Turn the widespread support for the campaign
into the strike action that can bring victory
Equal Pay for Equal Work!
Don’t Let Governments Tell You They Can’t Afford It –
Ripping Wealth from The Greedy Tycoons Will Easily Fund Equal Pay!
June 8 – Over 5,000 community sector workers and their supporters marched through Sydney City today to demand Equal Pay for Equal Work. The Sydney rally was part of nationwide stop works and rallies by community sector workers angry at how badly they are being paid. Community sector workers are truly getting a raw deal. These workers – who include childcare workers and disability and aged carers – are doing the same work as other workers (like public sector workers) and often have equivalent qualifications. But they are getting paid much less. This discrimination has much to do with the fact that 85% of community-sector workers are women.
So the union organizing the community sector workers, the Australian Services Union (ASU) is demanding Equal Pay for Equal Work by calling for a substantial pay rise for community sector workers. The union’s demands are being opposed by bosses and their organisations including ABI (representing disability employers), Mission Australia and the powerful Australian Industry Group (AIG) representing big business.
Currently the matter is tied up in the industrial court, Fair Work Australia. On May 16, community sector workers had a partial victory when a Fair Work Australia ruling acknowledged that social, community and disability service workers in the non-government sector are undervalued. Furthermore, the court had to admit that gender was a significant factor in causing this pay gap between the predominantly female community sector employees and their counterparts in state and local government, public service jobs.
That the pro-boss courts had to make these admissions is a concession to the struggle by community sector workers and the depth of support it is winning. On December 15 two thousand community sector workers and their supporters including small contingents from other unions marched through Sydney city in a vibrant demonstration. The protest coincided with a statewide stoppage by ASU community sector workers. When Fair Work Australia made its May 16 ruling it was aware that the ASU was getting set for today’s mass stopwork rally.
However, the Fair Work Australia decision does not actually grant the community sector workers equal pay or indeed any pay rise at all. The court has called for further submissions to determine what pay rise will be granted. Moreover, it even declined to lay out the principles for determining pay increases. Consequently, even the Australian Industry Group praised the court for its “careful and methodical approach.”
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Thus the struggle for equal pay for the largely female-dominated community sector workers is far from won. The ASU leadership has done a creditable job of publicizing the campaign and winning support for it. However, it and the rest of the social democratic union leaderships have baulked at mobilising the kind of industrial action that can actually force the bosses and their governments to accept the necessary pay rises. The June 8 rally should not have been only a two hour stop work rally but should have been a rally coinciding with the start of more concerted strike action.
Such strike action is necessary and possible. The campaign is at a high point as shown by the size of today’s rally. Of course, strike action would need to be supported by industrial action and participation by other unions. Crucial would be winning the participation of those strategic unions that are in a better position to hurt the profits of the big business bosses that make up the Australian Industry Group than community sector workers. Yet such support from trade unionists already exists. Today’s rally was supported by a large contingent from the National Union of Workers, a union that that organises, among others, oil refinery and chemical industry workers as well as storemen and packers. There were also smaller contingents from the Public Sector Union, the Maritime Union of Australia, the Fire Brigade Employees Union, the Transport Workers Union and others.
If our unions do not deal a knock-out blow on this campaign then there is a serious danger that the enemy will regroup and use the new downturn in the Australian economy and the resurgent crisis in the world capitalist economy as a “justification” to more strongly oppose granting the necessary pay rises. They will likely combine such flat opposition with slimy doublespeak to try and forever stall the granting of Equal Pay. If they were to be able to keep on getting away with this and the work within the system union officials continue to pull back from upping the level of industrial action then some union members would become demoralized and retreat from the campaign itself.
