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Last Updated: July 21, 2010
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FAIRWEAR

On this page: Pamela Curr

Pamela Curr

In April 1996, on the 4 Corners television program on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, there was a program about outworkers. These women sewing in their homes, in Australia, in garages and loungerooms, for $2 an hour.

I couldn't believe it. I thought
"We've got a basic wage, a minimum wage in this country. We have industrial laws, and yet here are wrokers in Australia routinely being underpaid and employers are getting away with it".

I set out to find out if indeed it was happening.

At the time I was doing Social Policy and I had to do an essay assignment so I thought I would combine it with that. That program alerted me to something I hadn't known could happen in Australia.

So, I spoke to the unions - I spoke to Annie Delaney from the TCF union, I spoke to the churches and to some groups who had been involved in investigating this.

Annie said
"We are looking at setting up a community campaign to work alongside the unions".

I thought about that and I thought
"Wow, that would really be something",
because the more I looked at it, the more I could see that what we had here was a Third World economy with Third World conditions operating in our beautiful, wealthy First World economy.

The contradictions were glaring.

So, I came on board with the Fairwear campaign before it was launched. I was working as a student on placement, getting it up. Then, after it was launched, as we got a little bit of money, I started working part-time. Initially I was working 2 days a week, co-ordinating the activities.

During that campaign I met a lot of really brave, clever, wonderful women. It reinforced for me the capacity for people to overcome adversity. But it also showed up the question of why they should face this.

I remember standing at a picket one weekend, outside a factory in Broadmeadows. The factory made shirts and suit for, as it turned out, people like Jeff Kennett - the right-wing Premier of Victoria.

These women told me they knew of factories where the women would go to work and find a red dot on their sewing machine, indicating they hadn't sewed the required amount the day before. This put them on notice - if retrenchments were happening - they were sacked.

They were also timed when they went to the toilet and heavily supervised. They told me how they came to work and were told to do a certain amount of, say, collars. It was something astronomical like 4,000 collars in a day.

They would come to work and find the collars hadn't been correctly cut. So the women had to recut them. But that wasn't factored into the time they were allowed. So they would still end up with a red dot.

I realized that it wasn't just outworkers, it was in-factory workers, working under legal conditions, with all the protections that should involve, who were still being really badly treated.

I spent five and a half years with the Fairwear campaign. They were fantastic years. I learnt a lot. I worked with wonderful people. Annie Delaney was one of the people who really inspired me.

Annie has an incredible energy, a very clear focus and great integrity. That is the sort of thing you need to take you through a campaign where you are constantly being asked to do deals - to pass over things. Because this was what we were asked. This was a hard campaign for politicians and employers.

In the beginning they denied it was happening. By the end, they knew they had to acknowledge it. We got state legislation in the end. We wanted national legislation, we didn't get it.

But in the meantime we fought two successive waves of Peter Reith trying to undermine workers' conditions. We were at the forefront of that, and the situation of outworkers was so well known and accepted that the politicians couldn't go around it.