On the Worker's Side (w/ Mark Buttigieg MLC)
NSW Labor MP Mark Buttigieg takes a deeper dive into the world of politics speaking to a wide variety of diverse guests about trade unionism, worker's rights and the future of the union movement in NSW and Australia.
On the Worker's Side (w/ Mark Buttigieg MLC)
Episode 4 - SDA Secretary Bernie Smith
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Here is the full drop of the 4th Episode of “On The Workers Side”. In this episode I had the pleasure of interviewing Bernie Smith who leads the NSW Branch of the SDA - the union that covers retail, warehouse and fast food workers. SDA members are at the coal face of so many major issues which affect front line workers today.
Uh g'day. Um it's Mark Buttergig here. This is the fourth episode of On the Workers Side podcast I've been doing. Very, very uh lucky to have with us today Bernie Smith, who's the State Secretary of the SDA, which stands for the Shop Distributive Allied Employees Union. They cover uh warehouse workers, retail workers, fast food workers. G'day Bernie, how are you? Good, Mark, how you go on? Welcome. Good to be here. Thanks for coming, really appreciate it. Pleasure. You look after, I think it's the largest union in uh in New South Wales, and as I said, covers uh a lot of retail workers, warehouse workers, and in particular, um, for a lot of people it's their it's their first job, particularly young people, but people in general. So I I guess it's the first time a lot of those people would have contact with a union. How important is that? And what's your experience of you know, running a union that has that sort of footprint and that first touch with people's experience of unionism?
SPEAKER_00Well, look, we take our responsibility to young workers very seriously, Mark. And uh you're right, it is most people's first experience of unionism. It was my first experience of unionism, and I joined the union when I was 14 and nine months old when I started working at Woolley's. Yeah. And I've been a member continuously ever since. And I suppose from the outset, even before I became an official of the union, I saw the care the union took for young workers. And on a very personal level, I got involved in the union at my workplace after I saw my older brother at another workplace get unfairly dismissed. And the union run him won him his job back. And I still remember the conversations around the kitchen table the day he came home and told mum and dad he'd been dismissed. Uh, and then I also remember the conversations when he got in touch with the union, and I really remember that night he came home and after going to the fairwork commission, he was able to tell mum and dad that actually got his job back because of the SDA. So, yeah, it's something we take very seriously and something it's a lived experience for myself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's I was gonna ask you about that actually because I knew you came from the shop floor, what we colloquially refer to, well, literally the shop floor, uh, which is always um something that I can relate to, having done the same thing myself, because it gives you a bit of a grounding and a perspective on the members that you're looking after because you've been there and lived and breathed it. But that experience for you with your brother taught you the importance of unionism. I guess not everyone necessarily has that catalyst to make them want to join the union. How can we make unionism uh attractive and educate people about how important it is when they may not have necessarily seen it firsthand like you did?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, good question, Mark. It's about having access to people most of the time. Uh the union's got a good story to tell. All unions have got a good story to tell. And when we get a chance to put that in an unbiased way in front of workers, we find the vast majority will join up. It's just been able to get access to them on a consistent and regular basis, that's the hardest thing. Yeah. When you talk to a worker and you're saying to them, well, you want to join a group of people like your workmates who come together to get better paying conditions, you know, to help you out with problems when you've got problems at work, to make your workplaces safer, which is a big issue at the moment as well. When you're doing those sort of things, then on top of that, you've got all the benefits the union brings to you on a personal level as well. It's actually not that hard to uh convince people that it's in their interest to join. The question is getting the access to the opportunity to ask them.
