by adding "worth joining for".

THE MEASURE OF VICTORY:
As part of the Your Rights at Work campaign, Australian unions targeted 24 conservative-held electorates in six States around the country in the lead up to the federal election on November 24, 2007. The Australian Labor Party won 20 of those 24 electorates from former government incumbents, with mostly significantly higher than average voting swings.

The average swing against the former government in the successful 20 union-targeted seats was 7.26%, compared to the national average swing of 5.44%.

The following table compares the voting swing away from the conservatives in each of the 20 union-targeted electorates won by the Labor Party with the average swing in the particular State.

Successful voting swings in union targeted electorates, November 2007 Australian election:

                                        (Source: Australian Electoral Commission)

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