Mobilise against attacks on working people

Vanguard June 2012 p. 1
Alice M.

BHP-Billiton, Rio-Tinto, Qantas, Chevron, Telstra, Toyota, Exxon-Mobil, Alcoa, the four major banks and main retail monopolies, the most powerful and decisive group of foreign and local monopoly corporations in Australia’s economy and politics, are mounting another major attack on Australia’s working people. 

They have issued their orders to whoever wins the next federal election. Crush fighting unions and any resistance by workers to intensified exploitation, deregulate the labour market even more, and give free hand to big business to casualise most of Australia’s workforce, bring back AWAs (individual contracts), slash wages and conditions, gut the hard won occupational health and safety standards, pay lowest wages to imported overseas workers, and wipe out the few remaining hard won rights of working people. 

Big business is becoming impatient with the ALP’s anti-union Fair Work, the almost identical twin of WorkChoices, because for them Fair Work is not swift enough in suppressing fighting workers and unions, they say.

The biggest corporations in Australia, led by the mining monopolies, are openly pushing for the more direct and savage assault on the working class to protect and extract even more profits from workers’ labour during the global capitalist economic crisis.  

That means more casualisation and freedom for big business to sack workers at any time, get rid of penalty rates and force workers to work harder and longer with smaller pay increases, without penalty rates and fewer occupational health and safety standards.  Simply, it’s all about big business and federal and state governments cutting labour costs for big business to maximise profits and rein in unions’ and workers’ struggle.  

That’s what Jac Nasser, the managing director of BHP-Billiton, the biggest and richest mining multinational in the world, and Michael Chaney, the National Australia Bank chairman, mean when they demand more productivity from Australia’s workers and want to bludgeon fighting unions.  It’s all about throwing workers on the scrapheap, sending many into economic hardship and insecurity after a life time of creating mega profits for the corporate monopolies.

The workers’ friend

Bill Shorten, the Labor Minister for Industrial Relations, who puts himself forward as friend of workers and the union movement, even dared to criticise BHP-Billiton. Not for its outrageous anti-worker and anti-union demands that attack workers’ health and safety and crush fighting unions, but for “not being able to persuade its long standing workforce of the case for change, then perhaps the problem isn’t just the law, maybe it’s the way the case is being put and the engagement with the workforce”.   Shorten is sending a message to big business that he and the ALP government are more effective than the Liberals in controlling workers.

Workers and unions fighting back

The latest big business assault comes at a time of workers’ growing anger seeing their jobs, job security and working conditions, and workplace rights disappear, whilst profits of corporations soar to record highs.  It comes at a time of rising costs of living; health, education, housing, and ballooning personal debt that working people are forced to rely on to make ends meet. In spite of the unprecedented offensive by monopoly capital, the resistance by unions and workers is building up.

Queensland coal miners

More than 3,500 BHP-Billiton mining workers in Queensland have been in a fierce battle for the past 18 month with BHP-Billiton /Mitsubishi Alliance over a new EBA.  BHP-Billiton wants to abolish the rights of unions in enforcing health and safety in the mines, spread individual contracts (AWAs), restrict the already limited unions’ right of entry, and many other attacks on mining workers’ conditions. BHP-Billiton/Mitsubishi mining workers and their unions stand in the front line of struggle against the attacks by foreign and local corporations in Australia.

In the past 12 months the mining workers in Queensland have been joined by processing and manufacturing workers, nurses, teachers, cleaners, airline workers, public and community workers, construction and maritime workers and many others.

(Above: Queensland BMA coal miners on strike)

The pledge by the new ACTU leadership to invigorate and unite grass roots campaigns by unions and the community for job security, workers’ and union rights, welfare and decent living standards, will be welcomed by many working people. 

Building a powerful and an independent mass movement around the struggle of workers, unions and communities is the only realistic response to the assaults by the multinationals. Already there is growing unity between workers, unions, environmentalists, farmers, rural and mining communities who are finding common ground and interests in their struggles.