United Voice

In the last few months, members in some of Melbourne’s luxury hotels have been getting organised. They’re sick of the low pay that plagues hospitality. They’ve decided they won’t be taken for granted by the boss. They want decent pay, and a real career path.

So, a majority of workers in these hotels got together. They signed a petition calling on their boss to sit down and talk about a collective agreement.

These members have great ideas about how to make working in hotels a better job, how to provide better service, and what will turn hospitality into a career they can commit to.

Yet, right now, hotel bosses are trying to ignore our ideas. The hotels are yet to sit down and talk with their employees.

Experienced union members know that this is a common reaction. Many employers wait for our voices to get louder and louder before they decide they have to listen.

So will Labor’s new laws help our strong voices get heard?

Yes. Under the future laws, if members can show that a majority of workers want a collective agreement, employers are obliged to sit down and negotiate.

Cleaners know how early talks could have boosted our Clean Start campaign. We got the bosses to the table without anything like these proposed new laws. It was the cleaners’ loud and proud protests brought the contractors to the table. But we should never have had to fight so hard just to get them in the room to hear our concerns.

Talking does matter. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to reach agreement, but Labor’s proposed laws would get us in the door, in the board room, and face to face with the boss.

Yet we also know that some employers can talk us to death without doing anything to solve the problems. That’s where “good faith bargaining” comes in. If we have majority support for an agreement, the boss needs to bargain in good faith.

What does “good faith” mean? For our hotel members, it means employers would need to regularly meet to discuss a new collective agreement. They would need to provide straight answers about what’s on the table. 

The proposed laws won’t make agreement inevitable. They would mean, though, that employers can’t legally ignore the will of the majority. That’s great news for all union members.

We still have to convince the boss that our ideas are right, and that we won’t stop raising our voices until we win real change. So while the laws should get us in the room, they won’t get us over the line. We will always need the strength of our membership, our courage and our power of persuasion.

LHMU members keep showing we have all this by the bucket-load!  I hope you are as inspired as I am by members’ stories of strength, courage and power in this magazine. They show that even when the laws are still stacked against us, we are winning!

Jess Walsh

Branch Secretary