Nick G.
The ACTU is likely to continue to develop its
own agenda of working class demands following the withdrawal of a threatened
leadership challenge by Assistant Secretary Tim Lyons.
Lyons announced that he would challenge Dave
Oliver for the position Oliver currently holds as National Secretary.
In an appalling piece of timing, Lyons
announced his move in the same week that led up to the Liberal Party’s spill
motion against Tony Abbott.
His withdrawal follows his failure to get
backing from major unions. Only United
Voice and the National Union of Workers indicated that they would back him in
the contest.
ACTU
has reassessed relationship with ALP
Under the leadership of Ged Kearney (President)
and Oliver, the ACTU has maintained a certain independence from the ALP.
This follows widespread recognition amongst
working class activists that the ALP has been a cheer-leader for neo-liberalism
and has come out against workers time and again.
They remember how the ALP nobbled the Your
Rights At Wor kcampaign firstly by shifting the focus from “Worth fighting for”
to “Worth voting for” and then taking its main spearhead, the ACTU’s Greg
Combet and bumping him into parliament.
The campaign was effectively stopped.
They remember the vitriolic personal attacks
on leading union officials, some forced from the ALP, by Kevin Rudd.
They remember Gillard’s part in the
development of the Fair Work Act which retained, instead of getting rid of,
many of the key features of Howard’s Work Choices.
They remember Gillard’s determination to keep
a “tough cop” on the construction beat, keeping Howard’s Australian Building
and Construction Commission alive for far too long and then resurrecting it in
the form of the Fair Work Building Commission.
They remember Gillard threatening striking
Woodside-Burmah workers in WA in 2010 with “the full force of the law”, saying
as Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations that she had “no tolerance
for unprotected industrial action” and that they faced “penalties and fines and
would be very, very, very substantially out of pocket”. Tony Abbott could not have said it better!
They remember the threat to use parents and
backpackers to break work bans by teachers on NAPLAN tests.
They remember that on the day she overthrew
Rudd as Prime Minister her first public comment was that she had “now thrown
the door open to the mining companies” and that she subsequently watered down
the proposed Mineral Resources Super Profits Tax to the point where its revenue
raising was negligible.
Against this background a number of unions
reassessed their relationship with the ALP.
So did the ACTU as the peak trade union body.
ALP
wants to control workers through the ACTU
Kearney’s first speeches as newly-elected
President of the ACTU contained a commitment to develop an agenda for the union
movement independent of the influence of the ALP.
Kearney made front-line appearances at
pickets which even the officials of the union representing the workers could
not be bothered attending.
These developments did not sit easily with
union officials whose career paths were intertwined with the ALP.
Nor did the development of a popular and
seemingly spontaneous mass movement against the Abbott government, because
those officials did not control it and could not use it for their own purposes.
Lyons was asked by a Maritime Union member
after the first big March in March event what relationship the ACTU had with
the event. He was entirely dismissive
and asked whether people had not seen the sorts who attended the March in
March.
“There were all sorts of weirdoes and loonies
there,” he said, refusing to acknowledge the tens of thousands of ordinary
working people who wanted to get out in the streets to oppose the Abbott
agenda.
Operational
plan for next federal election
Meanwhile, the ACTU has developed its
Campaign Operational Plan for 2014-2015.
It has identified defending living standards as its central theme, a
seemingly reformist slogan but one around which elements of an independent
agenda to make the rich pay and to isolate the big multinationals and corporate
Australia can be built.
It is worth quoting from the Plan.
“We
will not be campaigning for the election of an ALP Government, we will be
campaigning for an independent agenda or vision for our country. This agenda is also a demand we have on
business and all those who influence the living standards of our members.
“We
will not make the mistakes of the past where we stopped campaigning after the
election. We will build an alternative
agenda through undertaking the biggest mass participatory process ever
undertaken in our country. We aim to
involve hundreds of thousands of people online, in their workplaces and in
their communities.”
These are perspectives that strike at the
hold the ALP has traditionally exerted over working people though their
unions. That control has always been to
divert mass struggle into parliamentary channels and to close it down and shut
it before it develops its own logic and momentum.
The Lyons challenge to Kearney and Oliver was
meant to change the direction of the ACTU. Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review correctly identified “long running
tensions inside ACTU headquarters over the strategic direction of the union movement”
as the trigger for Lyons’ challenge.
It is indicative of how the ruling class
viewed this challenge that the AFR article was basically a puff piece for
Lyons, extolling his “skills as an advocate and strategist” and remarking that
these would be “a significant loss for the for the peak union body”.
Well we beg to differ.
The accolades for Lyons from the capitalist
press are a guide to where he stood and with whose long-term interests he was
aligned.
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