Episode 6- AWG Executive Director Claire Pullen

Here is the full drop of the 6th Episode of "On The Worker's Side". In this episode we talk to Claire Pullen who leads the union which advocates for writers. Here Claire talks about the challenges of ensuring AI is not used by companies to rip off the talent of writers who provide the creative intellectual input to the content we all enjoy and use. AI presents a great opportunity for us but ONLY if properly regulated.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

G'day, my name is Mark Buttergig. I'm a member of the New South Wales Parliament. Welcome to episode number six of my podcast called On the Workers' Side. Today we're very fortunate to have the lovely Claire Pullen, who is the CEO of the Australian Writers Guild. G'day, Claire.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Thanks for having me, Mark. Great to see you.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Anytime.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Claire, uh, I might just kick off by asking you, um, it's called a uh you've worked for a number of unions and you've been in the union member for movement for a long time. It's called the Australian Writers' Guild. What's the what's the history of that? What's the go with that?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Yeah, sure. So you would know this, um, being the the keen scholar of unions that you are, that a guild is a an older form of worker organizing. It predates unions in a lot of ways. And the guilds were originally formed around crafts, like the Printers Guild, the Stonemasons Guild, the the groups that formed guilds were originally sort of the keepers of the craft.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

They very much have that um trade union identity in terms of being about the trade.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

And we've kept the name all through our history, and it shows in some of the work that we do that we look after writers as writers, not just as workers. I also have another job which is running our collecting society, the Australian Writers Guild Authorship Collecting Society. This is something that's a it's particular to creative workers, and I think we'll probably end up talking about this uh later on. But it's a form of income that creative workers derive because they create intellectual property, their royalties or residuals are what they're called in the US. So that's the second part of my job is ensuring that stream of income for riders from the royalties their works create.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

So that so that is a product of uh, as you call it, a property, uh, intellectual property in this case, and an income stream being derived because it can be used presumably relatively freely. So it it's hard to keep a track of unless you've got a professional organization like yourselves doing that.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Yeah, it can be. Um, intellectual property is a property in like a car, it's a thing that you can inherit or leave to your kids. So part of my job uh when a screenwriter dies is finding their heirs and inheritors, so letting their kids know that even if your parent has passed away, uh their episodes of a country practice or homicide or Kingswood country are still earning money somewhere in the world, and we collect from all over the world and distributing that income to that writer's kids or family, whoever they've left that money to. And in some cases they leave it to charities or um some people leave it to us, which is great. That's really that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

So that in a lot of cases, I'd imagine the families may not necessarily be aware of their entitlement.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yeah, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_02 3:05

And there's no automatic sort of registration or government body that does it, and unless it was for the guild, it would just go astray.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Yeah, that's right. That's our job is to register the work. And when we say work, it could be either a film or an episode of TV. So someone who's written on Home and Away, for example, could have hundreds of episodes of Home and Away or Neighbours, and usually people have worked for both. You register the work with us, we collect royalties from Australia and New Zealand, but also everywhere in the world. So we get fascinating data about what people like to watch. So McLeod's daughters, for example, really popular in Eastern Europe. And I try at least once a year to pitch the media out about that to let Australians know that our work is used and admired and still really appreciated by people who don't even speak.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Especially in the age of social media and like you have to deal with all these platforms now, YouTube, Facebook, all the rest of it. Yep. That must get complicated.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

It can. So it's a bit more straightforward when we're talking about broadcast, which is where most of the royalties come from. But yeah, people uh watch Homicide, right? Which was that finished before I was born. I remember it. Yeah, sorry. No, no, it's okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

There were reruns.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Yes, yeah, and every time there's a rerun, yeah, one of my members gets paid.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Yeah, right. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

So a plug for my members' work. If you re-watch um Bluey or Lord of the Rings or Home and Away or Neighbours or any Australian or New Zealand film or TV, my members getting paid.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

