Workers look for leadership

Vanguard November 2013 p. 12
Ned K.

With the demise of the Labor Government and an openly anti-worker political party now administering the political affairs of the big corporations, workers are looking for answers and leadership.

The Labor Party’s response has been to ask workers to join it and have their say on who is the next leader of the Labor Party, Shorten or Albanese. While Labor Party membership has gone up recently, not even the official trade union movement is united on who should lead the Labor Party, nor on how much relevance this has to the lives of working Australians.

A healthy trend within some unions is emerging where there is more emphasis on building their own independent political agenda and winning it through campaigning on the ground. Unions are being forced to do this because of the concerns of their members about ‘big picture’ issues like the rising cost of living, a regressive tax system where the big end of town pays next to nothing, declining but ever more expensive health care and education, and many union members’ correct perception that the parliamentary set up is no solution. 

However, the reactionary Abbott Government and the big corporations that instruct it are also forcing union members and other concerned workers to fight on other more traditional industrial fronts at the same time. Attacks on penalty rates, individual flexibility agreements which cut award conditions, restrictions on trade union rights to function, are sure to be attempted by Abbott and his backers in the near future. In fact, they have already started with the resurrection of the ABCC against construction workers.

For progressive elements in the workers’ movement, there is the opportunity to unite millions of workers against these coming attacks in the context of building an independent movement for change to set the political agenda of the country and take it out of the hands of the big business and their parliamentary spokespersons.

 
Through these struggles, new leaders will emerge, based on their own day to day experiences as workers. In the case of migrant workers, they will combine their day to day experiences with the knowledge from intense social and political struggles from their countries of birth.