SPEAKER_01But I just want to get your impression of how how that access is. Is it is it easy these days with the Woolworths and the Coles and the people you deal with, or is it still is there still a way to go?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's not easy because of the way that people come into the workplace these days. So uh the reforms passed by the Albanese government have been great. Yeah, our union, our branch in New South Wales, we've always been a delegate-driven branch because of the size of New South Wales and the and you know the sort of the widespread of population that we have. So we've always relied heavily on our workplace delegates. So when they've got workplace delegate rights enshrined in legislation, that was a really great step forward. Uh but I suppose one of the biggest changes is that people come into the workplace in a much more atomised way. Uh there was a time when you know, when I started working at Woolies, four of us all started on the same day, went out the back at the same, you know, and at the same time of the week, people would always start their working life at Woolworths.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Then there's a time when maybe 20 people would come together with a group of stores and they'd be able to have the union put in front of them. But now it's one by one. So every single person who joins our union has an individual conversation with a delegate or an organizer or a workmate to facilitate that because now they start one by one. So with people um starting work through online induction processes, they sort of come to the workplace and it's uh might be one person early in the morning, one person during the day, and another person at midnight, and another person on the weekend. So it's just makes it a more disjointed process, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01And and naturally, I suppose a lot tougher in terms of the resource that the union has to put into um getting those touch points. It's um I I suppose it's a function of the Australian economy changing from relatively big shops. When I started with Osgrid, I think we we had 130 apprentices, like you say, all starting in one spot. A lot of those big shops are now disaggregated, and like you say, it's a one-on-one thing. So it's obviously a lot more difficult for what about the education piece in terms of um kids understanding the history of unionism and how that's shaped the country. Is there room for us to kind of expand into those areas so that people get an appreciation of the value?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's probably always more space in the curriculum to make sure we're covering those things properly. We find though that most people when we're talking to them in the workplace want to know about things in their workplace today, yeah, in terms of making that decision and seeing that it's actually good value. Yeah. A young worker who wants to join the SDA today uh will be the beneficiary of our adult age, adult wage campaign, which means for a young 18-year-old worker, uh when we win that campaign, hopefully very soon, it's like a $10 an hour pay increase potentially for them. It's a pretty good reason to join the union.
SPEAKER_01And this is the this is the quite a uh high profile case that you're running in the Fair Work Commission where eight people who are 18 years old doing exactly the same work as a a 21-year-old, both adults, but one's getting paid up to or more than $10 less an hour for the same, and sometimes supervising the older older people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right, Mark. So you know if you think about it in terms of the safe, even the old apprenticeships. I say work at in retail when I was 14 or 9 months old. By the time you get to the full adult rate of pay in retail at 20 at the moment, or 21 for some people, uh, you could have been there for five, six years. That's longer than an apprenticeship. Uh, it's crazy that we've got these uh laws in place at the moment, and we've been running a campaign for quite a while now, and we ran a big case last year to overturn these provisions to do the simple thing about wage justice to say that if you're an adult at 18 for every other purpose in the society in our community, why aren't you an adult at 18 for your term terms of your pay?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And uh that's only one of several campaigns, particularly in the last couple of years, um, where the union's been quite hope high profile and active. I know you had the um No One Deserves a Serve campaign. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure. Um we saw, well, everyone would be familiar with the footage that people saw during COVID of people behaving badly in shops and abusing retail workers and assaulting retail workers.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, really got out of control during COVID, didn't it?
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, but sadly it was the case before COVID as well, Mark. So back in 2016, the union started a campaign called No One Deserves to Serve, which is to try to uh you know reduce and hopefully eliminate customer abuse and violence in our workplaces. And it was a uh it was a campaign that was born around around a tea room table inside a supermarket, out the back of a supermarket one day, uh down in the shire where I know you're you're you're from, Mark. And uh around the a tea room in the shire at a supermarket one day. We were we were out there talking to workers about a range of things, and uh and an older worker came out in tears that morning. Right. And she'd been abused for the third time in a row that day by somebody. Now, the major did the right thing, got her off the checkout, took her out the back. Uh people were talking around the table, talking about how bad things can be and just the way it is. And we just posed a simple question is, well, should it be that way? And America, well, I suppose not, but what can we do about it? And that's when that campaign was born, and it's gone on to be uh not only a campaign in Australia but around the world, uh a campaign to say that retail workers deserve respect like everybody else. And uh, you know, there's a long way to go, but we've made some good progress in New South Wales in terms of legislative change, but that we've still got a long way to go in terms of behavioural change.
SPEAKER_01Yes, so we as a result of that campaign and and uh your advocacy, we introduced legislation, I think, which made it a uh criminal offence to abuse people in the workplace and they can actually be taken off-site. Was that was that pretty much the crux of it?
