Alliance Voices: Rebuilding Socialist Alliance Youth Work

Alliance Voices: Rebuilding Socialist Alliance Youth Work



This piece of PCD for the Socialist Alliance's 10th national conference is some interesting reading on the new direction Resistance will be taking. I argued strongly against making Resistance the youth of the Socialist Alliance two years ago in Adelaide; however, the situation in the party has changed considerably since then, and I think this has driven the need to regroup youth leadership moreso than "objective conditions".

Equal pay ruling boost for young workers

Originally published in Green Left Weekly issue 1004

 

The campaign to win equal wages for young workers made a big gain last month, when the Fair Work Commission ruled that 20-year-old retail workers must be paid full wages.

The ruling applies to workers with more than six months experience who are employed under the General Retail Industry Award and will be gradually implemented over the next financial year. It comes after a public campaign by the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), which represents more than 200,000 retail workers.

The 100% Pay at 18+ campaign aimed to bring workers over 18 to the full adult wage. It was launched a year ago at a convergence in Canberra and has more than 40,000 supporters on its website.

Campaign tactics have included petitions, television ads, stalls at university Orientation weeks and a series of creative videos produced by young workers around Australia showing what full pay would mean for them. It is one of the most prominent campaigns the SDA has organised in years.

SDA national secretary Joe de Bruyn said: “This is a real credit to our witnesses and the thousands of workers who have thrown their support behind the 100% Pay at 18+ campaign. There’s been overwhelming support from the community for fair pay for our younger workers."

The next step, according to de Bruyn, is to fight to bring 19-year-old workers in line with the adult wage.

The SDA rarely, if ever, organises industrial actions to pursue the interests of its workers. In fact, during industrial action by workers at the Woolworths Brisbane Liquor Distribution Centre in Stapylton in December, management tried to shut out the National Union of Workers (NUW) and bring in the SDA to sign a new agreement more to its liking.

In an interview with Crikey's The Power Index, de Bruyn defended his industrial tactics when dealing with retail heavyweights like McDonalds, Woolworths and Myer. “By going about our job in a sensible way we’ve been able to exert a remarkable influence over companies."

"We do not trade wages or conditions for access and we never have. The one thing we don’t do is go to employers and threaten their business. I think that by working behind the scenes and talking to the key decision makers in the company we’re more likely to get a change of heart and a higher wages offer than by going public and bagging the company.”

Under his reign, the union has taken an equally "behind the scenes" approach to influencing social policy in the Labor party. A staunch Catholic, de Bruyn has advocated against abortion and queer rights — most notably leading the push against the equal marriage campaign in recent years.
Rank-and-file members have led protests against the leadership's social stance — forming the group "SDA for Equal Marriage" in 2010.

SDA member Duncan Hart said: "We've made it our mission to try to show that the SDA leaders who act like they speak on behalf of their members, the 250,000 members of the SDA, do not represent the members."

The union has refused calls to de Bruyn will be stepping down as secretary after more than 30 years gives some small hope for change within the union.

Education is under attack - stand up, fight back!

Originally published at Green Left Weekly.

Around Australia, attacks on tertiary education have continued throughout 2012, with an ideological onslaught against the idea of well-funded public education being led by proponents of neoliberalism.

In July, Fred Hilmer, vice-chancellor of UNSW and chair of the Group of 8 Universities, a coalition of university managements, called for total fee deregulation and “cutting red tape”.

In an address to the National Press Club, Hilmer signaled that university managements intend to “play in the public policy field a lot more aggressively” when it came to government funding, modeled on the response of the mining industry to the MRRT, reported TheConversation on July 25.

He argued that capped funding requirements were enforcing a culture of “sameness” and stifling diversity in education, hampering the ability of Australian universities to compete for the international student market.

Hilmer’s address took it for granted that “a significant increase in government funding is unlikely” – and so did a report released by accounting firm Ernst and Young in October, “University of the future”, which recieved national coverage.

The report argued that major changes in the education sector are inevitable due to the “contestability of markets and funding” based on a declining level of public investment, as well as the impact digital technologies and the “democratization of knowledge” are having.

In a response, the NTEU national president Jeannie Rea stated that the government had failed to increase public investment.

