Down With Bosses' Anti-Union Laws!

For Class Struggle to Defeat Grocon/Baillieu Union Busting!

Break With Laborism! We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We reprint below a 24 September Spartacist League leaflet.

From 22 August through early September hundreds and sometimes thousands of angry CFMEU construction workers and other unionists picketed the huge Grocon Emporium building site in central Melbourne, halting production for more than a week. Defying Victorian Supreme Court orders that declared their actions “illegal,” workers from across the city mobilised against provocative attempts by union-hating Grocon CEO, Daniel Grollo, to prevent effective union organising at Grocon sites. Smeared by the bourgeois media as “thugs” and “criminals,” the workers repeatedly faced down contingents of police, including the riot squad, mounted police and dog squad, which were mobilised by the Baillieu Liberal Victorian state government. On 28 August, workers repelled a vicious attack by cops, including on horseback, wielding batons and using capsicum spray, as the state forces tried to break the blockade.

Solidarity actions broke out at other Grocon sites in Melbourne, and also in Sydney and Brisbane. With anger mounting, the Victorian Trades Hall Building Industry Group of unions representing 150,000 workers, threatened, as one of several options, a 24-hour state-wide stoppage. At the same time, CFMEU officials were embracing a Fair Work Australia (FWA) recommendation to cease industrial action during a two week “cooling off” period. Following failed union talks with Grocon, in the small hours of the morning of 31 August, the Baillieu government mobilised hundreds of cops to secure the Emporium site. When thousands of building workers arrived that morning, they stood firm when the union tops told them that they were outnumbered and should let the scabs through. However, a small number of scabs were secretly escorted onto the site under the protection of the cops. Since then, the CFMEU tops have stopped industrial action at the site as part of agreeing to negotiations in FWA.

Grocon, one of the largest construction companies in Australia, had earlier tried and failed to impose a non-union agreement on its workforce. After reluctantly making a deal with the CFMEU in April, it reneged almost immediately, refusing to recognise union and union safety representatives and attempting to prohibit all signs of CFMEU presence—including union posters, stickers and clothing—on the site. Across the country at least one worker is killed on construction sites every week and many more injured and maimed. This means little to the profit-gouging bosses who are only worried about their bottom line. According to the CFMEU, the only safety representative Grocon would allow at the Emporium site was the son of the company’s human resources manager! To enforce its anti-union strategy the company employed thugs including a former nightclub bouncer and state heavyweight boxing champion.

Bosses Escalate War on Unions

Alongside serving to enforce Grollo’s attempt to drive the powerful construction unions off Grocon sites, the massive display of police violence and intimidation also served to spearhead Baillieu’s draconian new anti-union construction code. Under this “code,” union organising is practically verboten while parasitic labour-hire companies are given free rein, driving down pay and conditions of all workers. Now Baillieu has announced an inquiry into the building industry that squarely targets the CFMEU. Make no mistake, the Baillieu government, working in tandem with Grocon, is out to cripple the building industry unions in Victoria.

The federal minority Labor government swiftly denounced the union struggle against Grocon, with Prime Minister Gillard railing: “What is happening in the streets of Melbourne is grossly unacceptable. It is breaches of state law. It’s illegal actions...” (ABC website, 5 September). Earlier, federal Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten echoed Grollo, accusing construction workers of “intimidation, violence and thuggery” (Australian, 29 August). The ALP government has been in the forefront of the war on the CFMEU. The Rudd/Gillard regimes maintained the Howard government’s witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission until this year, when they transferred coercive powers to the government’s new Fair Work Building and Construction Inspectorate (FWBCI). The FWBCI recently announced federal court action against the CFMEU and six officials over strikes and bans in Victoria in 2011. This follows fines of $200,000 against the Western Australian branch for actions in Perth last year.

In the context of the current world capitalist economic crisis, most sectors of the Australian economy (outside mineral resources) are floundering. In order to maintain and expand profits, the bosses are cutting jobs, and trying to slash wages and conditions, and enforce speed-ups at work. To this end, the bosses are escalating their attacks on the trade unions. Company heads such as Grollo know that where there is no union there is no organised collective force to resist the savage drive to increase the rate of exploitation of workers. As revolutionary Marxists, we fight to mobilise workers and their allies in defence of the unions against the bosses’ attacks.

From the public sector to airlines, maritime, manufacturing and construction, workers have been getting it in the neck and are itching to fight back. Militant workers know that if Grocon’s union-busting is successful it will embolden building-industry and other bosses across the country to replicate these attacks. Spartacist supporters who joined the mass pickets in solidarity with the union reported that many workers wanted all Grocon sites shut down until they win. Others pointed out that teachers, who were on strike against attacks on their jobs and conditions, should join them. Building workers have repeatedly demonstrated that they have the organisation and social power to shut down production and win against Grollo and Baillieu.

However, by ending union action and agreeing to negotiations in FWA, the pro-capitalist union tops subordinate class struggle to the dictates of the bosses. As was highlighted by last year’s Qantas dispute, union struggles that end up in FWA die there. While the union tops preach reliance on the bosses’ courts, the Qantas bosses are proceeding to slash thousands of jobs. FWA is no “independent umpire.” Replacing the Howard government’s hated WorkChoices regime, Labor’s FWA serves the same role of enforcing the government’s draconian anti-union laws and is an integral part of the repressive capitalist state apparatus.

