Here’s one to watch. Down in New Zealand, a country with an unusually cohesive (though struggling) union movement, affiliates of the national union federation have launched an innovative thing called “Together“. We’re calling it a thing because it doesn’t really fit into any of the usual drawers. It’s not a union, not an NGO, not an organisation, not a network, not an association, club, sect, faction, fraction, tendency or movement. What it is, above all else, is a potential solution to several of the quandaries that unions have been trying to solve for at least 10 years.
In the NZ Council of Trade Union’s own words:
“Together aims to connect workers in un-unionised work places with the union movement and the union experience.”
In order to do this, it provides “…help with issues like workplace bullying, sick leave, holiday pay, employment agreements and sexual harassment”.
Together is a national service that is being developed for the “precariat” — that rapidly growing cohort of workers who do not fit into the standard labourist model of industrial capitalism. Because it is being developed at the national level, with affiliates’ buy-in, it cuts across regional, sectoral and strategic lines. In particular, it aims to bring together:
- People on casual contracts;
- Those in industries like IT, tourism or in small shops, or driving taxis;
- Contractors and workers in remote areas and small towns who don’t currently have access to a union;
- The families of current union members.
Membership costs just $NZ 1 per week, which is roughly 20% of typical union fees in New Zealand. (One kiwi dollar is equivalent to about $US0.87 or £UK0.53 or ¥68). Family membership is also on offer, bringing a still larger audience back into unionism’s traditional orbit. In fact, the word they use here is “whānau”, which is a Maori word suggesting something more like “extended family”. So, for instance, if mum or dad is a union member, they can also arrange union support for their children, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces and grandchildren.
As affiliated unions sign up to support and promote the system, they sign a “Memorandum of Commitment” (click to download). This is they key document to read, if you want to understand how Together works. Needless to say, there are all kinds of potential conflicts and pitfalls and fishhooks in a project like this. It is a credit to the kiwis that they’ve managed to negotiate such concerns and get Together off the ground.
Will this be “the missing link “– a clear route between the precariat and the mainstream of the labour movement? If not, will it become the first step of something that evolves further? It is far too early to make any meaningful assessment of the project, but, as the great Anon once said:
“The best map in the world will not get you anywhere. Only going will get you there.”
A more detailed discussion paper on the project can be downloaded here.
The Memorandum of Commitment signed by affiliates is accessible here.
The Together website is here: http://www.together.org.nz/
July 26, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Australia has a similar service – Unions Australia.
July 27, 2011 at 9:12 am
The Aussie one is a lot more expensive though. At the NZ price i would join just to be supportive and take a look at what might be on offer, but at the Australian price I wouldn’t join until I was already in trouble. In Australia there are government bodies that will tell you what your entitlements are, so the non-unionised only need a union to assist with advice beyond the law and action.
August 3, 2011 at 8:25 am
Peter:
I welcome this initiative as well as other union ‘organising’ or ‘renewal’ strategies, in so far as they represent recognition of the world of work, workers and people out there beyond the ‘factory gates and the union office’ (Nigel Haworth and Harvie Ramsay 1983).
So please keep us updated about its progress.
I do note, however, that this (like the other experiments) is an outreach or extension of the tradition union model of the national-industrial period of capitalism. By which I mean that it is an attempt to reach out and include the newly-contacted so as to incorporate them within unions and industrial relations models that remain unquestioned.
My feeling, as suggested in a yet-to-be-published paper, ‘An Emancipatory Global Labour Studies is Necessary!’ (as well as various published others) is that it is less unions that have to be renewed or extended, than the labour movement in general that has to be reinvented.
Such a labour movement would need to be constructed, bottom-up and – if you like – outside-in from and by the new(ly-recognised) majority working class or categories, the ‘unemployed’, the ‘informalised’, the ‘precariat’, the ‘housewives’, the small farmers and petty-traders.
Of course, NZ is not like India (where, I read, the latest figure of those outside ‘formal employment’ = 90 percent). But we do witness the increasing ‘feminisation’ or ‘Brazilianisation’ of the labour force in the core capitalist countries.
Nonetheless, as I said, I welcome the initiative and will be interested to see whether it not only increases union affiliation but stimulates thinking about a ‘networked unionism of the future’ (Richard Hyman).
September 12, 2011 at 5:33 am
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