BY MELANIE SJOBERG
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national conference in August adopted a strategy the union hopes will stop the decline in manufacturing industry jobs, reduce job insecurity and strengthen the union.
National secretary Doug Cameron called for the AMWU to be "a campaigning union", according to the September edition of the union's journal, Manufacturing Worker. The union's "Make it here or jobs disappear", "Fair trade not free trade" and "Campaign 2000/1" campaigns will take the organisation into the future, he said. These campaigns aim to end tariff cuts, link core labour standards to trade and get increased investment in training: the key components of the policy that Cameron unsuccessfully argued for at last month's ALP national conference.
The AMWU is following the path of the ACTU-endorsed model for organising at the work site level. It announced an organising and recruiting plan that will target non-unionised workplaces as a way of rebuilding the membership. It intends to train more delegates how to recruit.
The AMWU's action plan focuses on reducing expenditure and redirecting resources to "grow the union's income". The conference allocated $1 million for a new "national organising unit".
In a dramatic shift away from internal democracy, the new rules will also allow the national council to "defer, abolish or convert into fixed term, elected organiser positions which come up for ballot". The previous rules allowed for the election of union organisers. Putting such decision-making powers in the hands of the national officials enables them to appoint favoured candidates and/or deny funds for an organiser to a particular division of the union.
These changes are similar to those made in the Community and Public Sector Union earlier this year. CPSU national secretary Wendy Caird made the same proclamations about the need to centralise organising so as to use union resources more effectively. The CPSU national officials established a national call centre, reduced staff in state offices and took over responsibility for some areas that had a dissident membership.