Becoming an Industry: The Struggle of Social and Community Workers for Award Coverage, 1976—2001

Abstract

Until the 1990s, most workers employed by non-government community services organizations were excluded from the most basic right of Australian `industrial citizenship' — award coverage. Expected to be a formality by the newly-formed Australian Social Welfare Union, establishing an award for the non-profit social and community services sector became a grinding struggle at both federal and state levels against the resistance of both Liberal-National coalition and Labor party governments, the major charities and other unions stretching from the 1970s through the 1990s. Our explanation of why the struggle for industrial recognition was so long and hard emphasizes the lack of social recognition for care work and contradictions among care workers between their roles as professionals, caring for others, and unionists — factors that led to internal, institutional, strategic and cultural resistance to an award for the social and community services workers.