FED: Winemaker s son seeks new harvest

AAP General News (Australia)
08-20-1999
FED: Winemaker s son seeks new harvest

(WITH ACTU BLUEPRINT)



By Alan Gale, Industrial Correspondent

MELBOURNE, Aug 20 AAP - Greg Combet is a winemaker's son whose qualifications to become
ACTU secretary include sometime coal miner and hotel cellarman.

Combet, from a French family of wine and champagne makers, is a fine judge of crisp dry
whites who grew up on the Penfolds vineyards.

Central casting could not have found a more physically dissimilar person to succeed the
short, rounded, grey and rumpled Bill Kelty; whose resignation as secretary earlier this week
was long-awaited but still unexpected.

By contrast the lanky, bespectacled, Combet measures in at 188cm; is never seen wearing
anything less than neat casuals and is comfortable in a well-tailored suit.

Combet is also a more available man, happy to cultivate media contacts and prepared to
carefully conduct journalists through the intricacies of the union movement.

Kelty, infamous for a low media profile, established a firm reputation as a media recluse
and shared former prime minister Bob Hawke's intolerance for the stupid or ill-informed
question.

Sensitive to his own deep regard for Kelty, it was a deliberately diplomatic Combet who
commented on their differences.

"If I am elected, my style will be a bit different; which should not be implied to be a
criticism of Bill - he's a very close colleague - but mine will be a little bit different,
that's inevitable," he told AAP.

However, both share an ideological commitment to unionism which borders on the fanatical
and explains their desire to occupy a position which is high on strain and responsibility but
relatively low financially at around $80,000.

"I came into the union movement (with degrees in mining engineering and economics) as an
occupational health and safety activist, and still consider myself here for the battlers," he
said.

However, the relaxed mood snapped into ardent activist mode when his simply expressed
personal goal of "better wage and improved working conditions" was dismissed as a glib phrase.

"They're not nice glib things, it's what unions do, how do you explain that fact that union
members earn on average 15 per cent more than anyone else, most union officials including me,
throughout our working lives, that's all we do, that's all we've done, we've negotiated
benefits and improvements for working people," he shot back with a machine gun voice.

The benefits and improvements have not translated into grateful members, who in 1986 formed
46 per cent of workers.

This dropped to 31 per cent by 1996, and to 28 per cent by August last year.

Barely one in six teenagers are in unions, and the Kelty era is regularly linked with the
failure of the union movement to halt or reverse the decline.

Combet admits unions failed react to the collapse in public service, manufacturing,
transport, chemicals and mining jobs.

"They were the heartland of union organisation ... employment has grown in services,
technology, IT, hospitality and labour hire," he said.

"All areas where unions have not made any gains in recruiting significant numbers of people
... and you have to make organisational change to get there."

In short that's the purpose of his report, Unions @ Work, the latest in a disturbingly
large number of ACTU strategic documents gathering dust in newsrooms and union libraries
around the nation.

Their failure is regularly illustrated by the steady reduction recorded by the Bureau of
Statistics' union figures.

AAP ag/br

KEYWORD: BLUEPRINT ANALYSIS

1999 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.