One day longer…

This is AWU National Secretary Bill Shorten's speech opening the 2003 AWU National Conference on 24th February 2003.

AWU National Secretary Bill Shorten

There's a story written by Australian poet Henry Lawson of a 25-year old drover who is pushing cattle across a river in Queensland when he falls and drowns. No one knows him. He's a stranger to the nearby town. But the townspeople chipped in and gave him a funeral anyway. They did it because, in Lawson's words, the stranger was a union labourer. The police had found a union ticket in his ruck sack.

That story may have been written more than 110 years ago, but the values inherent in the story have not faded. The people from that Queensland town understood the important role that unions play in building a better society for all. They understood that unionism makes a stranger a friend.

Today, union members from across Australia and overseas come together as friends for the biennial Australian Workers' Union conference. I am pleased to welcome you all here today.....

For those of you who don't know, let me tell you a little bit about our AWU. We are the oldest general union and the largest union outside metropolitan Australia. What we are today is the result of amalgamations with proud unions such as the Federated Ironworkers and the Australasian Society of Engineers. Today, our members are as diverse as the states they are from, ranging from metaliferous miners to shearers, steelworkers to civil engineering construction workers, and the public sector from hospital workers and council workers.

A comprehensive national survey of our members found half work shift work and 56 per cent do regular overtime. One in four do more than 10 hours overtime a week. Most have been union members for more than 10 years. Their average wage is between $40,000 and $45,000 a year. One in eight do not have permanent jobs and one in four were born overseas. Just under half have access to the Internet. Most are concerned about trade. Our members are the people who are injured when workplace safety is neglected. These Australians suffer when companies collapse and workers' entitlements are squandered.

There is no doubt that the union movement faces many fresh challenges since the days of Lawson's tale. Advances in technology have created scenarios where we must battle with employers over more than the traditional issues of safety, wages and employment conditions, but also protect our members' personal rights and privacy.

These technological advances enable employers to intrude in to the private lives of workers where they have no right to go. They intrude by using pshyometric testing to discriminate between prospective employees; by spying on employees' emails under the pretext of ensuring the content complies with company policies. Companies around Australia try to introduce drug and alcohol policies which punish workers. A modern role for unions is to protect our members' rights to a private life.

Genetic testing in the workplace poses perhaps the greatest future threat to workers' privacy. Your DNA can tell the story of your heritage, your present and potentially your future health. What right does any employer have to such personal information? And yet it is not science fiction. In the name of security, some companies are already using employees' fingerprints as a swipe card for access into the workplace. Where does it end?

Some of the challenges facing the AWU - job security, wages, workers' entitlements, education and further training, and safety - are old, simply recast in the modern era. The principles at heart are the same as those Lawson himself would have written about when he was contributing articles in 1890 to the AWU's national publication The Worker.

We must address these challenges, and more. To serve our members properly we must act to establish the balance between work and family so that a Tasmania miner is not forced to work a 53-hour week and spend little time with his family, as recently highlighted in a comprehensive study.

We must be vigilant about inspecting workplaces to make sure they are safe. We must ensure asbestos is not left hanging from the roof of workplaces like the Port Hedland detention centre where it can be inhaled to cause lung cancer. We must empower safety and job representatives so they can enforce safety standards.

We must improve the accountability of employers, whose corrupt or incompetent actions led to a record number of high profile corporate collapses last year, including One.Tel, HIH, Harris Scarfe, Pasminco and Ansett. It is about putting measures in place to prevent workers' from losing their entitlements if a firm goes bust.

It is about meeting the challenge of globalisation. While globalisation is not new - it has existed from the day man first learned to sail and the Chinese were exporting tea in exchange for spices with the Middle East - it has changed the modern market place. Unfettered globalisation has widened the gap between the world's rich and poor.

In Australia, as in other western societies, globalisation is a force for good and bad. On one hand our members are fighting for decent wages and for policies that encourage local production against cheap imports from countries with no respect for International Labour Organization standards. On the other, globalisation is cited by company executives to argue that they operate in a global marketplace and are therefore justified in walking away with a $30million golden handshake.

Take Chris Cuffe. I doubt many in this room had heard of him until last week when he made headlines for receiving the biggest payout in Australian corporate history. He cashed a $33 million cheque when he resigned from the Commonwealth Bank. Picture it. The number of employees who could have supported their families by sharing in that one payment to one man could fill the GABBA.

On the one hand, our members make products that are exported for trade yet on the other hand, our legislators say a level playing field that means our aluminium rolled can sheet exports fight to enter South Korea's protected market yet will allow Korean steel to be put in the $1 Billion Parramatta rail tunnel when competitive locally made steel receives no support.

These AWU challenges I have just outlined - family friendly polices, corporate governance, employee entitlements, workplace safety, wages, drug and alcohol testing, privacy in the workplace - they are all formidable challenges for the AWU. They are issues that will be addressed in detail over the course of this conference. The way we rise to meet these challenges is through grit and determination. In essence, it is our determination to go one day longer.

As individuals, possessing the stamina to go one day longer than the tyrant or bully or the corrupt is hard. As a member of the Australian Workers' Union, where strangers unite to become friends for a common cause, we promise our members that we can go one day longer. And, by going one day longer, we will succeed.

The AWU will fight one day longer for fair and equitable industrial outcomes. Our members' wage increases should never be below CPI. Our goal is to deliver at least a 4 per cent per annum increase at our sites so that our members can adequately support their families. We will work with companies to set decent standards that include:

• Company Superannuation contributions to be boosted annually above the mandatory minimum 9 per cent. Super should be 15% plus over the next 8 years.

• Family friendly clauses that put reasonable limits on shift work and hours

• We will seek changes to working hours and shifts so that they are more amenable to shift workers planning to retire.

• We will fight for our members' future by getting companies to contribute to an education fund so that workers can pursue further education and studies

• We will demand the same early warning rights as banks to check on the financial health of companies to ensure our members' entitlements are protected

• We will seek to adopt ILO standards of paid parental leave so that mothers get 14 weeks paid maternity leave and fathers 2 weeks paternity leave

• We will pressure reform of the oh and s laws and enshrine in agreements the rights of our safety representatives to maintain workplace safety against the tide of deregulation of oh and s

• We will maintain awards up to date to provide a secure safety net

Three and half days of the convention ahead Today, we shall deal with workplace issues affecting all our diverse members - corporate governance, family friendly reforms, shiftwork, protection of workers entitlements ...... Tomorrow, we shall talk about wages, bargaining strategies, hear industry reports from our national committees, proposals on portable long service leave, superannuation and on Wednesday, we shall discuss some of the broader issue affecting our members, water, the republic, the future of work, occupational health and safety, regulating technology and workers' rights in the workplace. Branches will provide reports on their wins and campaigns over the last 2 years and throughout the conference there will be a range of leading experts in their fields contributing their ideas to our debates.

We will fight one day longer for fair and equitable non-industrial outcomes, too. That means protecting our members' privacy and entitlements; ensuring workplaces are inspected for safety hazards; and speaking out against excessive executive salaries and severance packages. We will fight against industrial iniquity in all its forms. And we will win because we are many working together for each other, not as strangers, but as friends.

Together, members will believe that the union will always go one day longer.

ENDS.