Susan Price
& Sue Bolton
Over the past couple of weeks the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) has been holding delegates' meetings all over the country. The largest, in Melbourne, was attended by 700 delegates and officials. The second largest, in Sydney, was attended by 280 delegates and officials.
These two meetings were substantially bigger than previous delegates' meetings. The size of the Melbourne meeting in particular, indicates that AMWU delegates are prepared to mobilise the union's membership against the Howard government's proposed anti-union laws.
The Victorian trade unions have taken the lead in calling for mass mobilisations against the proposed laws. The Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) has called a mass delegates' meeting for March 23. That meeting will discuss a proposal for a half-day strike and protest rally on June 30, the day before the Coalition parties gain control of the Senate.
Outgoing VTHC secretary Leigh Hubbard told the March 12 Melbourne Herald Sun: "We're going to have to take to the streets, we're going to have to convince the Australian community that these laws are not in their best interests and we're going to have to tell workers that they have to take action, they have to make a noise about this."
The initiative from the Victorian unions for a combined union protest is starting to strike a chord with unionists in other states. On March 12, for example, the NSW Teachers Federation state council voted unanimously to call on Unions NSW to organise mass delegates'/union representatives' meetings and a union protest against the government's planned anti-union legislation.
Seventy-five people at a seminar organised by the Brisbane Labour History Association on March 12 — among them Transport Workers Union state secretary Hughie Williams, National Tertiary Education Union state secretary Howard Guille and Queensland miners' union president Andrew Vickers — voted unanimously for the Queensland Council of Unions (QCU) to organise a cross-unions delegates' meeting and a union protest.
However, March 13 Sunday Telegraph reported that some NSW union officials had said that taking industrial action would only alienate the public, and that the key was educating the public about the anti-worker nature of the proposed legislation.
Unions NSW has initiated a campaign of "community education" in the lead up to July 1. The campaign will focus on media advertising and leafleting of parents at childcare centres, churches and weekend junior sports events.
Unions NSW secretary John Robertson says that the campaign is "to tell people that [the new anti-union laws] will mean all employees will have less control over their hours. There'll be less regulation of hours and working families will find they won't be able to take their children to sport on Saturdays."
One of the key problems with the Unions NSW strategy is that it will focus on the impact of the anti-union laws on families, but won't focus on defending unions.
While an appeal to working families, community groups and churches to oppose labour market deregulation may be useful, unless this is backed up a union-organised campaign of industrial and other protest action, there will be a huge gap between growing public disagreement with the actual anti-union legislation and any means to publicly express that opposition in an organised manner.
The Unions NSW media-centred campaign was adopted by the ACTU executive at its March 15-16 strategy meeting. The ACTU is planning to spend up to $6 million on a media campaign over the next three years. Each union will contribute to this media fund, with the AMWU contributing $1.2 million. Like the Unions NSW media campaign, the ACTU campaign will focus on the democratic right of workers to bargain collectively and the defence of the needs of working families, rather than defending unions as a organisations necessary to protect those rights and needs.
The fundamental problem that the union movement faces in fighting the Howard government's anti-union laws is that the ACTU leadership has entered the period after the re-election of the Coalition government in October with a thoroughly defeatist approach. ACTU officials have repeatedly told gatherings of unionists that it isn't possible to stop the government from enacting anti-union legislation, and that all unions can do is attempt to survive until the ALP again wins government. The first edition of the ACTU's Union Update for 2005 reinforces this point.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with elements of the ACTU's approach such as strengthening workplace organisation, publicity about the negative impact of the Howard government's industrial relations laws on the lives of working families, and building alliances with sympathetic churches and community organisations.
However, can anyone seriously believe that these measures will force the Howard government and its big-business backers to back off from attacking the unions?
ACTU secretary Greg Combet told the March 16 Australian Financial Review that he intends to negotiate with the government to try to limit some of the worst proposals in its legislative agenda and to mitigate against their effects. But how is the ACTU going to do that when it has ruled out the most potent weapon — industrial action — the union movement has to pressure the government into not going ahead with the anti-union laws.
Combet and other ACTU officials have been quoted many times in the media ruling out taking industrial action to fight the new laws. ACT president Sharan Burrow, for example, told the March 16 Australian that the ACTU would not authorise industrial action that could be illegal and make unions liable for fines. That is tantamount to just accepting defeat without a blow even being laid.
If the union movement doesn't respond in a stronger way with a combination of industrial action and street protests then the Howard government will gain confidence to introduce even worse anti-union laws than is being proposed now.
It's very important that organisation of a campaign of mass protests and industrial action, like that being planned by the Victorian unions, be spread nationwide to drive back the government's anti-union agenda and to decisively win public opinion.
[Susan Price and Sue Bolton are members of the Socialist Alliance's national trade union coordinating committee.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 23, 2005.
Visit the