Not the Bosses’ Rules But Hard Class Struggle

In the 2010-11 financial year alone the courts imposed fines of more than $2.5 million on Victorian building unions for struggles they deemed “unlawful.” Millions in hard-earned union dues have been paid in fines over recent years to the capitalist state—which is then able to employ more lawyers and cops to intimidate and persecute militants and to strangle union struggles. Now, court action against the CFMEU launched by Grocon and the Victorian government outrageously threatens the union with up to $10.5 million in fines! With the wind in their sails, the bosses are looking to break the union by bankrupting it. Victorian Attorney-General, Robert Clark, threatened “there should be consequences if [Supreme Court] orders were not obeyed” while the arrogant Grollo lectured that unionists must “obey the law and the orders of the Supreme Court of Victoria at all times like the rest of us” (Age, 4 September).

There is no “us.” The laws in Australia are designed to uphold the interests of the capitalist ruling class—and the state, centrally the courts, cops, military and prisons, enforces them against workers in struggle. Workplace legislation is crafted, by Liberal and Labor politicians alike, to thwart genuine proletarian struggle. However, what the bosses can get away with depends on the outcome of class struggle. Strikes, backed by mass pickets and occupations can turn the rigged anti-union laws, including the huge fines levelled against unions, into a dead letter. In 1969, when Victorian tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea was jailed for refusing to pay fines imposed for defying anti-strike laws, determined mass strike action not only won his release but saw the anti-union penal powers shelved for more than a decade.

What is needed to defeat the current anti-union provocations by Grocon and the Victorian government is hard class struggle. This means a fight to shut down all Grocon sites with mass militant pickets that no one dares cross, widening the strike to shut down the whole building industry if necessary. Such a struggle should be linked to a series of demands, including the fight for a closed shop; for union-run safety committees with the power to immediately shut down unsafe sites; for an end of the scourge of labour hire companies; and for union control of hiring with special union-run programs aimed at reaching out to and training women, youth and oppressed minorities. With many building workers facing a long work week we demand an end to compulsory overtime. To fight unemployment in the building sector there should be a struggle for 30 hours work for 40 hours pay to spread the available work around at the bosses’ expense.

The chief obstacles to a class-struggle fight are the Laborite union bureaucrats who push reliance on the bosses’ courts and divert workers’ anger into electing the ALP to government, and keeping it there. This is a dead end for workers. From Labor Prime Minister Chifley who sent the military against the great miners’ strike in 1949 to the Hawke/Keating, Rudd and Gillard regimes, history shows that the ALP is the enemy of workers and the oppressed. The Gillard government’s anti-union legislation sits alongside their barbaric treatment of the unemployed, single mothers, refugees and Aborigines.

The stark decline in union numbers began in the 1980s under the Hawke/Keating ALP government, which tied the unions to the class-collaborationist Prices and Incomes Accord, demanding they kowtow to government dictated wages and conditions in the so-called “national interest.” Under the Accord, the gap between the rich and poor widened dramatically with the bosses raking in huge profits. Unions that stepped out of line were mercilessly gone after. When the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) went outside the lying “consensus” that underlay the Accord they were ruthlessly smashed by the federal Labor government, aided by John Cain’s Victorian state ALP government and supported by much of the union bureaucracy. Today the minority Labor government continues this anti-working-class tradition.

For a Revolutionary, Internationalist Perspective

While the CFMEU leadership like to posture as “progressives,” and are even seen by some as “leftist,” the Victorian branch remains affiliated to the Labor Party, and the national leadership unashamedly called to “elect Gillard and Labor” in the last federal elections. Earlier this year they helped spearhead a nasty chauvinist campaign by some unions that appealed to the Labor government for Australian workers to be given priority for jobs over “foreign” workers (see “No to Nationalist Poison—For Proletarian Internationalism!” Australasian Spartacist No. 216, Winter 2012). This campaign only serves to foster racial divisions amongst the working class, poisoning vitally necessary integrated, united proletarian struggle against the capitalist rulers’ attacks.

By pushing this vile nationalist jobs campaign, the CFMEU tops, like the union bureaucracy as a whole, act to transmit retrograde bourgeois consciousness into the ranks of the organised working class. In doing so they are turning their backs on some of the prouder traditions of building workers. In 1989 building workers organised a powerful protest against the police killing of Aboriginal man David Gundy in Sydney, and in 1996 they led a struggle in defence of Aboriginal protesters against a cop assault outside federal parliament in Canberra.

The ALP is a bourgeois workers party, based on the trade unions but with a thoroughly pro-capitalist leadership and program. When in power the ALP administers for racist, sexist, exploitative capitalist rule. The union tops’ attempts to corral militant unionists back into the ALP parliamentary fold underscore their servility to the very capitalist state that relentlessly prosecutes a war against the unions. To overcome the contradiction between the material interests of the proletariat and the grip of the conservative union tops, it is necessary to forge a class-struggle leadership of the unions that is linked to a revolutionary, internationalist vanguard workers party.

Steeled in political struggle against Laborite reformism and fighting to mobilise workers in complete independence from the capitalist state, a revolutionary party would be a tribune of the people, combating all forms of special oppression that divide workers along national, ethnic, language and gender lines. It would solidarise with the struggles of workers overseas such as the Greek working class currently being pummelled by vicious austerity measures and the embattled platinum miners facing murderous repression by the ANC/SACP/COSATU government in neo-Apartheid South Africa. We fight to build a workers party modelled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, who led the proletariat to power in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Seeking to win the advanced layers of the working class to its revolutionary program, a vanguard workers party would fight for the destruction of the capitalist state through victorious workers revolution and the establishment of a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia.