En Passant

But that is the whole point of the Royal Commission – to paint unions as bad in and of themselves and further restrict their capacity to win wage increases, defend jobs and protect life and limb at work. If the government can get away with using TURC as the springboard to further emasculate the union movement then Workchoices will seem a picnic compared to what the ruling class will have in store for workers. Kiss goodbye to penalty rates, and welcome longer unpaid hours, more deaths and serious injuries at work, more job insecurity, individual contracts and massive cuts to the social wage.

The CFMEU is a major target of the Royal Commission witch hunt into unions precisely because it is one of the few unions left in Australia today that actually stands up for and fights for its members. The MBA’s safety smear campaign and the clearly anti-union and political nature of the charges against Lomax show that the building industry bosses and their state apparatchiks will stop at nothing in their quest to put profit before people.

  In the latest edition of Solidarity James Supple rebuts the argument that under the China Free Trade Agreement Chinese workers will ‘steal’ Australian jobs.  He says in part: ‘The problem is not with migrant workers coming here but the potential for exploitation as a result of the new agreements. Instead of a xenophobic campaign, […]

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.

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.

If mass strikes to defend jobs, wages and conditions were to happen Tony the liberator could become Tony the liberated.

The radical historian Howard Zinn once said: “What matters is not who’s sitting in the White House. What matters is who’s sitting in!” If we want progressive change, we should take Zinn’s words to heart. Our side needs to get organised and rebuild a rank and file socialist current in the unions and an activist tradition on the campuses.

It has been our side’s lack of preparedness to use our industrial strength at key points that has been our downfall. That is, it has been the conservatism of the union leadership, and the lack of any significant organised left in the unions to challenge this, that remains our side’s key weakness.

The spin from Labor is that disunity cost them the election. This is fantasy land stuff. If only they had all united behind rabid neoliberalism then Labor would still be in power. Yeah, right. I have a bridge in Sydney to sell you too.

The disunity theme means that the real reasons – Labor’s massive shift to the right economically and socially over the last 3 decades and the collapse of class struggle over that period – can be and will be ignored by the neoliberals who are the ALP.

There is an alternative. Its name is struggle.