Hard Labour by Ben Schneiders

Author:Ben Schneiders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS069000, BUS038020, BUS022000, POL013000, LAW054000, POL043000, POL029000, SOC050000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Little has changed at the SDA since its embrace of the fierce anti-communism and social conservatism of the 1950s. Even in 2020, amid debate about the Victorian Andrews Labor government’s participation in the Belt and Road trade deal with China, Michael Donovan, the Victorian secretary since 1996, wrote to the premier pushing for change. The SDA, Donovan wrote, ‘stood on the side of the Chinese’ people and not the communist country’s ‘authoritarian government … We played our part in bringing down the Iron Curtain and giving human rights to the people of Eastern Europe and Russia … History will judge all of us. We want history to judge that we stood side by side with the Chinese people.’

It was a grandiose claim, on one level ridiculous — what role did a single Australian union play in bringing down the Iron Curtain? But it also gave an insight into how the SDA still sees itself, and into the power it has become accustomed to wielding. That power comes from factional numbers in Labor, and the ability to influence and control preselections. Ultimately, those numbers are drawn from the scale of its membership. Unlike most other unions, it draws this membership strength from its closeness to major employers, and not from its militancy, its independence, or its ability to negotiate world-leading wages and conditions. The SDA has provided large employers with predictable wage increases, zero industrial disruption, and a cooperative single voice speaking for a large and dispersed workforce. ‘They’re Catholic, they’re tribal, they’re anti-communist. But they do believe in social justice,’ is how former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty put it. ‘[The SDA] is a Catholic union with Catholic connections. A lot of employers supported it because of that, but they also supported it because the SDA was a moderate and friendly union.’

That relationship was cemented with a landmark deal in the early 1970s, whereby six big retailers literally signed up SDA members. Under the deal, membership of the union exploded from about 57,000 to an eventual high of almost one-quarter of a million. While strict closed-shop arrangements are no longer allowed in Australia, SDA organisers are also welcome at, and regularly attend, employee inductions. (My own experience was not unusual. When I started working as a shelf-stacker at Franklins in 1997, my manager signed me up to the SDA. I never met an SDA organiser or delegate, and was let go eighteen months later, soon after my twenty-first birthday, when the company would have had to pay me a full adult wage). As de Bruyn described it in 2014, ‘If we have a fundamental problem with a company, I will go to the top of the company and say, “You have a problem, and you have to fix it.”’ It was an approach that won support from all sorts of places, including a prominent H.R. Nicholls grandee and federal employment minister, Eric Abetz: ‘Joe de Bruyn is a role model of trade union officialdom. He is the type of official that gives trade unionism a good name.

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