So that that's obviously a very important aspect of the role of the guild. Um, the other one I'd imagine is copyright, which is uh a legal mechanism, I take it, for preventing people copying.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Um, that's part of it. So uh apologies in advance for how technical this is about to get. Not everyone finds copyright fascinating. I do, but that is not a normal You studied this, didn't you? I did. I've started my second law master's in copyright. Uh it's a property, right? So it's a thing that you can own, like a car or a house or a phone, but it's not a thing that transfers one-to-one. So if you sell your car, you can't use it anymore. But you can obviously watch an episode of TV over and over again. You can have five people watching it at any one time, anywhere in the world. Uh, copyright sort of, I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it. When you create the property, if you're a writer, when you write the script or the play, uh you own it. And there's what's called the exclusive bundle of rights that belong to you as the creator. So that's copying, which is called reproduction in the act, transmission. There's a range of things that all belong to you as the creator. And what my members often will do as part of a commercial transaction of being a screenwriter in particular, they will sell some of the rights or license some of the rights to the production company, then onto a distributor, and then perhaps to other parties. And it can be a quite complex legal setup about who gets to use the thing for what. And this is true for composers and screen directors and any creator. Actors have royalties and residuals that they get paid as well. And in all of that, it's sort of based on the idea that the creator should get some reward from creating the thing, that there's an ongoing relationship between the writer and the play or the writer and the TV.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Do they forego that right if they sell it on the commercial market? Like, for example, I remember the famous case of um the Beatles catalogue being purchased by Michael Jackson. Does that mean that all those rights flowing from that are gone to Michael Jackson?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Or does it can it depends?

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

So it you can sell some but not others. And it's really common in Screen, for example, to sell the primary rights but not the secondary rights. So the primary rights would be to use the script to make a TV show and then broadcast it three times, and then the secondary rights of every time it's rebroadcast or after the fourth, you keep the rights. So it's a matter of contract between the parties. But all of it's based on this idea that there's an ongoing relationship between you as the creator and the work as it goes out into the world.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

This is really, I mean, you don't really think about this until you talk about it and then start to think about it. This is really valuable stuff, isn't it? I mean, the artistic uh content that comes from humans' minds, which is very quite a rare skill, and yet it's so nebulous to try and capture, and your guild is playing a key part in making sure that you know people get recompensed and are valued for that artistic uh output they give to society, which enriches us all, really.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

There's also a set of rights at copyright that are called the moral rights, and so these are the non-economic benefits, and it's things like the right to be identified as the creator of a work, um, but also the right not to not be identified as the creator of a work, for example. And that sort of stuff is really important. And we, if we're talking about, say, fake art, um, derogatory treatment of a work, so the work being treated in a way that is detrimental to the artist, there's a special set of rights that treat creative properties slightly differently because they're special and they've got their own kind of existence in the world that persists often after people's death, right? We still talk about artists who've died, we talk about pride and prejudice, we're talking about Kingswood country, right? There's some of the writers are no longer with us.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

But that work exists and still influences our culture. And so there's a set of rights at law that talk about how we recognise that special member.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

I'm guessing your typical member or non-member wouldn't have a clue about all these technicalities and the rights that they might otherwise have if they didn't join the guild.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

And I wouldn't recommend they get across it, to be honest. That's our job.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

That's your job, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

You know, and my members are incredibly good at what they do. They are world beaters in a lot of cases in terms of the what they create. And so that's what we're here for, is to be experts in copyright, royalty collection, what the French society is doing, making sure that we're exchanging money with the French, because we collect royalties here when you watch a French property, for example, and then we exchange them to the French Guild. So there's that back and forth every day. I don't want my members worrying about that, I want them creating excellent TV that I want to watch.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Exactly, that's what that's what a professional association is for. Um tell me, there's also this specter of uh artificial intelligence, aside from all the concomitant job destruction which you and I have discussed in the past, which is a another subject, maybe for another. Yep. But how how is it, how has it affected your members? And I know you've done some groundbreaking stuff on this, so maybe just flesh that out for us.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Yeah, for sure. So any artificial intelligence model that uses words, so we're talking about Chat GPT, Claude, some of the co-pilot stuff that Microsoft uses, if it uses words, there's a very high likelihood that it has been built on stolen work. So this has come out both in the lawsuits in the US, but also the Senate inquiries that we've had here in our federal parliament. And Tony Sheldon chaired one of those, I think, year before last.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

All of the big AI companies have admitted this, um, both publicly and in lawsuits, that essentially they pirated novels, plays, uh, radio dramas, anything they could get their hands on to feed into the large language model. So the way these things work is they absorb as much text as they can and then predict the relationships between words. So the likelihood of how, and then r being followed by you is quite high.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

