By Frank Noakes
PERTH - The WA branch of the Construction, Mining and Energy Workers' Union (CMEU) has developed into one of the most effective and progressive unions in Australia. Its leadership is refreshingly young, innovative and political. A constant thorn in the side of the right-wing state Labor government, the CMEU recently disaffiliated from the ALP. BILL ETHELL, state and federal president of the union, spoke to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly about this and other issues.
"You know, it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic, the comments of Bob Richardson, the ACTU industrial officer for the forestry industry, telling the workers at APPM not to strike and give it to the Industrial Relations Commission to resolve", says Ethell.
"How many millions of dollars have we spent on Robe River? How many people have to be broken at the bench of an arbitration commission? How many lessons do these people need to realise their methods of resolving these problems don't work?"
But the issue is bigger than this: "The greater problem is that people like Richardson actually support what APPM is doing. Simon Crean definitely supported the end result at Robe River, as did key union officials around Western Australia. It suited their political agenda at the time to have everyone think that militancy was not on the agenda, and that anyone who thought it was would be dealt with severely. That's the culture that's got to change."
After many disagreements with the Lawrence Labor government on questions of social justice in general and Aboriginal rights in particular, the CMEU finally severed its ties with the ALP earlier this year. There's no space in the ALP for radical unions, Ethell says, and in fact the ALP had been actively trying to undermine the CMEU, even angling for its deregistration.
Citing the particularly close collaboration of the WA Labor government with big business, especially during the late '80s, Ethell says the ALP has decided to be just another political party for the capitalist class. "We took the view that there was no point in us trying to play a reforming role inside the Labor Party, as it is too far gone."
Ethell says the CMEU is not interested in supporting independents for political office, and that includes the ALP, which had become little more than a collection of political independents, and certainly independent of the labour movement. "We want people who are tied by conviction and ideology to working class interests, and this should be the backbone of any party in the future."
Ethell adds that although the decision to disaffiliate came from the rank and file through their delegates, this didn't mean they or the union had given up on a labour movement government; they'd simply had enough of ALP governments.
Accord
Arguing that the Prices and Incomes Accord was at once a political vehicle to elect Hawke and at the same time a means to hold down wages as the economy emerged from the 1981-82 recession, Ethell says he has no time for former supporters of the deal who now wail about the damage it caused. "They knew exactly what they were doing, they refused to listen to any other alternative, they were arrogant not only politically but also intellectually.
"It's one of the problems of the left that dissension is crushed with all the power available to people who believe that they hold the torch. Unfortunately, that's one of the influences of Stalinism that came through the Communist Party of Australia and in the Building Workers' Industrial Union was espoused by the Socialist Party of Australia. Thankfully, that influence is decreasing now."
It would be more useful, Ethell says, if the Accord's previous supporters were trying to stop the rot now, but instead they are just advocating a few changes to the Accord.
The main legacy of the Accord, and more recently award restructuring, is that many workers now mistakenly believe that the only way to get a pay rise is to go to TAFE, get more certificates, and set out on a career path. Ethell says that while unions should move with the times, they should also encourage, rather than discourage, a militant outlook, with the necessary combination of a sound tactical sense.
Ethell says union officials should "encourage militancy without wanting to control it, and to the extent that they do, we'll be more successful in getting back to a class position on economic matters". He says the CMEU members initiate and support the union's social and other policies, and if other unions took the trouble to consult their members, they'd get similar responses. After all, the CMEU is merely advocating policies common on the union left in the '70s and early '80s.
ACTU
Although Bill Ethell thinks it unlikely that unions will leave the ACTU, at least while Labor is in office, because the peak body has too many means of inducing key players to stay in the fold, he is concerned that in the event of a conservative government imposing New Zealand-style policies, the ACTU could collapse or at least be forced into dramatic changes because it is too tightly locked into an industrial-legislative straitjacket.
What, then, should the ACTU be doing? Ethell thinks it should be developing resources to enable it to anticipate APPM/Robe River- type situations and have plans in place to respond. As things stand, the organised union movement represented by the ACTU "must be the laughing-stock of every boardroom in the region".
Ethell also thinks there's potential for the union movement to "There's a lot of potential for reduced hours. A lot of people in the community would support this if it was portrayed in a correct way."
Building unions have agreed on a method of introducing a 32-hour week in an industry currently struggling with 30% unemployment. "I'm sure that people who are concerned about social justice and the violence that often occurs, particularly in working class areas during a recession - where you get increased domestic violence, increased street violence and increased incidents of rape - would support a shorter working week.
"It's not a response to increase the numbers of coppers on the streets, because they actually create a bigger problem. And it's not a case of increasing the number of hours or years that children have got to stay at school when they clearly don't want to.
"There's a lot of space in the economy, especially in the WA economy, for more people to be employed. There's a lot of wealth here, and if that wealth is redirected, in the short term that can be handled though it won't solve the long-term problems; they've got to be solved by other means."
Leaders
Ethell says it's difficult for some union officials "who think they have their hands on the levers of the economy to get their hands off it and let the work force learn, play its role, and advance its own interests without having university-trained union bureaucrats play their games".
The road won't be easy. "It's a lot easier to sit in a 16th floor office and play intellectual games with a company's industrial relations manager or the arbitration commission." But that has to change.
"Organising pamphlet drops, leafleting, doing research on companies, working out how you're going to feed people when they're out on strike for a long period of time, and dealing with all the psychological and emotional problems that come from long strikes - that won't be easy. A lot of people don't know how to do it, but they're going to have to learn because those people that do learn and have those skills are going to be the leadership of the union movement in the '90s. Everyone else will, hopefully, get thrown out."