Union woos the young
Taken from the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper. By Ellen Whinnett, state politics reporter. 29/5/2006
A rebel trade union will be launched in Melbourne today for young people working at fast food and retail chains.
The Unite union will visit schools and universities to sign up members who are paid youth wages to flip burgers and make coffees at franchise outlets such as McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks and Gloria Jean’s.
The move comes after the supersizemypay.com campaigns, which secured a 14.5 per cent wage rise for fast food workers in New Zealand, and is entrenched in the US through the internet.
The union will move in on work sites that are almost completely non-unionised.
And in a move likely to cause a trade union turf war, it will also move on retail workers who are already members of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association.
As well as the major food chains, the union wants to recruit people who work at retail chains such as Target and Jay-Jays, and small retailers such as corner stores.
Unite organiser Anthony Main, who is a member of the Socialist Party, said the decision to form the union was triggered by the Federal Government’s new industrial relations laws.
He said young people were particularly vulnerable under the new laws, as people under 17 could be paid as little as $6.38 an hour, and many were part-time or casual employees.
“The campaign supersizemypay.com quite a few years ago had some massive success with pay rises and forcing changes in some of the restaurant chains,” Mr Main said.
He said the union planned to visit high schools, university and TAFE campuses to talk to young people to sign them up.
“Young people think trade unions are about blue singlets and a hard hat and we want to show them it’s more than that and make trade unions relevant to young people,” Mr Main said.
Unite is not aligned to or financed by any other unions, but Mr Main said he planned to have discussions with Trades Hall and the ACTU.
He said he did not seek to take members away from the SDA, and had no objection to people being members of both unions.
“We think this will be a massive shot across the bows for John Howard and his new laws,” he said.
“We will be a fighting union and like Unite in New Zealand it’s not done by sucking up to politicians or getting distracted by Labor factional games.
“We will be hitting bosses where it most hurts, in production, whether it be by withdrawing labour or establishing a picket outside a shop.”