Trevor Cook

Where's the evidence, Joe (de Bruyn, SDA)?

2013-05-25T14:30:15+10:00

The SDA leadership continues resist reality, damaging the PM and the ALP brand in the process. This was in business insider a few days ago:

"Some apparent dissidents in Australia’s largest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (or SDA), are today calling on the organisation’s boss to reveal the research which he claims shows most of the country’s retail sectors workers are opposed to same-sex marriage.

That boss is Joe de Bruyn, a member of the national ALP executive and hugely influential figure in Labor party circles. The union, known as the SDA, has over 200,000 members.

A conservative Catholic, de Bruyn is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and says the majority of SDA members agree with his position.

Now a group called SDA Members for Equality want him to reveal the research that de Bruyn says was conducted a couple of years ago. The Canberra Times reports:

Mr de Bruyn said the union had “some years ago” discussed with a representative sampling of members the view that marriage was between a man and woman and received overwhelming support.

“We believe that this continues to be the view of the overwhelming majority of the members of the union,” he said.

The request by SDA Members for Equality is a reasonable one. It’s hard to square de Bruyn’s comments with the published polling which for some years has been showing around 60% or more of Australians support same-sex marriage.

(And that’s before asking why an organisation that represents people working on shop floors needs a trenchant position on same-sex marriage in the first place.)"

Trends in social media marketing

2013-05-25T14:09:04+10:00

Source: Social Media Marketing Industry Report & Forbes coverage

McGahern and John Williams' "Stoner"

2013-05-24T09:09:55+10:00

Just a few notes about some favourites.

This weekend the annual John McGahern International Seminar takes place in Carrick on Shannon and Aughawillan (I hope to make it there one year).

This prompted a nice article in the Irish Independent last week. I loved this bit:

The people he lived among seem hardly surprised by the attention. On the day Margaret Thatcher's death was announced, it was a talking point as John Fox chatted to customers pumping diesel into plastic containers at his garage in Ballinamore.

A car was waiting for fuel at the pump, but John was good humoured as his work was interrupted – obviously not for the first time – with questions about the McGahern connection. On the demise of the Iron Lady, he remarked: "They won't be crying about her around here."

Having featured in not just one but two of McGahern's most celebrated works, Fox is probably resigned to the fact that even a glimpse of him filling petrol stops some people in their tracks.

When I visited Ballinamore a couple of years ago, I met John Fox in his petrol station and was similarly stopped in my tracks. It's a bit like meeting the actor in one of your favourite long-running TV dramas, you feel that you 'know them' but have to remind yourself that you know a fictionalised character, not the person standing in front of you.

When I was at the Fox garage he moved away after a brief conversation to serve a customer leaving me to talk with one of his younger colleagues. Before Fox left, we got to talking about the differences between Mohill and Ballinamore. I was sceptical that two towns so close together (about 25 kms from memory) could be very different. Fox's colleague told me (with a twinkle in his eye) that the black and tans had been stationed in Mohill and many of their descendants still lived there and "some of them haven't had the horns bred out of them yet".

See also this brief report of Roy Foster's opening address to the seminar.

One of McGahern's faourite novels was Stoner by John Williams. (McGahern also greatly admired The Great Gatsby and Jane Austen's Persuasion, which he said were the two most perfect novels in the english language).

Although ignored early on Stoner is now considered a classic. It has recently been translated into French, prompting this NPR story (thanks to Professor Jackson for the pointer):

Fast forward to today and the book is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. It is a best-seller across much of Europe, including the Netherlands, where it has been the best-selling novel for the past two months. But it is not the action-packed thriller or steamy romance you might expect to be topping the charts. It is a quiet, slim novel about a young man who leaves a hardscrabble farm in Missouri to become a literature professor in 1910.

"It sort of pays tribute to a man whose life is, in one sense, utterly ordinary, but, in another sense, rich as anyone's life can be," said Edwin Frank, who runs New York Review of Books Classics, which republished Stoner in 2006.

I love Stoner and highly recommend it.

Another McGahern favourite that I also love is Alistair MacLeod. MacLeod is a Canadian writer of Scottish highlander descent. His short stories, in particular, are very evocative.

Ford's media release is a PR shocker

2013-05-23T12:33:16+10:00

There can be few worse things in the world of PR than transparently ridiculuous efforts to dress bad news as triumphs of corporate ingenuity.

Today, Ford Australia announced it will cut 1200 jobs.

