Control of the workers

Vanguard October 2011 p. 3

A crucial issue for capitalists is how to control the workers.

Labor says it is a government for the workers. It uses its name and its connections with trade unions in an effort to control the workers.

Government leaders and some union leaders call for loyalty to the ‘labour movement’, ‘to not rock the boat’. If not Labor you’ll get Abbott, O’Farrell, Ballieu. The Coalition is the workers’ sworn enemy, is the catchcry.

It has all been wearing pretty thin over the years.

Labor governments in the states have shown themselves as reliable agents for capital. And now the Federal Labor government chants the mantra of getting the budget into surplus and managing the economy, while real wages go backwards, services are cut and the profits of the big mining companies and banks hit multiple billion dollar records.

The Coalition has been brought into government in WA, Victoria and NSW applying wage cuts, privatisations, and austerity budgets, building on the Labor governments’ austerity, privatisation and wage cuts.

These attacks naturally prompt struggle. Trade unions are the main vehicle for that struggle.

However trade unions have two sides. They are the organised body for workers to obtain their just interests. They also exist under industrial law, to help enforce that law on the workers.

Trade unions are subject to laws and registration governing the union’s rules, their elections, their industrial action, their meetings, under the Fair Work Act and legislation in the various states.

That second life of unions as an arm enforcing capitalist state policy onto the workforce comes into conflict with workers’ struggle against exploitation and oppression. It restricts unions’ pursuit of struggle to obtain justice for workers, the primary thing for workers.

In the struggle for justice and rights, workers become frustrated with union leaders who don’t wholeheartedly get into that struggle.

The role of trade unions and trade union leaders rightly comes under scrutiny.

A number of union officials have positions in the Labor Party and many go to parliament through the Labor Party. Many also have a variety of paid positions in super funds, on boards of government entities, employee credit unions or the like.

Much has been reported about officials and former officials of the Health Services Union, including reports of annual incomes of $270,000 and more than $300,000 a year, including about half of it from board positions with government entities, super schemes and private companies.

Such extraordinary income from government and business patronage puts some union leaders in an extraordinary social position, going to the best restaurants, holidaying in top resorts, sending their kids to top private schools, driving the best cars, hob-knobbing with the captains of industry and commerce, living in the best suburbs.

The additional income from board or other appointments comes as a result of the role they can play in controlling workers’ struggle.

Financial inducement, provided under government and business patronage, separates them from the workers in their finances and lifestyle and compels them to protect their top union position from the workers and rival union officials.

When the activity of a top union official includes controlling the workers for their patrons in government and business, it becomes necessary to keep active members from developing networks to defend workers interests. It might become organisation independent of the leaders.

The tendency is for union structures, rules and activity to be moulded against members, against strengthening a union and to suppress workers’ struggle.

It takes leaders with strong principles, close ties to the workers, and strong working class consciousness to stand against enormous incomes and inducements and the tendencies that high incomes, social and political status and patronage create.

Lenin wrote in 1920 about extraordinary profits garnered by capitalists of rich and powerful states which plundering the whole world through financial transactions and exploitation of workers. “Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits ... it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And the capitalists of the ‘advanced’ countries are bribing them; they bribe them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.

“This stratum of bourgeoisified workers, or their ‘labour aristocracy’, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and their entire outlook, ... are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers, take the side of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Versaillese” against the Communards.

“Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken towards the solution of the practical problems of the Communist movement and of the impending social revolution.”

How very true.