Why union members earn more

Why union members earn more $1,450/week $1,100/week

By David Balfour

Union members

Non-union workers

Median weekly earnings (ABS 2020)

Author’s note: It is important to note that all the figures presented in this article come directly from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In all the reports in this article everything is referred to as “on average”. The ABS is not concerned with individuals. But it does differentiate between age, gender, education, occupation or industry and – most importantly – between trade union members and non-trade union members – when recording these remarkable numbers.

There is a measurable advantage in being a union member. This point is fundamental to everything that follows.

In the May 2009 edition of the Western Teacher, then-ACTU President Sharan Burrow advised us that union members earn, on average, $96 a week more than non-members.

The evidence for this intriguing piece of information came straight from the ABS (6310.0, August 2008) where it stated that the average weekly earnings of a union member was $1,026 compared with $930 for non-members. That is a 10.3 per cent difference!

With these 2008 figures, Ms Burrow was echoing her predecessor, former ACTU President Jennie George, who said in 1998, that:

1. Union members, on average, earn $90 a week more than non-union employees, according to the ACTU. Its figures came from the Australian Bureau of

Statistics.

2. The biggest difference was between female workers. Female unionists earned a massive $95.10 (26.3 per cent) more than female non-members. Male union members were $54 (8.1 per cent) ahead of their non-union counterparts.

a. The gap widened again when it came to casual and part-time work. 3. Part-timers in the union earned $65.10 (26.2 per cent) more than those part-

timers who were not. Casuals were $48.30 (14.9 per cent) better off. 4. Young unionists (aged 20-29) earned 14 per cent more than those not in unions.

5. That’s just on the wage front. Unionists were ahead on other employment conditions too. These included superannuation, sick leave, annual leave and long-service leave. This was particularly the case with casuals.

6. The average gain to all union members was $89.40 a week, which was well above the average cost of union dues of $4.25 a week. It clearly paid to belong to a union.

On 27 April 2012, the union received the latest figures from the ABS on the comparative wages of union members and non-union members.

Nothing had changed except that the differences were larger than before. There continued to be major differences between the wages received by unionists and those received by non-unionists.

Here are some figures for Australia and WA in 2012:

Mean weekly earnings for all employees nationally:

• National trade union members in main job: $1,189

• National non-trade union members in main job: $1,029 • Earnings gap: $160 (15.5 per cent)

Mean weekly earnings for all Western Australians:

• WA trade union members in main job: $1,312

• WA non-union members in main job: $1,158 It’s now much more difficult to break down figures for men and women or casual or part-time as I was able to do for earlier material.

In March 2016, I contacted David Colley, the federal industrial officer for the Australian Education Union (AEU). He provided me with an update on some of the salaries of unionists and nonunionists, which continued to demonstrate that the original story remains true. Unionists consistently and significantly are earning more than non-unionists.

However, David noted that the ABS had made extracting this crucial information much more difficult. He advised me that the ABS had discontinued the original source (the 6310 series – Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership).

It has now been replaced with a new one, the 6333.0 series – Characteristics of Employment, which was released in December 2015 for data from 2014. This has made the relatively easy comparisons of the past more difficult and timeconsuming.

A paper by David Peetz, professor of industrial relations at Griffith University, added to our concern. He said: “The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has made major changes to its union membership series, which complicate comparisons with previous years.”

This was before the complete change over to the new 6333.0, June 2014 document.

2014 figures

1. The weekly earnings of trade unionists against non-trade unionists across Australia:

Trade unionists: $1,342

Non-trade unionists: $1,200

2. The weekly earnings for the education and training industry across

Australia:

Trade unionists: $1,268

Non-trade unionists: $1,010

This is a 25.5 per cent differential!

People are often puzzled by these statistics, as it is not immediately obvious why there are such large differences, or indeed any differences.

In 1991, when I researched this question for a Masters paper on labour economics, everyone – unionist and non-unionist – were entitled to receive exactly the same wages and conditions.

Awards did not differentiate between the union affiliations of employees. But I had found the same ABS results as Ms George and Ms Burrow quoted in 1998 and 2009 – major differences between the salaries and conditions of union members and non-members.

The answer to this conundrum becomes clearer if the right question is asked. Asking why unionists get more is not the question because that is not the case.

Unionists only get what they are entitled to because their union ensures it.

The answer comes from the question - why do non-unionists get less than they are entitled to?

And this is why!

