Crush The NSW Government’s Attacks on Public Sector Workers!
Use The Only Means That Work – All Out Strike Action!
June 15 – Twelve thousand trade unionists demonstrated today outside NSW Parliament House against the O’Farrell state government’s attack on public sector workers. The stop work rally was the biggest workers rally in Sydney in five years. Particularly large contingents were brought out by the NSW Nurses Association, the Health Services Union, the Rail, Bus and Tram Union and the Fire Brigade Employees Union.
Despite the anger of the rallying workers, the Unions NSW leaders speaking at the podium promoted not a strategy of serious strike action to smash the anti-worker attacks but a “long campaign” – code words for a strategy that avoids all out strike action and instead looks towards getting the ALP elected at the next state election.
Yet many workers had strike on their minds. A Trotskyist Platform leaflet that called to rely on industrial action instead of hopes in a future Labor government was well received at the rally. We reprint the leaflet below.
Leaflet
Crush the NSW Government’s Attacks on Public Sector Workers!
Use the Only Means that Works – All Out Strike Action!
June 15 – It has not taken the newly elected NSW premier long to make clear what he intends to do to public sector workers. The O’Farrell government’s new legislation will restrict wage rises to a measly 2.5% per year (which would almost never cover cost of living increases) unless workers agree to trade off their conditions … and jobs. The right to strike will be further restricted. And governments hell bent on driving down workers wages and conditions will acquire powers that make it easier for them to do so.
The union movement needs to crush the Conservatives plans … and crush them fast! How? By the method that won workers their conditions in the first place. The method of industrial action. Let’s use today’s stopwork rally to build all out strike action by public sector workers backed up by solidarity action by the private sector unions.
If the workers movement here enters the arena of strike struggle we will hardly be alone. In Greece, Portugal and elsewhere workers have been forced to wage intense struggles to defend their very livelihoods. If any worker is complacent about what we face, consider this: If the ruling class here wants to so sharply gouge workers’ conditions now, when the economy is doing OK, then think what they are going to do when their profits start falling? What are they going to do when exports to China’s booming socialistic, public sector enterprises are no longer enough to hold Australia’s economy from going into the same crisis as the rest of the capitalist world? The time to fight is now!
One road public sector workers don’t want to travel on is the road that we finally ended up on in the campaign against Howard’s Workchoices. After over a million workers risked their jobs to participate in anti-Workchoices stop works in 2005 and early 2006, the ACTU leaders let the tires out of the industrial campaign. Instead they told workers that Workchoices would need to be defeated in the ballot box, i.e. by voting for Rudd and Gillard’s ALP. Well the ACTU leaders got their wish. And what we have ended up with is an industrial regime that includes most of the worst of the Howard era – from common law individual contracts to anti-strike laws. Workchoices Lite!
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The problem is not simply selfish ALP hacks. The problem is that the current system is structured to serve only the big business owners and therefore whoever is committed to running it must necessarily attack working class people. Look at the current federal government. It is not only a Labor government but in effect includes the nominally “progressive” Greens. But the Greens are merely propping up a government that in its last budget slashed payments to poor single parents; that spat on people on disability pensions and that further stigmatized the unemployed.
So if any union official tries to sell you the line that industrial action should only be used as an auxiliary to a campaign to get voted in a more favourable government, then they are leading you on the wrong path. Such type of officials should not be leading our unions. We certainly don’t need people preparing to “do the John Robertson” on us. No thanks! What our unions do need is a leadership that is committed to waging the class struggle to the very end, that understands that no government accepted by the corporate tycoons can ever defend workers interests. We need a union leadership that grows together with a genuinely anti-capitalist party, a party that has as its final goal a workers government based on socialist public ownership of the banks, mines, transport nodes and key factories.
Combine the Fight to Defend Public Service Workers with the Fight for More Nurses and Teachers!