It is worth looking at what happened to the campaign against electricity privatisation in NSW. That campaign had even more widespread support than today’s campaign for Equal Pay. On 26 February 2008, 12,000 workers marched in Sydney against the privatisation of electricity. Yet in the first half of 2008, then Unions NSW leader John Roberston kept on telling the strategically placed electricity workers that it was too early for industrial action. Eventually on August 29, a day after the NSW ALP cabinet voted for electricity privatisation, workers had had enough and 1,500 electricity workers walked off the job. However, the pro-ALP union officials limited the strike action and stopped it from continuing. Then just weeks after saying it was too early for strike action, Roberston started telling workers that it was now too late for industrial action to stop the electricity privatisation! This really demoralized the anti-privatisation campaign which then went into rapid retreat. The mass rallies stopped and a couple of years later the state ALP government (with John Robertson now a minister in it!) was able to – with little active worker opposition – sell off the electricity retailers and the rights to the output of two state-owned generators. Now the new conservative state government has left open the possibility of still deeper privatisation. There is still an opportunity to reverse these anti-working class privatisations by building a determined campaign based on industrial action. But the anti-privatisation campaign is in a much weaker position than it was three years ago when determined strike action to smash the privatisations was starkly posed.
We should not allow the Equal Pay for Equal Work campaign to go down the same road. Now is the best time for action while morale is high! Joint strike action by many unions over Equal Pay would give workers in other sectors, angry about things like casualisation and increased bullying by bosses, a chance to give powerful expression to their own grievances. Furthermore, if the call for Equal Pay is combined with demands that it be funded by taking wealth out of the pockets of corporate billionaires rather than out of the taxes paid by working class people then support for the campaign from the broader working class could snowball.
We reprint below the Trotskyist Platform leaflet that was issued in the lead up to last December’s Equal Pay rally. The leaflet called to fund equal pay for equal work and greatly improved social services by ripping the wealth from the mine owners and bankers and bringing it into public hands.
9 December, 2010
All workers must ensure that the December 15 rallies for Equal Pay for Equal Work are a success. The Sydney rally will start at 12pm at Sydney Town Hall Square – we urge all our readers to participate. The working class as a whole cannot free itself from exploitation while one section of the class – women workers – face discrimination through lower wages. On the other hand, a struggle bringing together all trade unions to fight for Equal Pay will powerfully unite the workers movement and thus make it better able to resist casualisation, privatisation and cuts to working conditions. The Gillard Labor government’s stab in the back of the Australian Services Union’s (ASU) claim for Equal Pay for women confirms that equal pay for women can really only be won through struggle. It certainly won’t be won by looking to any of the current parliamentary parties. Everyone knows that the Liberals are openly the party of the big business bosses. Yet the ALP government’s position that Equal Pay can only be funded through cutting vital community services shows, yet again, that while the Labor Party’s base is the working class, its program of accepting the capitalist system means that in the end it serves the corporate possessing class no less than the Liberals. After all, the Labor government’s treachery on Equal Pay for women hardly comes out of the blue. At the same time as it is shafting community sector workers this government is maintaining draconian anti-union laws targeting construction workers, laws that have almost led to the jailing of several CFMEU union members. Meanwhile, Keneally’s NSW ALP government is pushing ahead with privatisation of the state’s electricity generators.Now the Greens party have protested against the ALP’s betrayal on Equal Pay. It is good for them to do so. However, the Greens promote the illusion of progressive change purely through parliament and reject any notion of organising workers as an independent class to fight politically against the capitalist exploiters. This rejection of any class struggle perspective makes the Greens completely incapable of achieving even those progressive reforms that they claim to stand for. The fight to win Equal Pay for Equal Work, for example, cannot be won without taking on the corporate elite. For it is the corporate elite’s imperative to keep pushing wages low. It is they who are pushing to make workers pay for the budget deficit as well as for a reduction in the Mining Tax and lower taxes for the rich in general. Gillard capitulates to this ultra-wealthy class because she is administering their system. The Greens, as effectively a part of an ALP-led coalition government, are also joining in running this system and while they may not like some of its most oppressive aspects they have no program to challenge the class that holds the real power in society: the capitalists. To win Equal Pay for women and to win justice for working people we must rely on the industrial power of the united workers movement. That is why it is important that the December 15 rally is a Fund Equal Pay for Equal Work and Greatly Improved Social Services Rip the Wealth from the Mine Owners and Bankers And Bring It Into Public Hands! strike