Bad enough news to draw media comment from the prime minister, deputy prime minister and many others.

This is the headline from Ford's media release: Ford Accelerates Australian Business Transformation.

Worse still, the lead paragraph:

Ford is transforming its Australian business by accelerating the introduction of new products for Australian customers, enhancing the sales and service experience, and improving its business efficiency and profitability.

You don't burnish your reputation with childish corporate spin.

The effort to do so is insulting to your employees, journalists and the broader public.

If there's bad news, then tell it straight up.

The Accord 30 years on

2013-05-20T16:59:24+10:00

At the end of next week a 'special symposium' will be hosted by Macquarie University to mark the three decades since the ALP-ACTU deal helped to elect the Hawke Government in 1983. The good and the great of the Accord era will be there (Hawke, Crean, Kelty etc) as will many enthusiasts from the academic community.

The Accord was Australia's odd experiment in corporatism at the national level. Odd because the labour movement (or at least its leaders) seemed to embrace corporatism at the same time and, at least on the political side, with the same enthusiasm as it embraced the neo-liberal agenda then sweeping the anglophone world.

Whatever its merits, I found in my thesis that today's union leadership are split over the Accord. Split in intresting and important ways. Here is an excerpt:

The ACTU’s adoption of independence and external lobbying involves a direct rejection of the dependence and internal lobbying approach involved in the social democratic style Accord arrangement. The adoption of union revitalisation strategies is based in critiques of the impact of these social democratic arrangements on union vitality and membership engagement.

In fact, for the critics inside today’s union movement, the Accord is viewed through the lens of a contemporary focus on re-building membership. The Accord was good for working people, but it was, they say, bad for unions.

While a few interviewees found merit in both the Accord and the organising model, seeing them as appropriate responses to the circumstances of their times, most leaned one way or the other.

Current union officials were evenly split on the merits of the Accord, while former officials were either supportive of the Accord, often seeing it as a high point for the union movement, or offered no definitive opinion. It must be stressed, however, that the sample sizes are small, and the distribution of opinions is such that it is hazardous to draw strong conclusions about the relationship between the period in which interviewees held senior union positions and their attitudes to the Accord and its impact on union membership size. Nevertheless, the interviews contained much commentary and analysis that was suggestive of a generational shift in thinking on these issues.

Unsurprisingly, union officials with differing perspectives on the merits of the Accord tend to emphasise different aspects of the Accord experience. Supporters of the Accord tend to emphasise its policy successes, while detractors tend to see it as having adverse consequences for the union movement, in particular perceptions of unions being ‘too close’ to government and the impact these perceptions may have had on union membership numbers.

One interviewee, for example, argued that the problems with the Accord were outweighed by these lasting policy achievements: “Everybody knew whatever the criticisms were of the Accord and we’ve got plenty but there was an institutional position for unions within that, there was a seat at the table, unions were not just asked to exercise wage restraint but there was actually a negotiation which saw things like superannuation and Medicare, these sort of social benefits were part of the deal.

Another interviewee, however, argued that the ‘well-‐known’ negatives of the Accord tend to be forgotten by an older generation of union officials who remain nostalgic about the Accord era: “There’s always a perception that the old guys in this group (smaller unions) do want an Accord. I think a few of them hark back to it, look back with fond memories. A very fuzzy memory as well, they remember all the positive aspects and they don’t remember the negatives”

Other interviewees argued that it is the positives of the Accord that have been forgotten and that history has been re‐written by the union movement’s new leadership. An interesting part of this perspective is that it rejects the (apparently) widely held belief among contemporary union officials that the Accord was an era characterised by low levels of member involvement and mobilisation, and, consequently, declining union membership: “The Accord was the high point for the trade union movement both in terms of what it was able to achieve and how it was able to mobilise workers around it. I think the re‐writing of history bagging the Accord has been mainly by people who weren’t there. The collapse in union membership and all that post dates the Accord. Union membership pretty much held up during the Accord. It flattened in the 80s but didn’t start to decline until the 1991 recession.”

The contrary idea, however, that the Accord did involve a reduction in member mobilisation, was the more popular among interviewees. This idea that unions stopped doing all the member-‐engaging activities they used to do before the Accord is also evident in the interpretation many interviews placed on the meaning of union revitalisation. For instance: “It (the Accord) served the government better than the unions, quite frankly I think there is a whole range of things we stopped doing in that period.”

