Louise Tarrant

Recent Speaker

National Secretary LHMU

March 1, 2011

"Working: it's a Risky Business"

LHMU is a union unique in our community in its diversity and commitment to providing low paid workers with visibility, voice and agency.

An exciting new chapter in LHMU’s 100 year history will begin in March 2011 when the union assumes its new name: United Voice.

LHMU will become Australia’s first union to move away from the traditional way in which unions have expressed their identities.

United Voice will be a broader vehicle for the community’s voice on an alternate economic agenda.

The proposed focus of Ms Tarrant’s speech will be to link the everyday challenges workers on low and modest incomes are experiencing with the major changes occurring in our economy and policy.

In summary, too many people in our community are not sharing fairly in the progress of recent decades. The income shift away from workers, the erosion of the social wage, the increased risk exposure of individuals and households, the loss of political agency and the decline of collective organisation and legitimacy makes for an increasingly unequal and fragile democracy.

Ms Tarrant will argue that this is the major domestic policy challenge facing government and civil society.

Louise Tarrant has been a long time change agent within the Australian union movement. She rose to the position of National Secretary of the LHMU in 2007.