@billiglarper @acb @aj Thanks for sharing your insights around trade unions in Germany ☺️

I think the use of gig-economy workers and "self-employed" sole-trader contractors by companies who want to de-unionise are a bit of a problem everywhere, unfortunately.

A small step forward down here has been "same work same pay" legislation. This mandates that workers hired through labour hire firms get the same wages and conditions as directly-employed staff: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-05/business-rallies-against-same-job-same-pay-laws/102439720

With fragmentation, I think part of the issue down here is that, until the 1970s, we had a lot of small unions.

Between the '70s and '90s, there was a concerted push for these unions to merge into "super unions" that represent whole industries.

So for example, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union came about through the merger of the boilermakers, automakers, fitters & turners, printers, food processors, and engineering unions.

The issue is that Australian law only recognises one union per trade or profession as being the legitimate union that's allowed to bargain for workers in that sector.

So the unions tend to tightly guard their turf and take each other to our industrial relations court (the Fair Work Commission) if another union tries signing up workers in their industry.

So we have trades-based unions working in a system of enterprise bargaining, which is not ideal.

Most of our union's state branches are members of their states' respective trades hall councils (basically the peak union body in each state). At a national level, they're members of the ACTU (which is the peak national body for unions in Australia).

And the unions get 50% of the delegate votes in the Australian Labor Party (our main supposedly "centre-left" party) with the other 50% by party members.

The issue is some of our unions tend to be quite socially conservative. (The SDU, which represents retail workers, and AWU, mostly unskilled trades, in particular.)

We've also had a string of economically neoliberal pro-"free-market" governments that have put restrictions around workers' right to strike.

The low point was in the mid 2000s, when a conservative prime minister named John Howard tried to introduce a policy called "Work choices". It would have replaced enterprise bargaining with individual contracts.

Thankfully, he was voted out, and that policy was dumped.

#unions #tradeunionism #capitalism #workers #socialism #auspol #collectivebargaining #tradeunions