Pro-ALP union officials are telling militant workers that if the unions fight too hard, “it will play into the hands of the right wing.” But actually our unions can undercut the right wing and win much support if they explain well to the masses that working class people are being forced to tighten their belts at the very time that the richest 200 people in this country increased their total wealth over the last year by a staggering $39 billion (see BRW Rich 200)! And if the fight to defend public service workers is posed as part of the struggle to defend social services and linked with demands for massively increased resources for public hospitals and public transport then it will take off. After all working class people understand that we need more teachers, more nurses and more childcare workers.
One group of government employees that many of the poorer masses don’t want more of are police – notorious as they are for racist violence against Aboriginal people and attacks on workers picket lines. It is noticeable that the cops were only group that was exempted from the recent legislation against government employees. Why? Because although the police occasionally catch genuine criminals, their primary function is to enforce the unequal capitalist social order, where the exploiting class rules the roost. In times when the class struggle is relatively quiet this may not be visible to many. But whenever the class struggle heats up, their overriding political role is very apparent.
Now police are worried that they may in the future be paid less for their head kicking function and thus the Police Association have claimed that they would back public sector workers. Unfortunately they have been embraced by union leaders. Even some left wing groups like Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative have either appealed to the police to support the campaign or have reported on the Police Association’s role favourably. This is a wrong approach. Whatever their original class background, when a person becomes a police officer or a prison guard they have chosen, however consciously at the start, to become the paid servants of the exploiting elite. Just like a scab who crosses picket lines. If the police get better working conditions that only makes them better fed and better rested to repress our struggles. Now some may think: well if the police squabble with their masters all the better for us. Well let them squabble but keep them out of our struggles! Any apparent numerical “benefit” that would come from having the Police Association at our union rallies is far, far outweighed by the harm that it does. For one their presence repels the most downtrodden in society – Aboriginal people, the homeless, struggling tenants and not to mention union militants within industries like construction who have faced police attacks – who are all precisely the community members who will most energetically stand behind a union campaign against the powers that be.
Moreover uniting with the Police Association confuses workers as to their friends are. It is critical for workers to understand that – especially when the capitalist rulers are in a crisis and thus unwilling to compromise – it is the police who will be unleashed to smash workers. Recently in Spain, firefighters have had to defend themselves from violent attacks from heavily armed cops. In Greece public sector workers rallies have been on the receiving end of massive cop assaults. It is intolerable that we have a situation in the NSW union movement where the people who would be unleashed to smash our struggles are sitting in the same union meetings as us. Far from being embraced, the Police Association and the prison guards need to be separated out of our unions.
Police will only be on our side after this capitalist state has been swept away and a brand new state and police force is constructed – one with new personnel, new structures and new traditions all in the service of the working class. Until then we need to be absolutely clear that all the institutions of the state – the police, courts, prisons, the IRC – are on the other side of the fence.
Of course with such forces arrayed against the working class, it must urgently strengthen its unity. It must oppose all efforts to divide it – for example with racism – or to divert it from targeting the real cause of its suffering: the corporate elite. That means for example rejecting the ruling class’ efforts to scapegoat refugees for the deteriorating social services in this country. Instead the working class must actively campaign for the full rights of citizenship for everyone who makes it here in order to undercut all efforts by the rulers to divert its focus with nationalist jingoism.
Sisters and brothers, united and focused we can defeat O’Farrell’s attacks through our combined industrial power. Pro-ALP bureaucrats will say you can’t go down that road because there are anti-strike laws against it. Well if you play by those rules you can’t win! However, if workers unleash their united strength those laws become paper tigers because it is workers who make production run and when we withdraw our labour the arrogant capitalists suddenly become terrified. To be sure in a major clash, public sector workers will need backing from their union sisters and brothers in strategic private industries. Yet from maritime workers facing their own battles with the likes of Patricks to construction workers battling draconian laws, many unionists are itching to stand by a strong union fightback. For three decades now our unions have suffered defeats in this country. Let’s make the NSW public sector workers struggle the start of turning this around.