No Job Security For Security Workers Under Capitalism

(Photo: Titanium Security Facebook page)

 Written by: Ned K. on 5 August 2023

The capitalists who own the thousands of businesses across the country and their governments at federal, state and council levels have created armies, police forces and private security companies to protect their property and to maintain the operation of capitalism on a day-to-day basis.

The workers who constitute the armies, police forces and private security companies are employed in a scale of decreasing wages and job security. 

At the bottom of the scale are workers employed by private security companies. Most are lucky to be paid even the minimum Award rates of pay and many have minimal job security due to contract changes and insecure hours of work.

The private security industry employs many new migrant workers and older workers displaced from other industries such as the car industry that no longer exist.

Security companies come and go as they compete on price to win contracts in both the private and public sector.

Like the building industry, their insecure work is made even more insecure by companies going belly-up. The latest one is Titanium Security in SA which went into liquidation on 1 August leaving workers without pay for work performed and with loss of entitlements such as annual leave, superannuation   and long service leave. Titanium served a similar fate in 2021 when it was saved from liquidation by a Deed of Company Arrangement which enabled it to keep trading.
Titanium had won some large security contracts including SA Government contracts to provide security services for SA Water, the water utilities body in SA. 

Their website also states Titanium are a member of the Defence Industry Security Program (DISP) which allowed them to provide government defence department cleared personnel.  

When Titanium went belly-up on 1 August, their security officers kept working at their usual workplace not knowing who they were working for, who was paying them and who would be their next security company employer, if any.

Meanwhile the Director of Titanium was enjoying the good life in the Greek islands.

How governments of the Labor type can continue to treat workers this way by exposing them to contracted out private for-profit employers shows how embedded Labor governments remain in the capitalist system.

Sham Democracy and EBAs

(Above 1913 poster by Catherine Courtland - what has changed?   Source: Public Domain)

 Written by: Ashley C. on 16 April 2023

In his 1974 booklet Revolution and the Australian State, comrade Ted Hill provides the following assessment of the relationship between the Australian people, the legal courts and the police: 

Theoretically, people have their remedies in the courts before which, according to the theory, the police and the citizen are equal. Test the theory in practice. It is a bitter joke which emphasises the real dictatorship expressed through the police and the courts. (17) 

While this quote is lifted from Hill’s discussion regarding the real relationship between police and citizens, the same view may be applied to the relationship between employees and their employers. Working people in Australia may be convinced that they are on an equal legal footing with their employer. After all, we have plenty of industrial relations legislation in Australia and the Fair Work Commission, right? What’s to worry? Well, if that’s the theory, then perhaps workers should “test the theory in practice”. 

I’m a union delegate who works within a highly casualised industry. After many years of attempting to address issues at our workplace, customer-service staff have recognised the need for collective action and we have now reached almost 100% union membership with our relevant union. Prior to this, our employer has never had any involvement with unions during its forty years of operation and has always operated according to a top-down model of corporate management. Accordingly, operational decisions are exclusively made by board members and the executive management team. There has never been an enterprise agreement in effect at the gallery. 

We are currently in the process of bargaining and negotiating for an agreement that will apply to the museums lowest paid and most precariously employed workers. Management have been reluctant to meet with our assigned industrial officer from the union, and they didn’t officially agree to honour our initial notification to begin bargain process until we threatened to seek a majority support determination from the Fair Work Commission. Aside from being an incredibly frustrating and draining process, it has been interesting to witness the ignorance and incompetence of those who work within such highly responsible positions of executive management. They are in charge of managing millions of dollars in public money and yet they do not know what the substantial differences are between enterprise agreements and industry awards. 

Our log of claims was developed through extensive consultation and surveying staff members, and we were proud to submit the document to management. Our claims sought the best possible outcomes for staff, whilst remaining practical and respectful of the everyday functioning of the workplace. We submitted our claims in February and are currently still awaiting a clear response from the employer, despite having met for two bargaining meetings since. This process is being drawn out due to both the incompetence of management and their lack of understanding of the perspective of staff members. 

Note the following disputed claim. Casual employees wished to seek improvements on their entitlement to overtime pay. Under our current industrial award, we are entitled to the following: 

Casual employees may be employed for up to 10 ordinary hours each day, provided that all time worked in excess of ordinary working hours on any one day or in excess of 38 hours in any one week will be overtime.

Staff are not entitled to overtime pay until they have worked beyond 10 hours (we are also entitled to a 20 minute paid break for every 5 hours worked). The casual overtime rate is 150% and also excludes the 25% casual loading amount. Only after working beyond 13 hours will a casual be entitled to a 200% overtime rate. 

