SDA drops another delegate
The Queensland branch of the retail and fast food workers’ union – the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) – has again moved to clamp down on dissent within its ranks.
On 14 January, I was sacked as SDA shop steward at the shop where I work. I am at least the fourth SDA delegate in Brisbane to be pushed out for opposing the union’s public hostility to marriage equality, abortion rights, euthanasia and IVF treatment.
Two reasons were given for the dismissal: that it is wrong for a union delegate to mix politics with industrial issues, and that my involvement in a rank and file reform group (SDA Members for Marriage Equality) was divisive.
It is the position of SDA Members for Marriage Equality that the SDA, which represents 23,000 retail and fast food workers across Queensland, has no place backing state-sanctioned homophobia. The union should represent the views of its members, not campaign for a reactionary political agenda at our expense.
The officialdom’s confidence to pursue its agenda is symptomatic of a lack of democratic accountability to the membership on industrial as well as political issues. Union officials spend more time talking to managers than workers, and union leaders negotiate our industrial entitlements (or lack of them) behind closed doors. Workplace delegates are selected by and can ultimately be sacked by union bureaucrats, with no regard for the opinion of the workers they supposedly represent.
The organiser who pushed me out told me that the delegate position serves only the purpose of representing the union. She would rather have “no delegate in the workplace than the wrong one”, she said. The “wrong one”, as far as the SDA is concerned, is anyone enthusiastic about standing up to the boss and arguing for civil rights.
