My Dad worked in a brewery, which was a great benefit to me when I started drinking. There is nothing like free alcohol around the house to excite the taste buds of a teenager. Just before Christmas 1981 he was working the nightshift when negotiations between his union and his employer collapsed. A picket was put on the factory gate at 6am stopping the morning shift from getting in but trapping my poor old Dad inside. When he finally left he had to put up with some abuse from the strikers who assumed that he had broken the picket. This upset my Dad greatly. He wasn’t militant in any way but he understood the power of Trade Unionism and the protection that it gave to their members.
As a result of the union’s efforts, he was paid for every hour he worked, including double and treble time when he worked nights or weekend. Which is more than can be said in my industry where people are paid “a salary” and then are expected to be on call 24 hours a day and to work bank holidays for nothing. My Dad got all that because he was a member of a union. They ensured that the brewery had a Christmas Party every year and not just the years when the company is making lots of money.
I’ve always had a soft spot for unions to be honest. Capitalism is a battle between the workers and the bosses. The bosses have the Police and the military to ensure that their interests are respected. Workers on their own will be picked off one by one by the whims of the system, through redundancy or wage reduction. Unless they are in a collective body which will stand up for them.
Saying you like unions these days however, is like saying that you like pictures of 3 year old Indonesians smoking cigarettes. It’s very 1950’s. I’m not helped, I must admit, by the behaviour of some Australian unions, who have been taken over by individuals and run as personal fiefdoms. The Health Services Union in Australia for example, is run by a family that would make the Sopranos look like a clan of Amish farmers.
Australia does seem to be particularly militant when it comes to the interaction of workers and bosses. I work near the Victorian Parliament and hardly a day goes by without the streets being filled with red shirted placard holders demanding better conditions for teachers, nurses or sheep inseminators (members of the Ancient Order of Mutton Botherers, with branches in Australia and New Zealand).
The teachers were the latest group to take to the streets. They want a 30% pay increase which sounds a lot when it’s reported like that (which is how the right wing media here went about things). But that’s over three years, so when broken down; it’s ... well, still a lot.
This didn’t elicit a lot of sympathy from parents who had to deal with their kids been off school for a day at short notice. The kids presumably were happier. These days, parents treat school as an unofficial child minder and get annoyed when the baby sitter is unavailable.
The nurses were up before that. They generated a lot more sympathy from the public but most of their complaints centred on their objection to plans to bring in untrained assistants to do clerical work. Nurses are pushing to do work normally done by doctors (presumably because it pays more) but object to assistants being employed to do tasks normally done by nurses. Presumably if they had cake, they would want to eat it as well.
It’s a shame really that unions have allowed themselves to be wrapped up in protectionism and a culture of jobs for the boys. Because Victoria has a proud record of labour support. The eureka stockade saw the formation of the first union in Australia and a statue on my way home commemorates the 8-8-8 movement which campaigned for an eight hour day. Victoria was the first place in the world to bring in the policy of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours sleep. Although nobody seems to have told the banking industry or people with one year old children.
Banks used to open at 10am and close at 3pm. That was when they only serviced people within walking distance of the branch. Now banks are global, with clients in far flung countries who don’t even realise they are clients. As a result, you could work for 24 hours a day and find emails flying into your inbox demanding an instant response and phone calls from overseas at all hours of the night. Hardly anyone works an eight hour day in this environment, although it must be said that this is unlikely to garner much sympathy in the wider community. Banking is a pejorative term these days.
But I wonder what the men who fought for an eight hour day would think of this if they were able to gaze into the glass walled skyscrapers of the central business district? They would see an army of open shirted automatons toiling away to keep the wheels of capitalism greased. They would see lights on at 8pm and stressed out drones slouching towards miserably lit train stations.