In our log of claims, we have demanded for overtime to paid at a rate of 200% (inclusive of 25% casual loading) for all hours worked after 8 hours. Any worker would agree that this is hardly an unreasonable entitlement — 8 hours is a long time, especially when you are only entitled to a single 20 minute break. Management disagree and would prefer the entitlements set out in the award. 

Union members have also requested that overtime rates are to be paid for any additional hours worked outside of their rostered hours. Management disagree with this and they cite the National Employment Standards, where they are allegedly permitted to “choose to offer a casual employee additional work to that rostered and it is the employee’s choice to work or not.” Overtime entitlements may therefore be overlooked if the employee makes an individual choice to continue working. It’s bad enough that the employer not only thinks they can easily get away with this cynical and deceitful business conduct, but what’s worse is that they do get away with it. 

I’ve only mentioned one disputed claim here. There are plenty of other examples that I could go on about — on every issue, the employer sees the industry awards and the NES safety-net as guidelines for their business model of keeping their employees on the bare minimum of wages and conditions. This is all within the context of our particular employer that prides itself on its “progressive” image and its upholding of “best practice”. Even when workers organise themselves and jump through all the legal loops in order to secure a fairer share, it’s easy for management, the CEO and the Board members to keep dragging things out and avoiding negotiating with employees. 

While bargaining is ongoing (and edging towards an application for protected industrial action), a benefit to all this is that workers are learning of the fundamental antagonism that exists between themselves and the employer. Some will never trust another employer again. This is a hard lesson that’s learnt through first-hand experience. Across any industry, when it comes to unionised workers engaging in legal struggle through the enterprise bargaining process, the difference between formal and real democratic freedom is on full display. While you may have some rights and access to engage in legal processes, the apparent equality between employees and employers is an illusion. In the face of this, it is too easy — and tempting— for workers to give up trying to secure something more than the bare minimum and to embrace individualism in their working life. 

Working people do not need to be lectured about the inequalities of capitalist industrial relations. It’s through their direct engagement in bourgeois democracy, or the real dictatorship of employers and monopoly capital, that they can learn the disappointing lessons of their illusory access to legal power. To end, I encourage the reader to reflect upon another quote from comrade Hill’s Revolution and the Australian State, and consider how the present hopelessness within legal struggle can actually provide the lessons for revolutionary consciousness: 

in Australia we regard the struggle to defend democratic rights as an essential component in revolutionary struggle. Likewise, we regard the struggle against repressive legislation. The struggle to defend democratic rights is not a thing in itself, not something aimed at greater bourgeois democracy itself but is part of the struggle to end exploitation and to win state power. In the struggle, the workers and working people come to understand the severe limitation of democratic rights, come to understand the need to struggle for revolutionary power which will convert formal freedoms into real freedoms, enhance their revolutionary consciousness. (77) 

References: Hill, E. F. Revolution and The Australian State: A Socialist Analysis. Communist Part of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), 2023/1974

One Team?

 

Written by: B.Bill on 15 September 2022

One team. One Metro. As far as Metro Trains internal corporate ‘ethos’ goes, it’s about as bland and as uninspiring as it goes, and as when most of these things come to the crunch, it’s bullshit.

Metro management has sent out an email to all staff asking them to volunteer, yes you read that correctly, volunteer their time to act in a customer service role during the Spring Racing Carnival.

The Spring Racing Carnival and the Royal Melbourne Show are two of the busiest times of the year on Metro’s network and extra staff are always needed to support local staff. The way that this has been managed since even before privatisation is that all extra shifts possible are allocated to local part timers. Any shifts remaining are then open to be filled from part timers all across the network. If a few happen to remain, full timers can be offered overtime. Finally, if all shifts still aren’t filled, labour hire can contracted to perform the most peripheral roles. This has never been required, however, due to the ever increasing part time culture of work at Metro, all hours are readily snapped up.

Spring Carnival work can be some of the most dangerous of the year for Station Staff due to the fact that packed and delayed trains and drunk and often drugged up customers are not a good mix, with staff caught in the crossfire. It is no place for a person without experience in this environment to be. Recognizing this, the Rail, Tram and Bus Union has immediately filed a dispute notice.

Metro management must be confident that they will be able to find the requisite amount of scabs (scab is not a word I ever use lightly, but doing work that someone else would be paid for is a scab), otherwise they would not have posted the ad. The question is, who would be interested in doing such a thing? 
Plenty in Metro’s bloated middle management section would be happy to do so, thinking that sticking their brown nose further up their bosses arse might get them a promotion.

