Dick Nichols
On November 26, the Brisbane Courier Mail front page screamed: “Barnaby to wreck Howard’s IR agenda”. Less than a week later the “maverick Queensland senator” was trying to convince the country that government acceptance of his amendments to the Work Choices legislation had “saved Christmas”.
As Greens Senator Bob Brown put it: “Barnaby is the Australian Christmas turkey ... what an overinflated misconception he has of his ineffectual efforts to really save workers from these draconian laws.”
The day after, the Howard government guillotined a barely unchanged Work Choices bill through the Senate, bringing the beginning of the real war over the Australian workplace one step closer. On the same day, Howard’s freedom-killing “anti-terror” laws and his poor-bashing “welfare-to-work” legislation were also rushed through the upper house.
The silly farce of Joyce’s lightning conversion from wrecker to constructive amender of Work Choices reveals a lot about the war workers and their supporters are going to get into in 2006. The stakes are huge — a make-or-break struggle to decide whether the corporations will roam unchecked in the Australian workplace — and in society at large.
Millions of workers now understand or sense this — that’s why there was such a massive turnout on November 15 for the national protest against Howard’s attacks. It’s also why the Queensland Nationals have had to fake concern over Work Choices in the Queensland parliament.
However, corporate Australia is deadly serious about its support for the Howard government’s anti-union laws — it sniffs a huge win if it can crunch what remains of worker and union strength in this country. That was why when it became known that there was a chance that Barnaby Joyce might “wreck Howard’s IR agenda” all the major corporate umbrella organisations went into emergency offensive mode.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) chief executive Peter Hendy said that “some in government were becoming spooked by the ACTU campaign” and promised that “we’re going to be watching like hawks to make sure there’s no substantial inflexibilities built into the system that don’t exist today”.
Hendy stated that the ACCI “would strongly oppose writing in a guarantee on penalty rates”, because this would clearly undermine the ability of its small business constituency to get away with paying nothing more than a base-rate wage.
The Australian Industry Group, which reports a huge leap in interest in its seminars on how the individual business can milk Work Choices when it comes into force, didn’t oppose “sensible amendments to the legislation to preserve fairness and to address any unintended consequences” but stressed that “great care needs to be taken to avoid the loss of existing flexibility”.
National Farmers Federation president Peter Corish stated that “the objective of removing complex and inflexible arrangements must be adhered to by parliament. NFF would not agree to new provisions being included in the bill that in fact create more restrictive workplace practices than what are currently in place.”
These reactions intensified the drumbeat of business cheering for Work Choices. Corporate Australia has not only entered the TV advertising war (Business Council of Australia) but also gone on the offensive in the “battle of ideas” over industrial relations policy, with the recent publication of the BCA’s “action plan”, Locking in Prosperity, and the ACCI’s position paper, The Economic Case for Workplace Relations Reform.
As 2005 ends, a few opening shots in the real war over Work Choices are already being fired. In its drive to impose Australian Workplace Agreements as the rule for labour contracts, the Howard government is threatening any organisation it even partially finances that declines to implement AWAs with cuts to its funding.
At the University of Ballarat, staff have voted twice to reject this “choice”, with the result that the vice-chancellor will now be approaching staff members individually with a view to signing them up on AWAs. The local branch of the National Tertiary Education Union faces a critical fight to defend collective negotiation and confront the funding blackmail of federal education minister Brendan Nelson.
Hundreds of Victorian electrical contractors are concerned their union-negotiated agreements will exclude them from working on projects that receive federal funding. Here a fight looms that could squeeze the contractors between the Howard government and the Electrical Trades Union, supported by the Victorian union movement.
In 2006, such struggles will multiply. However, the nervous reaction of the employers even to Joyce’s pathetically trivial amendments should tell workers one thing — our enemies are very concerned about the potential strength of union and community opposition to their laws and are determined to make us feel a lot weaker than we actually are.
The message we should draw from the Howard government’s arrogant ramming through parliament of Work Choices, and the “anti-terror” and “work-to-welfare” laws, is clear: they have to act like the lords and masters of politics precisely because they are beginning to worry about the threat of our power.
So our 2006 New Year’s resolution should be to strengthen that power as much as possible — strengthening our unions and community-union networks to support any worker or union that comes under specific attack, and taking the magnificent protest of November 15 to an even higher level early in the new year.
[Dick Nichols is the managing editor of Seeing Red magazine.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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