They stood together with resolve. They defied intimidation. And they won. The Victorian nurses, that is. For nine days last October, the mainly female nurses union members took determined industrial action in the hospitals. Work bans led to the postponement of hundreds of elective surgery procedures and the closure of non-emergency hospital beds. The employers that the nurses had to stand up to, the Victorian state ALP government and the Victorian Hospitals Industry Association used dirty tricks against them. Some nurses were accosted by hospital bosses on their way to and from the toilets and threatened. Nurses were pressurized to “name names” of those participating in the work bans. Hundreds had their pay docked. However, in the end their determination and willingness to take industrial action allowed them to not only gain a decent pay rise but to also win 500 new nursing positions. This was a victory for the whole union movement and for the low and lower-middle class people dying to get better-resourced public health care.

The nurses faced down a Victorian government doing all it could to brand them as irresponsible for taking industrial action. In this country, whenever public sector workers take action to relieve their conditions, governments scream that they are hurting the public. This is absolute cynicism! The state system in capitalist Australia is not designed to serve the working class public but to give first preference to those in the big end of town. You often have to wait hours to see a doctor if you go to a public hospital and then have to deal with staff under pressure to clear scarce hospital bed places. The richer suburbs get better cultural and public facilities – compare the conditions of the schools and even railway stations in Sydney’s North Shore with those in the working class south west.  Meanwhile, some Aboriginal communities are so discriminated against by authorities that many of their residences do not even get delivered mail or a stable electricity supply. Moreover, a good part of “public” budgets in Australia are used for occupying “Third World” countries, domestic policing, spying etc. Such “law enforcement” is primarily not aimed at “fighting crime” which is really only an auxiliary role of the state forces but at preserving an unjust social order. Thus we have police attacks on union picket lines, a massive cop/military force deployed to corral (and in some cases arrest) anti-war demonstrators at the September 8 APEC protest, racist “anti-terror” surveillance of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities and daily cop violence against Aboriginal youth. The state in Australia is a capitalist state. Therefore, when nurses, teachers, postal workers etc seek to squeeze from this state better wage payments we should back their struggles just as we should support workers demands for increased payment by private sector capitalists.

To win their October battle, the Victorian nurses had to defy a ruling by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) which tried to scuttle the union struggle by ordering the nurses to end their work bans. Like all the courts, the AIRC is not a “neutral umpire” but part of a legal system that is biased towards the wealthy classes. Unions have little chance of winning struggles if they bow to these courts. The nurses did not bow down and that is a good part of the reason why they triumphed.

Another reason for the union victory was that the nurses were prepared to trod on that testament that currently smothers the workers movement: thou shalt never harm ALP electoral prospects. Of course, the pro-ALP nurses union leadership did not necessarily want their members to violate this testament. But, implicitly, by taking determined industrial action just a month before the federal election that is what the nurses indeed did do. Their struggle inspired Victorian teachers to follow suit. Just three days from the federal election, Victorian teachers went on strike with over 10,000 rallying on the steps of parliament. For the last couple of years, the ACTU leaders have held back restive workers from taking action to smash anti-union attacks. The ACTU bureaucrats preached that such action would disrupt the possibility of an ALP election win and that workers rights could only be saved through changing the government at the elections. But such a program did not sit comfortably with the likes of nurses, firemen, rail drivers, teachers, school cleaners and many others. For these workers it is the state ALP governments who are their employers and are thus the ones responsible for imposing on them overstressed workloads and unfairly low wages. When the nurses took action, the Victorian ALP government proved how similar it is to Liberal Party governments by actually using Howard’s Workchoices against the nurses unionists. ALP premier, John Brumby, threatened that fines were inevitable for nurses involved in unlawful industrial action and said he had no qualms about taking nurses to the Federal Court. At the 4,000-strong union meeting that followed their victory, the Victorian nurses voted unanimously for a resolution that included a clause expressing “dismay and disgust at the unprecedented intimidation and harassment ... and the zealous utilisation of WorkChoices laws.”

The new Rudd/Gillard Federal Labor government follows in the footsteps of the provincial ALP governments across the country. And that means that in many ways it also follows in the footsteps of John Howard and Co. The new ministry is certainly in no hurry to dismantle Workchoices. While they are planning to stop new AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements), existing AWAs will be allowed to run their course for years and thereby chip away at standard workplace conditions. Meanwhile, the government is intent on continuing to facilitate common law individual contracts which currently cover many more workers than AWAs and are similarly used to undermine workers solidarity and workplace rights.  Most significantly, the Labor government is recommitting to all the anti-strike provisions of the Liberals. And, for at least their first term, they plan on maintaining the draconian building industry commission targeting the CFMEU trade union.

