Racist Scapegoating of Refugees and 457 Visa Workers Is Aimed at Attacking Workers’ Rights

Trade Unions:

Win Freedom for Refugees!

Defend 457 Visa Workers’ Rights!

July 10: “Nauru Same as Guantanamo!” Referring to the notorious U.S. jail and torture site at Guantanamo Bay, that was the chant of asylum seekers locked up in Nauru during desperate protests earlier this year. Whether imprisoned in Nauru or in the malaria-infested Manus Island camp or on mainland hellholes like Villawood Detention Centre, asylum seekers fleeing to Australia are today being treated every bit as inhumanely by this ALP government as they were by the former Howard government … and then some!

Cynically, ALP and Coalition politicians – and the racist radio hosts that egg them on – are claiming that their “get tough” on refugees policies are, in part, aimed at saving refugees from drowning at sea. So, people are imprisoned in hellholes that drive many to attempt suicide out of “concern” for their welfare! The same kind of “concern,” no doubt, that was shown when the Australian Navy and Customs callously abandoned the search for the bodies of 55 Tamil refugees who drowned earlier this month. There is no way that would ever happen if the victims had been upper class white people! With such hostility to refugees, no wonder some are dying at sea. Instead of providing help to refugee boats in trouble, Navy and Customs are obsessed with seizing for imprisonment those who do make it through.

When Julia Gillard was ousting Kevin Rudd three years ago, Rudd said he was being targeted, in part, because his rivals wanted to move to the right on the refugee issue. But now, the new Rudd regime is moving even further to the right on refugees. Barely had Rudd’s counter-coup been completed when foreign minister Bob Carr ranted that most asylum seekers are not fleeing persecution and called for the Refugee Review Tribunal to knock back more asylum claims (Yahoo 7 News, 28 June.) Labor’s Carr is sounding just like despicable Liberal Shadow Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. The ALP’s ever crueller stance is in turn pushing Abbot’s right-wing Liberals to take an ever more extreme anti-refugee policy. However, when it comes to disgustingly blaming 457 Visa workers for taking local jobs, the ALP outdoes the Liberals. In March, then PM Gillard ranted that she wanted to “Stop foreign workers being put at the front of the queue with Australian workers at the back” (Herald Sun, 14 March.)

Yet it is not 457 Visa workers who cause local job losses. No, that is caused by greedy business owners who try to maximise profits by shedding jobs and making those who remain work faster. Thus, the way to save jobs is to mobilise workers’ industrial action – including strikes, occupations and secondary boycotts – to force the greedy bosses to retain their workers at the expense of their profits. Make these vultures have to do with a lesser number of luxury yachts and extravagant holiday homes! However, for militant workers to organise the action that is needed, they need their co-workers to be as clear as possible as to who the real enemy is. And they need the greatest unity between workers – including between local and 457 Visa workers. That is why it is crucial to oppose the ALP government’s divisive attempts to blame 457 Visa workers for unemployment. To be sure, the exploiting class does seek to force vulnerable guest workers into accepting substandard conditions in order to drive down the working conditions of all. Yet, that is what they do with all of the more vulnerable workers – including apprentices and casuals. Our response should not be to see these workers as rivals but to demand that they be given exactly the same conditions as other workers. In particular, so that the threat of deportation cannot be used to intimidate guest workers, we must demand they get the full rights of citizens. And to protect these workers against abuses, we must also demand 100% union membership for all 457 Visa workers … and indeed we must fight for 100% unionisation of all workers (including casuals) full stop!

Consistently Oppose Divisive “Aussies First”-Nationalism

Today, media hounds justify the anti-refugee attacks by insisting that politicians are merely following the wishes of working class Western Sydney. Yet the truth is that some of the masses do buy into this largely because they have been fed a barrage of anti-refugee propaganda by racist politicians and media commentators. Indeed, the way that the establishment excuses its anti-refugee attacks with the “reflecting community sentiment” argument resembles the 19th century British imperialists. Then, after feverishly foisting the addictive drug opium upon Chinese people, the British elite, in unleashing war against China for its attempt to restrict the trade, cynically claimed that they were merely adhering to the wishes of ordinary Chinese people because opium was “eagerly sought after by the Chinese people”!

