Inside the BLF: A Union Self-Destructs
By Brian Boyd
Melbourne: Ocean Press. 1991. $19.95
Reviewed by John Tognolini
All the empty office space in Melbourne and Sydney is equal to 16 Empire State Buildings. Ninety per cent of the workers who built the skyscrapers of the 1980s boom are out of work, and a lot of the quick quid developers are on the run from the banks.
Building workers should be asking whether all the work, steel, concrete and rainforest timber from the Third World was worth it. Empty buildings and homeless people walking the streets are the social cost of the 1980s building boom.
Someone who does not pose questions of this importance is Victorian Trades Hall official Brian Boyd. The following words from his introduction to Inside the BLF indicate how he views the issues facing unionists:
"Big changes are now affecting trade unions in Australia. The early 1980s saw the introduction of the ALP-ACTU Accord. Rank-and-file workers are now demanding a greater say in the direction of their unions. This is healthy and democratic ... And unions are increasingly involved in macro-economic and social policy formulation. "
In reality, workers' only involvement in macro-economic decisions is in dealing with their micro-economic consequences: like getting the sack and trying to survive on the dole.
The book is straight out of the Bob Hawke school of corporate unionism and will no doubt end up on the shelves of Trade Union Training Authority schools around the country. Its theme throughout is: have faith in the ACTU-ALP, and things will be right. Boyd's aim is to defend the Accord and justify the destruction of the BLF for trying to win wage rises outside the Accord.
This requires some rewriting of history — his own and others'. Thus Boyd criticises the intervention of the Norm Gallagher forces into the New South Wales branch in 1974, against the Jack Mundey leadership of the union. This might surprise members of the BLF in Melbourne who remember that Boyd attended his first BLF meeting along with members of the Maoist Worker-Student Alliance from Latrobe University, who were not there just to raise their hands, but to attack dissidents in the Victorian branch and the rest of the Melbourne left who opposed the strangling of the NSW branch.
Boyd doesn't own up to his own Maoist past. He attacks Gallagher over the destruction of the old NSW branch without mentioning that he went there with Gallagher to help him.
His book focusses solely on Gallagher. The rank and file don't feature except as sheep being led to the slaughter. It's not surprising that Boyd doesn't want to recall that many of the same dissidents he attacked in 1974 were in the front lines against deregistration in 1986. People such as Dave Kerin and Johnny Low understood that the union was more than Gallagher, and it was the rank and file who broke pour and drove developers crazy.
Hypocritically, Boyd pretends to mourn the loss of what the union could have been: "As a major union for so long, the BLF had the potential to play an ongoing, positive role in maintaining the militant, critical edge to industrial relations in Australia." But it was for this very reason that the BLF was deregistered and decimated, not because of Gallagher getting materials from a few builders and developers.
Another Boyd rewriting goes like this: "In the period 1980-86 many trade unionist in Victoria considered that the BLF was bad for the rest of the labour movement. Consequently, it was not surprising that there was a lack of real support for the BLF at the height of the vicious, almost military, operation mounted against it. Even though large sections of the organised labour movement conducted rallies, marches and collections around such struggles as SEQEB, Robe River and Cockatoo Island, no concerted, united activity occurred in support of the BLF."
No "large sections of the organised labour movement" did anything significant about SEQEB, Robe River or Cockatoo. The ACTU deliberately undercut support for these struggles as part of its commitment, shared with Brian Boyd, to the Accord.
In its 324 pages, the book has only eight pages on the five years of deregistration. It is a shoddy and evasive work, written by an ambitious individual who, when builders labourers where being bashed and jailed by the army of police that invaded the building sites in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, left the BLF for the relative safety of the Victorian Trades Hall Council. It's no wonder that Boyd's book was launched by ACTU president Martin Ferguson.
[John Tognolini is a former Sydney BLF organiser and a life member of the Ships Painters and Dockers who was involved in the Cockatoo Island struggle.]