White Collar, Empty Hands: Why Aren't We Unionised?

There’s a thread doing the rounds that asks a pretty simple question: why aren’t most white collar workers in unions? And the more I read through the responses, the more I kept nodding along and then immediately second-guessing myself.

I’ve worked in IT for a long time. DevOps, development, the whole circuit. In that time I have never once been in a union. I’ve watched teams get hollowed out, watched workloads quietly double while headcount stayed flat, watched people burn out and get replaced with contractors on worse conditions. And through all of it, the closest thing to collective action was someone posting a passive-aggressive message in Slack before their last day.

The discussion throws up a few reasons for this, and they’re all at least partially right.

The professional bodies argument landed hard. Someone pointed out that in accounting, organisations like CPA and CA are essentially structured to benefit the partners at the top, not the members paying annual fees for the privilege of using three letters after their name. Engineers Australia cops the same treatment, with people arguing it actively lobbies for more skilled migration not because there’s a genuine shortage, but because more members means more revenue. The ACS gets a mention too. It’s a pattern: bodies that look like professional solidarity but function more like a subscription service with a networking event thrown in.

That’s a genuine problem. If the thing that’s supposed to represent your profession is actually working against your interests, it’s rational to conclude that collective organisations are pointless. The cynicism is earned, even if the conclusion is wrong.

The other big argument is fragmentation. A small firm has two accountants, four IT people, a handful of sales reps. Different pay, different conditions, different everything. Hard to form a unified bloc when you can barely get people to agree on where to order lunch. There’s something to this. But someone pushed back well: you don’t need identical pay grades to fight for shared conditions. The right to disconnect. Better sick leave. Real CPI rises. Remote work protections. These matter whether you’re on fifty grand or a hundred and fifty, and they’re exactly the kind of thing a union can move on.

The free rider problem sits underneath all of this. Everyone benefits from better conditions when a union wins them. Not everyone pays in. In blue collar work, there’s a word for that. In white collar work, it’s just called Tuesday.

What strikes me most, though, is the apathy argument. Someone put it simply: nobody thinks they need the union until they’re sitting in a surprise Teams meeting with their manager and an HR rep. I’ve seen this happen to people. Smart, capable people who thought their performance record was armour. It isn’t.

Professionals Australia gets mentioned a lot as the actual union option for IT and engineering workers, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about them until recently. They apparently have a strong record on right-to-disconnect disputes. The Financial Services Union exists and is apparently effective inside the banks, which surprised me. These organisations exist. Most people just don’t know, and the ones who do often can’t quite justify the membership cost when the rent is already doing what it’s doing.

I find myself holding two things at once here. Unions are genuinely important, and the evidence for what they’ve delivered to working people over the last century is not really up for debate. At the same time, some of the organisations claiming to represent workers have given people completely legitimate reasons not to trust them. Both things are true. The answer isn’t to dismiss collective action; it’s to be honest that some of the vehicles for it have let people down and need to earn trust back.

I’m probably going to look at Professionals Australia properly this week. Which I should have done years ago, and didn’t, for no better reason than inertia.

That’s the thing about apathy. It doesn’t feel like a choice. It just feels like being busy.