Addressing trade union barriers to organising devalued and labour-intensive workforces: a study of disability support workers in Victoria, Australia
Creators: name: DOUGLAS, Karen
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 441005
subject: Social theory

description: This thesis focuses on the role of union organisers and leaders in organising atypical and insecure workers in the support services sector. From their historical foundations, modern unions in the last two decades have dedicated themselves to recomposing their internal organisational structures, diversifying their internal workforces and developing fresh organising techniques as ways of reversing union decline to influence and empower the unorganised. Focusing on disability support workers providing support to people living with intellectual disability in the Australian state of Victoria, the research sets out a detailed account of how unions with a commitment to organising and diversification struggle to shift union approaches to developing more engaged forms of organising.

The unions studied organise some of Australia's most vulnerable workers operating in the social support and care services sector. This sector has long faced structural and institutional deficiencies that continue to see the sector undervalued, underfunded and under-resourced. In addition to these external barriers, the empirical data demonstrate internal barriers. A reliance on traditional forms of representation and bargaining approaches set around a culture of standard employment arrangements continues to present obstacles to unions developing deeper forms of organising in this sector.

The unions examined in this thesis embrace grass-roots organising, promoting themselves as transforming, campaigning unions. The research suggests a disconnect between how organising is discussed outwardly and practised internally by trade unions. This is the case for workers in the not-for-profit sector, the largest and most unorganised workforce, whose work and employment arrangements do not model that of standard, public-sector arrangements. For unions to organise vulnerable workers they must break away from tactics and strategies that continue to support an ever-diminishing part of the workforce, public-sector workers and work arrangements.

The research contributes to the ongoing study of trade unions and their attempts to renew in individualised political and economic conditions unfavourable to collectivism. It focuses on an often-neglected group of workers - disability support workers - providing support services in increasingly individualised working arrangements. It examines how the introduction of neo-liberal marketisation practices in the care and support sector in the 1990s diminished a workforce already the subject of institutional gender discrimination, low pay, poor working conditions and weakened bargaining opportunities. Thus, the research examines challenges for unions in identifying opportunities to organise these workers and it provides insight into how union strategies and tactics can support vulnerable workers in an increasingly precarious, individualised and marketised environment.