BY KIM LINDEN
& KATHY NEWNAM
NEWCASTLE — When you're on your next holiday, spare a thought for the people cleaning your hotel room. Chances are that their pay and conditions are below those set out in the award, they are being bullied and harassed by management, and intimidated if they are in, or want to join, a union.
These are some of the reasons why the Liquor, Hospitality Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) is on a recruitment drive in a sector which, in Newcastle and the NSW central coast, has not been highly unionised until the last three years.
One of the main issues the LHMU is tackling is the problem of bullying, LHMU Newcastle secretary Carmel Cook told Green Left Weekly. Bullying is institutionalised in the hospitality industry. It is a common form of harassment and can be used by managements to keep the union out. Bullying is largely the result of employers not wanting to pay award rates or wanting workers to work beyond award standards.
How does the union deal with bullying in an area that isn't highly unionised?
"It's hard in hospitality, especially the hotel industry", said Cook. "New employees often get asked straight out, 'Are you in the union?'. So people are forced to lie straight away if they are in the union and if they're not in the union they're put off joining.
"Our strategy has been, if we get approached by a worker who has been harassed or bullied, and their workplace isn't unionised, we recommend that they arrange a meeting with their co-workers. We help arrange the meeting and send an organiser along. It's all part of an approach to get the workers to stand strongly together. It is part of the ACTU's 'organising model' of unionism."
The union campaign against bullying, Cook explained, was inspired by the Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union in the United States.
The strongest demand for unionisation in the hotel industry has come from house attendants, Cook told GLW. "They're the workers who prepare and clean the rooms, as well as cooks and kitchen attendants. The majority of these workers are young."
For the LHMU the recruitment campaign is about educating young people about the role of unions and the way in which they can organise. According to Cook, the response has been good where the LHMU has recruited members and the union achieves a victory. The word of that spreads.
But the union still has a hard slog tackling the industry's employers. "The [bosses] have been bastards", Cook said. "This is an industry which has been tipped as the 'work of the future', and as a result you have a lot of young people in the industry. But with the level of harassment and bullying that occurs it's like throwing them into the lion's den.
"Employers don't stick to the award. For example, some hotels try to pay workers according to the number of rooms they prepare or clean, like piece work. Or they try and set a time limit so that in an eight-hour day you must prepare 18 rooms.
"Under the award there is no time limit to prepare rooms.
"Things like this push people past their capacity and they injure themselves, especially when you have one person cleaning and making up king-sized beds. It's dangerous. Then the workers go from very hot working conditions to the cold and back again. It leads to serious health problems such as muscle damage."
The federal government's anti-union Workplace Relations Act has taken away, among other things, certain rights of union delegates. Cook says there is a positive side to this. "It educates the members to stand as a collective".
Cook believes that social contracts, such as the prices and incomes accord under the former federal Labor government, are not the answer. "Sometimes unions are stronger when Labor is in opposition. It makes the workers stronger because they see they can't lobby the government to change things and that they need to tackle things differently."
"Our overall strategy is to build workers' confidence and to make the members, not the union hierarchy, the strength and focus of the union", Cook concluded.
From Green Left Weekly, February 20, 2002.
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