The idea of hitting voters with a powerful message on election day is just the culmination of three trends in Australian campaign communication that have been brewing for decades.
Malcolm Turnbull is using Victoria’s long-running enterprise bargaining dispute between the CFA and firefighters’ union to highlight the Liberals’ credentials to challenge union militancy.
The ACTU’s main election campaign focus is to target 28 marginal Coalition seats, including 11 in NSW and six in Queensland: the key battleground states.
When sociologists, driven by their value commitments, go beyond the relative comfort of the classroom and engage with organisations outside the university, they dirty their hands.
The story of the Builders Labourers Federation campaigns that saved historic locations and green spaces in the 1970s still speaks to contemporary Australians’ concerns about urban development.
In an increasingly individualised workplace, unions can no longer rely on organising tactics to survive. Instead, they need to undertake a major “rebranding”.
The Fair Work Act delivers a much more peculiar system of collective bargaining than many realise. It has outcomes that contradict the hopes and fears of both sides of the IR debate.
South African labour unions have shown themselves to be effective in translating the prescripts of the law into benefits for their members. This is particularly true in the public sector.
Unions may well feel justifiably aggrieved by the findings – and impact – of the trade union royal commission, but there are nonetheless lessons to be learnt from them.
Even though union membership has dropped to just 15%, unions still have an important role to play in ensuring that workers have meaningful input into how their workplaces are run.
A diminishing membership base, changes to labour and industry and heightened political attention has left the once-powerful trade union movement flailing.