Australia: Summer of discontent – workers strike back
[Workers Power Australia, March 2000]
Recent visitors to Victoria could be forgivenfor thinking the state is on the verge of an impending industrial war. Themainstream press and TV news is filled workers striking for wage increases, less work hours and the defence of existing conditions, while employerscounter with lockouts and an anti-union propaganda blitz.
The Yallourn energy lockout, the strike of gas pipeline workers, thestruggle of textile workers in West Melbourne for their entitlements, andof course the fight in the construction industry around the 36-hour workingweek, have all brought the industrial temperature in the state to boiling point. It looks set to get evenhotter, as the Labor Government intervenes on the side of the bosses, anddemands that workers "put the state first".
The reasons for this explosion are many.Generally they show the intrinsic tension between bosses and workers,despite the millennial dreamers’ vision of a new century, free of class struggle. Beyond this though, thereare more specific reasons for the present industrial conflicts.
Catalysts
The expiry of a whole series of enterprisebargaining agreements is the most immediate catalyst. Employers have soughtto wring new concessions out of workers, by imposing harsher work conditions, plus changes to hours and over-timerates. This was the crux of the struggle at Yallourn Energy, which is stillsimmering despite Premier Bracks’ shameful decision to force theworkers back to work.
Employers’ attempts to effectivelydeploy the Federal Government’s anti-union laws, have also figuredprominently.
The crude attempts by BHP to force its workersin the Pilbara in WA out of the unions and onto individual contracts,provoked workers in other states to take action. And they have good reason: if BHP is successful in imposingindividual contracts in WA, workers elsewhere will be the next target.
An important reason for growing industrialunrest is the capitalist economic boom itself.
Everyday workers hear of new record profits and obscene salaries of seniormanagement. Workers rightly want a greater share in the wealth their labourhas created. For example, construction unions are demanding a 24 per centpay increase over three years,and a 36-hour working week.
Opportunities
The growing war on Victorian work sites presents both opportunities anddangers.
Workers stand to preserve existing gains, and improve their present wagesand conditions. Renewed militancy creates the potential to empower the rankand file of the unions, giving greater confidence in fighting the FederalGovernment’s anti-union laws and bosses’ union bashing.
The example set by stronger sections of the class - such as the buildingworkers – can show the way forward for other sectors entering wagenegotiations. The example of militant mass action can serve as a beacon toother workers, showing what’s needed to fight the bosses.
Dangers
Sectionalism threatens the unity of the unionmovement. The Yallourn Energy dispute saw how quickly even a well placedsection of the working class can be marginalised by a united front of the capitalist class.
It is possible that even powerful unions - theCFMEU, the ETU - will again be marginalised and defeated if they don’t seek to generalise their struggles.
The emerging offensive struggle by militant sections of the class, whileimproving their own wages and conditions, could leave less organised,part-time, and casual workers behind. This would further divide the workingclass, providing the bourgeoisie with additional leverage against the labor movement.
Perhaps the greatest threat to workers’success, however, comes from within the unions themselves. Privilegedbureaucrats have sold out workers’ struggles in the past - and theywill again.
The bureacracy who head the union movement at present, have already shown that they haveno appetite for pushing beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality. Theyprefer to fight in the courts, rather than mobilising their members on thestreets and pickets. All recent history - from the MUA lockout to the Yallourn struggle - demonstrate that thisis a recipe for defeat.
The bureaucracy’s legalistic strategybinds the unions to a legal system designed to defend the rights of thosewith property. It sidelines the rank and file of the unions, who hold the real power to bring the bosses to theirknees: the power to withdraw their labour.
Finally, the trade union bureaucracy cannot betrusted because of their intimate relationship with the treacherous leadersof the Labor Party.
Bracks and Labor
Throughout recent industrial disputes, SteveBracks’ Government has displayed all the hallmarks of reformism: itstwo facedness, its cynicism towards workers, and its outright hypocrisy.
Until the first weeks of this year, Bracks andLabor refused to enter into the industrial fights, saying that industrialrelations is a matter only between employers and workers.
But as soon as the industrial climate grew threatening for the bigcompanies, Bracks showed his true colours. In early February he invokedemergency laws to force the Yallourn strikers back to work, and only dayslater condemned the demands of construction workers.
The zigzags in Bracks’ rhetoric show thecontradictory nature of the ALP. Labor is what socialists call a BourgeoisWorkers Party (BWP).
It is a workers party in that its origins are in the workers movement, itis linked to the unions, and unions support it at the polls. However, Laboris a bourgeois party in that its programme is pro-capitalist - it defendsprivate property, capitalist profits, and the rights of capitalists to exploit workers.
This contradiction comes to the fore whenworkers are in struggle, and Labor is in Government. The scope forpresenting the party as the representative of workers is decisively diminished when that same party has to defend profits by attackingworkers.
This is precisely where Bracks now findshimself: between the rock of the workers’ determination for a betterdeal, and the hard place of the employers’ defence of their profits and privilege. Labor will come down on the sideof the bosses, because Labor’s committed to reforming the capitalistsystem rather than overthrowing it.
As Labor claims to represent, all class-conscious workers must demand thatLabor immediately declare in favour of the workers presently in struggle. To begin with, Laborshould support a 36-hour week without loss of pay for all workers, not justconstruction workers.
Their failure to do so should be condemned, and a cross-sectoral campaignof mass strike action, taking its lead from the construction workers’struggle, should be built to realise these demands. Let’s turn this summer of discontent into workers victories that Bracks willreally see as "unacceptable"!