• They don’t get ongoing union advice about their working conditions.

• They don’t have a union to go to when they are being cheated or bullied.

• They don’t get specific advice when something goes wrong that relates only to them.

• They don’t receive protection from their employer when they are threatened.

• A union cannot represent them when they are accused over a matter of performance or discipline.

• They are unaware of the benefits of having union representatives at their worksites who are highly significant in the two-way dissemination of information and in assisting members when issues arise. Union reps get extensive training from the SSTUWA.

• They do not receive a copy of their

Agreement and Award from the union. • They do not have access to a Member Assist phone line or email address.

• They are not the beneficiaries of the ongoing dialogue that unions have with the employer on behalf of their union employees on both individual and system-wide issues.

• They have no access to a union organiser or a specialist in occupational safety and health, advocacy, equal opportunity and union training.

This union offers the best industrial and professional education and training in Australia.

• They have no access to the SSTUWA

Growth Team which assists new teachers.

• They have no access to a union lawyer.

It is ignorance of conditions of work and the ability of the employer to ignore you when things are not right that makes discrepancies in wages and conditions possible.

Unions spend a lot of time and effort negotiating new awards and agreements. But once that is over, there remains the reality of policing what the employer has agreed to.

For the 10 per cent or so of a union’s energies in actually getting an agreement, the other 90 per cent of its time is devoted to keeping what has been agreed to.

It is the day-to-day work of a union that creates these impressive ABS differences. These salaries and conditions differentials are being created every day of the week as:

• Worksite representatives put in hours of unpaid work for their fellow members.

• Organisers go out to worksites on both minor and major issues.

• Thousands of emails, letters and phone call requests are answered.

There are many cases that come to the union where a teacher is on the wrong salary scale or is in dispute with the Department of Education about housing or long service leave, sick leave and a host of other areas that come up every day.

The union is there to assist its members each time, simply to ensure that the members receive their entitlements and nothing less.

It’s not a one-off event but incremental and cumulative

The benefits of being a unionist can all be taken for granted. In so doing, we often fail to recognise just how much industrial information and support is being received and how much non-members are missing out on.

There are still other unions who don’t believe these numbers relate to them. Well who else is looking after the interests of their members? They are! There’s no one else. It’s their unions that are making the difference.

Here are some key statistics from the ABS for August 2020. • 14 per cent of employees (1.5 million) are trade union members.

• Since 1992, the proportion of employees who are trade union members has fallen from 40 per cent to 14 per cent. • The education and training industry (31 per cent); the public administration and safety industry (28 per cent); and health care and social assistance industry (24 per cent) are those with the highest proportion of employees who are trade union members.

• The education of trade union members looks like this: Graduate diploma or graduate certificate (26 per cent); bachelor’s degree (17 per cent); postgraduate degree (13 per cent); no non-school qualifications (10 per cent).

In the year 2020, here is the ABS’s main story for earnings:

The median weekly earnings for employees who were trade union members in their main job was $1,450 per week, compared with $1,100 for employees who were not trade union members.

That’s an average 31.8 per cent increase! If teachers knew about these salary differences, there would be 100 per cent membership. We need to tell them. There are three very important words, which are a direct consequence of union membership: Representation, advice and

protection.

Whenever you feel moved to ask what your union has done for you lately, remember these ABS figures, consistent for at least 30 years, and hold onto these three words that refer exclusively to union members and to no others.

Privatised education: the virus exposed by the pandemic

By Shelley Morse President, Canadian Teachers’ Federation

As COVID-19 continues to reap havoc and draw the public’s attention, governments across Canada are sharing a privatisation playbook as they use the pandemic as cover to transform publicly funded public education.

A few years back at Aldershot elementary, at my school in Kentville, Nova Scotia, a fundraising drive kicked into full gear to finance a new playground. The old equipment had, due to a lack of funding for upkeep, deteriorated over time and was in desperate need of replacement. The community came together, as it so often did, to raise the money needed to back the modest project.

Soon after the construction was completed, a sign appeared before the playground. Instead of a plaque thanking the collective efforts of the people and organisations that made the initiative possible, it was an ad placement for Google. In fact, Google signs were everywhere. Mounted all over the equipment, the signs encouraged children to visit Google, all in an effort to mine personal information about them and their families. So much for no screen time.

It turned out that the school board had allowed the tech giant to install the signs. Though, after some sustained pressure, the ads were removed. At the time, I was shocked, and I must admit, naïve, to see such blatant privatisation, but, as it turns out, this was only child’s play.