The ruling class’ attacks on refugees are in fact blows against the working class people of Western Sydney – and indeed of the whole country. The capitalist ruling elite want to scapegoat refugees so that working class people will be diverted from the truth that it is they, the elite, who are the sole cause of the unemployment, the intolerable hospital waiting times and the shortage of affordable housing that so infuriates the masses. The capitalists know that nationalist diversions (like blaming refugees) stop the working class from organising against them and thus enable these exploiters to further assault workers’ rights. That is why for the struggle for workers’ rights to advance, the workers movement must firmly oppose scapegoating of refugees and must take action to demand freedom for refugees, the closure of all detention camps and full rights of citizenship for anyone who makes it here. At the same time, with violent fascist groups emboldened by the war on refugees and the scapegoating of 457 Visa workers, the trade union movement must mobilise alongside “ethnic” youth, Aboriginal people and anti-racist activists to crush the fascist menace.

In an important advance for the refugee rights struggle, the Sydney Branch of the Maritime Workers Union (MUA) has come out strongly in support of asylum seekers. At the June 16 refugee rights rally, leftist Branch secretary Paul McAleer spoke powerfully and passionately about the need to fight for freedom for refugees. This shows the potential for the workers movement to mobilise its industrial muscle behind the struggle for refugee rights.

Unfortunately, at the same time as it takes a worthy stand on the refugee issue, the MUA continues to push a demand that buys into the nationalism that fuels anti-refugee hostility – the demand for “Australian crews on Australian ships.” Such setting up of the interests of Australian workers against their overseas counterparts can only breed resentment to foreigners and thus to refugees as well. What’s more the demand does not actually help to protect “Aussie jobs.” For by dividing local and overseas seamen, maritime workers are denied the international unity that they need to be able to stop rich shipping corporations from downsizing their workforces. Now, of course the profit-obsessed shipping bosses seek to use lower wage workers from poorer countries to drive down everyone’s wages. However, the response of our unions should not be to set up Australian workers in rivalry against their overseas counterparts but to solely focus on ensuring that all seamen on local routes have the same pay and conditions as local workers.

Similarly to the MUA’s stance on foreign-crewed ships, the pro-ALP officials heading other key unions are aggressively joining the ALP government’s campaign to set up the interests of Australian workers against those of their 457 Visa counterparts. This they are doing even while simultaneously doing some good work to defend the workplace rights of 457 Visa workers themselves. Needless to say, branding foreign workers as competitors of Australian workers is going to create national-chauvinist sentiments hostile to refugees as well.

This economic nationalism promoted by the ALP, since its very founding, runs so deep within society that even some groups that have been heavily involved in the struggle for refugee rights have been feeding into it. Thus, the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group has supported the pro-ALP union bureaucracy’s nationalist campaign to keep out 457 Visa workers (although it has somewhat moderated its stance.) It has sought to justify its stance by downplaying the jingoistic nature of the campaign. To be sure, SAlt is justified in slamming the hypocrisy of the racist business bigwigs that have denounced the unions for being “racist.” And SAlt, itself, has in words distanced itself from the overt calls to “put Australian workers first.” Yet actions speak louder than words. The reactionary nature of SAlt’s thrust on 457 Visa workers issue is proven by the fact that it supported and hailed the July 2012 “Local Workers First” rally in Perth (see Socialist Alternative article, “Perth Workers Rally For Jobs, Reject Racism Smear”, 3 July 2012.) No matter how many quotes SAlt produces of union officials at the rally insisting that they are not against immigration, the act of loudly demanding that Australian workers be put ahead of overseas workers is not only blatantly divisive but can only fuel hostility to foreigners and thus to refugees as well.

The ideological blanket of xenophopic nationalism that the capitalist ruling class has thrown over the Australian masses is so heavy that any embrace of it in any one arena – for example, on the 457 Visa worker issue – will make it harder to throw off elsewhere, for example on the refugee issue. That is another reason why it is not sufficient to fight for refugee rights only by chanting “Free the Refugees” at refugee rights rallies. There must be a consistent opposition to Aussies First-nationalism in every social arena – including crucially within the union movement.

We in Trotskyist Platform are proud that, in all political arenas where we are active, we have been standing squarely against the divisive campaign to keep out 457 Visa workers while calling for the workers movement to win these workers the rights that will prevent them from being specially exploited or used to undercut the conditions of other workers. Thus, at the Sydney May Day rally, we carried a large banner that read:

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Win Full Citizenship Rights and 100% Union Coverage for 457 Visa Workers!

No Competition for Jobs Between Australian and Guest Workers!

