Dressed in my uniform, a navy pinafore in the style of the Handmaid’s Tale, my supervisor sat me down in the store manager’s office, a smallish, windowless room at the back of the building painted a drab, sort of aspirational off-white.
The manager, whose energetic moustache I recall but name I do not, explained that as part of my employment I would need to join the SDA – the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. My membership dues would be automatically deducted every week. The end.
When you think about it, it’s scandalous. I was a minor. My parents weren’t told, let alone present. It was presented as a fait accompli and that’s exactly what it was. There was no opportunity to ask questions and frankly the power imbalance in that room meant that was out of the question anyway.
Since 1992, union membership in Australia has dropped like a cast-iron hang glider from the sky. Then, nearly half of all workers were unionised; now it’s a paltry 14 per cent. Only 14 per cent of working Australians place enough value in union membership, and what it has to offer, to hand over their hard-earned coin.
And is it any wonder, when they dish up stuff this like they did this past week, pushing the virtues (oh but the virtue) of enshrining period and menopause leave into law for Australian women. Period leave of up to a day month. On top of sick leave. On top of personal leave. On top of the great many other appropriate and legitimate forms of leave already in place.
Trust me when I say this is not a topic I ever imagined to be having a conversation about, but 2022 continues to be as wild as a two-year-old on fairy floss, so let’s go there. Period leave is a wonderful idea if your broader aim is to further undermine women’s inherent value as individuals beyond the sum of our reproductive function. Throw free tampons at us and give us period leave? That’s us sorted.
It’s excellent if you want to position women (especially those in lower-paid sectors and roles) as less employable. It’s initiatives like this which continue to marginalise women, inferring that we don’t have the agency and capacity to manage our health and whatever challenges may come along. If that’s the intent, then chapeau, comrades! You’ve nailed the brief.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, this is a dumb idea. The Australian Workers’ Union, the Transport Workers’ Union, the Rail, Tram and Bus Union and the United Workers Union are behind it because they say currently leave entitlements don’t adequately reflect the health experiences of women.
I’ll spare you the detail of my own experiences, but can confirm that like most women it’s a mixed bag. What I will vehemently contend though is that none of us, regardless of experience, needs unions to hand us a Kit-Kat and a hot water bottle and give us the day off. Frankly, most of us don’t want the world knowing when our situation is situating.
I suppose it’s cute and somewhat reassuring that there are still people who know what a woman actually is and are seeking to recognise that. I wonder how long it will last. I also wonder where is the proposed leave entitlement that properly reflects the specific nuances of men’s health? Kidding! I’m kidding, of course, because we all know that’s never going to happen. Women are of course a far better political commodity.
It might shock some of you to know that I’m not anti-union. I strongly believe it’s every worker’s right to choose to join a union. I have and will continue to defend that right. I believe that, once, unions played a valuable and important role in Australian society – commercially and more broadly. They were focused on protecting those who were vulnerable in an employment setting. Nowadays? It’s just politics. Politics, power, graft and grift. And what appears to be a firm commitment to making Australia an impossibly difficult place to do business.
Period leave is nothing compared to the cost of Labor’s insane multi-employer bargaining proposal that will send many small businesses to the wall.
At the bigger end of town, companies will face costs up to six figures, according to the government’s own regulatory impact statement. This policy has disaster written all over it, as does the broader suite of legislation.
Like every other business owner in Australia, large or small, I’m watching closely to see what the Prime Minister does. Rushing the proposed IR laws through parliament before Christmas has a whiff about it and not the good kind. What’s the hurry? If he is dancing to the unions’ tune, best he remembers that they don’t speak for all of us. They speak for just 14 per cent.
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My first experience of the union movement came in 1987. I had just scored my first job as a checkout chick at a major supermarket chain at my local shopping centre. I remember it vividly. The excitement of looming financial freedom at the princely wage of $45-odd bucks a weekend: $45 bucks minus a few, as it turned out.