Workers hungry for alternative to Labor

By Peter Boyle

The frustration of rank-and-file building workers who marched up to the ALP national conference on July 31 to demand that the Rudd Labor government honour its promise to abolish the Howard government-created Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was palpable. First the march was called off by union officials, then it was put on again at the last minute. But when the workers got to Darling Harbour they were shepherded away from the ALP conference site to a hall around the corner.

Then they were told by ACTU President Sharan Burrow and Union NSW Secretary Mark Lennon to “celebrate” the trade union movement and the community Your Rights At Work campaign which defeated the previous Howard Liberal governments anti-union laws.

Burrow also tried her best to frighten workers with the prospect of thousand of job losses from the global recession brought about by corporate greed. The implication was: you better not make too much fuss about your rights now - just worry about keeping your job.

But the workers weren't buying it. They kept up the chants against the ABCC laws and booed when the image of former ACTU Secretary Greg Combet (now Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science and Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change in the Rudd government). And the message was made pungently clear in the photoshop-ed image of Julia Gillard (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) as Margaret “Thatchard” proadly brandished by one building worker.

Burrow and Lennon were decidedly uneasy.

And so they should be. The next day the unions represented at the ALP conference supported a motion on the ABCC which would allow its Gestapo-like powers of coercion to be transferred to a special division of Fair Work Australia even though it also said that: “Labor understands that coercive investigation powers impinge upon people’s civil liberties and that their use should be limited to circumstances where these powers should have a continuing role in the enforcement of workplace laws.”

Since then, on August 5 penalties totaling $15,000 were imposed on the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU) and organiser Noel Washington by the Federal Court. On August 11, South Australian building worker Ark Tribe goes to court to face a possible 6 months jail for refusing to speak to the ABCC Gestapo.

On July 28, Ark tried to ask PM Kevin Rudd a question during a meeting. He was the only one standing up in the hall with his hand raised. But Rudd couldn't see him, it seems, http://www.arkstribe.blogspot.com reported.

What was Ark's question?

"Why is it, that as recently demonstrated by Mr. Turnbull, he like most other Australians can exercise their right to remain silent, yet I as an Australian Construction Worker who only demands the same right, find myself in a situation where your government is trying to imprison me for 6 months?”

“All I want, Mr. Prime Minister, is a fair suck of the sauce bottle mate."

Before the march on the ALP conference, at a meeting of building delegates of the NSW CFMEU construction division, one delegate got up and said the obvious: that the ALP was in no way the workers' party and that workers needed to build a new party of their own. He was strongly cheered.

It was also clear that most of the rank-and-file prison workers who rallied in Sydney on August 6 against the planned privatisation of Parklea prison by the Rees NSW Labor government had given up on the ALP. They reserved their strongest cheers for left-wing Greens MLC Sylvia Hale, who has been a regular visitor at the 100 days-long picket outside Premier Nathan Rees' electorate office.

The union officials had to bring Hale forward on the speaking list when the workers kept chanting: "Bring on Sylvia! Bring on Sylvia!" It showed once again that rank-and-file trade unionists in struggle know they need a political alternative to Labor.

Meanwhile most of the leaderships of the trade unions are still bogged down doing dirty deals in the Labor party despite the effect that Labor government after Labor government keeps proving that they are nothing but alternative governments for big business. They do everything to make the corporate richer and more powerful, they are helping weaken the very unions that donate millions of dollars to the ALP year after year and they prove their venality and corruption over and over again.

The contradiction is growing and the challenge for all of us on the left is to demonstrate not only that it is necessary to build a political alternative to the ALP but that it it is also possible.