Education clearance sale

Today, under the shadow of the pandemic, governments across Canada are busily working away to flip the switch on publicly funded public education. Instead of focusing on concrete ways to keep students, teachers and support personnel safe in order for school buildings to remain open and maintain education of the highest quality, ministries of education are focusing efforts on bringing their systems down from the inside.

What began as a slow creep toward privatisation has, because of the crisis that endures, accelerated at an alarming rate. For these vultures, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine was not a warning but a business plan.

For all of the sickness, death, economic and personal destruction of COVID-19, one of its side effects may prove to be the most damning long-term. As a privatisation accelerant, the pandemic has provided the perfect combination of fuel and oxygen, emergency rationale and political cover, for causing the kind of harm that could impact generations to come, not to mention the irreparable damage caused by tearing away the very foundation of our social fabric.

Despite Canada’s reputation as a leader of strong, quality public education systems, the early days of the pandemic quickly laid bare the cracks. Formed over years and decades of government neglect, only to be repeatedly triaged by the education community, and too often at their own expense, the COVID-19 crisis has pressured the levies to their breaking point. And without adequate measures to ensure physical distancing, testing and contact tracing, schools in most parts of the country went online, leaving children without proper support or the technology needed to participate.

The domino effect

More than a year after life as we knew it came to a sudden halt, the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta have pulled out the privatisation playbook, following the cues of my home province of Nova Scotia, which pushed the first domino a few years ago with the elimination of school boards and the splintering of the union.

Most recently, Ontario announced that, starting this September, online learning will become the norm. Offered as an alternative to in-school learning, a child will have the opportunity of completing kindergarten through Grade 12 without ever having to step foot in a school.

Of course, what is presented as an educational choice is, in fact, the big play to encourage all financially-abled families to opt for private schools, while those excluded from fee-paying options will be left scrambling for stable internet connections and digital devices to learn at home. It is also an “innovative” way to eliminate teaching positions.

In Quebec, over a year of hardball bargaining tactics and the elimination of school boards has left teachers exhausted as they continue to contend with keeping students as safe as possible while trying to maintain quality teaching.

In Manitoba, the government is following the union busting script written in Nova Scotia, with the help of some of the same consultants, and is in the early stages of passing legislation that would dismantle democratically elected school boards and remove principals from the teachers’ union. The province’s education system may soon be unrecognisable.

Farther west, in Alberta, the name of the game is to cut, cut, cut while the province promotes educational choice that will see the flood gates open to an increase in charter schools. These moves have led to a drop in public school enrolment and an

increasing number of families opting to place their children with private providers.

For some, these actions could be mistaken as pure incompetence, although they are anything but. Appointing education ministers with no experience in education may seem like folly, failures in leadership, but rather it should be viewed as part of an effort to create chaos, causing the public to lose confidence in a system that was not broken and was not in need of fixing.

Despite the actions being made to paint publicly funded public education as ineffective and redundant, in fact, the opposite is reality.

More public, less private

The pandemic has shown how important well-funded public institutions are, from health care to education, for our communities, our children and youth, and their families. Yet it has also dramatically pushed us all out of old habits and routines that can be considered part of a bygone era, known as pre-March 2020.

Just think that a little more than a year ago very few knew what Zoom was. Now it’s considered a verb. But in this rush towards digital immersion, we cannot afford to abandon what works.

What the pandemic has proven is that inperson teaching and learning remain the bedrock of a quality education, but that doesn’t prevent us from acknowledging areas where virtual learning has opened doors and kept people safe.

It is time to begin a collective conversation focused on where we go from here, on how we can strengthen our public education systems, for the current generation and the generations to come.

The answer to building a better, more equitable, more just society will not be found through a fire sale of our most precious public assets. Rather, it is about doubling down on what we know delivers in our modern world.

Just like the new playground at Aldershot elementary school, it was the public that made its conception and construction possible after years of neglect.

By showing up after the fundraising and work was complete, Google was looking for recognition without any of the effort, to bask in the success of the project.

Even though that incident was minor in the global push to go private, it is an example of what we have long known: private interests are not making longterm investments for the betterment of a community, but rather short-term bets for quick bucks. We cannot let that gamble continue with Canada’s publicly funded public education, or we will all lose.

This article was first published at the Education International website. It is reproduced here with permission.