From Industrial to Social Campaigns: Lay Morality, General Elections and Australia’s Trade Union Federation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the potential for union revitalization through campaigning in general elections. It first charts changes in unions’ campaigns in general elections, moving beyond a focus on industrial relations issues towards issues of social significance, such as health and education. Second, by reconceptualizing this activity using lay morality, unions may enhance their ability to increase their power and legitimacy. Thus, by acting in this way, unions can broaden the bases for their legitimacy and build new opportunities for their renewal. However, this approach may not lead to revitalizing their density, but may open the opportunity for their renewal because this approach consolidates their legitimacy to a broader constituency. We suggest that when unions act in this way, they become agents of social utility who champion the interests of a wider constituency. We argue that, given the dynamics of changes to work and the ways in which workers now work, this provides one route for unions to tap into these multiple subjectivities of workers and remain relevant. This article combines an analysis of over 1000 media articles that cover four periods of campaigns by peak unions in Australian elections between the years 2007-2016, with original interviews with key informants and an analysis of electoral survey results for each election to provide the discussion. These three methods triangulate to establish the shift in unions’ campaign focus and to suggest that this is a potential path to revitalization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".