En Passant

The Coalition Government in Australia is struggling with internal divisions and crossbench pressures, plus recent polls show it is “on the nose” with voters. To read the whole article click here on John Passant’s report in Independent Australia.

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?

With growing inequality and austerity has come growing anger, inchoate in Australia but finding a left wing political expression in places like the UK and US in the form of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Workers in struggle are the short term solution to the problems of capitalism. Workers in struggle are the long term solution to the problem that is capitalism.

Briggs identified the real problem when she said that profit cannot come before safety on building sites any more. However proft does come first, and will continue to come before safety. That is what the ABCC is about. It is what smashing union industrial campaigns for safety on site are about.

Can we cull the business sharks who kill building workers? The best way to ensure there is safety on building sites is to give the workers power to cut off the flow of profits to the bosses, without loss of pay, when sites are unsafe, or for workers to take that power.

If there is any hope it lies in the proles. The most important battles in the weeks and months to come are likely to be by unions, in particular building unions. The Abbott government has signaled a brutal crackdown on the CFMEU and other building unions in the near future, especially through its soon to be revitalised Australian Building and Construction Commission.

To drive back the repressive state, we must join together with building unions to help them win their fight against repression and in their victory create the space for freedom to blossom.

Perhaps the difference in treatment in death is that police protect the profit system, whereas workers don’t. We workers make the profit for the bosses. We are expendable and our deaths at work are nothing to them compared to the death of a police officer.

By their eulogies shall ye know the bosses and their system.

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

Having Grocon in charge of safety is like putting John Howard in charge of refugees. Only union reps on site can really help enforce safety. Only the ability to walk off the job without loss of pay over safety issues can really force the bosses to take the issue seriously. It has been a long long time since workers as workers have fought the bosses and their police so successfully and drawn in other workers in their own city and elsewhere. A long long time. What a great day.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees workers deserting it and some (though not that many) swinging to the Greens? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees or will see many workers holding their noses and voting for the Liberal or National Parties or even Bob Katter’s Australian Party?

Far better to blame a bogey man party like the Greens than to actually analyse why Labor is on the nose with workers.