On some symbolic issues, the Labor cabinet is slightly distancing itself from the hard line right-wing stance of the Liberal/National Coalition but in substance the line is similar. So Rudd promises to formally “apologise” to Aboriginal people for the stealing of Aboriginal children but has disgustingly ruled out compensation for the victims.  Furthermore, the new Rudd government continues to drive forward the paternalist Northern Territory intervention and has already extended the racist quarantining of welfare payments to black residents to Wadeye and other Aboriginal communities.

Even the change in ideological posture from the Howard years is minimal. Appeasing the conservative wing of the ruling class, Rudd emphasised in an interview highlighted in the election-eve issue of Murdoch’s Australian that there would not be an Aboriginal treaty under his government. In the same interview Rudd reiterated his White Australia, Howard-like position on “border security”:

“You cannot have anything that is orderly if you allow people who do not have a lawful visa in this country to roam free. That’s why you need a detention system.
“Deterrence is effective through the detention system but also preparedness to take appropriate action as the vessels approach Australian waters on the high seas.

Australian, 23 November 2007

The right-wing Murdoch media were also assured that Rudd implicitly endorsed the stigmatisation campaign against African migrants by making a point of stating that a Labor government would not lift the current intake of African refugees.

Certainly, right-wing redneck elements do not feel that the election of Rudd/Gillard has put them too much on the back foot. Less than a month after Rudd’s ascendancy,  racist agitation against the building of a Muslim school in the Southwest Sydney suburb of Camden reached a fever pitch. To insult Muslim people, right-wing activists placed pig heads on a stake at the proposed school site.  On December 19, nearly 800 people flooded the Camden Civic Centre for a meeting to oppose the school proposal. Various fascist organisations were active around the meeting including the Australia First Party, a group involved in inciting the December 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach.

Working class people rightly hated Howard. His 2007 electoral defeat did record some sort of shift in overall political mood, albeit a minor one. The net shift in the two-party preferred vote from the 2004 elections was just 6% with Labor now recording 53% and the Liberal/National Coalition 47% instead of the other way around. More significant was the fact that opposition to the Coalition’s union-busting Industrial Relations laws was so strong that the unions were able to mobilise hundreds of activists to campaign against the Liberals over Workchoices. Some middle class voters were also sick of the unashamed racism of the Liberals. And although Labor supports the Northern Territory intervention, the fact that the unpopular intervention was first implemented by Howard and Brough led Aboriginal voters in the Territory to overwhelmingly shun the Coalition.

However, because Labor refused to campaign on an explicitly pro-union program against the greedy bosses, the ALP election victory was not one that has emboldened workers to struggle. Rudd and Gillard promised “working families” less extreme, anti-worker Industrial Relations policies than the Liberals but also reassured the capitalists that the ALP would hold down the unions. Still the ruling class demanded more assurances from the ALP. And they were granted them! Granted with ever greater spinelessness the closer that the ALP leaders got to gaining office. Most notably, the Labor tops proved their subservience to the corporate billionaires by driving out militant union leaders from their party. In May, Victorian Electrical Trades Union secretary Dean Mighell was forced to quit the ALP after he was “exposed” for having done what a union official ought to do: use robust methods against greedy business owners. Later, Rudd expelled WA CFMEU assistant state secretary Joe McDonald for the “crime” of having correctly identified John Howard as a “burnt-out dictator.” The Rudd gang had been looking to get rid of McDonald who was being persecuted in the courts on various “trespass” charges – i.e for entering work sites to defend the rights of union members.

By the time the elections were held a fair section of this country’s capitalists were backing Rudd or at least were not too opposed to an ALP victory. Many in this ruling class elite not only thought Howard’s Workchoices were too extreme to win support but feared that the continued reign of the Coalition could provoke a strong working class fightback. They figured that a fresh government protected by the mandate of an election triumph would be better able to make the masses submit to the continued gouging of workers rights and to “war on terror” militarism. It is notable that on the final Sunday before the November 24 elections, half of Australia’s big business-owned, major Sunday papers including both Murdoch’s Sunday Telegraph and Fairfax’s Sun-Herald editorialized for a vote for Labor.