Workers United Will Never be Defeated Means Unity with Guest Workers Too.

Australian, Guest and Overseas Workers Unite to Take Industrial Action to Force Greedy Capitalist Bosses to Increase Hiring of All Workers

To its credit, another organisation on the Left, the Solidarity group, which has been heavily involved in the refugee rights struggle, has also taken an internationalist stand on the 457 Visa workers issue. Solidarity has justifiably attacked those left groups that have capitulated to the nationalist campaign. Thus, a Solidarity statement of August 2012 titled, “Open Letter to the Left, Welcome 457 Visa Workers” correctly stated that:

“…. The unions’ “Local workers first” campaign is fundamentally directed at keeping out “foreign workers”, especially those employed on 457 visas.

“Tragically, almost all of the left has got behind the union leaderships’ call for the abolition of 457 visas. In the context of a campaign against 457 workers coming here, this can only feed nationalist and racist responses to the economic crisis.

“… Socialist Alliance has explicitly called for scrapping both “Rinehart’s Migration deal and 457 visas” at the same time as promoting “full residency and industrial rights for migrant and guest workers”. But the call for full rights is empty if 457 workers are barred from entry.”

Unfortunately, the Solidarity group then undermines this stance in defence of 457 Visa workers by – rather than refusing to support any of the nationalist, pro-capitalist parties that inhabit parliament – calling for electoral support for the very party that is running both the poisonous campaign against the 457 Visa workers and the Pacific Solution Mark II, the ALP. To be sure, Solidarity makes its backhanded calls to vote Labor while at the same time making strong criticisms of the party. Yet when you call for electoral support for a party, you are doing far more than telling people to tick a certain box on election day as a “lesser evil.” No matter what criticisms you make of the party, you are still effectively telling your audience that its program is, in at least some degree, worthy of support. Thus, any support for the ALP at these elections can only undercut opposition to its racist and anti-working class policies. Furthermore, if Rudd were to pull off an ALP victory, every vote that the ALP received, as opposed to say an informal vote, will be used to legitimise its governing policies: from its racist war on refugees, to its scapegoating of 457 Visa workers, to its cruel slashing of welfare payments for low-income single parents, to its curbs on funding for higher education and to its maintenance of discriminatory laws against unionised construction workers.

Rely on Class Struggle and Not on Appeals to the Small-“l”-liberal Greens

More enthusiastically than they back the ALP, Solidarity and several other groups involved in the refugee rights campaign, like Socialist Alliance, support the Greens (albeit with criticisms.) Yet, although the Greens have spoken out against the worst excesses of the ALP’s war on refugees, the Greens were in a defacto coalition with the government for much of the last three years. In other words, for the Greens the horrors of Labor’s John Howard-like treatment of refugees was not worth leaving coalition government over. That hardly sounds like a party committed to refugee rights! Furthermore, the Greens take an even more extreme opposition to 457 Visa workers than the ALP. When reforms to the 457 Visa scheme passed through parliament last week, it was the Greens who pushed hardest for more stringent “Australian workers first” provisions (see Greens MP Adam Bandt’s own website, 27 June.)

There is another reason why any support for the Greens harms the struggle for refugee rights and harms the fight against racism in general. That is because the Greens do not even claim to be a party that stands for the particular interests of the working class – as even the Labour Party in some way claims to do. Thus, the Greens object to trade unions – the mass organisations of the working class – funding political parties and outrageously equate that with corporate funding for political parties. Indeed, much of the Greens’ base is the upper middle class as well as more liberal members of the capitalist class itself. Therefore, when left groups convince politically active workers to support the Greens they are undermining workers’ understanding that it is only their own class united with the oppressed that can defend their class interests as workers – and not the graces of “nicer”, more liberal capitalists. The loss of this understanding is disastrous for class struggle. For when it happens, instead of mobilising their united industrial power to fight for their rights, workers start hoping and lobbying for a nicer boss that they hope will treat them better which never really happens and gets them nowhere anyway. And if workers are not participating in – or at least seeing their fellow workers unleash – industrial action to defend their rights and jobs against their greedy bosses, they become susceptible to propaganda blaming refugees and migrants for their hardships.

