Why Disamalgamation Will Lead to Union Renewal

An important measure of union effectiveness is union membership density.  Australian union membership has suffered a profound decline falling from fifty-one percent of the workforce in 1976 to the current level of thirteen percent!  In 1990 Australian union membership density was forty-five percent of the workforce so that the 1990s was the period during which union membership fell sharply.  The cause of this phenomenon should be identified.

The major cause of Australian union membership decline in the 1990s was union amalgamation.   The implementation of the union amalgamation policy in this time was a profoundly de-unionising process.  This occurred because too many rank and file union members refused to join the new industry unions as they had previously identified with their employment craft upon which their union membership had been based to that time.

It is therefore somewhat distressing that the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) supported an application made in July 2021 to the federal Fair Work industrial relations tribunal submitted by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) to prevent its mining section from leaving this conglomerate union.  A sinister dimension of this specific ACTU representation was its opposition to union members of the CFMEU’s mining division conducting a secret ballot on disamalgamation! 

The concept of a secret ballot is a cornerstone of the democratic process. It was introduced to prevent discrimination against voters who may have defied the wishes of other interests in a voting contest.

The ACTU seems to hold the view that there should be no secret voting at least on this occasion. Is this because the ACTU’s senior leadership believe that there is no danger of discrimination / retribution against those who vote against the interests of the CFMEU central body?

The record of the CFMEU in dealing with disputes of any kind does not fill one with confidence that retribution would not occur to those who disagree with the motion of the mining section to utilise the coalition government’s legislation to enable this section’s disamalgamation from the major amalgamated union of which they are currently a part.

Maybe it is in order to frustrate this legislation, that the CFMEU is willing to utilise extreme pressure tactics to achieve their aim of frustrating disamalgamation by ensuring that secret balloting does not occur.

Does the ACTU’s senior leadership not realize that union democracy is at the heart of Australian unionism?  Should the ACTU’s leadership succeed in helping frustrate members of the CFMEU’s mining division from disamalgamation then the ramifications for Australian unionism may well be dire!  Thousands of rank-and-file members of the CFMEU’s mining division might become alienated from the union movement if their collective will is undermined by the ACTU’s active opposition to union disamalgamation. 

The ACTU, instead of trying heavy-handedly to frustrate union disamalgamation, should whole heartedly be supporting the process!  The re-formation of smaller craft-based unions offers the potential for Australian union renewal.  This is because craft-based unions tend to be smaller so that they are consequently more democratically responsive to rank and file needs, such as representation of interests.

Therefore, while the size of Australian union organisations may shrink in the short term, in net terms Australian union membership stands to eventually regain ground because new craft-based unions will be more able (for the above cited reasons) to reach out to attract currently non-unionised employees to join the union movement. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                       The Organising Union Model

For the fact of the matter is that the ACTU to date has ignominiously failed to reverse the de-unionising ramifications of the union amalgamation policy of the 1990s.  The ACTU’s strategic response to the low membership crisis has been to promote since the mid-1990s the organising union model (the organising model).  The organising model was originally an American approach to workplace organising which was formulated in the 1990s as a strategic response to a similar crisis in the United States.

The organising model seeks to engineer rank and file support for union organising at a grass-roots workplace level.  This model envisages that paid union officials (such as union organisers) will ultimately recede from undertaking the bulk organising tasks to instead fulfil a supportive role as they liaise with rank and file elected workplace delegates, who will have the main responsibility for sustaining workplace union activity.   

A major challenge with regard to the organising model’s objective of facilitating Australian union effectiveness it that it is often too difficult for mega unions to generate support at a grass-roots level because they are too bureaucratic and consequently aloof from their membership because of their large size.  This would not be the case with smaller craft-based trade unions who could engage with their members to form an industrial community that would create an affinity with a trade union which is based upon their employment craft.

Whatever, the Morrison government’s motivations were in introducing legislation which facilitates union disamalgamation, the opportunity is still there for the Australian union movement to return to the pre-1990s craft- based model of trade unionism which had previously served Australian employees, and the union movement itself, so well.  Therefore, if the ACTU successfully opposes this disamalgamation bid (which probably has rank and file support) by the mining section of the CFMEU then this peak union body could find itself eventually becoming a collection of chiefs with no Indians. 

 David Bennett, the author of this article, was previously a National Industrial Officer with the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) and was awarded a PhD on the topic of The Organising Union Model and the Australian Union Movement.