Of course, many working class people who helped to elect Rudd’s ALP did not buy all the worse aspects of its program. But for those many committed trade unionists and leftists who enlisted in Labor electioneering, the very act of doing so necessarily drained some of their militancy. What does it mean to be active in a campaign that on the one hand attacked Workchoices but on the other also “assured” that Labor was against industry-wide bargaining and militant unionism? It means that your own pro-working class spine gets badly bent. That is in fact what usually happens to leftist workers who get involved in the ALP milieu. You see, the Labor Party is a political party that includes people with a whole range of views from within the politically interested elements of the workers movement, from those rabidly committed to capitalism to those who consider themselves socialists. But, typically, the left-wing factions subordinate themselves to the right-wing hacks and the right-wing then grovels to the ruling class. This is played out time and time again because the ALP’s very foundation stones tilt the party’s political stage towards such scenarios. In a party that stands for political cooperation with the capitalist exploiters, those most amenable to the capitalist ruling class have considerable advantage. This is true of both the ALP’s parliamentary and industrial wings. Look at the way the capitalist media, especially the Murdoch press, gives favourable coverage to the likes of Bill Shorten and his fellow right-wing replacement as AWU union leader, Paul Howes. And compare that with the way the mainstream media have vilified the likes of Dean Mighell or Joe McDonald.

In this ALP setup it is naturally the most unprincipled, self-centred and careerist types who rise to the top. Those not so willing to abandon their working class principles don’t usually make it to leadership positions and more often than not resign themselves to becoming members only on paper. Others eventually fall into temptation and allow themselves to become assimilated into the beast. Such people often end up as the most articulate advocates against class struggle action, experts at throwing out such lines as “those methods are outdated” or “you don’t want to do anything that could give the Conservatives an excuse for remaining in (or regaining) power.”

The twisted nature of the ALP is not a reason, however, to reject working-class politics in general. No, that would be a gutless cop out! It would simply vacate the field for the ALP to run in a scoreboard of further betrayals of workers’ interests. Without clearly defined principles, organisation and political education the masses can only ever come “spontaneously” to a viewpoint that is, to a more or lesser degree, shaped by the propaganda and influence of the powerful capitalist class. The workers and downtrodden do need a party. But one that is very different to the ALP sell-out machine that they have now. The party that we need must be composed only of people who are committed to struggle against the exploiting class. Those who have convinced themselves that the working class can get a better deal through collaboration with the capitalists should not be allowed to join. And neither should careerists – people who are more interested in gaining self-satisfying positions than in serving the masses. We need a party of class struggle action, a party that will organise resistance to exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialism.

         

Most working class people who supported the election of a Labor government don’t expect Rudd to bring them a rose garden. But they do expect that at least things will get worse less quickly. However, there is no guarantee that even these modest expectations will be met. And as this becomes clearer and clearer, contradictions are being exacerbated within both the ALP’s political and industrial wings. Already WA CFMEU union secretary Kevin Reynolds has quit the ALP and although this was in part connected with the party’s dealings with his politician wife, it also had much to do with Labor’s attacks on the union’s militancy. Now the leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union has publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the ACTU tops for their reluctance to stand up to the Rudd/Gillard regime.

The main reason that the Labor Party cannot satisfy workers’ expectations is not because the ALP social democrats are not more willing to make concessions to working people than are the right-wing conservatives. Rather, it is because the capitalist mode of economy which self-proclaimed “economic conservative” Rudd is committed to upholding has its own requirement. And that requirement is for the owners of industry and infrastructure to constantly increase their rate of exploitation of those that work for them. For many storemen, process workers, service industry casual employees, construction workers and others this is their reality. They read about how there are new faces in government but on the ground what they are experiencing is bosses trying to squeeze longer hours out of them, “mistakes” in the amount they are paid, attempts to make them wear individual contracts, racist taunting of non-white workers and all sorts of management plots to set worker against worker. These are the many working class people for whom media reports about how the Australian economy has been “doing well” mean little.

It is the capitalist class that has reaped the benefits of this country’s mining boom. Several wealthy shareholders have gotten very, very rich. Take, for instance, Australia’s second richest man (behind inheritor James Packer), Andrew Forrest. Forrest is the biggest shareholder in Fortescue Metals Group. That iron-ore mining company is actually yet to ship a single tonne of iron ore – and the capitalists say that they deserve their wealth because they do “hard work” for society’s benefit! Yet by the end of last year, Forrest possessed $8.6 billion!

Now it is true that some of Australia’s middle class is also getting a few benefits from this country’s unique resource wealth. But any flow on has been cut off from lower paid sections of the working class, from Aboriginal people and from the majority of non-European migrants living in Sydney’s Southwest.  Some skilled workers are doing alright financially but that is based on having to toil longer hours in more stressed out work environments. And higher interest rates, inflation and credit card debts are eating into their precarious position. Now with an economic downturn looming even these more senior workers are faced with job loss or casualisation. It won’t be the company owners and high-flying executives who will pay for any recession!

