Life Member

Jim Doyle was an AWU life member and legend of the union movement, recently passed away at the age of 102.

He was a member of the AWU for 87 years, holding the longest continuous membership of a trade union in Australia.

This makes him the first Double Platinum member of our union with 80 years of service.

Jim lived a full life and encapsulated all that is unionism.

While Jim served his country overseas in WWII, he would mail his membership fees to his parents to pay for him, so he wouldn’t miss a day.

He spent his entire life fighting for union values of fairness and equality, being at the forefront of some of Australia’s biggest industrial wins, including the 40-hour work week.

As an AWU organiser he travelled more than 90,000km a year around the Whyalla region fighting for his members and recruiting the next generation of unionists.

Jim was the embodiment of the term “Stronger Together” and he will be sorely missed by us all.

THE PLOD

In later years Jim Doyle’s expertise as an editor came to the fore with his unique publication called “The Plod” which provided commentary from an editorial perspective of all the major local and international news concerning workers with helpful editorial insight as to how the situation could be rectified or which individual had given rise to the problem and how they should be dealt with. It was compulsive reading for many years with the publication only signing off once Jim had turned around 99 years of age.

Read over 80 Copies of The Plod here:

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Watch the full-length speeches featured in the Jim Doyle commemorative video here.