Sadly, some part time station staff may be tempted as well, in a misguided thought that winning ‘brownie points’ could lead to the coveted full time position. They must be spoken to and have it explained the very serious effect scabbing will have on their reputation.

There are many theories as to why such a grubby course of action has been taken. It may just be an attempt by Metro to introduce and normalise such a practice. It could be an attempt to split the workforce. The most commonly discussed theory however, is that a certain manager’s bonus is linked to the amount of public holiday penalties are paid to staff per year, the lower the better for her. With an extra holiday being introduced to celebrate (whoops, sorry) commiserate the death of a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha who married her cousin, this certain manager may be clamoring to save her bonus. We may never know.

One thing is for certain. This grubby corporate behavior from a foreign multinational in charge of a vital public services demonstrates more than ever that our public transport must be just that again, public. Rip up the contracts and give the system back to the people!

"JOB SECURITY - WORTH FIGHTING FOR"

Written by: Ned K. on 31 October 2021 

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and affiliated Unions are starting a "Job Security - Worth Fighting For" campaign narrative, coinciding with the lead up to the coming federal election.

Surveys conducted by the ACTU and many Unions show that job security is a highly important issue for workers across pretty much all industries and occupations. The stand downs, job losses and cuts to hours of work experienced by millions of workers during the Covid 19 pandemic of the last two years have taken the level of job insecurity to new heights.

What is "job insecurity"? It takes many forms. Casualization, labor hire, fixed short term contracts, sub contract work, insufficient hours of work, low wage jobs, so-called gig economy jobs are some of the most common forms of job insecurity.

However, under capitalism, even so-called secure jobs such as in the public service or large manufacturing businesses turn into insecure jobs without warning. 

For example, outsourcing and/or privatizing of government jobs, trade wars leading to reduction in production and job losses or loss of regular overtime or even cutting back from three shifts to one day shift can see workers moving from relative job security to job insecurity within a very short space of time.
The ACTU is hopeful that it has found an issue that the majority of workers (especially young workers, new migrant workers and women workers) feel strongly enough about and see as "worth fighting for"!

'Worth fighting for" has been included in the campaign narrative to try and replicate the success of the "Your Rights At Work, Worth Fighting For" campaign which succeeded in throwing out the reactionary Howard Government in 2007.

Job security in its many different forms is an issue that affects millions of workers far beyond the 9% union membership density of the private sector workforce in Australia. 

It is a campaign narrative that is likely to win support from millions of workers, especially if linked to the insecurity for working people caused by the impact of climate change.

For young people secure jobs for the future is inseparably linked to the issue of environmental sustainability.

Within the leadership of the Secure Jobs Worth Fighting For campaign on the eve of a federal election, there will no doubt be an opportunist element who want to steer the campaign to a dead end if a Labor government is elected in the coming election. 

The stated intention of the campaign is that it is a longer-term campaign to unite millions of workers to define in common struggle what an Australia with secure jobs will look like and what changes to the current set up need to be made.

The initiators of the campaign say that the extent of the changes needed for secure work for workers will depend on the development of the strength and power of the grass roots movement in workplaces and communities. This is encouraging to hear.

The ACTU formally represents far less than 50% of workers at any point in time due to the low union membership density. However, Unions in general have a fluid membership. Many workers not currently in a union may have been in one a year ago or may be in a workplace shortly where there are union members and union rank and file leaders. 

The success of this latest ACTU campaign getting off the ground will largely depend on the level of involvement and leadership of active workers in their workplaces and communities and build from the ground up. 

Any attempt to confine the activities of such a stated campaign to marginal Liberal or National Party electorates should be opposed as most workers, union members or not, know that to reverse the trend of insecure work will need a social movement that extends far beyond the establishment's three year election cycle.

 

Campaign for secure work is a worthy cause

 

Written by: Ned K. on 24 July 2021

The ACTU leadership has been investigating what are the key issues that can unite all workers in Australia. 

At a recent union forum ACTU Secretary Sally McManus said that insecure work was an issue that union members across all union memberships identified as a most important issue. 

Insecure work in various forms was present in industries with high paying salaries such as tertiary education to the lowest paid rural farm workers. McManus said that many unions already campaign on insecure work issues. 

She said that what has changed is that there has been a shift in public opinion with the majority of Australians now really concerned about insecure work. The stand-downs by employers during Covid-19 lockdowns and the federal government's scrapping Job Keeper has added to the change in public opinion.

She said that in her role as ACTU Secretary, she was determined to lead a campaign that linked the isolated fights around the many manifestations of insecure work through "umbrella messaging" captured by the slogan "Secure Jobs, Worth Fighting For"

She said that as important an issue that job security is for workers, it is only one part of a bigger picture goal of the ACTU affiliated unions and their members. 

