Sam Wainwright, Fremantle
On May 1, 300 maritime workers, their families and other unionists crammed into the North Fremantle office of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) for a "sausage-sizzle debate" on how to fight the federal government's planned anti-union industrial relations legislation.
MUA WA branch secretary Chris Cain is in no doubt that the union movement can and must take the fight up to the government. He successfully moved that UnionsWA call a mass delegates meeting to discuss what action should be taken and has welcomed the decision by Victorian unionists to organise a mass stop-work rally on June 30.
At the May 1 meeting, UnionsWA secretary Dave Robinson argued that such protest action should be just part of a "basket of activity". He did not explicitly support or reject joining the Victorian initiative.
Joe McDonald, WA assistant secretary of the construction workers union (CFMEU), responded by calling on UnionsWA to let the mass meeting of delegates make the decision on what to do.
Supporting McDonald's call, Cain said: "We want a mass delegates meeting. We want the workers, the rank and file, to make the decisions about how they go forward. We don't want UnionsWA to do it, we want the members to do it."
In response, Robinson said the delegates' meeting would be held on June 1.
While most union leaders talk about community support, little is said about who the target audience is and how it will be won over. State School Teachers Union secretary Dave Kelly confronted this head on, saying: "Reliance on courts and legislation is not going to work for us... We have to build alliances with the community. If we don't have the community with us, we are done. It's the unorganised workers, unemployed and students that we have to make sure are not left on the outside while we look after our narrow agenda."
The unorganised, Kelly explained, will be the first to be hurt. "Have we got the principles and the ability to support the unorganised when it's difficult to convince our members? Have we got the guts to go and put it to our members that we have to support the unorganised in whatever way we can?"
Kelly explained that the government's attack on student organisations through its "voluntary student unionism" legislation and the attack on unions both flow from its determination to destroy any form of collective organising. He said: "The government fears anyone organising outside the norms of their political realm... Organised communities are their big fear because if you are organised at the community level you will act. That's where the union movement lives."
Pointing to a picture of legendary Waterside Workers Federation leader "Big Jim" Healy, whose nine-month jail sentence in 1951 was wiped after wharfies walked off the job, McDonald stressed that the government's agenda cannot be defeated unless the union movement is prepared to defy the anti-worker legislation, as it has done in the past. "I sit on committees that say 'let's be careful'. But comrades, let's not be so careful that we do nothing...
"I sit in some of these executives where they say 'How are we going to avoid fines?' The only way you are going to avoid fines is to do sweet fuck all, let me tell you. If you're going to have a go, you're going to get fined. We've made a decision in my union that we are going to get fined because we're not going to give up. If they want to lock people up then people will get locked up."
From Green Left Weekly, May 11, 2005.
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