The unity of labour is the hope of the world

No issue in this country is more pressing than the Coalition’s onslaught on the very existence of trade unions. The Howard government’s intent goes far beyond routine union-bashing.

The goal now is, effectively, to abolish them. Howard’s “final solution” would replace all forms of collective bargaining with individual contracts or collective agreements as weak as individual contracts. The string of wins for the bosses, which began at Mudginberri and Dollar Sweets back in the days of Bob Hawke, is to be made universal. Our first job is to multiply the roadblocks built in defence of the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998.

Socialist Alliance members have been explaining the stakes in this fight, and are flat out in helping organise resistance. As a quarterly, Seeing Red cannot play a part in those day-by-day efforts. This issue hopes to be useful in two ways. It provides a forum for experiences, past and current, and it tries to deepen analysis of what the Coalition is planning and why.

Confusion about the government’s ambitions is encouraging the ACTU hierarchy to proclaim that the unions can survive only if they roll over and play dead. The fatal assumption of our “peak body” is that its leaders can negotiate so that the movement will live to fight another day after the ALP is returned to office.

The ACTU cannot think the unthinkable. By 2010, the unions will be destroyed or so hollowed out that organised working people may well be back in the graveyard of the late 1890s. Nor can the hierarchs face up to the fact that even if the ALP does ever get back, it is likely to accept most of the Coalition’s laws as a continuation of its own 13 years of giving corporations the run of the “labour market”.

Howard’s attack is not a political stunt to get re-elected in 2007 — not another Tampa or interest-rate spectre. The abolition of collective bargaining is also more than an ideological romp by the Institute for Public Affairs and the ratty Right in the Coalition. The Business Council is in there pushing hard.

The corporations have a double aim. In some sectors, they want to lower the hourly cost of entitlements, which involves more than wages. Indeed, they will increase cash-in-hand if they can abolish other costs. The other aim is to eliminate paying anything at all for the hours during which workers are not adding value — the obvious example is in food outlets between the rush hours.

However, the onslaught from the state on behalf of capital presents opportunities as well as obstacles. Unprecedented attacks require novel responses to organising. Those problems and possibilities are at the core of this issue as three militant unionists, two of them elected officials, respond to questions from Seeing Red.

Jim Staples brings his own experience of being “busted” as an arbitration judge to his discussion of union busting. Dave Kerin leads into the complexities of creating activist workplaces while avoiding the bosses’ king hits. Ross Gwyther draws on his experience as an NTEU organiser to provide a case study of building within the tertiary education sector. John Parker explores the embedding of organised labour into the social needs of localities around Gippsland, just as Steve Jolly recounts battles from inner Melbourne.

Mario Novelli’s account of Colombian workers’ resistance to privatisation and state terror provides an inspiring example from another continent.

Other contributions to this issue include the first part of US Marxist Bertell Ollman’s “Letter of resignation from the Jewish people”, lucid in its analysis of the political and psychological roots of Zionism and the Israeli settler-state. A similar concern about an ethical basis for the Australian national identity — also the product of settlement that marginalised the original inhabitants — provokes Mark McKenna’s thoughts on republicanism and reconciliation.

[This is the editorial from the new issue of the Socialist Alliance journal Seeing Red. To subscribe, see the ad on page 16 or visit .]

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