What was "the bigger goal"? She said the bigger goal for union members was to struggle to change the industrial laws which strangled workers’ capacity to take collective action apart from the extremely limited "protected industrial action" during isolated enterprise bargaining campaigns.
 
She said that there would be the usual campaigning by unions in marginal electoral Seats leading up to the federal election to get rid of the Morrison Government.

However, unlike the ACTU leadership at the time of the 2007 election, election of an ALP Government was not the end of the matter, but the beginning in the fight for secure jobs. She said even if workers did agitate sufficiently for a new ALP government to make substantial changes to industrial laws, there was no guarantee that new laws would be enough. She said, "We will need collective action on the ground" both to force changes to anti-worker laws and also to have any new laws more favourable to workers complied with by the employers.
 
No doubt, as the election gets nearer, there will be a push by some within the ACTU and within the ALP upper echelons to change the campaign slogan of ""Secure Jobs, Worth Fighting For" to "Secure Jobs, Worth Voting For"! 

The 2007 campaign "Your Rights At Work, Worth Fighting For" was changed to "Workers Rights, Worth Voting For" and as soon as the election was over, the ACTU dropped the whole campaign and organisation that had been built up "on the ground" in workplaces and communities.

Workers were left with "Work Choices Lite" in the form of the Fair Work Act.

It is pleasing at this stage to hear Sally McManus commit to a campaign for Secure Jobs that is independent of parliamentary election outcomes.

Time will tell whether this eventuates. Workers will embrace such a campaign as their deteriorating economic situation compels them to do so. Workers will find alternative leaders from within their own ranks in such a campaign if current ones fall to live up to expectations.

Wages: why the capitalist system is always exploitative

Nick G.

Two new studies into aspects of wage payments in Australia, and the repeated call by the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe, for higher wages, create an opportune time to discuss wages from a Marxist perspective.

That perspective requires us to go beyond the surface phenomena of wages and to understand why Marx, sounding at first like a grumpy old industrialist, called for scrapping the slogan: “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage”. After all, that is what motivates union activism and is the cornerstone of much of what passes as progressive politics.

We will look further down at why Marx rejected the “fairness” of the slogan. We highly recommend Humphrey McQueen’s 150 Years Young: Marx’s Capital , available to readers as a downloadable pdf on our website, for more on this topic.

First, let us note that amongst the many contradictions of capitalism is the one that compels individual capitalists and corporate CEOs to try to keep the wages of their own workforce as low as possible, while requiring the workforce as a whole to have expanding wages in order to absorb through consumption those goods and services which provide the capitalists with their profits.

Lowe wears two hats: as the head of the financial industry in Australia and as CEO of a particular, if central, component of that industry.  In the former case, he said last June that workers should demand “wage justice”, a call repeated last week when he pointed the finger at employers for Australia's extraordinarily low growth in wages, saying they are not paying more despite the tightening jobs market. This was Lowe looking at this from the perspective of the capitalist class as a whole – worrying about the sustainability of profits, of bank loans and the housing market.

In between June and November, Lowe granted Reserve Bank employees average pay rises of just 2 per cent a year over the next three years - below the current rate of inflation and Treasury forecasts of inflation. Workers who are meeting all the expectations of their role could still see their pay go backwards in real terms under the new RBA workplace agreement. This was Lowe as a corporate CEO trying to contain the same costs that he accused other employers of trying to contain.

Dr Lowe said he wasn't "calling on the workers of the world united to rise up against the evil capitalists”. He was trying to say that it was okay for wages to grow a bit more quickly – just not in his bank!

The Reserve Bank workplace agreement fits the pattern of post-GFC Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBAs) as revealed in this graph from Alan Kohler:

The graph shows that since 2008, wage increases under new agreements have been below those contained in agreements that were current at the time new ones came in.

Other evidence of the current decline in wages comes from the Australia Institute’s Excessive Hours, Unpaid Overtime and the Future of Work: An Update, and a paper by two NSW academics for the Migrant Worker Justice Initiative, Wage Theft in Australia. Both papers provide quantitative data on the deterioration of wage levels in Australia.

Not surprisingly, those polled for Excessive Hours… provided evidence of ongoing polarisation between those with full-time, relatively secure jobs, and a growing portion working part-time, casual, temporary, or insecure positions. On average, full-time workers gave 6 hours of unpaid overtime per week to their bosses; part-time and casual gave 3.3 unpaid hours per week on average.  This “time theft”, as the authors call it, has an estimated value of $130.7 billion in 2016-17, an increase from the previous year’s $130/7 billion.

