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Interview with Michele O Neil, National Secretary of the Textile, Clothing, Footwear Union Australia

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4 April, 2012

What does precarious work look like in Australia?

One of the things that has characterised clothing workers in Australia over many decades has been that companies manufacture goods through very long, complex and broad supply chains. The supply chains in numerous cases have multiple levels and often at the end of those supply chains you find someone working at home – these are predominantly women, mainly migrant women in the Australian context; they don’t have English as a first language and they are working in very isolated circumstances; they commonly work 7 days a week and when there’s a rush for orders they’ll work throughout the day and night. It’s also common that they’ll involve other family members including children to try to get the work done and part of the other aspect that characterises these workers is that they’re often told that they’re not employees, that they’re not workers, and the people who give them the work require them to have some sort of company name or corporate structure to be able to give them the work. This is a sham arrangement – they’re not genuine contractors and have no genuine independence at all. This is an attempt by the company and the brand to distance themselves from their employment responsibilities.

What action has the Textile, Clothing & Footwear Union of Australia taken?

More than 20 years ago we succeeded in having a legal set of award conditions that said that if you are a worker in a factory in our industry or at home you are entitled to the same pay and conditions – this along hasn’t fixed the problem. So, what we are now doing – and have had some success – is with different state governments in Australia introducing state legislation.

Our unions campaigned for many, many years on this issue, and we don’t do it alone we’re part of a broader campaign called the ‘Fairwear’ campaign which is made up of unions, church groups, student groups, community organisations and activists who for more than 15 years have had a campaign which focuses publically on companies who don’t take seriously their responsibility to workers in their supply chains, and pressures them to become accredited with a voluntary scheme which makes the whole supply chain transparent. The accreditation scheme is based on Australian legal minimum standards being met, so through the campaign and the unions’ exposure of many examples of exploitative behaviour of workers working from home we got some state governments to introduce laws and now we’re just at the point of having the federal government introduce a national legislation which picks up on what we achieved at the state level and makes it nationally consistent. It’s now gone into the Australian Parliament and will be voted on in the next couple of weeks.

The proposed legislation does 4 keys things. The first thing is it deems all outworkers (our terminology in Australia for these workers working at home is outworkers) to be employees, it says regardless of whether you are required to have a business name or company structure you are an employee. Secondly, it allows those workers to recover unpaid money up the supply chain, so if the person who gave them the work disappears they can go to the next company up the supply chain, or the next company above that, to recover unpaid wages and it includes the notion of the ‘apparent employer’ so it allows you to recover money from the apparent employer as opposed to only the actual employer. The third thing it does is allow the government to introduce a mandatory code to complement the voluntary code that I spoke about before, and that mandatory code would put obligations not just on the manufacturers but on the retailers – so it would require retailers by law to make their whole supply chain transparent. The forth thing it does is gives the union greater right of entry powers – not into homes, we already have right of entry powers in relation to the records etc. about homeworkers and we don’t want to be able to enter into someone’s home without their permission, but it gives us far greater powers to enter what we describe as sweatshops than apply to most other unions under Australian law - most other unions under Australian law have to give 24 hours’ notice of entry, and are only able to look at their members’ records. What this law will do is allow us to not give any notice so we’ll be able to go straight into the workplace without giving them any prior notice, and it will also allow us to check all of the workers’ records, not just the union members.

How does your union organise homeworkers?

We’ve tried a variety of different methods and are still trying new things all of the time because they are, from our experience, the hardest group of workers to organise. Because of the level of pressure that they’re placed under they are very fearful of seeing to be associated with the union, otherwise they lose work. But the method where we’ve had some success is that for many years we’ve run free English language classes that are targeted to outworkers in their community so in the regions and suburbs that they live in. Those classes deal with English languages and literacy, but also with rights and the role of the union. We also visit workers and try and establish new networks of connecting these workers, often using social occasions as a way of bringing workers together. One of the things that characterises this work is that it is really isolated so we try and find opportunities to bring them together. We do things like a trip to a garden show – a range of activities where they and their children can come. The other thing we do is employ organisers who have done outwork themselves and also speak the language – the majority of these workers currently are Vietnamese, so we’ve got a strategy of employing Vietnamese organisers in the union that can deal directly with people in their first language and also organisers who have had the experience of doing that sort of work themselves.

More information on this campaign is available here.

Since the interview took place the bill has been passed by the Senate and will now be discussed at the House of Representatives.