It is indeed precisely because of the low level of workers’ industrial struggle over the last several years that the capitalist rulers have been able to so impregnate some of the masses with hostility to refugees. On the other hand, if there was a serious working class fight back that combined opposition to corporate job slashing with demands for properly funded public hospitals, free childcare and a massive increase in public housing to drive down rents then not only would the working class as a whole become more immune to anti-refugee propaganda but more sections of the unemployed and lower middle classes – amongst the layers most susceptible to racist demagogy – would realise that the problem is not refugees and migrants but the ruling capitalist exploiting class.

We badly need such a fight back! For with the capitalist world economy continuing to be mired in a deep economic crisis, we are likely to see more job losses here as well. The situation in the likes of Greece and Portugal becomes more unbearable every day, Italy and France lurch towards a similar fate, in the U.S. real unemployment and homelessness remain at high levels and in the capitalist part of the BRICS countries economic growth is either stalling as in the case of Brazil or completely stagnant as in the case of Russia. If the Australian economy has remained relatively stable, it is solely because China’s powerhouse socialistic economy has been buying up Australian exports at ever higher levels. However, as new mineral resources are discovered in other parts of the world and China consciously refocuses its economy on services and high-end manufacturing, China will no longer be buying Australian mineral resources at the same rate. The effects of this will flow on to the whole Australian economy. Then, Australian business owners who have ripped fortunes out of their workers’ toil will not think twice before slashing the jobs of these same workers that made them rich. If the workers movement does not then take action to prevent such job cuts then racist demagogues will surely feed off the resulting increase in unemployment and insecurity. Unfortunately, this is what is happening in Europe where far right racist groups are gaining strength.

To unleash the kind of class struggle that we so desperately need, our unions must be re-directed onto a new agenda. The current pro-ALP union leaders shy away from industrial action. They accept the fraud that workers’ wellbeing depends on their bosses’ business being as profitable as possible. Thus, our current leaders’ main response to job slashing has been to try and make the culpable firms more profitable through calling for protectionist measures to give them the edge over overseas producers. Against this losing strategy, we need our unions led by a program that does not accept the leaching bosses’ “right” to maximise profits. A program that says, instead, that workers have a right to a job and that this must be defended by any means necessary – and that means by militant industrial action to force the bosses to accept more jobs at the expense of their profits. A union leadership fighting on such a program would need to do everything possible to unite the working class – most importantly by taking action to oppose the diversionary scapegoating of 457 Visa workers and refugees.

Yet, the struggle for refugee rights does not simply depend on what politics guides the union movement. It also depends on what politics guide the refugee rights movement itself. In order for larger sections of the workers movement to be won to the refugee rights campaign, the campaign itself needs to outline a program that motivates how fighting for refugee rights is essential for the workers movement to unify and strengthen its ranks so that it can better resist its exploiters. This, the refugee rights movement must do through, for example, the slogans it uses for calling rallies. However, this is not only a vital step for the movement to take – it is also a huge step. For taking this step will necessarily repel from the movement liberal ruling class elements and some of the upper-middle class elements who are anti-union and anti-industrial action. Yet so be it! Without appealing to the class interests of the working class, the refugee rights campaign will not be able to win decisive chunks of the workers movement to its side.

Sisters and brothers, many anti-racist activists have worked so hard to publicise the plight of refugees, to bring their humanity to the public, to broadcast their sufferings and pleas to wider audiences. This is crucial work. However, without the social power of the workers movement behind us, the chances of victory are greatly minimised. That is why the movement must urgently recast its slogans so that they appeal to workers’ class interests. We must say: “Don’t let the bosses’ politicians divide workers with racism! Make our unions stronger – Build workers’ unity – Fight for refugee rights!” and “Don’t let the ruling class get off the hook by blaming refugees. Let us working class people support refugees so that we can better focus people on who the real enemies are – the greedy corporate bosses who lay off workers at will and grab so much wealth that there is little left for social infrastructure.”

There is an additional overarching reason why the refugee movement must explicitly link its struggle with that of the workers’ struggle against the capitalist exploiters. That is because in the long run we cannot get rid of the racism – that today in Australia targets refugees, non-white “ethnic” communities, overseas students and 457 Visa workers alike – unless we can sweep away this capitalist system that breeds it and replace it with an egalitarian socialist society where the material basis for racism will simply not exist. We thus need the refugee rights movement and, indeed, every other progressive social movement to contribute to the struggle against capitalism by directing its participants onto an anti-capitalist path. Let’s fight hard to do this while at the same time maximising our chances of victory in the refugee rights struggle today – let’s unite the refugee rights struggle with the class struggle of the working class!