However, Rea argued that the choice before the government was between the current system of 38 public institutions or a "handful of elite research intensive universities concentrated in the capital cities."

Greens higher education spokesperson Lee Rhiannon, on the other hand, took up the source of the current crisis in tertiary education - decades of "cuts to the bones", with more than $1.3 billion in funding slashed by the Gillard Labor government since the start of 2011.

"'Market contestability' and 'competition' are buzz words designed to paint increased funding cuts to public universities as inevitable and the private sector as the saviour of universities.", said Rhiannon in a statement.

For students, it's quite clear that we need to expand, not maintain or cut, our public investment in tertiary education. Classroom sizes continue to balloon, and areas of study are more and more moulded to corporate priorities. The "democratisation of knowledge" is being used by neoliberal managements to reduce staff hours and face-to-face contact time.

The wave of restructuring cuts which has taken place in 2012 has been driven by the federal government's shift to a demand-driven system which pits universities against each other for students - with the Gillard government uncapping places to encourage universities to over-enroll. University managements are shedding jobs and courses to adapt to the future of market-driven league table-based funding for higher education - yet the reccomendation from Hilmer or Ernst and Young is more of the same.

The current round of cuts are far from over, with the University of Western Sydney (UWS) announcing that over 50 academic jobs and several subjects, including the entire Economics degree, will be cut in 2013.

Students from across the six campuses of UWS launched a campaign and rallied in response on November 21, despite the cuts being announced during the middle of exam period - clearly an attempt to limit the ability of students to organise major responses to condemn the management in the way that they have at other universities throughout 2012.

But so long as student struggles to defend and expand our education remain swept up into student election campaigns, disconnected and unable to link up with campaigns against neoliberalism in other areas of society, the well-organised campaign by the neoliberal ideologues will continue to hold the upper hand.

Students from across Australia gathered at the ANU in Canberra in September for the EduFactory conference to discuss the wave of attacks coming down. The second EduFactory! conference is being held at the University of Sydney over the ANZAC day long weekend 2013, to discuss national education policies and to organise campaigns for the year. Anyone interested in standing up for free, well-resourced public education should attend and get involved in the struggle.

Koori Centre Cuts

Earlier this year, myself, members of the local Redfern community and many supporters of Aboriginal rights staged a small photo shoot in Redfern in front of the Block's Aboriginal flag, to show support for Damien Hooper at the Olympics:

Unfortunately, Sydney Uni doesn't share in the same level of goodwill towards the original owners of our colonised land... Despite acknowledging the Cadigal people of the Eora nation whose land the university was build on, the administration has pushed ahead with implementing a new strategy for Indigenous education which has raised serious concerns by the students, particularly due to the fact that the “Wingara Mura — Bunga Barrabugu” strategy will scatter the Koori Centre’s functions and staff across campus in 16 faculties".

In the above article SRC Indigenous Student Officer Narelle Daniels highlighted the key concerns students had with the changes:

"How long will students have access to Koori Centre facilities like the library, computers and common room?
It’s not just about the rooms, it’s about keeping Indigenous support close to home. We simply don’t want 16 different places … But when we’ve asked for a meeting with him [Houston] reception keeps putting us off."

Although students have gotten word of this restructure coming down on the Koori Centre at the end of Semester 1, due to SRC elections taking place this semester the campus activists who took on the management over staff cuts in Semester 1 didn't play a huge role in organising. Koori students have been collecting signatures and attempting to at least get a meeting with the DVC Indigenous, Shane Houston, to discuss the implications of the restructuring on their experience and ability to remain at Sydney Uni.

Resistance members collecting signatures during the SRC elections

By the end of semester Koori students were feeling quite uncertain about the future - particularly given the break for exams begins this week, and students will be off campus and unable to mobilise any action against closing the common room for months. So at short notice a rally was called for the final week of semester, at which over 60 students turned out to support the Centre remaining open. As soon as the action was called it got picked up by the national movement; Alice Springs radio called Kyol Blakeney, one of the organisers, for a live interview, and a letter was read out from Gary Foley, legend of the Tent Embassy movement!

