No Parliamentary Party Is Offering Any Major Gains for the Most Exploited & Downtrodden Workers
8 March 2019 – Siva worked for ruthless bosses. The business owners at the warehouse where she was employed simply stole her wages. They insultingly paid her $11 an hour less than she was legally entitled to! Her story, which Siva told to a Queensland parliamentary inquiry, is far from unique. In some sectors like restaurants, cafes and beauty salons, bosses are more likely to pay workers below the legal minimum than they are to actually pay award wages.
Siva was a casual worker. Since bosses can sack casuals on the spot or simply not give them shifts if they complain, casual workers are often underpaid. Moreover, Siva is a woman in a society where, even as we mark International Women’s Day (IWD) in 2019, women continue to suffer gender oppression and much lower pay than men. Also, she is of Asian descent. Either because they are themselves prejudiced or because they know that racism and nationalism is so widespread – and thus that people of colour will be more isolated – bosses think that they can rip off workers of Aboriginal, Asian, African or Middle Eastern origin.
And then there is the all too legal mistreatment of casual workers. Many casuals have no certainty about the number of hours of work that they will get in any given week and can be called in to work at any time. A disproportionately high percentage of casual workers are women and young people. When one adds those employed through labour hire, the gig economy or short-term contracts and the still more who have not even been lucky enough to obtain any work, it’s clear that a large majority of young working class people in Australia do not have secure jobs! It’s not surprising that anxiety, depression and, most tragically, suicide amongst young people are so widespread!
The super-exploitation of casual workers and so many young and women workers hurts all of us workers! When workers are forced into jobs with poor conditions in some industries it allows bosses elsewhere to also chop away at working conditions. Under a capitalist, so-called democracy, no matter who wins an election, little will improve for working class people – and for working class women in particular. The Liberal-Nationals and the right-wing minor parties are, as always, trying to slash workers’ rights. The Labor Party does oppose the push of the conservatives to introduce a new category of “flexi-permanent” worker in order to expand casualisation. Yet the ALP’s agenda will largely maintain the status quo where workers’ wages are not keeping up with ever increasing prices even as the 200 richest people in Australia bolstered their wealth by a staggering $50 billion over the last year. The recent ALP conference refused to commit to an increase to the paltry Newstart Allowance for unemployed workers. The ALP has no policy to prevent bosses from hiring new workers as casuals. Indeed, the continued oppression of casuals and the expansion of short-term work have all occurred under the Fair Work Act regime brought in by the last ALP government and it was the earlier Hawke-Keating ALP administration that had overseen the near doubling of the rate of casualisation in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There is a time-honoured way that we can use to fight back against the undermining of workers’ rights. That is through industrial action and mass mobilisations. This is how workers, women and all oppressed groups have won whatever rights we still enjoy today. Earlier this decade, a union campaign of strikes and rallies by community sector workers won decent pay rises. This was a victory for gender equality too as the low pay of these workers was partly based on discrimination arising from these workers being mainly women. In the middle of last year, strike action by workers at an infrastructure firm, Downer, culminated in the unionised workers defeating the bosses’ attempts to impose yet another wage freeze. This proves that only determined and militant class struggle can bring about positive change!
Unfortunately, many workers don’t work at larger sites with lots of fellow workers where it is easier to organise unions. Small businesses owners are often even more vicious than corporate bigwigs and are more likely to hire workers on an unpermanent basis. That is why we need to fight for laws to protect workers with an insecure employment status. We must demand laws that mandate that all workers be hired with the rights of permanent workers. All workers must also be granted a certain minimum number of hours of work per week. We must say no to gig economy-style employment! Those employed in the gig economy must immediately be transferred from being contractors to being permanent employees. They must start getting paid for the time they are on call and when they aren’t receiving “gigs”. Laws decreeing such measures would be a step forward but we would then still have to work out ways to enforce them. That is why we need to expand union membership. When our unions start taking militant action in workplaces where we workers are well organised then our fellow workers in smaller sites will be inspired to join our unions.
CLASS STRUGGLE & PROMOTING SALVATION THROUGH
VOTING FOR THE ALP & THE GREENS
ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE STRATEGIES
Though most groups on the Left would say that they agree with industrial action and mass struggle, nevertheless at the same time they promote support for the ALP and Greens – either through openly pushing for a vote for these parties or through calling to “put the Liberals last” at the upcoming elections. These left groups like Solidarity, Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party of Australia and Socialist Alternative would argue that they are simply employing a “diversity of tactics” in the struggle for workers’ rights. However, the more that workers believe that their salvation lies with an ALP or ALP/Greens government, the less they will be willing to take the risk of waging class struggle action. This is especially the case because laws restricting strike action have become so draconian that workers who think there is another easier sounding path will be reluctant to dare to engage in militant industrial action.