SPEAKER_00So the the first um good piece of legislation was um by by the previous government actually was about spitting during COVID, so that was sales criminalised, which was which was a good piece of work done by Brad Hazard at the time. Yeah. Uh but then when uh the Labor government came in, we made some really really good progress. So New South Wales was the first jurisdiction in Australia to adopt retail um laws specifically for retail workers that if you assault a retail worker or abuse a retail worker, it became an aggravated offence under the criminal code. That's right. It carried much heavier heavier penalties in relation to that. Yeah. Uh and I know just uh just last month in the lead up to Christmas, sadly, 64 people were charged with those offences, another 54 in January as well, because of the continuing.
SPEAKER_01Obviously, needed if you've got those stats. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh so that was a really good step forward. Um, but there's more to be done. We're really pleased with the retail crime strategy that was announced by the government late last year, which has seen more visible policing in shopping centres. Uh, but there's more needed to be done. And uh the next thing we're calling for is workplace protection orders, uh, which is basically like an apprehended violence order where repeat offenders who are constantly causing trouble can actually be excluded from a workplace. And rather than a worker having to take out that as an individual, uh either a company or the union could take that out out on behalf of all the workers in a workplace uh to remove the problem. You know, if you look at a health and safety uh concept, it's uh how do you eliminate the risk if you possibly can?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and this all stems from a conversation one-on-one with uh the affected worker and their union. So it's it's a tangible manifestation of what a union, of the power of the of the of being in a union. I mean, if it wasn't for the union, who's going to take it up uh uh without that collective action and that representation and the expertise, the legals, all the rest of it.
SPEAKER_00That's right, Mark. And I think it also shows that you know often people talk about uh well, I get caught a union boss sometimes, which my children think is a very amusing term. Um but the reality is that a union is just a group of workers who come together to get a better deal with each other. And uh you'll see without what most of our campaigns are just really driven by member concerns. Yeah. So no one deserves to serve came from around that tea table. Uh yeah, but most of our campaigns just have a genesis in us talking with our members and our members telling them, telling us the daily problems they're facing, and how can we try to alleviate those?
SPEAKER_01What about the uh uh under pressure campaign where you've got excessive workloads and people at the end of their tether because the unrealistic demands and what about that one? That that's another high-profile campaign.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so look, we just released a report late last year called Under Pressure, the Hidden Cost of Retail, and it really does go to those issues that you identified, Mark, about um there's been ever since COVID, there was some workplace pressures we noticed in the in the workplace where there's understaffing, uh, which we initially thought was to do with the problem of getting enough staff. But as more staff have become available, we see that the actual staffing levels have remained low and so a far more systemic problem than that. And actually, it's a really common, it's the most, it is the single most common issue I get raised with me when I have meetings with members is the intensification of work, uh the workload that people are facing, and the constant cutting back, which we see as um the result of a couple of things. One is um we call it the Audi Amazon effect. It's really like a bit of a vice that the traditional retail market has been squeezed by at either end. So at one end you've got Audi, a huge multinational. People think it's your little corner store. Yeah, they do. Fourth biggest retailer in the world. Right. It's huge. Yeah. Uh and they have a really low-tech but really high-intense work process where they've got really low staffing levels, uh, they've got really unusual items and actually have quite high injury rates historically in the retail industry at one end of the market putting pressure on, and they've got a very limited number of items. And at the other end, you've got Amazon who came into the market in 2017-2018 with an unlimited number of items, but a really high-tech approach to squeezing workers where they just use technology to drive workers as hard as they possibly can. And that's left uh retailers, traditional Australian retailers in the middle responding in a way that we don't think is appropriate either. So it's something that we need to address for the whole industry.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like a race to the bottom. Um, so the other one, of course, which is related, you mentioned Amazon make Amazon pay. That's been another really uh high-profile successful campaign, part of which has led into a bill that Minister Kotz has put through the House recently called the Digital Work Systems, and it's about the using algorithms and electronic allocation of work systems. Um, do you want to just flesh out some of that for us? Because that was a significant uh reform.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, we're really pleased. We thank the government again for its world-leading reform. It's probably world-first legislation passed here in New South Wales with the Digital Work Systems Bill. But it's not a radical bill, or just simply says that if you deploy technology in the way that you allocate work, or if you survive workers using technology, you have to do it safely. It's as radical as that. Yeah. Uh but unfortunately, you know.