Kyol told me:

I promote the idea of more black fullas in Uni and more understanding throughout the wider community of the culture but I do not condone the idea of the removal of the Aboriginal support staff as it makes no sense to take away support when you are trying to encourage other Aboriginals to come to uni and succeed. That is the reason why I am in the protest and against Shane Houston.

At a meeting with Houston at the end of the protest, Kyol and the other students from the Koori Centre got the following commitments (posted around the Save the Koori Centre FB page):

Space and facilities – common room, computer lab

Indigenous Student Support & ITAS Co-ordinators – Tanya Griffiths and Freda Hammond to be reinstated into their office in the Koori Centre at 2 days per week minimum with their own office space.

Faculty support – support officer (Indigenous within each faculty.)

2 additional support officers with roles towards – ITAS, Working with Cadigal, Basic Personal Support.

Looking to seek funding for an entirely new Koori Centre that acknowledges the word (Aboriginal/Cadigal) in the title. This will include common room, Computer lab and Indigenous support staff at a minimum.

No faculty-specific common areas – There will be only one big community space for every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student on main campus and the University of Sydney.

Ie they won! (At least the lion's share of demands, although the dispersal of the academic programs doesn't seem to be on the table for discussion anymore, and students of those courses have recieved notification presenting it as a fait accompli).

Of course, we haven't seen the students demands incorporated into the new strategy yet, so it's all tentative... It's now summer break, so the uni may try and take advantage of the absence of students to reneg and hope nobody notices... but the inspiring action sofar has certainly showed that the student movement at Sydney Uni hasn't gone anywhere. And they know the latent power of the student movement and its' ability to create PR nightmares and untenable situations for management.

Their Leadership and Ours

Along with the previous post, The Tyranny of Coffee, this piece is part of a larger article I submitted to Resistance Pre-Conference Discussion discussing how socialists, particularly youth, should organise in Australia today.


UPDATE: 4000 page views, w00t!

The kind of leaders and the vision of leadership prevalent in society today today are fundamentally deformed by the nature of class society. Under modern global capitalism, leadership – whether in civil society, parliament or industry – is structured hierachically. Leaders, whether formally elected or, like Rinehart,Palmer and Forrest, not at all, are expected to command those below them, and implement their own individual vision of how to carry out decisions that are made, either by them or collectively.

The socialist vision of leaders is something radically different. Socialists understand that, as human beings, we are best equipped to solve our problems collectively, through collaboration and teamwork. Our vision of leadership is collective too; decisions that are made by a group should be carried out by a group, with the different ideas of how to carry things out that all members hold tested out in practice. Our organisers are not "leaders" to instruct members on how to carry out their assignments or tasks they have taken on, or take on responsibility for doing everything themselves, but members of the team, there to ensure decisions made collectively through branches or executives are actually getting carried out in practice, and to help comrades out when they need it.

Failures should not lead to individual shame or demotion, but are also the responsibility of the whole team involved. Going it alone as activists or taking on too much work as individuals rather than as a team, no matter how much easier or more efficient it might seem in the short term, is a quick route to developing bad ideas unchecked, becoming more and more alienated from those we are seeking to lead, and in the long run, burning out and losing faith in people or activism altogether.

Youth are particularly vulnerable to being under-developed as leaders in class society – we are underrepresented in leadership positions both in politics and the economy, under-developed or mis-developed as leaders by civil society programs and official forms of student politics, and super-exploited and in the workplace. Yet since we haven't yet risen to better jobs with better perks, and we haven't yet been as ground down by the capitalist system as the rest of the working class, we are also most open to ideas about changing the society that we live in in a revolutionary way.

Unless we actively take steps to safeguard against it, the dominant consciousness of leadership developed under class society also plays out within activist spaces. This is true for a variety of oppressed groups in society, but particularly so for youth and new members – given the seriousness with which socialists committed to building an organisation take our task of fighting to overthrow the system, it is only natural for older and more experienced comrades to step in when new ones are making mistakes or unsure of what is to be done – and this isn't always a bad thing. But if it happens repeatedly, then it means that we aren't allowing space for young activists to develop as real leaders, with confidence in their own abilities, but who understand they aren't operating alone.