Protracted struggle needed to restore rights to the workers

Vanguard December 2011 p. 3

One of the features of the recent Qantas dispute was the re-emergence of the language of abuse that is always visited on workers and their unions by reactionaries working for the ruling class.

Elected union officials are called “union bosses”, conveniently ignoring the fact that no boss employing workers ever puts himself or herself up for election to that role.

Then there is the insult of “union thuggery” as though unions in this country had the power to impose their will on employers through some threat or act of violence.

The truth is that unions have very few rights today. Some, such as the construction unions, even have special laws that deprive them and their members of even the most basic rights.

Long gone are the days when unions could simply call their members out on strike, and on any issue. Long gone are the days when unions could stop work in sympathy with other unions engaged in industrial action.

It used to be the case that the number of working days lost per 1000 workers each year was around 200 – and sometimes twice that amount. This is not to romanticise strike activity. Workers don’t like to lose pay by striking just for the hell of it. But it is a bit of a rule of thumb in relation to the ability and willingness of workers to win concessions and improvements from the capitalists. In the early 1990s the average number of days lost per thousand workers went, for the first time, below 100. Today it is less than 10.

Labor has ‘delivered’ the working class

The emasculation of trade unions was carried through by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments as part of their embrace of neo-liberalism. The various union amalgamations could have created stronger and more militant unions, but were carried out to a design that saw organisations created that increasingly divorced their official structures from the rank and file membership. A new class of “professional” union official emerged. This led to a strengthening of what our Party has identified as the bourgeois ideology of economism/trade unionism: confining demands to those that present no threat to the system of capitalism, and pursuing them through methods that present no threat to capitalism.

Until quite recently, the result of Labor neo-liberalism has been to weaken the overall fighting capacity of the working class and has almost paralysed sections of the trade union movement.

Liberal and Labor collaborate to choke workers’ struggle

Howard, as a member of the Fraser Liberal government, refined Sections 45D and E of the Trade Practices Act so that they became weapons against “secondary boycotts” or sympathy strikes. Labor governments choose to leave these iron fists in place.

Both Labor and Liberal governments are committed to the concept of “protected” industrial action, although they have some minor differences about what this might include. Their industrial laws have created the categories of “unprotected” and “unlawful” industrial action.

For an action to be “protected” it must meet certain very narrow criteria that essentially confine it to action during a limited bargaining period in support of a new agreement or award. It must be supported by a majority of members involved voting in a secret ballot approved by Fair Work Australia, the so-called “independent” industrial tribunal created by Gillard. At least three days’ notice must be supplied to the employer, depriving workers of any element of spontaneity or surprise.

Action is “unprotected” if it does not meet these requirements, and “unlawful” if it precedes the expiry of an existing agreement. In both cases, unions can be fined or sued for damages by third parties.

In these ways the great Australian working class is chained to sacred altar of employer rights. This altar is supported by the political pillars of the Liberal and Labor parties.

Protracted struggle is the only way to win back rights for organised workers and to advance to the struggle for the replacement of capitalism with anti-imperialist independence and socialism.