SPEAKER_01Which would happen in a one-on-one human relationship. If your boss tells you, I want you to go and um you know dig that hole or stack those boxes or whatever, and it's an unsafe direction, you have the right under the pre-existing WHS laws to do something about it. This is about aligning the electronic allocation of that work with those laws, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, precisely. Just bringing the act into a modern age, yeah. We don't want to be stuck in the past. So we're not people who say no to new technology. We want the new technology to be safe and we want the gains to be shared with workers when it gets introduced rather than rather than the Amazon approach of it being unsafe and workers being left behind. So uh we're really pleased that that legislation passed because it's not just Amazon. What we've seen is that with Amazon's entry into the market, there's been a real pressure on all retailers to adopt uh algorithmic allocation of work or roster setting and demand lines. And uh what you're really seeing is the introduction of a tailorist mindset back into a workplace. But the you know, the tailorist mindset of how do we make work more efficient on a production line with no inputs and outputs is one thing, but when you put that into a dynamic environment like retail, which you've got these things called customers that get in the way of uh those sorts of things, and you're in a very dynamic and uncontrolled environment, it just doesn't work. And so they're trying to apply um a almost like a closed system allocation of labour to a really open system, and it's been really problematic, uh and we're really pleased that the laws have changed. And uh we hope to really uh sensibly engage with all uh operators to look at how do you allocate work safely, how do you use technology, that's great, but how do you do it safely and how do you do it in a way that actually makes work easier, not more intense, and less sustainable.
SPEAKER_01And what about this big hoo-ha from the business community about union bosses getting access to the books and you know getting in the way of business and all this sort of business? It seemed to be um they got quite sort of uh uptight about the whole thing. Um what's your response to those arguments?
SPEAKER_00I just think it was really strange, really strange. Uh I was accused of potentially getting I potentially getting into systems and somehow break the employer's system. Now I didn't duck down to TAFE to do a coding course to be able to do these sort of right of entry inspections. That's not how these things operate. Um but we just want a pretty simple principle upheld, and that is uh that all all systems of work, no matter no matter their format, should be deployed in a way that is safe and not harmful to workers. Uh there's the particular risks associated with digital work systems about excessive workloads, uh excessive levels of surveillance, inappropriate surveillance. We just think that those things should be able to be checked upon.
SPEAKER_01Yes, because you're not when you don't have the human interaction and accountability to kind of five it to uh some sort of algorithm electronic allocation is a is a cop-out, isn't it? Because they just say, well, you know, that's just how it is, and uh it's not us doing it, it's the algorithm.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll give you a classic example. The very week that this legislation went through Parliament earlier that week, got a message from uh a member of ours who was just scratching the head saying, That they were they're a manager at a you know yeah, sort of department manager level, and they'll build in a roster for their particular work workers that they worked with. And uh they'd had a problem with a problem that you know at a certain time of day they needed more workers, so the employer came back and said, Okay, no, we can get you more workers at that time of day. Uh but what they didn't say was that uh yes, we do that, but we're moving them from all these other parts of the day. And so the total number of hours was actually less in a workforce that was already stretched. And the person building the roster couldn't understand it. They said, look, but I can't, there's no transparency. As you say, there used to be a time we could ask somebody about it, or they'd say, Look, um, you know, we've got X number of cartons, and you know, we have an average rate of how many cartons poker might pack in an hour. So this is how many hours we roughly think we'll need, and because there's always things that get in the way, we might need a bit more work allocated for that. And this person was there saying, Well, they just told me to trust the curve, the computer-generated curve, but they said there's no transparency as to how many um items they're expecting us to get through in a particular day, and it was just more intense than it had been before that.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, so this is really interesting, and it leads me into another thing which I think is um gonna be very challenging for uh working people, in fact, the whole economy and everyone in it going forward, and that is the broader advent of AI, which is as you know, probably better than a lot because a lot of your members are at the forefront of this. The coupling of AI to automation, robotics, and all the rest of it, and how we deal with the potential it's got the it's got the potential to be a great thing in terms of making our lives easier so that humans can go off and do higher order things as long as it's done properly. Um now this is the trick, isn't it? Because those sort of things you were talking about, those examples you were using, that's as a result of not placing workers at the centre of its implementation. Where do you see all this going, Bernie? Do we need a are we gonna need a macro legislative response to put workers at the centre of this? Or you know, the other view is you just let companies do what they want to do with it and the market all sort it out. I mean it's it's quite frightening. It's fine.