What working class people need to do is to claw back some of the fruits of their labour. They need to stop an ever-increasing share of workers produce from ending up in the profit ledgers of the capitalists.  To do this the working class must mobilize the power that it has – the power over production. In other words the power of industrial action. We should use some of the methods that the Victorian nurses unionists used to achieve some gains last October – trust in union action, defiance of the industrial courts, refusal to bow to governments of any stripe. Such struggle would of course have to challenge the swathe of anti-strike laws that have been brought in by both ALP and Liberal governments over the last twenty years. We need united strike action by unions to demand: Abolish the anti-strike laws! Down with the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission! Repeal all restrictions against industry-wide bargaining! The working class showed its determination to oppose the anti-strike laws and the restrictions on union workplace access when it mobilized in mass stopwork actions against Workchoices during 2005 and early 2006. Those stop works involved hundreds of thousands of workers risking their livelihoods to take action in defence of their unions and their rights. Workers flocked to the union rallies because they understood that the spreading of individual contracts would inevitably lead to the wholesale slashing of workplace conditions. While we still have much momentum within the workers movement on these issues, there needs to be a coordinated campaign to roll back individual contracts and win industry-wide conditions for workers. Bigger workplaces with better organised union branches need to use their industrial muscle to help win collective contracts for the many isolated and intimidated workers toiling away in small sites. This would help to recruit to the unions many employees who work in these small workplaces.

Such angry resistance could indeed well occur, especially when the mass of workers who overwhelmingly voted Labor realise how much the government is still against them. However, this is far from guaranteed. Sometimes when people are led down the wrong road it can lead to demoralization and a withdrawal from political activity. Today, if we are to have a powerful industrial action-centred fightback, the most politically aware unionists and leftists will have to bring clear direction to the workers movement. This is their responsibility. But to be able to fulfill that responsibility they must themselves come to a high level of political clarity. Here are key questions that pro-worker activists must thrash out:

1.    Even though the ALP government has a lot of problems is it not at least a workers government? No, not at all! True, the Labor Party is a party composed of working class members and linked to our unions. But when running Australia’s federal or provincial governments it is a party running the capitalist system using the state machine that has been constructed to serve the capitalists. The ALP in government can be compared to a former worker who chooses to become a manager for a capitalist boss. The former worker tells everyone that he is only doing it to ensure that there will be a kinder management for workers. He may even convince himself that this is what he is doing. But because of the economic realities of his role, he will inevitably end up just like the other headkickers for the owner. He will be the worst type of traitor to the workers and will be rightly looked at by workers as such.

2.    The anti-strike laws and restrictions on union workplace access that Labor supports sure are terrible but is this not what Rudd has a mandate for? No! We cannot speak of elections being a “mandate” because it is impossible to have truly “free elections” in a society where the wealth is possessed by a small class that has immense power to distort public opinion. This capitalist class owns all the mass media and controls book publishing. Members of this ultra-rich layer have the resources to fund political parties, more easily hire meeting venues and finance “think thanks” that favour their class interests. Each individual capitalist has many more financial resources to fund anti-union advertisements than each worker does to finance pro-union campaigns. All these inequalities mean that “democracy” under capitalism is in practice only a democracy for the rich. Therefore, parliamentary election results should not be taken as the ultimate mandate. The mandate that the union movement should respect is the mandate given by union members to serve workers’ interests. This is part of the grander mandate to fight against oppression which humanity’s history of class struggle has granted to all exploited classes.

3.    If we go on strike too much when Labor is in government, won’t that make it easier for the Liberals to get back in? Well, one thing is for sure, if the working class does not wage class struggle resistance now, the inevitable hardships caused by an ALP-administered capitalism cannot but strengthen the Liberals. It was the thirteen years of chipping away at workers’ rights under Hawke and Keating that eventually pushed a section of the masses to go for Howard. Today, if Rudd is allowed to do, unchallenged, the same as his Labor predecessors not only will that pave the way for another Liberal government but could result in insecurities and frustrations coming out in even more horrifying, reactionary ways: like the December 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach, for instance.

4.    Should the union movement get involved in social campaigns or should it simply focus on workplace issues? This is the wrong way to pose the question. Unless the workers movement takes a stand against all types of oppression, it will have little capacity to defend workers’ jobs, wages and conditions. Why? Well, think of the international situation. If the owners of Australian multinational corporations and the military that serves them are able to get away with riding roughshod over the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands then the corporate bigwigs will surely be more confident to trample on workers’ rights at home. Think also of the effect of White Australia racism. Such racism serves greedy bosses. They use it to try and make non-white workers too intimidated to resist exploitation. That is why the unions must stand against the racist anti-terror laws, must oppose the racist movement to prevent the building of the Camden Muslim school and must come out much stronger in solidarity with Aboriginal resistance struggles. A very positive development in this regard is the fact that the Sydney Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) has joined with vigour the campaign to have charges dropped against Aboriginal anti-racist hero Lex Wotton. 

Satisfying People’s Basic Needs