And so by putting more text in, they get better at predicting what the next application is.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

I've noticed it's even on your phone now and you've got predictive text. That's right. Sort of starting to put together the grammar and that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Yeah. So these models only work if you put lots and lots of text in. And that's fine in and of itself. The problem is all these companies pirated and stole works to put them into the models in the first place. So one of the things that came out in the inquiry that Senator Sheldon ran was that companies like Amazon and Meta and Google have programs that listen to YouTube, possibly even the ABC. They create a transcript from what's being said and what they're hearing, and then they feed that into the model. And there's huge databases of stolen, particularly books, but also Australian plays online. So the LibGen database is one of them, the Books 3 database is another, where they've just mass imported authors' works to build these models that predict the relationship between the words. So then you can, when you're typing on your phone or typing an email, have the next word predicted. No one was paid for the input of their work, and no one was asked if their work could go into that model or not.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

And there's some researchers in the US that have demonstrated that you can get a copyrighted work out of one of those models. So if you do the prompts right, even if you don't say the name of the author or the work, you still get a copy of the work that comes out of the large language model. So if we're talking about the right that creators have to make sure that they decide who copies their work, that's gone. That these big tech companies have taken it. And one of the ways I talk about this is that it's instead of wage theft, it's work theft, right? Because this work that someone has created, whether or not it was with the intention of it becoming an income-generating property, if it's part of how they develop their skill or part of the library that you're pitching around, that future existence of that work is gone.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

And I imagine I'd like to take it a step further, it's creative enough to go, well, this particular play or this particular uh TV series or whatever the artistic content is worked well. Let's do a little bit of a facsimile of it, which we know is going to run well, change a few things, and it's obviously theft, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Obviously.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

And one of the things that must be hard to track down, like in terms of how do you uh adduce the intent and then extract the recompense.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Well that's right. And in any I'm just trying to think how to put this without swearing. Uh in any normal commercial transaction, what would happen is that a company would approach the creator and say, hey, we'd quite like to license your work. Can we work out the commercial terms? And we'd work out the commercial terms, set out what the work can and can't be used for, and then it gets used for those terms. We do that every day. That's what licensing is. That my members do that as a condition of getting anything made. We're very familiar with that. But that whole, I think, what you'd probably call a value chain has just been skipped. And these incredibly large firms have just frankly taken the punt that they're not going to get sued for copyright infringement. And you see that in a lot of the public conversation we hear about it, particularly here in Australia. Both the big AI firms and their cheerleaders from various places going, oh, but AI's got such a public benefit. We should just skip over and ignore that part. Or, you know, there's a benefit to everyone to having AI, so don't worry about the work that's been stolen to get there.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

It's like any introduction of technology, though, right? You get these massive opportunities because you're augmenting human capacity, but if it's not handled properly, it can actually take you backwards before it takes you forwards or not even forwards at all. So it's a critical role. Tell me, Claire, what about the other aspect of your work, which is um like local content, cultural value?

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

I don't know if it's just because I'm getting old, probably is, but I've noticed that we're losing uh a sense of ourself in terms of uh Australian culture, the way we talk, the idioms we have, the what our outlook on the world. And it seems to one correlation is the obvious diminution in local content and cultural policy. What about what's the guild's view on that?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Yeah, so we had a golden age of Australian cinema and TV, and unsurprisingly, it's when we had government settings in place to encourage the production of Australian works, not necessarily with any one particular story being told. In fact, some works were in conversation and disagreement with each other during that time, but the volume of it told an Australian story to an Australian audience, but also the rest of the world. And it when I'm overseas talking to my international colleagues, everyone knows about Priscilla. You know, people talk about Gallipoli if they like that kind of work.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

One of the things that happened under a previous coalition government during COVID, uh, we've always had, well, I say we've always had, my entire life, we've had content quotas where Australian broadcasters have to make a certain amount of Australian TV. Um there was conditions around when they had to show it, it couldn't just be on at you know midnight, and you had to make kids documentary drama.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

When did all that start, Claire? Where where they government started prescribing the requirement?