SPEAKER_00It's exciting, but it's frightening to there's a real opportunity to for Australia to become a place where AI is deployed well, and then that will give real productivity gains. Yeah. But what you often see is um companies deploy these new technologies in a way that maximizes their profit, not their productivity. Uh so if you hurt workers in the process, uh and that is an externality that gets hoisted upon the community because uh the other community has to pick up the pieces, and it's not more productive for the whole community, it might be more profitable for the business. So I think we have to have an honest discussion about how these things operate. And um there is an opportunity to go the high road, and that's uh the way that Western economies have traditionally deployed technology in the past, you use it in a way that actually increases everybody's wealth, and we saw that great explosion post-World War II. Yes, uh, but that's not what we're seeing this time around. We're really seeing the gains being retained to a much smaller group of people rather than more broadly being dispersed, and some of those gains are quite illusory. You know, Commonwealth Bank a little while ago uh laid off a whole lot of workers because they thought they had this AI chatbot that would now answer all the questions, and then they had the embarrassing situation where they had to hire all the workers back because they found out that the chatbot didn't do quite what they thought. So I think there's a a long way um to go through this process, but the things that we identified in their under pressure report about ways to address workload, I think are actually also a lot of the things to use to address how you deploy AI in a way that's worker-centered, true productivity gain gaining, uh true productivity gains to be had, uh, and also have you a way that distributes that more fairly. Um we had a five-point plan as part of that. Uh, and if I sort of go through it in reverse, I suppose. So in in under pressure, we sort of went one to three to five, but if it went backwards, um that plan calls for worker co-design of systems. Yes. And I think if you get workers involved in co-design, you'll get a much better system.
SPEAKER_01Because they know their jobs better than anyone else, so they know where to deploy the AI to make their jobs more interesting, plus get the productivity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they'll they'll see the what the real bottlenecks are rather than what the head office might think the bottlenecks are. It's workers done versus work as imagined, is how we sort of describe it. And if you get workers involved in the design, I think you have a great outcome. Um, consultation then is is the other thing that we've always been calling for. Uh, and there's there are very strong consultation provisions that companies need to actually abide by today. And I think that Sally McMahon has put everyone on notice that you know. Are we expecting them to abide by those consultation processes? Because once you've designed the work, even if you have done it with workers in the co-design stage, every workplace is different. So then how you actually bring it into an individual workplace requires that consultation and how we get things done properly and how we minimise any negative impacts. For us, we also see the need for support for frontline workers, whether that be managers or or employees, in how you deploy it in a way that actually works for everybody to deliver sustainable workloads, which is not something that, you know, you work at your peak capacity, you get timed, and that becomes the new standard. But what's actually sustainable over a working month, a working year, in fact, a working lifetime where we all have ups and downs in our capacity. So what's actually sustainable over that period of time? And ultimately, underneath all that, what's safe staffing levels that maximizes productivity and return, sure. But also does it in a way that doesn't hurt people.
SPEAKER_01So, Bernie, I suppose one uh example of all this, which has been around for quite a few years now, is it's I suppose it's it's one of those things, isn't it? It's hard to know whether it's automation or AI. But uh, I suppose automation in this case where you had automated checkouts in supermarkets, how what what effect did that have on the workforce and productivity and all that sort of business? Because we've had that in place for what, that'll be 10 years, would it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Mark, what we saw initially was wasn't the displacement of workers through that process uh because it sort of coincided with the on the advent of online retail in a much heavier way inside shops. So uh you might have seen work move around a shop, so you have less people at the checkouts, but you had more people then fulfilling orders for online retail. And when you think about it, that uh might have had less workers per store, but more stores were opening up, and so there was no net loss in jobs. Yeah. Uh and the other way that we thought about it at the time was that if you think about the traditional retail shop, goods come in the back of the store, an employee unloads the truck, another employee takes it from the back dock onto the floor, another employee puts it on the shelf, then a customer comes along, you come along with your trolley and you take the goods off the shelf, and you took it down to the down to the checkout, and then you uh drive it home in your car. What we saw with the advent of uh more of the of the online retail being fulfilled from shops at the same time as in introducing um the self-serve checkouts was a process where the goods still came into the back of the store, an employee still took it off the truck, another employee took it onto the floor, another employee put on the shelf, then another employee took it off the shelf rather than a customer for the online order, and then they would take it to a staging area where another employee would pack that all up together, and either a customer would come pick it up for click and collect, or another employee again would then take it on a truck to the person's home. And so, whilst there was uh less people at the checkouts, there was more people doing other things inside the store.
