BY SUE BOLTON
At a joint media conference on March 17, Electrical Trades Union Victorian secretary Dean Mighell and United Firefighters Union Victorian secretary Peter Marshall announced that they were quitting the Labor Party.
It is not surprising that the first union officials in a long time to make a public break with the Labor Party come from Victoria, because this is the state in which a Labor government, headed by Premier Steve Bracks, has done little or nothing to reverse Australia's harshest "economic rationalist" experiment under the previous Coalition government of Jeff Kennett.
There are many stories from unions which staunchly support the ALP, as well as unions which are very critical of the Bracks Labor government, about hostile actions by the government towards workers.
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state secretary Craig Johnston, who left the ALP in the 1980s and is a member of the Socialist Alliance, told Green Left Weekly: "For our members, Kennett was one of the worst things that ever happened, so there was a lot of hope that with the election of a Bracks Labor government, a lot of Kennett's policies on workers compensation, industrial relations, health and education would be turned around." For these reasons, the AMWU's 2000 state conference debate over ALP affiliation voted that the Labor Party should be given another chance.
Since then, Johnston says, the state Labor government has "done nothing on industrial relations" and when it eventually put forward a fair employment bill, the government was never committed to it. "Bracks never got behind it at all", Johnston said. The government "made some slight improvements in education and health, but they were only minimal".
On workers compensation, Johnston said the "government's done the very minimum of reinstating common law rights but there's a whole heap of strings attached so that it's nowhere near what it promised".
"But then", said Johnston, "the Bracks government began attacking our union and our membership. It threatened our members at Yallourn Energy, when they were out on the grass for about four weeks, with essential services legislation. This would mean fines and jail terms for individual workers as well as for the union." In another incident, a company used the repressive Section 45D of the federal Trade Practices Act against the union, and the state government supported the company.
Bracks also interfered in the state branch of the AMWU by writing to the union's national office and calling for an inquiry into the Victorian leadership for being too militant and scaring off investment.
When asked by GLW why he had decided to resign from the Labor Party, Mighell replied that his disillusionment with the ALP "hadn't arisen overnight". He had "many reasons which had grown over a long period of disillusionment. I've grappled with this issue since the days of the [Prices and Incomes] Accord". The Prices and Incomes Accord was the mechanism used by the federal ALP government in the 1980s to hold down wages and conditions and prevent industrial action.
Mighell said that he was disappointed with the Labor Party at both a federal and a state level. When federal ALP leader Simon Crean announced after the federal election that the ALP needed to reduce internal union influence, Mighell said he felt that stamped the ALP permanently as a "middle-ground" party which could not represent the interests of workers.
On a state level, Mighell said that his union had found that the Bracks government simply ignored unions and the rights of workers.
Since Mighell and Marshall's press conference, there has been a lot of public discussion about which unions are likely to disaffiliate from the Labor Party. Many of these discussions pre-dated Mighell's and Marshall's media conference.
Johnston explained that "at every state conference there's a debate about whether we stay affiliated or pull out. I won't pre-empt the likely outcome of the debate at our state conference in April, but for the first time that I can remember in my 20 years as a conference delegate and a shop steward, there's a whole heap of resolutions coming from jobs calling for disaffiliation.
"In the past, we've had the occasional resolution from a job, but I don't ever remember us having resolutions from a number of jobs. If it does get up, it will be of huge significance to the Labor Party because the AMWU is the single biggest union affiliated to the ALP. We are 12% on ALP state conference floor and we spend $250,000 on affiliation fees alone. When we raise that with members they are absolutely outraged that we would spend that much money on a mob that are screwing us. Secondly, if we do disaffiliate, it would send a message that if the single biggest affiliate has pissed off, there's a fair chance a number of other affiliates will piss off."
While Johnston didn't want to pre-empt the result of the ALP affiliation debate at the AMWU state conference, he made clear, that if the union did decide to leave the ALP, it would not mean that the AMWU would "desert the political spectrum. It will certainly be the view of the leadership and I believe of the more progressive layers of the membership that we wouldn't suddenly drop out of the political agenda".
It is not only in the AMWU that this discussion has been going on for some time. The branch committee of management of the United Firefighters Union's Victorian branch has already voted to disaffiliate, and expect that the membership will endorse disaffiliation in a few weeks time. The NSW branch of the UFU has already disaffiliated from the ALP. The branch was fed up with the NSW Labor government's intransigence on gutting the workers' compensation scheme, and gutting the firefighters' own accident and injury scheme.
The ETU in Victoria is not due to have a state conference until December, so a decision on union affiliation will have to wait until then.
While there are a number of unions, especially white-collar unions which are not affiliated to the ALP, there are very few unions whose leaders are not members of the ALP. The Victorian branch of the AMWU is an exception in this regard.
Mighell outlined his plans to GLW, saying that as soon as the ALP had processed his resignation letter, he would join the Greens. He said that there was no truth to some media reports that he would re-join the Labor Party. He had tried hard to influence the ALP in a progressive direction since 1995, but it had not worked. "I'd be amazed if enough changes were made to the Labor Party to make me change. It's not just a matter of policy — some of the policies are good on paper — it's what's implemented that's important", he said.
Mighell said that the ETU had worked closely with the Greens for quite some time, especially over the issue of investment in renewable energy. Mighell has already met with Greens senator Bob Brown, and is meeting with the Greens Victorian state council to discuss his membership.
After his involvement in the ALP, Mighell is enthusiastic about joining the Greens, especially for their industrial relations and social justice policies. However, he didn't rule out working with other parties to the left of Labor. He said that he was planning to meet with the Socialist Alliance, and that he would welcome a broad-based social justice party as being crucial for working people.
From Green Left Weekly, March 27, 2002.
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