En Passant

I have been a long-time supporter of the Construction, Forestry, Mining, Maritime and Energy Union or its various earlier incarnations. I remember joining with BLF members in 1985 and 1986 to fight the Hawke government’s de-registration of the union. In the short term they lost. However, their commitment to class struggle remained and so did […]

Could the union movement, or rank and file unionists, organise protests in major cities on 18 April, the first sitting day back, in defence of unions and against the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill?

If the ACTU, or at least the left unions, were to announce a complete boycott of the Royal Commission, and to back that up not only with the threat of (illegal) mass strike action in defence of anyone prosecuted for not appearing, but also with an education campaign among their members as to why they must walk off the job in response to the biased Commission, it would destroy the witch hunt. The CFMEU is due to appear before the witch hunt today at 10 am. Boycott it.

Dave Oilver: “The ACTU calls on the Abbott Government to shut down the Royal Commission, which has been proven to be an $80 million dollar political witch hunt. It is untenable that the former judge charged with overseeing the Royal Commission is helping to fundraise for the Liberal Party.”

ACTU President Ged Kearney will launch Unionists for Refugees at a public meeting at 6.30pm, on Tuesday 3 March at the Belconnen Labor Club (Fred Daly Room), Chandler St, Belconnen. Publicise this meeting as widely as possible.

Ged Kearney, President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, will launch the group Canberra Unionists for Refugees on 3 March. More details to come  as we organise rooms and times etc, but it is likely to be around 5.30 pm or 6 pm somewhere in Civic.

Is there an alternative to Labor’s guided Schumpeterianism and the Liberals’ overt ‘let the market forces rip’ destruction of jobs and capital?

The Transport Workers Union has given a hint of an alternative. It has threatened strikes against QANTAS and its attempts to sack 5000 staff.

Paid trade union officials are the retailers of our labour power to the bosses and what Abbott wants to do through this Royal Commission is cut out the middle men and women, the union officials, and allow the bosses to completely dominate atomised workers and thus drive down wages and slash conditions, cut jobs, and lengthen the working day, among other things.

The way to avoid total defeat is to go on the attack now. Sitting around the campfire chanting Kumbaya and holding hands with the bosses and Abbott won’t stop them knifing us in our sleep. Massive discord holds the key to the possibility of success and of beating back the bosses. Or as the BLF says in much plainer English: ‘If you don’t fight you lose.’

Aussie jobs and similar slogans are part of the problem, not the solution. Class struggle offers the best way to defend foreign workers and win them residency and employment rights and conditions the same as other workers in Australia. That fight can then lead to a fight against the same and other bosses when they sack workers in Australia or cut their wages or conditions.

And that is what happened in Melbourne today. Workers responded to direct government attacks on them by walking off the job, an action that is illegal under Labor’s industrial laws. It may be just the start of a real fight against these draconian laws against construction workers.

Workers in Perth could follow suit, not for Aussie jobs and other dead ends but for more jobs, for permanent residency for all who come here to work, for proper wages, for empowering unions to police all worksites and for more spending on education and training, paid for by the bosses.