SPEAKER_01 16:41

It was actually Gorton.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah, it goes back that far. And it used to be a bipartisan thing. Uh so Gorton introduced it, Goff kept it, and it was uncontroversial for most of its life.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Then during COVID-19 For those for those of you who are a little bit um younger, we're talking about John Gorton, who predated Whitlam, who was the Prime Minister in 1972. So we're talking about late 60s, early 70s. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah. And we'd we'd had an earlier flourishing. There was a point in time when Australia was the world's largest producer of film.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Yes, in the 1900s, turn of the century. Then the American cinema chains and Hollywood got involved and things changed. What happened during COVID was the then coalition federal government halved our content quotas and said, right, you don't need to make um this number of hours of kids, this number of hours.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Sorry, when was that clear or missed that?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

COVID.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Oh, during COVID. During COVID.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Yes, that recent. Yeah, right. Yep. And I got rid of this what we call the subquotas, so the requirement to make kids content, documentary drama. Just said, here's what you have to make, this amount of hours, go nuts. And it was half what it had been. Unsurprisingly, two years after that, we had zero hours of Australian kids TV being commissioned and made in Australia for our commercial broadcasters. We're a little territory, but there's not many Australians compared to the other English language markets of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. So we're in competition with some pretty big English language markets. We've always had government support for our work, and to change the requirements like that, frankly, just took the bottom out of the industry. It's something we started talking to the then Labor opposition about pretty early on and were able to get an election commitment from what went on to become the Albanese Labour government to reintroduce screen content quotas for the streamers because that's the other big change in our market. In 2021, we crossed the threshold of more people getting their content on streaming platforms than from broadcast, and that trend's only continued. The broadcasters had the content quotas, inadequate as they were, but the streamers didn't have any. So we had to make sure that the market evened up for everyone, particularly given that the streamers were very clearly going to be the majority of the market.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

And it took a really long time. It's not uncommon for um free trade agreements and foreign affairs to come into talking about this, particularly if we're talking about the US. But that was past end of last year that we now have streaming content quotas in Australia that you have to make a certain amount of Australian content quotas.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

But they're still down at that COVID threshold, are they?

SPEAKER_01 19:25

The broadcasters are. Yes. And the streamers for a range of reasons have a slightly different set of measures. And as it's only just come in, we yet to see what that will look like. But there is a review period and we're watching it really closely to make sure it does actually pick up the production.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

We might just tease that out a little bit without sort of wanting to go on it too much because I think I alluded to it at the beginning, and and you have too. But what what do you say to someone who says, Well, who cares? Like we're a global society, you know, we need to be exposed to everything. What why do you think it's important to have local content?

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Yeah, well, look, I don't think it's an either-or. I think you can have both, and I watch a lot of content from overseas.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Um, but but I think one of the things that's really important about Australia is that we are a multicultural democratic success story, you know, in a lot of ways. And there's work to do on that front, obviously, but we have a lot of really interesting and exciting stories to tell. I was in Canada giving a conference paper in February, and people couldn't wait to talk to me about Fisk. Like they love that show, and then they started talking about Bluey, obviously, the cultural juggernaut that is Bluey. Uh, we have really exciting things to say to the world, and the world wants to watch them. And I think it's not necessarily strange to think of TV as an export product in the same way that we talk about beef as being an export product.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

So I think you can have both.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

This is who we are, this is our culture. Sure, we're like you, we speak the same language, we've got similar cultural norms, but there's something very specific about the way we think and act and do things.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

Great sense of humour. Yeah. Landscapes that you won't find anywhere else in the world, but also we have a really particular take on how to do democracy as well. Like the same conversation I was having in Canada with um my Canadian colleague, we talked about Fisk and we talked about the democracy sausage. And I pulled out the webinar, like, here it is, here's the website, I'll zoom you in. The next thing, oh, Tasmanian election, that's the next one. Let's find out where the cake stalls are. You know, that's an incredible cultural export to be able to talk about who we are as Australians and what we do and how we do it together. And it's not necessarily about having one story. I actually think you should have as many as possible in conversation with each other. And that's why our government supports our storytelling, not just because of the jobs, though we our cultural industries make a lot of money. It's billions of dollars a year that we create in jobs and value for people. But this is an incredible export product, particularly in the South Pacific, being able to talk to our neighbours about who we are and how we do all of this together.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Now tell me, uh, and we did touch on this earlier, in your previous one of your previous lives, you were uh senior industrial officer for the FIRES, the FBEU. Yes. Great union. Um, recently big win in the state parliament, finally, presumptive cancers, which you were instrumental in way back in the, I think what, 10, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yes, 10 years ago now.

