BY STEPHEN O'BRIEN
Any participants who hoped for a radical anti-globalisation message at the "Make it here or jobs disappear" November 15 rally in Newcastle would have been disappointed. The 3000-strong rally was billed as part of the movement against globalisation, but it didn't come anywhere near the militant anti-capitalist sentiments expressed at the September 11-13 blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne.
The featured speaker, the "proud Aussie capitalist" Dick Smith, not surprisingly advocated a "Buy Australia" campaign as the way to oppose globalisation. "Thank goodness", Sharon Burrow (president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions) responded to Smith's proposal for a national summit on globalisation, while Doug Cameron, national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), advocated tariffs as the way to protect jobs.
The initiators of the rally, the AMWU, in collaboration with a task force made up of Trades Hall officials and representatives from employer groups, welfare agencies and the churches, promised the rally was to be the start of a national campaign to show that we all "care about jobs". They also circulated a petition which, among other things, called for the NSW government to force "project developers to utilise NSW-made and/or Australian-made material" and "to stop the bleeding of NSW jobs to other states and overseas".
Is the AMWU national leadership's call really meant to be taken seriously? Do workers really want a return to the days when, as part of their "response" to the 1982 steel crisis, some Newcastle metal unions banned non-Newcastle based unionists from working in the Hunter region?
Who gains when the states are played off against each other? During the late 1980s the NSW Labor government justified the gutting of the workers' compensation scheme by claiming that it had to reduce insurance premiums to the lower levels paid in Queensland so that NSW bosses could "compete" with firms in that state.
Recently, white-goods manufacturer Email sacked 520 workers at its Brunswick plant in Victoria in order to relocate to Dudley Park in South Australia with an overall loss of 180 jobs. The company is rumoured to have pocketed $2 million in "industry assistance", courtesy of South Australian taxpayers.
The rally leaflet, while decrying that one million jobs are "up for grabs", avoided the devastating impact of privatisation (one of the holy tenets of neo-liberal globalisation) on jobs.
More than 200,000 public-sector manufacturing related jobs have been lost through privatisation and cutbacks nationwide. The Newcastle State Dockyards, for example, was closed in 1987 by Labor's Laurie Brereton. The floating dock and the profitable ship repair business were sold off to "local" employers.
It is estimated that from 1985 to 1997, 43,000 jobs were lost in the electricity industry. Over 48,000 rail jobs disappeared in the eight years to 1988 with the bulk being lost in rural Australia. In the 10 years to 1997, 114,000 jobs were lost in public-sector infrastructure facilities.
These privatisations were often supported by both the ALP and the Liberals. They also often, apart from notable exceptions such as the Cockatoo Island and the Newcastle State Dockyards closures, met with little union resistance.
According to the AMWU's petition, manufacturing is the second largest industry, employer and source of exports in NSW. Nonetheless, the manufacturing bosses still need protection. The Hawke Labor government's Steel Plan gave BHP a guaranteed dominance of the Australian market but jobs were still lost during and after the plan. BHP employed 11,000 in 1982, but by the time the Newcastle steel mill closed last year, there were only 2500 jobs left. Output remained at near record levels.
Unions would do better to advocate policies which would unite, rather than divide, workers. Such demands could include the implementation of a 36-hour work week without loss of pay (recently won in the Victorian building industry). Where this has been won, it should be strictly enforced. By this means the ground could be prepared for a further reduction to 32 hours as a means of further sharing the available work around.
There is also the need for a campaign to return to previous levels of corporate taxation. Business has done very well out of the GST and Howard's cuts to corporate tax rates. The extra revenue raised through restoring previous company tax rates could be put back into the community by being used to create public sector jobs — especially in the education and health sectors. Schools, TAFE colleges, universities and hospitals are the largest employers in many parts of regional Australia, but their services are threatened by government funding cutbacks.
A real campaign against further privatisations — such as against the Carr government's plan to sell off Freightcorp — and for reversing privatisations such as Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank, is also imperative. This would raise awareness that job creation can take other forms than by subsiding private-sector corporate profits.
Policies such as this would help to globalise solidarity between workers, whatever their region, state or country, but admittedly they would probably be unacceptable to millionaire exploiters like Dick Smith.
[Stephen O'Brien is a former steelworker and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]