Newspoll workers respond to redundancy news
Probably the only thing worse than being told you’ve been made redundant is to read it first in the Australian. This is what happened to workers at Newspoll, the Murdoch-owned opinion polling company, this month.
To add insult to injury, the article said there would be “some redundancies among the 26 staff”. In fact, around 150 people will lose their jobs. If management have their way, most of them will get nothing.
Red Flag spoke to Kieran Adair, who has worked at Newspoll’s Sydney office for 18 months. “They relied on our work to make Newspoll profits. The moment they no longer needed us, they were happy to kick us to the kerb without a second thought.”
Fortunately, almost all the workers are in the union. The National Union of Workers (NUW) arranged to meet with NewsCorp executives and the Newspoll manager. When 30 union members turned up at the meeting, the company tried to back out. It backfired. Management were instead forced to listen to a room full of angry workers.
Kieran summed up the workers’ feeling: “People are furious that we’ve been disrespected. We’ve been deprived of quite basic rights that any worker should have, and we’re not going to take it”.
The workers want personal references, a redundancy payout for all, a correction to be issued in the Australian and an extra hour of union meeting time.
The demand for dignity and respect is indicated in the demand for personal references. All management is offering is a “statement of service”, as if the workers are machines whose period of use should be noted.
Newspoll is very highly unionised compared to most workplaces today – despite everything we’re told about young workers and casuals being hard to unionise.
As Kieran explained: “Ten years ago market research was one of the most poorly organised, and poorly treated, workforces in the country. Newspoll workers were actually leaders in the movement that saw our sector become unionised and win rights”.
A second meeting with management took place on Friday, 22 May. At the end of it, the workers walked off for a portion of the shift and decided to organise a protest outside Newspoll. People have also begun talking about striking instead of producing the next political opinion poll.