SPEAKER_02 22:26

Drawing up these lists of presumptive cancer. Do you want to just explain to the audience what that was all about and uh how it reached its fruition, what was only last year, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yes, gosh, it was. I was here actually, sitting in the gallery watching that. Oh, so some jobs, as I you would know from your background at the ETU, have particular risks that go with them because of the nature of the work. And for firefighting, that's cancer. And we've known this since the Second World War. People have been studying firefighters and cancer for a really, really long time. And there was a federal government inquiry into whether or not workers' compensation laws federally should change around firefighting, because the evidence is pretty overwhelming that even when you account for the fact that firefighters are generally healthier than the average person, they still contract cancer at an elevated rate. So one of my jobs when I was at the fire is certainly not work I did on my own. I mean, as you would know, unions are a collective effort in the very definition of the term. And I had elected leaders who were incredibly generous with their time and sharing their stories and signed off on the submission that went to the federal government. But I was lucky enough to be able to research what we did in Canada, what some of the Northern American states do. There are all around the world, countries have grappled with this, this issue of firefighters getting cancer. And sort of put together a rough and ready, what I thought at the time wasn't hugely scientific, but it turns out it actually was later on. List of if government was to make policy on this, here's the list of cancers you should look at covering because the evidence all around the world kind of says these are the cancers that firefighters get. And at the time, before the list came in, firefighters were still getting compensated for their cancers, but you had to fight it. And the employer at the time had a really unfortunate posture of fighting.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

So, in other words, we want you to show us why you contracted this as a byproduct of your employment.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

That's right. Whereas all the evidence showed that the nature of firefighting, the cumulative effects over time, and fireies stay in their jobs for a long time. It's it's one of the last careers that you can join at 18 and retire at 65. Yeah. And you stay in the same job the whole time. It's not any one fire or any one incident, it's the cumulative effect, not just of the fires, but of the diesel trucks in the living quarters because you've been to fire stations. A lot of the older ones, there's the engine bay, and then you walk into the kitchen.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

Yes. This is diesel particulate. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

So the diesel particulate from the trucks and the shift work. So shift work is, as you know, is a category two cancer risk. So the combination of all of those means professional firefighters are more likely to get cancer than other workers. So I have to say, most of the cases that I'm aware of and that I was I helped with when I was at the fire, is the firefighter did win their case. But you're putting someone who's already dealing with cancer treatment.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

You've got to prove it legally.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

This yeah, they're not fast processes.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Whereas what this legislation does, thanks to the advocacy of the FBEU and uh and you laying that foundational work years ago, is it presumes that if a firefighter gets X type XYZ type of cancer, then there's an automatic access to workers' compensation. Yep. That's pretty groundbreaking, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Oh, look, I'm really proud of it. It's it I toss up between that and a another piece of law reform, which is actually how you and I met.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Yes, I remember that. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Uh whether that's sort of a career, like my biggest career highlight. It's it's no more than those members deserve. And I do I do sort of feel a little bit sheepish talking about my role in it because unions always do these things as a collective, and we move together and we're as strong as we are because we're a group. But it's it's so critical that unions respond to what their members want. And that was something that was driven out of the membership of people going, I've been to my third funeral this year, and uh, firefighting is a job where there's a lot of people's dads or brothers or family members serving together, and firefighters were the first to notice that trend. Yeah, and so being able to put together a list and go, look, at least for these 12, let's start there and sign off on those. And the the insurer can still contest those. You know, if someone is a smoker or you know, they've had a they a firefighter worked for four years and they've been in a civilian role since, you can still contest it.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

But the parameters around contestation are limited, presumably.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Yeah, there's look, workers' comp is complex, as you know.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Indeed.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

And we don't necessarily want to get into that. I'd be here for days. Uh but that was the starting point in New South Wales and now in most states and territories in Australia. And I really do appreciate and I appreciated the invitation when I was here last year, that to be honest, it's only a Labor government that would take this on as an issue and kind of go, We're going to deal with this, we're going to put it to Parliament. Um, and each time that a Conservative Party has put it up, it's been in response to something that Labor has done.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