The “breadth, depth and complexity of non-compliance with Australian labour law” is acutely felt among the 900,000 temporary migrants with work rights in Australia according to the Wage Theft…study.  These include international students, backpackers and s457 visa holders. Together they comprise about 11% of the Australian labour market. All are required to be paid minimum wage rates by law.  A substantial proportion (detailed figures by employment area, ethnicity, migrant status etc are given in the report) were paid around half the legal minimum wage.

Most people would know that for Marxists, wages are a mask for exploitation.  And for most, this simply means that the wages are “unfair” by being too low or earned because of excessive demands on the time of workers or through harsh intensification of the work to be performed.  Wage Theft… offers a definition of exploitation along those lines: “exploitation means an employer’s use of workplace practices that are coercive, criminal, or constitute serious breaches of Australian labour law, in order to benefit the employer”.

Marx, however, offers a radically different concept of exploitation, one that sees exploitation embedded in every purchase from the worker of his or her labour power by the employer, regardless of how high or low the wage, safe or unsafe, tiring or relaxing, long or short the conditions for the performance of the work.

Paradoxically, that concept of exploitation is based on what Marx called an exchange of equal values.  If the employer pays the worker enough to cover his/her cost of living and the worker creates values equivalent to that in the production of saleable goods or services, then there has been an equal exchange of values.  However, the worker enters into a contract with the employer to work, say, for 8 hours a day.  It may only take 3 or 4 hours to create the value of his/her wage in products.  The remainder of the time at work is time in which the worker produces more than the value of what has been paid in wages: upon its sale, the employer takes that value, surplus to the exchange of equal values, as profit.

On this basis, a person may be paid a high wage in a comfortable work environment and cover his/her own costs in an hour, working the remaining seven for nothing.  Here the rate of exploitation is very high. Conversely, a low wage worker may find it hard to cover his/her own costs in seven hours and really only contributes one hour of labour power to the surplus value taken by the employer.  Here the rate of exploitation is very low.

If this seems to stand logic on its head, then it does so only to the same extent that pre-Copernicans thought Copernicus a liar and heretic for claiming that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe and that the Sun did not circle it.  The Sun quite obviously rose in the East, travelled across the surface of the Earth and sank in the West. How could there be logic in the theories of the crazy Polish scientist?

All of the matters that have emerged in the studies above (the extension of the working day, the intensification of the work routine, the just-in-time employment conditions of contract and part-time employees, the non-payment of overtime, the payment of wages below legal minimum levels and so on) relate to the employers’ need to reduce the amount of time the worker spends on the equal exchange of values with the employer and increasing the amount of time spent producing surplus value.

For Marx, exploitation was not a moral judgement, but a mathematical relationship between the two types of time hidden behind the mask of the “indivisible” working day. Swindling -  that is, not even allowing the worker to earn enough to cover living costs – denies even the exchange of equal values and is exploitation of a special type. Swindling is particularly in evidence in the industries covered in the Wages Theft…study.

Be it exploitation or be it swindling, Marx could not conceive of a situation where there was “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” in the capitalist economy. There was always the unfair and unjust fact of the capitalist economy requiring the theft from the worker of at least part of the time he or she was at work, and thus, of part of the value created by the worker in that time.

That theft arose solely from the private ownership of the materials, tools and processes used to create goods and services – commodities - for sale. If that private ownership could be abolished then the surplus values need no longer be privately appropriated by a handful of rich and super-rich capitalists, but socially appropriated as a revenue stream for the benefit of all productive members of society. 

The replacement of a society run by and for capitalists, where exploitation always exists in the relations between labour and capital, by a society run by and for the workers and where there is no basis for exploitation, is the promise of socialism.

In Australia’s case, the first socialist measure is the winning of anti-imperialist independence. Smashing the power of the biggest, best-organised and most powerful section of the ruling class, the section which comprises the imperialists and their hangers-on, will facilitate the further expansion of the socialist economy and remove wage-slavery from the equation.

Food and Beverage Workers Under Attack

Ned K.

With the decline of the automotive manufacturing, white goods, coal fired power industry and steel industry in Australia, some political servants of imperialism in Australia are pinning their electoral hopes on a vibrant food manufacturing industry providing jobs in areas of growing blue collar unemployment. 

There is some truth in this, particularly in wine and dairy industry areas of Australia as exports of wine and milk products to Asia add to the established export markets in Europe and to a lesser extent the USA. 

However, even in a buoyant industry like wine, use of labour hire at cheap rates is on the rise.