All this has been evident in the course of the ACTU leadership’s Change the Rules campaign. Now we certainly do need to “change the rules” which are stacked against our unions and severely restrict our right to strike. The ACTU’s campaign was meant to employ a “diversity of tactics” including stop-works, rallies and electioneering for the ALP. However, since it is a lot easier for the ACTU to electioneer than to wage industrial action, the campaign, especially as the elections have neared has become almost entirely a “Vote ALP/Greens” operation. In this light, it is evident too that the focus on “Changing the Rules” became an excuse to avoid unleashing the necessary struggles in defiance of the unjust anti-strike laws. This was dramatically seen in January last year when the leadership of the RTBU union, with the evident acceptance by ACTU leader Sally McManus, bowed to a Fair Work Commission ruling and called off a planned rail strike in Sydney. To be sure, a year earlier, McManus caused a stir when she rightly said that there is no problem with workers breaking laws when the laws are unjust. Yet, as we saw with the aborted Sydney rail strike, these have remained largely empty words. Industrial action is at an all-time low. That is why workers’ wages are so stagnant. And as the elections approach, even the ACTU tops’ talk of breaking unjust laws has evaporated along with the stop-work action component of the Change the Rules campaign.
The bankruptcy of this elections-based strategy is highlighted by the simple fact that the ALP does not even promise to get rid of the anti-strike laws. They even sanctified these very laws in their 2009 Fair Work Act. The left groups that are campaigning for the ALP and/or The Greens contend that they want to get these parties into government and then “hold them to account.” However, the problem is not mainly that the leaders of these parties need to be “held to account.” The issue is the very essence of their politics. In the face of a powerful, capitalist class with its massive wealth that it can use to fund political parties, its ownership of the media and its control of all state institutions, the ALP doesn’t seek to challenge the power of this ruling class but, instead, to get the little they can for workers that these capitalists will find tolerable to give. And this is not very much at all! In the wake of the late noughties’ Global Recession, what the insecure capitalists are willing to give is actually almost nothing! That is why the ALP has promised to maintain the Coalition’s tax cuts for companies with revenues up to $50 million a year. In other words, the ALP has agreed to give multi-millionaire business owners a huge bonus while taking away funds that could have been used for public hospitals or for restoring the parenting payment for low-income single mothers which the former ALP-Greens government so cruelly took away in 2012 (the same year that the then PM Julia Gillard gave her famous anti-misogynist speech!) The Greens do have some social policies that are more progressive than the ALP’s. Yet they do not believe that the working class ought to challenge capitalist power or even organise separately to the capitalists. That means that, ultimately, they must bend to the capitalists’ agenda on nearly all major issues. That is why when The Greens were in government in a coalition with the ALP in Tasmania from 2010 to 2014, they actually pushed for retail electricity privatisation.
Workers must refuse to support any of the pro-capitalist parties. Having been convinced that class struggle is the only road, the working class movement will be better prepared to fight against the attacks of whichever party is elected to administer a state that’s designed to always work in the interests of the big end of town. The struggle to bring this clarity to the working masses is part of the fight to bring a class struggle program to the ascendancy within the working class. Such a program understands that building class struggle resistance requires bringing the working class together in the tightest possible unity. That means rejecting our current, pro-ALP union leaders’ divisive economic nationalist calls which set local workers in competition against our international and guest worker sisters and brothers. We must actively oppose nationalist and racist divisions. We must mobilise the union movement to fight to free the refugees, to demand the rights of citizenship for all visiting and guest workers and to build genuine unity with trade unions right across the world. Unlike the ALP’s strategy, the class struggle program that we must fight for is based not on what the capitalists can tolerate but what we and our fellow working class sisters and brothers need. That means demanding permanency for all workers who are currently employed as casuals or as pseudo-contractors in the gig economy. It means fighting to force profitable companies to, at the expense of their profits, increase hiring. It means fighting for free, around the clock, childcare! For equal pay for equal work! Of course, in the face of a powerful movement making such demands, the capitalist exploiters will yell, “we can’t afford this, the economy will collapse.” To this a class struggle leadership of the working class, that is a revolutionary socialist party, would respond: If you can’t run the economy in a way that gives secure jobs to all and enables women to have the complete economic independence they need to maximise their participation in society and enable them to more easily dump violent and abusive men, then you do not deserve to have ownership over the economy. We will take it from your greedy, miserly and clumsy hands. Under the watchful eye of our sovereign Aboriginal sisters and brothers, the workplaces and industries of this country will thrive under the public ownership and the collective control of a socialist workers government.