So it's now the obvious cliche from Conservatives is going to be, yeah, you would say that because it's all about Labour and the unions. But the truth is, is that because the unions are so integrally part of the Labour movement and the Labour Party, that they have an influence, uh, lo and behold, that favors workers. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? Claire, tell me, um, just before we wind up, I we could talk for hours, but I just want to canvas one last thing that you and I have discussed before. Union density and the growth of unions, um, yeah, there's a lot of criticism again from the conservative side of politics, but everywhere, really, that you know, union membership is now such a small percentile of the population. Are they really relevant anymore? Um, why do we value them so much? Why why is Buddy Geek doing this podcast about you know union movement who's got 20% of the workforce or whatever? What do you say to that? And what do you say about how we can grow union density? I mean, some unions, as you pointed out, are actually growing hand over fist.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Uh we are. Uh and I'm very proud of the fact that we're growing and have grown year on year uh since I came into the role. Look, I think it's important to recognise that at the same time we're seeing cost of living accelerating, housing being unaffordable, um, wages flatlining. Those graphs travel in concert with union density, and I don't think that's a coincidence that if you see a decline in people participating in mass democratic movements, then yeah, you get individualized atomization where people feel like they're on their own and they're treated by their boss like they're on their own and can't fight for the wages and conditions that they would want. We're also um Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this saying about um a particular piece of regulation that it's like putting your umbrella away because it's not raining at the moment. We have long service leave, the annual leave, sick leave, domestic violence leave, all the superannuation. We have all these conditions of employment that whenever you talk to someone from overseas, they're absolutely blown away by, all of them because of the union movement.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Um, so I think I'd point out that declining unions mean declining standards of living, frankly. And I think it's a good thing for people to participate in democratic organisations. My guild is a democratic organization, we have elected leaders. I think now more than ever, and given the moment we're in, people building people's democracy muscles is actually really important and a union is a really good way to do that.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

And the other thing people forget, don't they, is that it's not necessarily um uh a lock, stock, and barrel part of the Labour Party in the sense that unions, Labour parties aren't always in government. So when a Conservative government's in power, a union will campaign to get conditions and improvement in in their members' lives. But even when um even when Labor's doing the wrong thing, a good union, a membership-driven union like yours, and the Faries, for example, will campaign against the Labour government if they have to, because at the end of the day, their members aren't getting justice, getting you know the right thing done by them. So it's not about uh political power for a union per se, it's about outcomes for members regardless of who's in power.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

That's exactly right. Look, I wish the Labour Party worked the way that Conservatives think it does, where I rock up and present my list of demands and everyone goes, yep, tick, there you go, problem solved and out the door. It's actually more work when Labour are in government because instead of standing outside and going, You bastards, why won't you give me what I want? I've got to negotiate, I've got to meet, I've got to talk to Treasury about where the money is coming from. It's actually more work and no guarantee of outcomes because one of the things that Labour do when they're in government, they're incredibly conscientious about being in government and they watch the purse strings and they don't take out loans or fritter money away that you know, which is a source of frustration for me as a union leader, as with others, that we do the work to make sure that Labor are in the best possible position when they go in, and then you turn up and go, right, here's the list, and they go, Well, that's lovely. But I think you'll find where the Australian government or the New South Wales government hear, and so you can go to the back of the queue along with everyone else. So all you get for being uh having a Labor government in is a more sympathetic hearing, and then it's on you as an organisation to do the work to convince the government, regardless of their flavour, of the merits of your case. That's the only difference.

SPEAKER_02 32:20

And I suppose one of the archetypal examples of that was in Queensland, where um the uh union movement weren't happy with the then Bly government, and we all know, remember the result of that. We're reduced to six or seven seats because the union movement said if you're not going to come and talk to us and look after our members, these are consequences. Claire, it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. It's been lovely to talk to you. We could spend a few more hours. You'll have to give me a few tips on um on copyright of this podcast, and then I might consider joining. How's that?

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Well, I can see you've got notes, mate. So if it's scripted, you definitely count as a member. Once you hit a certain number of credits, you can join.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

Done deal. Done. Thanks.