Association of Draughting, Supervisory and Technical Employees

ADSTE
Full name Association of Draughting, Technical and Supervisory Employees
Founded August 1915
Date dissolved 1991
merged into AMWU
Members 21,800 (1987)[1]
Journal Blueprint
Affiliation ACTU, Metal Trades Federation, CAGEO, ACSPA[2]
Country Australia

The Association of Draughting Supervisory and Technical Employees (ADSTE), originally known as the Association of Architects, Engineers, Surveyors and Draughtsmen of Australia (AAESDA), was an Australian trade union which existed between 1915 and 1991. It represented white collar and technical-grade employees in manufacturing, construction and the public service.

The union published a monthly journal known as the AAESDA Bulletin and later simply as Blueprint.[3]

Membership

Unlike many other white collar unions in Australia ADSTE did not include managerial-level employees and many of its members were tradespeople (60% in 1991) who had been promoted to more highly skilled positions.[4] The union's membership was widely dispersed throughout a variety of industries and occupations, and it was rare to have more than five members employed in a single workplace - often making union organisation a challenging task.[5]

The union was organised into eight state and territory branches, which each paid 32 percent of their income to a federal office.[6]

The union was generally politically-unaligned, and the membership actively resisted the attempts of some officials to encourage affiliation with the Australian Labor Party (a common practice among Australian unions) during the early 1970s.[5] This was again the case when in 1984 the ADSTE Federal Conference rejected a motion, supported by the union's officials, to allow the union to financially or publicly support political parties.[5]

History

The union was founded in Brisbane in August 1915 as the Association of Architects, Engineers, Surveyors and Draughtsmen of Australia with a membership of 108.[7] The union initially represented white collar employees in the Queensland Railways workshops, but soon expanded to cover engineers employed in the Queensland Public Service and local government engineering offices, as well as architects in the Public Works Department and Department of Public Lands. After unsuccessfully seeking federal registration,[6] the union was registered with the Industrial Court of Queensland on 11 April 1917 as the Australian Union of Architects, Engineers and Surveyors, Union of Employees, Queensland.[7] The union grew slowly over the following decades, reaching 243 members by 1933 and 528 by 1939.[4]

The union grew rapidly during WWII, due to the increased demand for employees with technical expertise, many of them promoted from trades positions, and by 1941 the union's membership had reached 1,793.[6] In 1944, with branches in Victoria and New South Wales, the AAESDA achieved federal registration.[2] The first annual meeting of the new Federal Council of the AAESDA was held in December 1945 and it was decided to move the union's head office from Queensland to Melbourne, where it would remain for the rest of the union's history - mainly due to the fact that the Victoria state branch had the largest membership in the union.[6] In 1948 the AAESDA took over members from the deregistered Australian Association of Draughtsmen and the Commonwealth Temporary Technical Officers' Association.[7][5] By 1965 the union had 12,738 members, of which 7322 were employed in the private sector.[4]

The AAESDA played a key role in the 1956 establishment of the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations (ACSPA), the peak body for unions and professional associations representing salaried employees. The AAESDA's federal president, Paul Allsop, became the first president of ACSPA.[8] The union remained affiliated with ACSPA until 1977, when it transferred its affiliation to the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), shortly before ACSPA merged into the ACTU in 1979.[5]

In the 1970s the AAESDA, like many other Australian unions, became more industrially militant, including being more prepared to undertake strikes and other industrial action.[4] The union's membership was also undergoing a change as fields such as architecture and engineering became increasingly professionalised, requiring university-level qualifications, and many members in these occupations chose to be represented by occupation-specific professional associations such as the newly formed Australian Professional Engineers Association (APEA).[4] By 1979 technicians accounted for 48 per cent of the union's membership; draughtsmen, 31 per cent; and supervisors, 18 per cent - architects, engineers and surveyors collectively made up less than 3 per cent of the union.[5] To better reflect this new membership profile the union changed its name in 1981 to the Association of Draughting Supervisory and Technical Employees (ADSTE).

In the 1970s and 80s technological change and the decline of the Australian manufacturing industry put pressure on ADSTE and it began to seek options for amalgamation. In 1971 it took over members from the deregistered Federation of Scientific and Technical Workers,[7] and in 1986 it amalgamated with the Australian Public Service Artisans' Association, which represented approximately 2200 permanent trades employees of the Federal Government.[5] Unsuccessful attempts were also made to amalgamate with the CSIRO Technical Association and the Supervisory Technicians' Association.[5] In 1970 ADSTE began talks with the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), which had a broad membership among blue-collar workers in manufacturing, however there was a strong backlash from the membership of ADSTE, who resisted the loss of their union's distinct identity.[5] Driven by the union's financial difficulties, these talks were restarted in 1984 with the successor to the AEU, the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union (AMWU), and the amalgamation was finally completed in 1991, after a referendum in which 60% of ADSTE's membership voted to support the amalgamation proposal.[9] The merged organisation was named the Metals and Engineering Workers' Union and had a total of 167,500 members.[5][7] The membership previously represented by ADSTE became the 'Technical, Supervisory and Administrative Division' of the AMWU.

References

  1. ↑ Bolton, Brian (1993). Telecommunications Services: Negotiating Structural and Technological Change. International Labour Organisation. p. 36. ISBN 92-2-108263-6. Retrieved 5 June 2014.
  2. 1 2 Huntley, Pat (1980). Inside Australia's Top 100 Unions. Middle Cove, NSW: Ian Huntley (Aust.). p. 23-26. ISBN 0-9598507-4-0.
  3. ↑ Edgar, Patricia (2013). In Praise of Aging. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. p. 126. ISBN 9781922147554. Retrieved 5 June 2014.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Dettmer, Andrew (2013). "The Hope of the World: The Amalgamation of ADSTE and the AMWU". In Andrew, Reeves; Andrew, Dettmer. Organise, educate, control: the AMWU in Australia, 1852-2012. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing. pp. 34–58. ISBN 9781922235008.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Davis, Edward M (1987). Democracy in Australian Unions: A Comparative Study of Six Unions. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. p. 73. ISBN 0043202055. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Corrie, Joan (5 July 2006). "Creating the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union: 1991-1995". The Management of Financial Resources: Post-Merger Structural Choice in a Blue Collar Union (PDF) (Ph.D.). Griffith University. Retrieved 10 June 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Smith, Bruce A. (2010). "Association of Draughting Supervisory & Technical Employees (i) (1981-1986)". Australian Trade Union Archives. Australian Trade Union Archives. Retrieved 5 June 2014.
  8. ↑ Hill, John (1982). From Subservience to Strike: Industrial Relations in the Banking Industry. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. p. 147. ISBN 0702218308. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  9. ↑ Norton, Paul C. R. (2004). "The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Environment". Accord, Discord, Discourse and Dialogue in the Search for Sustainable Development: Labour-Environmentalist Cooperation and Conflict in Australian Debates on Ecologically Sustainable Development and Economic Restructuring in the Period of the Federal Labor Government, 1983-96 (PDF) (Ph.D.). Griffith University. Retrieved 31 May 2016.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/22/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.