Build an "ever-expanding union of workers"

Vanguard October 2013 p. 8
Ned K.

Karl Marx wrote in his essay, Wages Prices and Profit, that “Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of workers”.

With the decline in numbers of workers in mass organisations and trade unions, due in large part to imperialism’s destruction of Australia’s industrial base, the appearance is that workers are losing the battle of building an ‘ever expanding union of workers.”

Trade union membership in the private sector is about 13% and in the government sector declining steadily due to privatisation and job cuts by all three levels of government in Australia – federal, state and local.

However these trends hide other trends within the working class movement that imperialism is worried about. Unionisation, and more importantly, collective action and activism by women in service industries has been on the increase in the first 13 years of the 21^st Century.

Collective action and campaigning by women in nursing, child care, disabilities and aged care has seen improved wages and conditions, but more importantly in the context of the quote from Marx above, these campaigns have expanded the union of workers in areas that the Business Council of Australia and other big business organisations want to keep ‘union free’ for two reasons.

First is that the more organised are these workers, the harder it is for governments of either Labor or Liberal variety to divert more tax payers money away from services like health and education and into  areas such as road building for mining projects or defence ‘joint ventures ’ with the US military.

One tactic used by imperialism and local big business in Australia to prevent the new seeds of collectivism in the service industries is to ‘flood’ these industries with migrant workers in the hope that their more precarious situations will help employers divide and conquer their workforces.

While this has some temporary success for some captains of industry, migrant workers, including overseas students, have their own needs like all workers, and in industries like aged care and disabilities their active participation in unions and assertion of their rights at work is on the increase.

In one industry, contract cleaning, it was in fact non English speaking background (mainly women) workers who joined together in their union to win in a three year protracted struggle substantial pay increases and improved conditions in collective agreements covering most capital cities across Australia.  Their success through united struggle even won significant changes in the cleaners’ base award pay and conditions, including a 15% allowance for part time workers and an increase in minimum engagement from two to four hours.

With the parliamentary election win of an Abbott government, no doubt the most reactionary elements within the big business community will be out to prevent this “ever expanding union of workers” in industries where workers have made the significant gains mentioned above. They tried under Howard and failed. They will fail again as the workers’ movement strengthens independent of the outcome of parliamentary elections!