The money is good it must be said, but it seems as though you sign a Faustian pact that negates all your other rights to rest and sleep. My Dad’s union would never have stood for it. If someone in my Dad’s brewery had been asked to work on Christmas Day for no extra pay, there would have been a picket placed immediately. But these days unions are considered to be a dinosaur, existing only to enrich their full time officials. It’s every man for himself now and the system will pick us off one by one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and it’s no fun being a poodle.
As a result of the union’s efforts, he was paid for every hour he worked, including double and treble time when he worked nights or weekend. Which is more than can be said in my industry where people are paid “a salary” and then are expected to be on call 24 hours a day and to work bank holidays for nothing. My Dad got all that because he was a member of a union. They ensured that the brewery had a Christmas Party every year and not just the years when the company is making lots of money.
I’ve always had a soft spot for unions to be honest. Capitalism is a battle between the workers and the bosses. The bosses have the Police and the military to ensure that their interests are respected. Workers on their own will be picked off one by one by the whims of the system, through redundancy or wage reduction. Unless they are in a collective body which will stand up for them.
Saying you like unions these days however, is like saying that you like pictures of 3 year old Indonesians smoking cigarettes. It’s very 1950’s. I’m not helped, I must admit, by the behaviour of some Australian unions, who have been taken over by individuals and run as personal fiefdoms. The Health Services Union in Australia for example, is run by a family that would make the Sopranos look like a clan of Amish farmers.
Australia does seem to be particularly militant when it comes to the interaction of workers and bosses. I work near the Victorian Parliament and hardly a day goes by without the streets being filled with red shirted placard holders demanding better conditions for teachers, nurses or sheep inseminators (members of the Ancient Order of Mutton Botherers, with branches in Australia and New Zealand).
The teachers were the latest group to take to the streets. They want a 30% pay increase which sounds a lot when it’s reported like that (which is how the right wing media here went about things). But that’s over three years, so when broken down; it’s ... well, still a lot.
This didn’t elicit a lot of sympathy from parents who had to deal with their kids been off school for a day at short notice. The kids presumably were happier. These days, parents treat school as an unofficial child minder and get annoyed when the baby sitter is unavailable.
The nurses were up before that. They generated a lot more sympathy from the public but most of their complaints centred on their objection to plans to bring in untrained assistants to do clerical work. Nurses are pushing to do work normally done by doctors (presumably because it pays more) but object to assistants being employed to do tasks normally done by nurses. Presumably if they had cake, they would want to eat it as well.
It’s a shame really that unions have allowed themselves to be wrapped up in protectionism and a culture of jobs for the boys. Because Victoria has a proud record of labour support. The eureka stockade saw the formation of the first union in Australia and a statue on my way home commemorates the 8-8-8 movement which campaigned for an eight hour day. Victoria was the first place in the world to bring in the policy of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours sleep. Although nobody seems to have told the banking industry or people with one year old children.
Banks used to open at 10am and close at 3pm. That was when they only serviced people within walking distance of the branch. Now banks are global, with clients in far flung countries who don’t even realise they are clients. As a result, you could work for 24 hours a day and find emails flying into your inbox demanding an instant response and phone calls from overseas at all hours of the night. Hardly anyone works an eight hour day in this environment, although it must be said that this is unlikely to garner much sympathy in the wider community. Banking is a pejorative term these days.
But I wonder what the men who fought for an eight hour day would think of this if they were able to gaze into the glass walled skyscrapers of the central business district? They would see an army of open shirted automatons toiling away to keep the wheels of capitalism greased. They would see lights on at 8pm and stressed out drones slouching towards miserably lit train stations.
The money is good it must be said, but it seems as though you sign a Faustian pact that negates all your other rights to rest and sleep. My Dad’s union would never have stood for it. If someone in my Dad’s brewery had been asked to work on Christmas Day for no extra pay, there would have been a picket placed immediately. But these days unions are considered to be a dinosaur, existing only to enrich their full time officials. It’s every man for himself now and the system will pick us off one by one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and it’s no fun being a poodle.
