Police, Courts Hands Off the HSU!

In the most extensive state intervention into the workers movement since the smashing of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the 1980s, police raided the NSW offices of the Health Services Union’s (HSU) East Branch on 2 May, seizing computers and documents. Subsequently the federal Labor government succeeded in having the branch placed under administration. The groundwork for this outrageous intrusion by the capitalist state was laid by HSU officials treacherously dragging the union into the capitalist courts as they pursue their unprincipled power struggles. National secretary Kathy Jackson has levelled corruption charges against her factional opponents, East Branch general secretary Michael Williamson and former HSU official, now federal MP (and suspended ALPer) Craig Thomson.

Far from leading their members in a fight for better pay and conditions, Jackson and Williamson have spent months in a squalid intra-bureaucratic brawl. The picture is one of salacious allegations, competing claims and underhanded manoeuvrings between pro-capitalist ALP heavies (Williamson and Thomson) and Jackson. Addressing a 12 June meeting of the union-busting H.R. Nicholls Society, a think tank with close connections to the right wing of the Liberal Party, Jackson despicably called for “tougher supervision of unions and new controls on union elections” (Australian, 13 June). In her fight against Williamson, Jackson has been assisted (reportedly pro-bono) by notorious anti-union lawyer and H.R. Nicholls Society member, Stuart Wood.

Acting national president of the HSU, Chris Brown, remarked, “Anyone who has been running with the people that [Jackson] has been running with is not acting in the best interests of the union movement” (Australian Financial Review, 13 June). No kidding! However, whatever creepy role Jackson might be playing, “the best interests of the union movement” are also certainly not served by the likes of Brown, who supported federal ALP government moves to place the East Branch under administration. Nor are they served by ALP hacks like Thomson and Williamson, or the ACTU tops who responded to the “corruption” allegations by suspending the East Branch from ACTU membership and establishing an “independent” panel, presided over by a former federal court judge, to “improve transparency and accountability” within the union movement.

By inviting the bosses’ courts into union affairs, the union tops act to legitimise the very forces that are conducting a war on the unions. Unsurprisingly, the bourgeoisie have gleefully seized on the HSU charges and called for broader state scrutiny of the union movement. Serving its capitalist masters well, the federal ALP government quickly drew up legislation to make unions more “accountable” and “transparent.” Meanwhile, opposition leader and anti-union bovver boy, Tony Abbott, has called for significant jail terms for any union official convicted of corruption.

It is obvious that no side in the bitter HSU factional wrangling is fighting for the class interests of the union membership, whose largely female and multiethnic ranks include workers slaving long hours at low pay in essential jobs such as hospital cleaning. To further its own class interests, the proletariat must be mobilised in complete independence from the bourgeois state. Consisting at its core of the police, military, courts and prisons, this state exists to enforce the interests of the capitalist rulers against the interests of the working class. Marxists oppose calling the capitalist state into the trade-union movement—unions must clean their own house! In political opposition to the pro-capitalist union tops, workers need a class-struggle leadership determined to take on the bosses and win. Such a leadership, linked to a revolutionary party would fight for nothing less than the overthrow of the whole rotting capitalist system through workers revolution. We demand: State out of the unions! Police, courts hands off the HSU!