Stories to April 2000 include shorter work week in France and Australia, East Timor & Indonesia , Third Wave, mandatory sentencing and more

February 2000 editorial

A workers' plan for workers' rights

"If we were to go back and pick up Braybrook, then people who were affected before that could come to us and say, what about us... there'd be thousands, tens of thousands" said John Howard.

He was rejecting the demands of demonstrating Pelaco workers from Braybrook, Victoria, who want the government to contribute to the payment of their lost entitlements, when their employer went broke. Their expectations were raised by the Government's support for workers employed at National Textiles, in the Hunter Valley, where John Howard's brother Stan is Chair of the Board. Indeed there are tens of thousands of workers who have lost entitlements, from Woodlawn, Oakdale, Austral Pacific, Grafton abbatoirs, Buddy Holly Production Company and more.

Unionists, Labor politicians, newspaper editors and those who write letters to them are united in their moral outrage at the injustices suffered by employees of bankrupt companies, particularly since a one day national strike by the CFMEU last August, which finally won payment for Oakdale miners. On the same day that the government promised to help National Textile workers, it was revealed that George Trumble, ex-head of AMP Insurance company, had received over $13million in severance pay. NSW Labor Premier Bob Carr felt able to rage about the 'obscenity' of the contrast between what a sacked corporate executive gets, compared to a sacked worker.

Yet Bob Carr and the ALP do not propose any reforms which would fix this state of affairs.

When a company goes belly up, back pay, long service leave, annual leave and so on can be unpaid. Company law gives creditors owning capital the right to receive funds from bankrupt companies, ahead of workers employed in those companies. Yet even if the pecking order were reversed, bankrupt companies may not have enough funds to pay entitlements, or at least may be able to appear not to have enough funds to pay.

Once the Government came to the aid of the National Textile workers, everyone else with lost entitlements was ropable. Lots of people are complaining that it should be the responsibility of employers to pay these debts, not the general taxpayer. Union and ALP leaders point out how stingy Reith's longer term proposed scheme is, leaving workers still well out of pocket. ACTU Secretary., Greg Combet has called on the Government "to establish comprehensive protection for employees so that all accrued entitlements were protected against company collapse" and "to amend corporations law to classify employee entitlements as debts, and increase penalties for directors who traded during insolvency." according an ACTU press release of 25 January.

The ALP is proposing a compulsory insurance scheme for worker entitlements, to be paid into by all employers. Employers complain that this would create another cost in employing people, which has to be born by all companies, even those who don't go bust. (Yes, well that is what insurance is, you'd think a capitalist would know that!)

How about a national trust fund, managed by the workers, where all entitlements over a small amount have to be deposited? This would be a much bigger fund than any insurance, and it would be in the hands of representatives of workers, not bosses.

In fact the Oakdale miners were paid from the coal miners' $200 million Long Service Leave Fund, which Reith had been wanting to abolish, and return funds to the employers. True, the Oakdale miners were paid not just long service leave, but all other unpaid entitlements from this fund.

We can thank the strike campaign of the CFMEU, which won payment for Oakdale miners, for fuelling the outrage at sacked workers missing out on their entitlements.

The Oakdale victory reinforces an anti-union prejudice that it is the strong blue-collar male unions only which can and will fight for themselves. Other unionists, weaker because of their industrial bargaining position cannot mount the same fight and are therefore left in the cold. Many young or not-yet unionised workers fear they will miss out in a second rate scheme to protect entitlements. If the union movement does campaign for and win a scheme that will benefit all workers, including these less organised and powerful workers, this will strengthen the entire movement

Without a campaign by the union movement, and a clear workers' plan for a solution, then we'll end up with the issue being defused by Reith's inadequate taxpayer funded "safety net" which will leave tens of thousands of workers dissatisfied and in dire straits.

Entitled to more than entitlements - what about jobs?

The real problem is that workers are being sacked at all. There is general recognition of the injustice of being sacked and losing all your accumulated leave and so on. Why is it that loss of entitlements is galvanising workers into action, and the media and politicians into expressions of sympathy? Yet workers getting laid off as such, is not?

Howard has the hide to say that the National Textiles workers were laid off, "through no fauilt of their own", as though other workers are at fault - and here he is probably thinking of unions such as the CFMEU. Is there an idea of innocence here, implying that workers who don't work hard enough for little enough pay, might be the cause of some companies going bust?

Or is it resignation to company closures, as a result of 'globalisation'? Nothing to be done? But on the entitlements, at least the government can do something to protect them, can't it? And a major factor in the holding of the view that something could be done, is that there are now many instances of workers who have lost entitlements maintaining their solidarity in picketing and camapaigning, not letting the issue die, culminating in the national one day strike by the CFMEU last August for the Oakdale miners. The strike won an agreement that employers would produce the money. That is what has changed attitudes from "nothing can be done" to "something must be done".

It is unclear who can do anything about company closures and mass sackings, if you think that capital is best equipped to decide who makes what whereabouts in the world. How can people learn to think differently, and challenge captial's right to take away people's livelihoods? When workers decide to act, and stand up for their rights, this has an extraordinarily challenging effect on general consciousness - as in for example, the case of the Oakdale miners.

But the unions are not acting against mass sackings and closures. Union leaders are not blaming capitalism for the sackings, but a combination of irresistable forces of globalisation, and "free market" policies of governments. The old call of the left would have been for "nationalisation" and by the far left for "nationalisation under workers control". These demands had a ring of possibility about them in the days of Keynsian economics and state ownership. Now they would seem farcical. Neither Liberal nor Labor are going to "nationalise" anything.

In the Transitional program , Trotsky advocated a combination of factory occupation, and workers opening the books, or records of companies claiming bamkruptcy. He based this on the wave of occupations which swept the USA in the 1930s. This also seems fanciful now, in the context of the resignation of the labour movement to job losses, and the conservative peace-keeping role of minimising class conflict that is the record of the ACTU. Yet one or two groups of workers, resisting the sack, and thus the dictates of capital couldspark a bigger movement. What better way to resist than to occupy? The occupiers then need to decide collectively on the course of their action, and how tehy survive, learning themselves and teaching others the power of workers self-organisation.

The decision of workers to resist or defy the right of capital to hire and fire, can be encouraged and supported by those who analyse capitalism, and develop an understanding of Marx's analysis, which shows that unemployment and factory closures are an integral part of capitalism, and that capitalism is a peculiar form of social organisastion that can pass as it came.