Locke Keith: Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 A previous National speaker spoke about unions versus union members which struck me as rather odd because union members are the unions. They make up the unions. There are of course elected officials in unions. Perhaps the member was going to talk about union officials versus the members. But union officials are always elected by secret ballot. If any union official starts to kick the union members around force them to go on strike and beat down anyone who votes against a strike or anything like that that union official would not last very long particularly at the next secret ballot election. 
When we look at the actual process in the workplace of deciding on a strike we see the secret ballot is not primarily a protection against union members being pushed around by union officials but is a protection against union members being pushed around by their employers. Anyone who has been in a workplace knows that the fear of supporting a strike amongst workers is a fear about what their employer might think about their decision to vote to go on strike not a fear of what union officials might think about whether they are voting for or against the proposal. Because there is usually a democratic atmosphere in the union which the workers insist on the officials accept people voting for and against a strike. But the employer gets rather upset and makes that quite known to the workers if they vote to go on strike. When the workers go back from the union meeting to the shop floor or whatever it might be often the person who is in charge—the supervisor or somebody—will ask them about the meeting how they voted and all the rest of it. So the secret ballot is actually a protection of the workers against harassment from their supervisors and employers not from union officials. That is a practicality of the workplace. 
I support the amendments to the Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill that are being put forward by Darien Fenton although I am a little questioning of one provision that would require a secret ballot in every case of a strike because as I indicated in my first speech sometimes that is impractical. That should be a rare exception and in any big workplace normal workplace Public Service workplace or whatever a secret ballot is certainly practical and should be pretty universal—although I am not sure whether that universality should be prescribed in law. 
There is another question relating to rules and this is where the issue comes back to a provision in the Employment Relations Act. That Act is supposed to govern the relations between workers and unions and employers organised in some form as employers. It is not supposed to be an Act to determine exactly how all employers will conduct their business or how all unions will conduct their business. That is not the nature of that Act; it concerns the relations between two self-determining parties. This bill tries to say one of those parties is no longer self-determining and it will prescribe exactly how that party is to function. Once we do that we disrupt the balance between the unions on one side and the employers on the other. We will give the employers the right through pressure on the State or judicial process to then say the other party the union is not abiding by this or that provision in terms of the conduct of the secret ballot. Someone can say that they have proof that so-and-so at 36 Lewis Street Wadestown or wherever it is did not get a ballot paper in the mail and was not able to participate in the election so therefore that ballot on a strike is illegal and da-de-da-de-da. That just causes huge frustration amongst the workers concerned who may have perhaps voted by 95 percent for some sort of strike action but are hampered by the State getting involved in their union’s internal affairs.