There are also worrying signs for workers in the food and beverage industry generally regarding their wages and conditions. In Queensland recently Coca Cola announced it was changing its production focus away from the high sugar component soft drinks to other products with lower sugar content. To implement their product changes they also decreased the wages of their production workforce and increased labour hire workers at much lower base award rates. 

In Western Australia, Hong Kong based food and food ingredient manufacture Goodman Fielder announced complete closure of its bread bakery with the loss of about 100 jobs. It plans to have its products made at the plant owned by George Weston Foods, its main competitor in the Australian bread market. 

In the milk product manufacturing industry, Parmalat has recently started hiring labour hire employees on the lowest wage levels and requiring them to perform higher wage level jobs. 

This is all part of the general push by imperialism to lower living standards of workers to increase profits. 

Workers in the food and beverage industry have no illusions about their job security and the ruthless behaviour of Coca Cola in closing its Adelaide manufacturing plant will only heighten their vigilance.

Working class struggle wins the battle against giant multinational brewery

Alice M.

Savouring their sweet victory and proudly chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated”, the courageous Carlton United Brewery maintenance workers, surrounded by cheering and clapping union and community supporters, walked back to work through the CUB factory gates (Melbourne), having won back their original wages and conditions after 180 days of resilient struggle.

The CUB maintenance workers’ six month fight with the world’s biggest multinational brewing monopoly, Ab InBev, is no mean achievement. It takes place at a time of intense assault by global capital on the working class around the world. The CUB55’s “Battle of the Breweries” struggle succeeded in pushing back the multinational’s attack against brewery workers in Australia.

The struggle of united and determined CUB workers, the union movement and the wider community is a victory for the entire working class in Australia and a blow to big business. It sent ripples of nervousness through the Boardrooms of many big business and multinational corporations scheming to widen attacks on the working class through contracting and casualisation.

For more than six months, the CUB55 maintenance workers were sitting it out, with their supporters, at the unions and community picket outside the CUB brewery gates in Melbourne.  Preparations were made to be there for Christmas, and dig in for as long as it took to get their jobs back on their original wages and conditions.  They refused to accept the 65% wage cut; and they refused to walk away, find another job and allow the multinational to implement its anti-worker and anti-union plans to hire new casual workers on less pay, and casualise the entire brewery workforce.

The CUB55 workers knew that this fight was much bigger than the protection of brewery workers’ wages and conditions.  They knew this was an important struggle for all workers in Australia that needed to push back the big business and multinational tactics of contracting and casualisation.  They stood their ground and persisted to fight the biggest global multinational brewing monopoly to protect the hard won wages and conditions of all workers in Australia.  They knew that the outcome of this struggle would have ramifications for the working class in Australia. The resilience of CUB55 workers, their wide support in the union movement and in the community has forced AB InBev to pull back. 

When AB InBev gobbled up the previous multinational owners of CUB, SAB Miller, it didn’t count on the fierce resistance by the organised working class in Australia and the wide public outrage at the treatment of workers by a foreign multinational. It was the determination and unflinching resilience of the CUB55 and the union movement and the wide public support that forced AB InBev to retreat.

Union EBA protects brewery workers’ original wages and conditions

The CUB55 maintenance workers’ original wages and conditions are protected in the new 3 year EBA.  The new EBA applies to any labour contractor or sub-contractor during the life of the agreement – including changes in contractors.  

The CUB brand’s dominant position in the Australian market was the main attraction for AB InBev, the biggest global beer monopoly, in its takeover of CUB.  Ironically, it was also the popularity and loyalty of working people in Australia to the local CUB brand and the rights of brewery workers that helped the CUB55 succeed in the fight against the multinational.

The loyalty of the people to the local working people’s iconic Australian beer brand, protection of local jobs and the manufacturing industry in this country, worked against the multinational’s schemes.  It showed where the workers’ and unions’ real strength in struggle can be found.

AB InBev’s alternative of scaling down its production of beer in Australia, or closing down in the face of strong workers’ and  union resistance and importing beer from low cost countries, would have been strongly and widely resisted and was no longer an option for the world’s biggest brewing multinational.

The CUB55 victory is gloriously celebrated by many workers. The repeated experience and history of working class struggle shows that workers’ hard won gains are only temporary and big business constantly plans new tactics to come back and take away any gains made by workers.  This is capitalism, and the struggle between labour and capital never ceases. 

It is inherent to capitalism to relentlessly push down wages and conditions to maximise bigger profits.  And it is only working class struggle and resistance that can win concessions from capital and defend hard won gains.  The CUB55 struggle shows the huge capacity and potential of the working class and its allies in the wider community to unite and mobilise against multinational corporations’ attacks on workers’ rights, and to defend local jobs and local industries.