SPEAKER_01So that's a cla that's a classic example of really what we were talking about, where you actually get the productivity uplift because your outputs increase because you're selling more goods and services, your employment's actually increased. So your bottom line is increased by the virtue of increased output, not squeezing wages, cutting wages and cutting jobs to extract more of a margin. This is a this is a that was a real life practical example.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that was that was a good initial thing. But what we've seen since then is a real squeeze on that business model as uh businesses like uh Amazon have come in and really squeezed that model, and so we see much more work intensification for those people doing those online picking orders, for example. But look, here's another good example of how you can share the gains. Um some operators now have got large customer fulfillment centres uh you know where they do the online picking out of a larger uh shed rather than just out of the shop. Um, and then one of the big operators uh here in Australia did a partnership with an overseas company who runs the automation. Uh that company has got an enterprise agreement with the SDA, and those people who do the automation inside that particular shed are on $150,000, $180,000 a year. But that's a good outcome in terms of sharing the wealth. Yeah. And then the workers inside there who are doing the same work that they used to do on the shop floor, but in a more automated way, are getting a premium of an extra 10% or so on top of the normal wage they used to get.
SPEAKER_01So the key, the key is for the for the uh companies to come together with workers in the unions to work together to get those those um win-win out, win productivity, win job security, higher wages outcomes. If that it do we have the industrial instruments in place in Australia to facilitate that sort of cooperation, or do do you think we might need something more down the track?
SPEAKER_00It was interesting. Amanda Rishworth, who's the current uh Industrial Relations Minister federally, uh, gave a speech recently here in Sydney where she observed that um in Denmark, where the union density is closer to 70% versus Australia where it's closer to 17% or 13%. Uh, Denmark has less days lost to industrial disputation than Australia per thousand employees. Uh, because it's a more cooperative approach and a more of a problem-solving approach between uh the you know, business accepts the legitimate role of unions, and therefore you get a better outcome. So, you know, I would encourage sensible businesses to do what what a lot of businesses do and actually uh engage in a sensible way with with their unions that represent their workers and you get a better outcome. It's not rocket science. Uh yeah. I remember many years ago um a large Australian retailer came to the union and said, Look, they were going on a tour of the United States and they wanted um our secretary to introduce them to some unionised companies or tell them the unionised companies. And he said, Oh, why do you want to know the unionised ones? And he said, Well, they're the ones who've got to be more efficient, aren't they? Because they pay higher wages and yet they still compete in the same market. And so it can be a win-win where people approach it in the right way. But at the moment, um we're in a process where I think we need to address this. Um here's an analogy. Yeah, you remember when uh social media started, Mark, and everyone said this is gonna be a wonderful thing for democracy, a huge, a golden highway of information, and people be able to exchange ideas freely and it'd be wonderful. And then we turned around 20 years later and it'd become a bit of a sewer. Uh and so then our government had to step in and uh regulate with the you know, the quite extreme step of taking the you know the regulating for under 16s recently, yeah, that world first ban. Yeah, because we had just let it rip. We hadn't regulated it in a way that made it uh a safe environment for everybody.
