Alison Barnes

While early research suggested that web-based technologies, such as social media, had a strong potential to enhance employee voice, more recent analysis indicates that this early promise has not been met. This chapter looks at the impact of new communication technologies on the expression of individual voice, including the proliferation of organisationally sanctioned voice mechanisms and the factors influencing employee use of them, including employers’ social media policies. On collective voice, the chapter points not only to the range of web-based mechanisms that have emerged in recent times to enhance collective engagement and action, both within and alongside trade unions, but also to emerging limitations in their capacity to revitalise unionism.

Social media use by Australian public servants has given rise to questions pertaining to their political rights, impartiality and privacy outside of work. Drawing on the recent case Starr v Department of Human Services these issues are explored. The findings suggest that social media use has heightened tensions around public servant's rights to comment on issues of the day, and its use by employees both inside and beyond the workplace remains contested terrain.

The emergence of web 2.0 technologies led to optimistic predictions that social media (SM) might alter traditional gendered patterns of member participation in trade unions. Greene, Hogan, and Grieco and others suggested that the forms of communication and engagement these technologies offered to unions and their members had the potential to foster gender inclusion and contribute to union diversity, arguably central to effective representation. This article reports on a survey of union members’ experiences with and perceptions of their union's SM services, to identify whether there is a gendered dimension to members’ use. The findings indicate that for most union members regardless of gender, more traditional communication channels such as face‐to‐face contact and email remain the preferred means of communication. However, the findings also show that women are just as likely as men, if not more so, to engage with union SM. Given that historically, women largely participated less in union activities than their male counterparts, this broad parity of use by women supports the conclusion that SM has substantial potential to improve women's participation in unions.

Peak union bodies in Australia have a long and influential history, and most recently have developed an approach to union revitalisation based on community-based campaigning strategies. In responding to labour market changes, declining union membership and hostile governments and employers, peak union bodies have developed new ways to strengthen the collective ability of their affiliated unions to successfully represent members at the workplace level. They have embraced local-level strategies that tap into community concerns and are aimed at capacity building across the labour movement. The resulting grass-roots organisations have the potential to shape both the workplace and the public domain. We explore one example of this approach: the establishment of Local Union Community Councils by Unions NSW. We argue that although peak bodies are well placed to spearhead community campaigning, the grass-roots councils being created will need to progress through several stages of development, if they are to become self-sustaining organisations, contributing effectively over the long term to community mobilisation and stronger, more coordinated union campaigns.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Australian union movement’s Organising Works programme, this article introduces a symposium discussing potential ways forward for unions. It overviews research regarding the challenges of union organising and renewal, both in Australia and internationally. It provides a broad historical perspective on the origins and progress of the grassroots Organising Works agenda initiated by the peak union bodies, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Unions NSW. It explores how trade unions can best generate and sustain their spirit of mobilising and organising, while also ensuring the institutional legitimacy they require to effectively represent workers. Unions have had to manage the tension between two dynamics of trade union growth – the sense of movement involved in mobilising workers, and the institutional stability and legitimacy needed to represent workers. Unions have faced both the need to confront global capital restructuring through their own restructuring, and the need to renew and maintain a strong and democratic community base. To do so, they have built new networks and campaigning approaches, in order to organise an increasingly diverse and insecure workforce and build strong community links.

In 2005, Australian universities were required by a federal government, well known for its hostility to unions, to develop representative forms of employee consultation. This requirement posed a considerable threat to union voice in the sector. The article examines the union response to this situation. Our findings suggest that in the short term, the unions adopted a strategy of compliance with this requirement through support for the development of hybrid forms of voice, such as staff consultative committees. The unions then sought to dominate these committees by ensuring that union members were elected as staff representatives, thereby safeguarding the dominance of union voice. The non-union employee representation that was created, however, was constrained as an expression of employee voice. The findings are consistent with Anglo-Saxon literature focusing on the union substitution role of non-union forms of employee representation. There are also resonances in the union strategy with European trends for complementary relations between unions and union-dominated forms of non-union employee representation. However, while our study confirms the importance of the role of the state in determining the structure of non-union employee representation, it departs from the literature in demonstrating an instance where union substitution was sought by the state rather than by management.

The introduction of open-plan (OP) academic offices is critically examined through interviews undertaken in Scotland and Australia. The development is discussed in the context of the increased managerialism in higher education. The conclusion is that, despite a rhetoric of synergy, the dominant rationale for OP is one of cost reduction and that the experience for many academics is proving detrimental to both scholarship and professional identity.