Our common cause: Craig Johnston, welcome back to the struggle!

Socialist Alliance today welcomed one of its most prominent members, former Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) state Victorian secretary Craig Johnston, back to freedom and to the looming struggle against the federal Coalition government's industrial relations laws.

Sue Bolton, a national trade union coordinator for Socialist Alliance, said Johnston's release yesterday from Victoria's Loddon Prison had "given back the union movement one of its most important generals when he is most needed".

"With its industrial relations 'reforms', the Howard government is on the warpath against organised labour", Bolton said. "It needs leaders who can inspire and organise popular resistance and real on-the-streets opposition. Craig is nothing if he is not such a leader!"

Bolton stressed that Johnston should never have received his nine-month sentence for "affray" at Skilled Engineering and Johnson Tiles in 2001.

"The failure of much of the union movement to oppose that criminal witch-hunt can only have encouraged Howard in his present course", Bolton added. "It's high time for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the national leadership of the AMWU to stop distancing themselves from Craig. They should let bygones be bygones and unite with him and all those workers who support him in the struggle against Howard."

Bolton said that the Socialist Alliance fully supported Johnston's call for a campaign to drive Howard out of office.

She concluded: "A fight-back against the Coalition's industrial relations attacks will also be a struggle for justice for all those against whom this awful government has committed crimes — people on welfare, refugees and asylum-seekers, Indigenous Australia and the people of Iraq."

Johnston will be speaking at the National Trade Union Fight-back conference (at Trades Hall in Melbourne on June 11) and at the fourth Socialist Alliance national conference (at the same venue on June 12-13).

From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.

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From GLW issue 628