Workers' Liberty Australia
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class

Reith's second wave can be broken!

Motions for your organisation to support

Sixteen months ago, thousands joined picket lines to support the waterside workers fight against the move by stevedoring employer Patrick to lock them out and replace them by non-union labour. The leaders of the waterside workers' union, the MUA, and of the ACTU, said that the battle must be conducted on cautious, damage-limitation, lines, with no open industrial solidarity, for fear of falling foul of the new anti-strike laws introduced by the Coalition government.

We disagreed. Though the damage-limitation strategy did stop Patrick's crushing the MUA outright, it meant that after apparently winning their battle the waterside workers lost hard-won conditions and hundreds of jobs - and Peter Reith's (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) laws came out of it with their authority enhanced.

At the time the Coalition government was politically on the defensive. Reith's legislation was new and untried. The MUA was a strong union, with strong and widespread support. If it had shut down the ports by industrial action, and called for the ACTU support pledged in advance by general secretary Bill Kelty - up to and including a general strike - Reith's legislation could have been made unworkable, and the waterside workers would have emerged from the dispute stronger, not weaker.

Because the leaders of the union movement missed that opportunity, now we find ourselves faced with a "second wave" of legislation from Reith. The ACTU describes it as a "matter of life and death" for the union movement.

Time for radical action at last? Not for the ACTU leaders!

The ACTU's response is to ask us to write a letter to Democrat Senator Andrew Murray, Meg Lees's chief supporter in doing the GST deal. The ACTU leadership is obviously worried, and is also calling for meetings, rallies, days of action, but the ACTU leaders themselves present this action as no more than aimed to put pressure on the Democrats to use their swing vote in the Senate.

The ACTU website reports that the Democrats are likely to refer the legislation to a Senate committee. If the unions hold back on campaigning against the 'second wave' laws for the life of the committee, then we'll be losing valuable time, and allowing the Democrats to blur the issue. It could easily be the GST revisited.

Western Australian trade unions pushed back legislation similar to Reith's by an active campaign. The Victorian Trades Hall Council has shown the greatest initiative so far on Reith's new laws. It is conceivable that these states could take a stand and draw the rest of the states and the ACTU behind them.

If unions in France and South Korea and many other countries where the trade union movement is weaker than Australia - have been able to organise mass political strike waves in recent years, and push their governments on a number of issues, why not here too? The ACTU leaders have spent decades arguing that to attempt anything more drastic than legal manoeuvres and limited protest action is foolhardy and amounts to "being provoked" or "trapped" into "just what the union-bashers want". The best we can hope for is an orderly retreat.

That perspective failed the MUA in all but the most limited sense. The MUA still has coverage of the docks, but hundreds of job losses, work speed ups and restrictions on union action are huge losses. Workers' Liberty believes it could have been otherwise.

Tens of thousands rallied for the future of one union, the MUA, when Victoria was the only state where there was a stop work. Hundreds of thousands could be mobilised to act to defend the whole union movement - if the ACTU leadership called on them to do so.

In this matter of life and death for the unions, Workers Liberty proposes that the following draft motions provide a basis for immediate agitation, in union meetings, campaigns and groups that are part of the working class.

Move this in your union branch

  • We welcome the ACTU's decision to call mass rallies in protest at the Coalition government's new wave of industrial relations legislation.
  • In view of the Democrats' record on the GST and Reith's previous wave of anti-stike legislation, we believe that the union campaign against this new legislation should not and cannot be limited to pressuring the Democrats against it in the Senate.
  • We endorse the ACTU's judgement that to defeat this legislation is "a matter of life and death" for effective trade unionism. Since there is no real democracy for the working class with out effective trade unionism, it is a matter of life and death for democracy to defeat the legislation. We consider it vital that the planned rallies be the start, not the end, of the campaign.
  • We call on the ACTU and the union leaders to organise a special conference of the union movement to debate and decide a thoroughgoing campaign. In our view this campaign must include a big publicity effort, mass demonstrations, and protest strikes in defiance of the existing law. The union movement must be prepared to escalate its action, education and mobilising its members and the wider working class as it goes, as far as it takes to defeat the legislation and restore effective trade union rights.
  • We call on the ALP to represent the interests of the union movement on which it is based, by using its strength in the House of Representatives and the Senate to speak out against and obstruct this legislation to the greatest extent possible, and to pledge now that the next federal Labor government will repeal all the Coalition government's anti-union laws.
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