SPEAKER_01So that's a that's a really good analogy, and I guess it's um somewhat reactive in the sense that we we had to see the quality of the information go down into the sewer as you put it and then legislate proactively. But this is um because of the potential of this to have such huge ramifications right across the economy. If we get this wrong, we can always pick up the pieces. But the potential, my fear is that the potential for uh the size of the disaster is so big that we have to try and get ahead of the curve, don't we?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we shouldn't be waiting for the sewer to occur in our workplaces with with AI. Let's actually make sure it is a productive tool that um is beneficial to the broad community, not just a very limited few, and often a very limited few who are offshore. So I think that we've actually got a great opportunity. Like Australia's got some really great advantages in terms of uh the data centres that we can set up here, uh, but we don't want to be the digital quarry of a 21st century, you know, where we don't want to be exporting uh just raw energy and raw data out of data centers. We should actually be trying to build the infrastructure that goes with it in terms of the digital infrastructure, uh, in terms of the AI systems that can go with it, but doing it in an Australian way. Uh like another analogy I sometimes think of is if you think back to the 80s when we had another big leap forward in technological change around the world and a really big shift in in economic structures around the world. Uh Reagan and Thatcher did it one way, Hawk, the Hawkeeting Labour government in Australia did it a different way. Well, who did it better? Well, we had what 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth because we did it in a Labour way, in an Australian way, which put workers and their employers together rather than pitting them against each other, and in a way that said, here's some lift to the social wage, here's some safety ness we put in place in the workplace, here's a process of consultation through the TCR clauses. I think there's some templates there in both of those examples to say that yeah, AI is different. Uh, it's it's shiny new technology, but we can deploy some of the things we've done in the past about bringing workers and their employers together effectively through their unions to consult and uh build better systems and also making sure we've got the right guardrails and regulation in place. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed, but I I suppose I call it right touch rather than some people advocating for light touch.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And just finally, Bernie, um obviously if you're if you're a union member, you're not always necessarily uh uh uh uh have political views as strongly as other people might have, and people look at the unions and say, oh, why are they so close to the Labour Party? And um I mean the reality is that when we've got Liberal governments, unions have to fight just as hard, sometimes harder, sometimes less harder, depending on the day for their members. Um what would you say to people who are wondering about that relationship and the effectiveness of it? I mean, you've been able to achieve quite a few things under Labour governments, federal and state, but you're also able to achieve things under Liberal governments, which you pointed out before with Brad Hazard and a few of those things. You got any commentary around that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, we speak to all parties and and whatever the government is, it's the government of the day, and we'll always work with the government of the day to further our members' interests. Yeah. Um I suppose what I would say is that more often than not, the big advances come through when there's people who are more open to workers' issues, and we find that tends to be the case with Labour. But can I say during the darkest days of COVID, uh, you know, we'd be having weekly hook hookups with um the Treasurer's Office of the Liberal government or the health minister of the Liberal government. Um I stood side by side with the health minister, with Mr. Hazard, and announced those spitting law reforms. We helped give them feedback about the um deployment of vaccines at that point in time and the fact that uh some of the mandates they wanted to put in place would have shut down all of country New South Wales because there wasn't enough vaccines in country New South Wales that workers could have met the mandates. And through that practical engagement, which I hope they found beneficial, we got practical outcomes. Yes. We said, okay, yeah, we will delay it in those areas where people can't possibly meet those sort of mandates, or we'll change the timetable for that. Uh, because it's just practical feedback that we were getting from our members that we passed on. Because in the end, we're not union bosses, we're just uh part of a group of workers who come together uh who want the best for our members, we want the best for our community, and we do that by um by bringing people together and and and telling the truth wherever we possibly can to people who need to hear it about what might be going right, what might be going wrong, and what could be better into the world.
SPEAKER_01And then that loops back into your commentary to before about the Denmark example and this northern European model of uh cooperative and cooperative work with the unions. In fact, regardless of which government's in power, unions are simply people embedded in the life of their workplace in those models, and therefore it it's better because you've got more intellectual property feeding into how we can do things better. It's as simple as that, really, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like yeah, unions are nothing particularly radical. We're just you know, you work walk around your neighbourhood, and there's plenty of union members in every neighbourhood and every shopping centre you go to. You know, we're your friendly neighbourhood union, and um the Nordic model is some something which we think is a is a good model in terms of how do you cooperate and work in work in an effective way together. And yeah, we've often uh looked to that model to see well, how do how do we have a process where you can cooperate? But you for that you need willing partners on both sides of the equation. You can't have it can't be a one-way street.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, all right, Bernie. Well, we might wind it up there, mate. Thank you very much. It's been a very fascinating and enlightening conversation. Congratulations on all your wins and really appreciate appreciate you coming on as a guest tonight. It's been it's been very, very illuminating and helpful. Good on you.
SPEAKER_00Pleasure, Mark. Thanks. Good on you.