A History of the SDA

by Alex Mcleay

As broadcasted by dozens upon dozens of headlines over recent years, wage theft is rampant in Australia, and despite audits, investigations by the ombudsman, and inquiries by the ACCC, appears to be persistent in current labour relation environments. In 2019, it was estimated that over one million workers, around 13% of the workforce, had been affected, resulting in $1.35 billion in underpayment. In 2015-16, the Fair Work Ombudsman reported the average rate of compliance with Australian labour laws was only 61%. Particularly prevalent in the scourge of wage theft scandals that have been exposed in the past few years have been Coles, Woolworths, and Wesfarmers (the parent company of Bunnings, Kmart, and Officeworks). While these retailers claimed, for the most part, that underpayments were unintentional, the lack of employee security and unreliable industrial relations in retail begs examination. Wage theft disproportionately affects part-time and casual employees, migrants (especially those holding temporary visas), young people, and women. UnionsACT reported in 2018 that seven in ten women under 25 have experienced wage theft. Understanding the insecurity of retail work and the nature of exploitation, especially in tandem with sexist and racist employer practices, elucidates the conditions of wage theft and industrial relations more broadly in Australia. Retail is one of the largest sectors of Australian industry, employing over 1 million people, about 10% of Australia’s workforce. Of this, around 57% are women, and more than 1 in 4 women under the age of 25 are employed in retail. Retail has low profit margins of around 5% before tax, and is a labour intensive industry with over 70% of value added by service workers. In such an industrial context, employment practices become of paramount consideration, productivity and flexibility of primary concern for management and executives. This has seen the overworking, underpayment, exploitation, and abuse of many vulnerable workers. Across Australia, almost a third of casual workers earn less than the minimum wage. Some migrant workers have reported rates of pay as low as $10 an hour, manifold forms of workplace bullying and racism, and disregard of award conditions and superannuation payments. Women in Australia - especially young women - have reported disproportionately higher rates of managers ‘hustling’ them and encouraging unpaid overtime. Neglecting legal superannuation payments has the knock-on effect of senior poverty; the average woman will currently retire with $90,000 less than a man.

The rostering system has enabled higher levels of flexibility that ostensibly has benefits for parttime and casual employees in the provision of penalty rates and scheduling considerations. It was introduced in 1971 as part of an agreement between the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), the union covering most retail and fast food workers, and the six major retailers of Coles, Woolworths, Myers, David Jones, Grace Jones, and Waltons. Rostering initially allowed full-time employees to maintain full-time hours in the context of extended trading hours, but increasingly saw the use of casual staff to pad ‘peak’ trading hours. This enabled more women to enter or return to the workforce in conjunction with domestic responsibilities that would have otherwise conflicted with full-time employment. However, it set a trajectory for the continuing precarity of retail employment. The legacy of full-time, career employment in retail was significantly undermined by short-term, casual, and high turn-over employment in the industry. The shift in employee demographics of retail also promoted a feminised characterisation of retail work, which has fostered cultural undervaluations of labour. The gender dynamics of sales work often function to restrict women to lower paid assistant and clerk positions, while pay equity remains a persistent issue.

This agreement occurred at a time of change for Australian unions. In the 1970s, national levels of union membership dropped below 50%, and Bob Hawke, then head of the Australian Council of

Growing Strong Trade Unions (ACTU), was pushing for attention in the growing white-collar sector of industry. The high-turnover character of retail employment, especially with a growing number of casual employees, and many women who would depart or halt employment due to shifting domestic obligations, had discouraged some employees from joining the union. Many other unions have and continue to oppose the casualisation of workforces as an issue of employment security, with an implicit understanding that permanent, full-time employees are more likely to join and participate in their unions. The 1971 agreement introduced the employer deduction of union fees, rather than individual members, effectively introducing compulsory unionism in a large portion of the retail industry. When negotiating with employers, the SDA had argued that a fully unionised workforce would lead to more moderate members and leadership. Compulsory unionism in retail, by automatically extending membership to casual employees, no longer necessitated this consideration.

This shift in member demographics reorientated the character of the SDA, and the increase in membership numbers increased the voting strength of the SDA in the Labor Party. Today, the SDA is a significant voting bloc within the ALP, and continues to lobby parliamentarians to adopt conservative positions on conscience votes. The leadership of the SDA, in contrast to its membership, is majority older, white men, many of whom have held positions for decades. Joe de Bruyn, National President of the SDA, fought against Labor binding MP’s to vote for same-sex marriage in 2015, stating “marriage is between a man and a woman; always was, always will be. It is based on what is innate in human nature.” While the ‘closed shop’ arrangements ended in the 1990s (wherein employers would sign up employees to the SDA themselves), the SDA maintains a close relation with employers, and much of the industrial work of the union is dependent on organiser and executive action, rather than membership or ‘store floor’ organising. As the SDA derives its power from aggregate membership numbers, recruitment is a predominant consideration. Due to the often short-term, unstable nature of retail employment, the union needs to recruit around a third of its membership each year to maintain this. While collective agreements negotiated by the SDA are quite extensive in scope and coverage (including non-union employees), the majority of workers in retail are passive in terms of union engagement and services.

This character of provision enforces, rather than challenges, conceptions of industrial relations. Employees in precarious work arrangements can feel disempowered to engage with forms of organising, exacerbated by the distance of negotiating. The SDA’s submission to the Senate concerning wage theft recommended more comprehensive oversight and penalties, visa protections, and the establishment of a small-claims jurisdiction for wage theft. While all helpful, the underlying issue of individual, immediate security perists. Indeed, a UnionsACT survey reported that 39% of women felt “unable to discuss their pay and conditions with their supervisors/employers due to a fear of risking their job”. The business model of the SDA has not fostered active engagement with trade unionism, nor provided genuine security for precarious and vulnerable workers. Top-down service provision, distanced negotiation, and capitulation to employer interests (with the effect of shoring up political power within the ALP) has created an industrial environment that is nominally the highest density of unionism in the private sector, but continues to suffer exploitation, wage theft, and sexism.

Art by Amelia Mertha