Some interviewees also attributed much of the success of the Accord to Hawke and his special, or unique, relationship with the trade union movement. Again, this line of reasoning is strongly supportive of the view that the Accord was a one‐ off, almost a temporary diversion for Australian unionism: “Hawke wanted that relationship to work, he wanted that relationship, and clearly he saw benefits both for his own government and for the union movement through the Accord. As I say, I think at the time it worked well.”

For interviewees that are strongly critical of the Accord, the link between membership disengagement and membership decline is almost an article of faith, and clear evidence that the corporatism of the Accord, while good in policy terms, was bad for unions in organisational terms.

For these interviewees, an obvious causal relationship exists: “I can only compare and contrast the union density numbers in Australia with the UK during the Thatcher period. We actually went down faster. Whatever else the Accord delivered it didn’t deliver sustainable union density.”

The link between member disengagement and elite negotiations between the ACTU leadership and the leadership of the FPLP is also taken as axiomatic by many interviewees. In this view, the Accord excluded not just members, but also the most senior levels in union hierarchies; it is as if a whole generation of lower and middle union leaders was disenfranchised by the Accord: “The Accord was a dismal failure. A combination of Kelty, Keating, the Metals, the NUW under Sword, made some very fundamental strategic mistakes. Rather than trying to capture the opinion of the workforce and lead it and develop it they came up with a model they said was going to improve the country and there was very little ownership amongst the union secretaries, union officials, all democratically elected, and more accountable than most politicians in many regards.”

The Accord processes, with their emphasis on top‐down management of the union movement, were seen as even less useful during the tough years of the Howard Government; several union interviewees suggested that union officials had to re‐learn the basics of unionism: “The structure of the Accord process almost relegated union members to the position of observers. What we have learnt through the Howard years was that workers have to be more than observers they need to be participants. Because the Accord was negotiated at a peak level between the leaders of the ACTU and the prime minister and treasurer of the day it wasn’t as inclusive and consultative and engaging as we need it to be in the new millennium. “

An interviewee with direct experience of the Accord era, denied that it was the Accord itself that was the problem, rather the fault was with union leaders that failed to use the opportunities created by the Accord structures and processes: “It’s crap; if your members weren’t involved you weren’t trying hard enough because the Accord provided a framework for really significant campaigns. Superannuation came because there had been a 4 or 5-‐year union campaign. The structural efficiency principle – great opportunity for unions to get not just real pay rises but also give workers real control over the working environment. It’s true a lot of unions just treated the Accord as ‘every six months I turn up and I get a pay rise’. But the more effective unions actually used it as an opportunity and won quite historical breakthroughs”

Perhaps the strongest criticism of the Accord by today’s union leadership, however, was that unions had become too close to government and therefore too dependent on the ALP. This criticism is related to the argument about membership disengagement by over‐reliance on elite leadership negotiation, but it goes further and points to emerging expectations that union members have for independence in the unions‐ALP relationship.

The concern was expressed by one interviewee as a reversal of the belief that the ALP wants independence in the relationship more than unions do: “The Accord was a fundamental error, not because it did bad things for working people, but because it was bad for the unions, it tied us and made us a government agency. Too close. Which is an interesting thing because there is always this view that the unions want to be closer and the party doesn’t. Often that’s not the case. Being too close hurts us as well.”

Links for 2012-06-10 [del.icio.us]

2012-06-11T00:00:00-07:00

Chrome 웹 스토어 - RSS 구독 확장 프로그램(Google 제공)

Links for 2011-10-04 [del.icio.us]

2011-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

None

Links for 2008-10-12 [del.icio.us]

2008-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

Looking in all the wrong places

Links for 2008-08-13 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

I think I forgot why I started blogging in the first place. Did you? « PR Interactive

Links for 2008-08-06 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

How to Track 500 Business Blogs in 10 Minutes a Day
Engagement vs. Popularity Metrics in Blogs
What's your strategy?
Is the social, mobile web too small to care about?

Links for 2008-07-19 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-20T00:00:00-07:00

How to use PR People to Build Traffic for your Blog
CEPU: Telstra EBA Negotiations Progress Update
Yesterday, Telstra decided it didn't want to talk to the unions anymore about an enterprise agreement affecting up to 32,000 employees.A day later - after saying they would no longer talk - Telstra's HR managers launched a website called "Now We're Talkin

Links for 2008-07-12 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-13T00:00:00-07:00