"discoveries"

Over at Strikewatch Matt Oliver has blogged on Matt McCarten's column in the Herald on Sunday.

Unfortunately MM's column doesn't give the full story. In fact it doesn't even give half of it.

For most unions much of the '90s was taken up with debating the organising or servicing approaches which MM outlines as having recently occurred to him. Finsec and SFWU have been two unions that have deliberately adopted an organising approach in the last 5 years, although many unions have yet to make the leap. While some of the public sector unions will probably never move away from a servicing approach, many of the private sector ones have seen this as an important development that not only goes some way to addressing the crisis caused by the ECA, but also devolves power to members and gives them a chance to build meaningful strength. The CTU is a strong advocate for the organising model and in fact the CTU Traineeship (like an apprenticeship for union organisers) is focused around organising unionism.

MM seems to have finally caught up with much of the rest of the union movement with his "discovery".

In terms of the part of the article where MM refers to Sky City Auckland workers, that's where his train really starts to go off the truth track entirely. SFWU members have been organising themselves with help from union staff, for at least five years. They in fact have a density of at least 50% in Auckland (the 20% figure could only be true if MM was referring to the entire Sky City group, which includes several sites in Australia which are in fact organised by the SFWU's sister union the LHMU). SFWU members recently concluded bargaining for a CEA that saw a major improvements in the terms and conditions for members, in particular in regard to union rights after a major campaign on the site which included a strike overwhelmingly voted for by the members.

To make it worse MM's "professional association" at Sky has been peddling blatant lies about the SFWU, in particular that the SFWU would start charging non-members a bargaining fee on December 10th if they didn't join MM's union instead. Not only is this completely untrue it is also legally impossible - a ballot of the whole work site (members and non-members) is necessary before a bargaining fee can be charged, the employer must agree and it must be done in a very specific timeframe in relation to bargaining, which isn't going to come around again at Sky for nearly two years.

Unions that have been around a while know that when two (or more) unions fight over the membership at a site it is the workers who end up losing. Let us not forget Heinz Watties, where three unions fought over the membership, resulting in a massive loss in terms and conditions for those workers. Many were turned off unions altogether, whilst those who did join were scattered across EIGHT collectives. Not exactly building the union movement is it?