By Kevin Healy
A week when congratulations are in order. Congrats to a company, to its subsidiary and to the law. A toast to that fine example of law-abiding corporate responsibility, North Broken Dill Pissko, to its fine example of law-abiding corporate responsibility subsidiary, A Double P for Piss on M, and to the law they abide.
Right through this dreadful Burnie business, the company has done nothing but observe the law, a law designed to create a balance between adversaries, the bosses and the workers, in this new world where no adversarial problems exist anyway because we all know we got Australia together back in 1983. We all recognise that class struggle died years ago and the interests of the bosses and the workers are identical, which makes you even more astonished at why these violent, lawless workers at Burnie have chosen to go the way they went.
Throughout, this responsible company abided absolutely by the letter of the law, even when the police allowed the picket line to be a picket line and actually keep goods in and so-called scabs out — who, we all know, are just workers who want to get on with being workers. The company had to get a judge to rule that the police had a legal obligation to ensure that the picket line could stay there only as long as it didn't actually operate as a picket line — that it didn't keep some things in and other things out, the latter including honest workers who just want to do a day's work.
And the law very clearly states that it's management's role to manage, and workers' role to be managed, or sacked, or locked out or whatever happens to be the management's mood and preference that day.
As Johnny Hew-Them said, he wasn't taking sides, he was only upholding the right of management to negotiate with workers individually, and if the company didn't want to negotiate at all, well that was the fault of the industrial relations system, and you couldn't blame the good responsible company for that, and if you did than he'd get it to send in a couple of black-clad ninja-booted special employees to sort out your thinking.
But in the end there were no winners. All the company got out of it was all it wanted in the first place: the destruction of penalties and conditions it wanted to get rid of and recognition of the right of management to manage. But as Martin Cliché said, the ACTU had had a very great victory.
The next time the company wants to slash pay, penalty rates, conditions or work practices, it will have to ring the union movement and tell them it is doing it. "It is important that we know when workers' wages and conditions are being slashed", Martin explained, "so we can endorse that and help explain the benefits of that to them".