It shows the huge potential of a great united movement in the struggle for anti-imperialist independence and a socialist Australia where the working class will run this country for working people, not the multinational corporations.

Extend the victory of the resilient CUB55 workers and their supporters - Kick out the greedy multinational corporations from Australia!

Full-time jobs harder to find

Ned K.

The Reserve Bank has recently released its analysis on employment trends in Australia. 

It claims that in 2016 the official unemployment rate declined slightly to 5.6%, and that all of the increase in jobs was part-time, meaning less than 38 hours a week. Since 2013 67% of new jobs were part time. 

The report says that in the 1960s when manufacturing in Australia was at or near its peak, part-time employment comprised about 10% of total employment. In 2016 part-time employment is about 30%.

It is unclear from the report whether part-time employment includes sub-contractors or workers on ABNs. So the figure may be even higher than 30%. Similarly it does not say if part-time employment includes casuals working less than full-time hours. The latter is common with workers employed by labour hire companies who often work unpredictable hours which may be full-time equivalent hours one week and very few the next.

Even more alarming for the thousands of workers to be made redundant from full-time jobs in the car and car component industry over the next 18 months is that the underemployment figure for 2016 has increased from 7% in 2010 to 9% in 2016. Underemployment is measured by those workers who declare that they are looking to work more hours per day or week in order to feed their families, pay the bills and keep a roof over their heads.

The Reserve Bank report says that the rate of growth of part-time work is in what it calls "households services", a broad category including food, retail, healthcare, accommodation, education and recreation. In this category, part-time work is averaging 45% of total employment. It is not surprising that with the decline of full-time work and rising real unemployment of 14.6% (5.6% + 9%) that workers in the "household services" sectors are prioritizing job security and security of hours of work ahead of higher wage increases in enterprise bargaining struggles with their immediate employers. Even full-time workers in production and distribution sectors are doing the same as employers use labour hire workers more and more.

The whole situation has led to a decline in the average enterprise agreement wage outcomes for all industries from between 3.5% to 4% to the range of 2.5% to 3%. This is a transfer of wealth from workers to employers in the form of profits.

Employers argue that they need "flexible work forces" and need to "contain costs and be competitive" when defending the increase in part-time jobs and the reluctance to agree to conversion clauses in Agreements which include the right of a part-time worker to become full-time when vacant shifts arise. 

If the employers want "flexibility" and no longer require workers to work 38 hours a week, the time is ripe for a shorter working week of 32 hours a week on full pay. 

This would increase the number of full time jobs and lift the hourly rate of part-time workers

Cleaning industry workers fighting for a fair deal once again

Ned K.

It was in the dying days of the Howard Government's Work Choices that contract cleaners in city office buildings combined together to win pattern collective Agreements which increase their wages by nearly 40% in four years, job security at change of contract and an increase in minimum shift time from 2 hours to 4 hours.

Once the Agreements were implemented, the ruling class representatives in the property services sector and their subservient contract cleaning companies did their utmost to prevent the spread of the cleaners' gains to other sectors such as shopping centres.

Some big property owners colluded with the cleaning companies to create new employing entities to try and avoid compliance with the terms and conditions of the cleaners' newly won collective Agreements. By the nominal expiry date of the Agreements in 2013, property owners through the Property Council of Australia gave the order to cleaning companies not to negotiate any new Agreements with cleaners and their union United Voice.

The cleaning companies also set about de-unionizing the cleaning workforce by restricting organizing rights of the cleaners' union and selective hiring of cleaners whom they anticipated would be least likely to join a union. There were a few exceptions with some property owners deciding to ignore the Property Council thinking that it was best to not "take on" the cleaners again and lose as they had done in 2007-8.

By 2013 the high turnover of labour in the cleaning industry meant that many cleaners had not participated in the initial struggle to win better pay and conditions back in 2007-8. So the majority of office cleaners decided not to push for new Agreements provided they maintained the superior above-award conditions contained in the initial collective Agreements. This was understandable but proved to be a mistake.

Once the wage gap narrowed between the nominally expired Agreement and the award, the cleaning companies, supported by the Property Council of Australia decided to apply to the Fair Work Commission to terminate the Agreements and push city office cleaners back to the minimum award conditions.

Whether they succeed in dong this remains to be seen as cleaners' resistance to this latest move by the greedy property owners and the cleaning companies they control gains momentum.

The attack on cleaners' working conditions is part of the overall attack on workers in Australia at the moment. It seems that even the very restrictive potential power that workers have in a bargaining period is too much for the ruling class to tolerate, particularly in the ruling class's "non-core" sectors such as contract cleaning. The exceptions are in some "core" sectors where the ruling class reluctantly accepts some collective voice of workers but uses the enterprise specific bargaining system and restrictive worker rights that go with it to contain struggle and minimize any gains made by workers.

