Sam Wainwright
On July 28, federal transport minister John Anderson announced a $100 million package of new maritime "security measures", which included background checks on workers in the industry to be carried out by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the immigration department and the Australian Federal Police. Media reports suggest that these agencies will investigate allegations of "politically motivated violence".
The Howard government's anti-union laws have criminalised essential union activity. Is an arrest at an "illegal" picket line proof of a tendency towards "politically motivated violence", or is it enough to be on the record as opposing the war on Iraq?
In 2003, the federal parliament passed the Maritime Transport Security Act. While the act does not spell out requirements for background security checks, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) was told that such measures would apply only to newly hired maritime workers. Now it seems this is not the case.
So what about the assurances that it is not the purpose of the act to prevent lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and industrial action? US experience shows there is a lot to be concerned about.
US experience
In 2002, the US Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Antiterrorism Act. As first proposed, this piece of legislation would have made any industrial action by maritime workers a criminal offence. While this was removed before the bill was passed, measures that seek to screen and ban workers deemed a "security risk" were passed. US maritime workers are now subject to criminal background checks going back seven years.
While the US legislation does not specify what criminal convictions would see a worker removed from his or her job, US airport workers can be fired if they have been convicted of one of 28 felonies ranging from murder to drug use.
The justification for such draconian measures is that workers with criminal convictions and in difficult financial circumstances might be bribed by terrorists.
If applied to the US waterfront, such measures could result in thousands losing their jobs. US waterside workers are picked up for work through a union hiring hall and not directly employed by any particular company. This system has given workers with past convictions a chance to work that they might not have got anywhere else.
In an interview with the March 12 Capital News Service website, Baltimore waterside worker Anthony White said: "The waterfront has saved a lot of people, man. I mean a lot. You got your life together, why do they want to take that away from you? You have a car payment and a house payment. What are you supposed to do?"
Officials at the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) estimate that 200 to 300 of the 2000 registered Baltimore workers will lose their jobs under the new security rules.
Clearly, there are some jobs that require screening. None of us want convicted paedophiles working in primary schools or devotees of Osama bin Laden flying airplanes. However, the security checks proposed for maritime workers in both the US and Australia must be opposed.
The idea that any prior criminal conviction predisposes someone to terrorism is absurd. To deny a person employment or to sack them on such grounds is an abuse of natural justice and due process because they have already received the legally appropriate penalty.
However, it is not just individual workers' civil liberties that are at stake, but the very right to organise. In the US the "war on terror" is being used as a new McCarthyism with which to smash unions. Not surprisingly, airport baggage screeners were first to be attacked, with 30,000 being sacked.
When the new airport security screeners began to organise Transportation Security Agency boss Admiral James Loy banned collective bargaining in January 2002. He said: "Fighting terrorism demands a flexible workforce that can rapidly respond to threats, that can mean changes in work assignments and other conditions of employment that are not compatible with the duty to bargain with labor unions."
Meanwhile, some US federal government employees have been told that their employment is incompatible with union membership. In January 2002 nearly 1000 employees of the Department of Justice were put under this ruling. Then in February, 1000 workers at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency lost their union rights. The Homeland Security Act also gives the head of that department the authority to suspend collective bargaining rights for any of its 170,000 employees.
US President George Bush has also made it clear that industrial action that affects the operation of an industry or any large profitable enterprise will be considered a threat to national security. This was demonstrated in the 2002 contract negotiations between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the bosses' Pacific Maritime Association.
Bush made no secret of the fact that a stoppage on the docks would prompt him to invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which gives him the authority to order parties back to work under terms of his choosing.
War on workers
When the Howard government announced its plan to conduct background checks on maritime workers, an MUA press release condemned this as a "blatant attempt to turn the war on terrorism into a war on workers". But the "war on terror" has always been a war on workers — first and foremost those living in Third World countries that defy Washington's dictates. It has also provided a pretext for attacking the civil liberties and union rights of workers in the developed capitalist countries.
This is not to deny that terrorism takes place. Two MUA members were among those who lost family members in the hideous Bali bombings. The point is that the exploitation, misery and humiliation enforced on the peoples of the Third World create the breeding ground for such acts. The Bush-Blair-Howard gang want to intensify this exploitation, at gunpoint if need be. Rather than reducing the risk of terrorism, their bogus "war on terror" can only increase the anger and desperation.
Recently, the MUA has made the possibility of terrorist attack the centrepiece of its public campaign against Flag of Convenience (FoC) vessels trading between Australian ports. The union's publicity says such vessels are potential terrorist tools. It has raised the frightening possibility of a bulk fertiliser carrier being turned into an enormous floating bomb.
No doubt the murky process of FoC registration makes it easier for all manner of villains to get their hands on ships. However, it is a grave mistake for the MUA to make the "terror threat" the focus of its campaign against FoC ships. Firstly, this bolsters the climate of fear and hysteria used to justify war abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home. Secondly, it has the effect of casting every poor Third World seafarer as a potential terrorist.
The workers employed on FoC ships are fellow workers facing far worse wages and conditions than Australian seafarers. That, of course, is why the shipping bosses want to use more FoC ships in Australian waters.
The Howard government, no doubt driven by its unfinished business of destroying the MUA and driving down maritime workers' wages and conditions, has encouraged this process by granting more exemptions than ever before from the cabotage law requiring that cargo being shipped from one Australian port to another be carried on Australian flagged and crewed vessels.
We can not beat Howard at his own game. Every person who works in Australia should be employed on Australian wages and conditions. This should be the main argument of the MUA in the fight to save Australian seafarers' jobs.
In the US, the ILA suggested that rather than being seen as possible suspects, its members should be enlisted as the frontline defence, the "eyes and ears", of the government's anti-terrorism campaign. ILA president John Bowers wrote a letter to Bush (complete with the slogan "ILA = I Love America") pledging to "stand solidly behind our valiant troops spearheading the war against terrorists and tyrants in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else they can be found and hunted down". Bush repaid this offer of collaboration by introducing measures that could see thousands of ILA dockers lose their jobs!
Most US unions have limited their criticisms of Bush's measures on the basis that they go too far. But once you accept the logic of the supposed threat, it is very hard to argue against the more draconian measures. Instead, our unions must directly challenge the very premise of the "war on terror".
[Sam Wainwright is a member of the MUA in Western Australia.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, August 18, 2004.
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