Contrary to popular belief, Clinton de Bruyn is not related to Joe de Bruyn. One of the more bizarre Griffith SRC stories…

If you’re going to do street theatre, imho, you should be made to do it in mime form, or at least sotto volce, to save the rest of us from your embarassment.

When did FUCKING MIME ever save anyone from embarrassment?

YOU ARE THE FUCKING EMBARRASSMENT BUDDY!!!

KILL ALL MIMES!!!

However, I’m not going to be at all shy of questioning his definition of my gay relationship as a “radically different type of union”.

The news I had confirmed yesterday was about my boyfriend’s advanced diabetes condition. The news is very bad.

We’ve both been rehearsing the theme “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” because of the precise focus we’ll both need to make sure his life is prolonged.

I never previously considered my relationship to become something I’d use to make a political point, but I must at least say that it would certainly help if our political leaders could in future be “more sensitive” to the health needs of gay relationships, starting with making the debate about gay issues “more focused” and “less shrill”.

…From Justin

Perhaps people would prefer the LHMU, who nationally are proud of representing the lowest paid and most frequently exploited workers in the nation….??? Not much of a union.

And, as a Union, the lhmu have a pretty horrific habbit of indulging in street theatre and making their members sing when on picket lines. If you’re going to do street theatre, imho, you should be made to do it in mime form, or at least sotto volce, to save the rest of us from your embarassment.

The SDA may not be the most militant union about (and I do agree that they do a decent job in a difficult area), but at least they don’t pretend that they are…

De Bruyn retains his post because he improves his workers wages and conditions, and protects some of the most vulnerable sectors of the employment market from exploitation. Pretty simple.

Well, no. That’s going a bit far. De Bruyn retains his position because of the benefits of incumbancy, as discussed above.

Perhaps people would prefer the LHMU, who nationally are proud of representing the lowest paid and most frequently exploited workers in the nation….???

Heh!

Yes, they do need a new marketing approach

Allegations like “bosses like him and are happy to connive to keep him in place” are simply outrageous.

Perhaps people would prefer the LHMU, who nationally are proud of representing the lowest paid and most frequently exploited workers in the nation….??? Not much of a union.

De Bruyn retains his post because he improves his workers wages and conditions, and protects some of the most vulnerable sectors of the employment market from exploitation. Pretty simple.

The unions did come around quite regularly and scare the local woolies manager into treating people better which was nice.

The single most important reason that Joe de Bruyn will never be involuntarily unemployed and that his successor will probably be his son, or another member of his family, is that the members of the SDA are largely casuals, and there is little long term employment that might provide a base for challenging what is in fact, a highly idiosyncratic and authoritarian leadership grouping, which is absolutely ‘out there’ on any scale of contemporary and rational social views.

However, the importance of union organisation of Shop Assistants should not be underestimated by anyone. The alternative to his conservative, and ‘employer friendly’ style, is no organisation at all. Think Wal-Mart. While SDA members have certainly had a number of conditions traded off that would have been electoral suicide for a union representative in most other industries, the fact is that shop assistants in this country are immeasurably better off for union organisation underpinning that labour market, even if the people who organise and represent them are quite unrepresentative.

In my view this is a small price to pay for ensuring that the domestic non traded services sector, has some standards to speak of, and has not been reduced yet in this country to the level of that sector in the US. Union organisation has ensured that some the benefits and standards able to be secured in more strategic sectors of the economy, have been at least in part spread to less strategic parts of the labour market of which retail is a very large part. Whatever the idiosyncratic nature of De Bruyn, Wal Mart style employment would be far worse for shop assistants and their families than his largely irrelevant views on marriage and the family.

“It robs marriage of its unique and privileged status and it puts it on the same level as a radically different type of union,� Mr de Bruyn said.

This sort of rhetorical boilerplate is why I favour taking the word “marriage” out of legislation entirely. Let “marriage” be a word for the religious blessing of registered unions (with its unique and privileged religious status), and let the various legislations define what unions of consenting adults qualify as being eligible for official registrations for partner benefits/inheritance/coparenting purposes.

The way that the British handle marriages as a combination of registry office ceremony and separate religious blessing ceremonies is a good start, but the system could be improved to highlight the distinctions between legal recognition by the State and religious blessing by the Faith even further.

The whole evil union boss schtick is boring me witless, but I’m just an ordinary working person who thinks that unions have problems but that I wouldn’t want to be without them in today’s cimate.

Yep. Why hasn’t this classic example of unrepresentative swill been knocked off?

This have be a function of the following factors: (a) the intrinsic difficulty of knocking off an entrenched leadership in any organisation which has the advantages of incumbency and is none too scrupulous about how it uses those advantages; (b) the bosses like him and are happy to connive to keep him in place; (c) a large part of the workforce which he misrepresents are casualised, temporary and have medium- to long-term plans to cease being shop assistants, and are therefore difficult to organise into a long-term base for a reform group in the union; (d) shoppies who don’t like the union leadership will register their objection by not joining.

The joke is that De Bryun, a Roman Catholic anti-womens rights unionist, apparently represents the views of a mostly female shoppie constituency.

I dont think so!