Hospo Voice 2.0 and Capitalist Realism in the Unions
Look at this image. “Hospo Voice Plus Membership”. Does this sound like you're joining a union, or signing up for some internet streaming service? Words cannot describe how wrong this is.
“Hospo Voice” is a project of the United Worker's Union and at one point did, in fact, have good organizers, and was fairly militant. Now look at it. It has “membership tiers” and is structured like an internet streaming service. Pay $79 a month and we'll help you deal with a dodgy boss, but unless you have that Golden Platinum Plus membership the most we can do is offer you some comforting words.
How completely divorced from reality do you have to be to consider this anything close to a good idea? What thoughts were running through the heads of the people who made this? What tangible, material benefit does having tiered membership in a union achieve?
I'll tell you: nothing. Why nothing? Because union bosses (a disgusting concept) are nothing more than scabs. They want to rake in the dues money and run off to do a Labor Party run in the Senate or something, then become Prime Minister and screw over the same workers they were meant to be helping.
This is not about building a “bigger and more powerful union”, you don't thousands of dollars to do that, what this is about is out-of-touch union bureaucrats displaying their complete and total disconnect from the workers they supposedly represent. The true irony is that most hospitality staff can't even afford $79 a month! Who did they even think would pay that much anyway? The boss? The fact that none of these “membership tiers” ever even mention decision making at all is concerning enough in and of itself.
Hospo Voice 2.0, described as a “major upgrade”, has been nothing more than a cheap attempt at gig-ifying unions. Its name will forever be tarnished by this laughable and disgusting attempt at rebranding, and so the only hope left for hospitality workers is for them to form their own unions, not join the pet projects of bigger unions led by out-of-touch bureaucrats who wouldn't even piss on them if they were on fire.
Unions in this country have, over time, become nothing more than the mere mediators between workers and capital, instead of being the organ of working class power. Staffed with middle class university-trained bureaucrats and bourgeois politicians, the major unions of today are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts at controlling workers, and exploiting them further for political brownie points. Much of Labor's apparent “legitimacy” comes with their connection to the ACTU monopoly.
Self proclaimed “unionists” have become nothing more than out of touch drones hooked on party politics, with no other aspiration than to have a career in “unionizing” and in politics. Careerist cockroaches continue to, time and time again, spit in our faces and laugh at our misery. They are the same kind of fools to get excited because Anthony Albanese made a flimsy promise to publish a white paper on full employment, once he's elected Prime Minister, of course...
Empty promises and $79 a month membership fees are all you're going to get from the Labor aristocrats of 2021. Is it just me, or is this going to be the future of unions now?