Editorial: Beware of soft cops
Beware of soft cops
The wharf dispute must be pretty serious: after a couple of decades indoors, be-suited ALP politicians have been appearing on (well, alongside) picket lines. Last week, Kim Beazley did a photo opportunity at the MUA's Fremantle picket, and the last remaining Labor premier, New South Wales' Bob Carr, grasped the megaphone at Sydney's Port Botany.
Their message was utterly predictable. The sacking of 2000 wharfies "isn't the Australian way" (tell that to BHP's victims in Newcastle) and "represents partisan interference by government in industrial relations" (unlike Labor's judicial slaughter of the Builders Labourers' Federation and the Australian Federation of Air Pilots).
Carr has a peace plan. In the tradition of all deals between industrial and political Labor, the plan involves conceding to the wharfies' immediate demands in exchange for their agreement to be slowly disembowelled afterwards.
Thus, Patrick would reinstate all its sacked workers and they, in turn, would have to deliver productivity improvements agreed to by the MUA and ACTU and policed by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. No doubt even Professor Alan Fels of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would have a role, prowling with his clipboard around the waterfront toilets and meal rooms.
And if the wharfies were to reject this "reasonable" offer — just as they rejected the Webb Dock enterprise agreement twice last year — they would place themselves beyond the pale, in company with the pilots and builders labourers.
It seems that it's OK for the ALP to fight corporate Australia's Liberal-National hard cop (especially when that cop wants to destroy unionism root and branch), but don't try resisting the ALP soft cop too much.
If you do, Bill Kelty will be down on the picket line — for the first time in a decade — warning unions like the CFMEU that they're privileged and shouldn't be too greedy.
And ALP "left" unionists will be wringing their hands about the impossibility of supporting "rogue" unions which "partly brought it on themselves".
But the main audience for Carr's peace plan is corporate Australia. The mass picketing of Patrick sites is beginning to put the Howard government in crisis, and the big capitalist umbrella groups, like the Business Council of Australia, which only a week ago were drunk with delight at the prospect of a smashed MUA and crippled unionism, must now be having second thoughts.
The whole business is getting out of hand. At last week's Victorian Trades Hall Council delegates' meeting, 4000 stood up to indicate they were prepared to flout the Workplace Relations Act.
A 6000-strong picket on East Swanson Dock No. 1 on April 18 held off 1000 police, and a 30-container goods train was blocked at another site by a spirited women's picket.
The pickets are getting bigger. As happens in any mass struggle, people are beginning to wake from political slumber, asking total strangers in the street how to get to the picket lines.
Enter Bob Carr, on cue. The present "chaos", he says, simply proves that big capital gets a better deal from the ALP and its Accord-corporatist strategy. This sort of stuff never happened under Hawke and Keating.
But for those of us who support the wharfies because they are fighting in a just cause and on behalf of all Australian workers, the present magnificent fight is proof that both the hard cop and the soft cop of Australian politics have to go, and that a party worthy of this struggle must be built to give all victims of capitalist restructuring the political voice they deserve.