rally. And it should be a strike not only of the majority-women ASU but also of other unions. The participation in the December 15 actions of workers unions covering those areas where large numbers of female workers work side by side with their male counterparts – including in manufacturing, textile, clothing and footwear and health services – can be a springboard for launching the bulk of the union movement into a powerful fight for Equal Pay for Equal Work. A determined struggle for Equal Pay could energise a broader fight that combines campaigns for women’s emancipation with the struggle for workers rights. Such a struggle is badly needed. A recently released study by a UK think tank found Australia near the bottom of the list – ranked 17 out of 21 countries – of OECD countries when it comes to gender equality. Together with the struggle for Equal Pay must come a fight to win other demands that will allow women’s full participation in social, political and economic life. That means struggling to win free childcare, fully accessible to all, and the provision of free school lunches to all public school students. It means winning the provision of free abortion on demand: a right which – as the recent horrific attempt to jail a Cairns couple for using abortion drugs showed – is far from guaranteed in Australia. To ensure that working mothers – and indeed working fathers – are able to participate fully in their occupation while knowing that their children are well cared for and happy, the workers movement should demand that free, widely available and interesting after-school activities are provided for all children with safe bus transport from schools to the required sporting/cultural/music/hobby venues organised by the state. To all these demands the big business bosses – and their mouthpieces in parliament, the media and “independent” economic institutes – will reply: this will blow the budget. To this we must respond: “Well we demand that you pay for these necessities! You greedy bankers, loud-mouthed mine owners, corrupt developers, rip-off chain-store executives and factory bosses, you have all been leaching billions from our labour. Now we are going to grab some of it back.” To put things in perspective, consider this. The 2010 rich list tables published by the BRW (Business Review Weekly) magazine showed that the seven richest people in this country had a combined wealth of 31 billion dollars. Thirty-one billion dollars owned by just seven people! If, hypothetically, that were divided up amongst the 150,000 community sector workers then each worker could be given … over $205,000! And they claim that there is not enough money to fund equal pay for women! And they try to blame refugees and migrants for decaying social services! No way! We will not fall for Abbott and Gillard’s attempts to protect the greedy tycoons by shifting the blame onto victimised minorities. The facts are clear. The reason that public housing, public health care and so many vital social services are being neglected and so many workers are underpaid is because so much of this country’s wealth is hoarded by a small number of filthy rich exploiters. Of course, when demands are made to grab back capitalists’ profits to improve social services they will threaten that such moves will “force” them to slash their workforces. In the face of such threats we should not recoil. Instead, politically conscious workers should take the opportunity to point out to the broader masses a simple truth. That is, if the wealthy private business owners are not capable of handing some of the stolen fruits of workers’ labour back to the masses without throwing workers onto the dole queues then industry and commerce ought to be taken out of their greedy hands. That is indeed what needs to happen! We should start agitating for this by targeting the most parasitic and hated of the corporate exploiters through calling for the nationalisation without compensation of the banks and mines. Eventually, if we are to ensure that the economy is to be organised to serve the masses’ interests – including by providing jobs for all, widespread quality public housing, decent services for the disabled and genuine equality for women – we must bring all the key sectors into public hands. To do that we will in the end have to sweep away the current Australian state that is so wedded to the tycoons and build a new state committed to enforcing working class people’s interests. Building the movement to finally win such a socialist society means fighting today for what we need. If Australian workers were to unleash an industrial campaign to fight for Equal Pay for Equal Work we will hardly be alone in the world in going down the road of class struggle. From air traffic controllers in Spain to oil refinery workers in France to public sector workers in Portugal and Greece, workers around the world are fighting against being made to pay for the capitalist global recession. Yet in the rest of the capitalist world the key question is also the very same one that the workers movement faces here. And that is: will progressive struggles be shackled by ties to those parties and institutions that are committed to administering the bankrupt capitalist system through a sham parliamentary process or will the most politically aware workers organise to guide the struggle on to an independent path that relies only on our own power and on the unity of all of the oppressed? Trotskyist Platform fights for the latter to happen. We say: Unleash union industrial power to fight for Equal Pay for Equal Work! Struggle for a massive increase in funding for public and community services! Build a movement to call for the wealth of the banks and mines to be ripped out of the hands of the corporate tycoons and brought into public hands!