An interim demand to combat this situation is for industry-wide collective bargaining and the right of workers to take industrial action across workplaces and outside of the short bargaining period.

For the longer term workers are learning through these experiences of short term wins being taken back by the capitalists at first opportunity, that the only answer is for the workers themselves as a class to become the ruling class of society.

Construction workers organise against casualisation

Louisa L.

A tsunami of casualisation and subcontracting is crashing over our country, submerging workers' wages and conditions, and drowning the hopes of most young people for job security and the chance to ever own a home. Casualisation is no accident. Oversupply of labour power, born from inevitable capitalist boom-bust cycles, is deliberately used to entrench corporate rule.

Yet in NSW the CFMEU held back this tidal wave from the construction industry for a time.

Workers are strongest when demand for labour is high, so in 2013 the NSW CFMEU took advantage of the mining and construction boom's labour shortage to enforce security of employment in the State Code, by requiring subcontractors to pay the same rates to employees as the major contractor. They didn't sit down and chat nicely with the bosses, they fought for what they got!

The corporate ruling class was prepared to put up with it for a time, but waited till conditions suited it better.

Keeping companies in line

According to the Financial Review, the Fair Work Building and Construction Inspectorate (FWBC), established under the Gillard administration to replace the Australian Building and Construction Commission, “has developed a robustness of activity under the Coalition Government”, with over 1000 investigations in the past year, and 62 current legal cases, a large number against the CFMEU or its officials.

But there's more to it than the Coalition's  iron fist tactics against workers.“Tough Jobs, The Rise of an Australian Working Underclass”, a CFMEU published research analysis led Dr Kristy Jones, points out 3,700,000 Australians are now either unemployed, casually employed or working as 'independent' contractors.  

Corporations have a new message to workers, “You're expendable,” and Fair Work Australia (FWA)  has now blocked every NSW construction EBA coming up for renewal. None have been signed in months, halting overdue pay increases.

FWBC is organising this tactic's implementation, conjuring up rules that companies and unions have 'no right to tell another employer what to do '.

Individual companies have sometimes been prepared to back down to union militancy, but FWBC also enforces corporate unity of action. While denying that right to others, it can and does tell companies what to do. It helps organise corporations as a class, instead of separate competitors for profit.

Nothing workers have won is secure

In '07, Labor rode in to parliament on the union-led Your Rights at Work campaign, yet corporations still ran Australia as usual, driven by the capitalist imperative – make greater profits or perish.

Unlike the Coalition, which plans to reinstate the ABCC immediately (despite barely mentioning it during the actual election campaign) Labor, under both Rudd and Gillard, delayed and then watered down Howard's industrial laws instead of junking them. Current ACTU President Ged Kearney declared that not maintaining workers' mobilisation enabled this.

The results speak loudly; under “Fair” Work Australia it's OK for a company to sack half its  workers and replace them with casuals on 65 per cent of wages, or dump Australian seafarers on local routes, and replace them with deeply exploited foreign crews.

But it's illegal for workers to strike at all in some industries and legal only during 'bargaining' periods for the rest. Doing their job is also illegal for the 30 union officials denied right of entry to job sites. 28 of them are CFMEU officials.

While ever multinational corporations hold the commanding heights of  Australia's economy, they will stand above parliaments, and ensure nothing workers have won in the past is secure.

Questions and solutions

Construction is a physically tough industry which results in the death and maiming of workers. Where unions and workers are weakened, safety suffers. Deadly asbestos has already reappeared on Australian construction sites in the race for profits. 

Policy changes, laws passed by parliaments, are not solutions. They arise from the real solution, our ability to organise and fight.

We must ask the question, what do unions and working people have to do to destroy the network of laws and  punishments that trap unions and workers, denying them fundamental rights like the right to strike?

It can only come from the selfless action and sacrifice of  leaders prepared to stand up to threats of fines, jail and sale of personal assets. So much has been lost, and the cost of taking it back will be high.

Beyond that is the much bigger struggle to end capitalism's rule once and for all, to put our country genuinely under the control of the overwhelming majority of the people, making capitalist booms and busts a thing of the past.

Australia's people are crying out for leadership, for fundamental change. That requires a different kind of leadership and different kinds of organisation, that go beyond the union role of winning better conditions under imperialist rule, to overthrowing that rule.

When the tail end of this boom finally busts, there will be hell to pay. The implications of that crash will make the current casualisation tsunami look like a ripple in a toddler's wading pool. We'd better be ready.