Unionising NEWSPOLL

By Dom Rowe

When Dom Rowe began working at NEWSPOLL, there was one union member. When she left there was union density of 90% (165 people).

She worked in a call centre, "the factory of the future", with high levels of monitoring and supervision. Over 90% of employees were casual, and there is generally 100% turnover of workers every two years. The work can be very transient, as it is a feast or famine industry - depending on economic conditions.

Here Rowe outlines how she developed an organising approach in the workplace, from understanding the workers, realising in herself that this unionism was very different to student union activism, and how she strategically targeted groups within the workplace, starting with who she perceived as the easiest to gain support from to the more difficult groupings.

Dom is now an organiser with the ASU. This paper is based on a talk she gave at the Workers Control conference in Sydney in October 2003.

(Seeing Red; Issue 2, September 2004)