Union-basher is no friend of equality
Human rights commissioner Tim Wilson recently announced his intention to conduct an investigation into the practices of the retail workers’ union – the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA). The impetus for the investigation was the testimony of an SDA ex-official at Abbott’s Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption.
Rosa Perry, a former SDA organiser, testified that the union leadership refuses to accept people as shop stewards if they identify as gay. In the days after Perry’s testimony was reported, Wilson was urged to intervene by a number of anti-homophobia campaign groups, including Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and Australian Marriage Equality.
This is a dangerous course of action for LGBTI rights groups. It will do nothing to empower members of the SDA – gay or straight – in our fight to reform the union. Tim Wilson is a right-wing ideologue and open opponent of collective action. More than once, Wilson has crossed a picket line and publicly joked about it afterwards. Before his plum appointment as “freedom commissioner”, Wilson was a paid-up member of the Liberal Party and policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs.
The IPA is a conservative think tank that champions an anti-union, pro-business agenda. It intervened in the recent Fair Work Commission annual wage review to argue for the abolition of minimum wages. The IPA views collective agreements as an undue imposition on a boss’s right to rule. It has developed a “capacity to manage” index that rates workplace agreements on the basis of how gravely they constrain the power of the boss.
Rank and file SDA members need to be organised to assert our own interests, to fight for a militant union. We don’t need a union-buster coming down on our side. Only an active and engaged membership that can assert our basic economic rights will be able to stand up against homophobia in our union.
Not long after Rosa Perry’s royal commission testimony came to light, it was also revealed that a dodgy 2010 deal between the SDA and fast food chain Red Rooster had resulted in workers being paid less than the legal minimum. Tim Wilson and his Liberal Party mates – who have been angling to cut penalty rates for retail and hospitality workers – no doubt find this situation perfectly agreeable. It’s no coincidence that the industrial passivity of the SDA goes hand in hand with a conservative political stance amongst the leadership.
Cheering on a union-basher like Tim Wilson as he sticks his nose into the SDA does nothing to help rank and file activists arguing for democracy in the union. Instead, this strategy is a recipe to strengthen the hand of the conservative union officialdom, who can dismiss critics of their homophobia by characterising the charge as part of the Abbott government’s union witch-hunt.
Those of us fighting for change in the SDA can do without friends like Tim.
[Duncan Hart is convener of SDA Members for Marriage Equality.]
