The real betrayal

November 6, 1996
Issue 

The Democrats' agreement to support the Howard government's anti-union Workplace Relations Bill (WRB) should be condemned, but the real betrayal was by the Labor Party and the ACTU. While Labor leader Kim Beazley postures about the ALP's "total opposition to the bill", the ALP-dominated ACTU refuses to organise a campaign of industrial action and mass mobilisation against it.

Bob McMullan, the ALP's spokesperson on industrial relations, told the August 11 Canberra Times that when Labor becomes federal government again, it will not return industrial relations back to its pre-Howard government state.

Howard's anti-union laws could be defeated by the trade union movement if its leadership had the will to organise a serious extra-parliamentary campaign. For instance, when the Court Liberal government in WA tried to introduce draconian anti-union laws last year it was forced back by a mass campaign organised by the WA Trades and Labour Council.

But months ago the ACTU officials decided that its strategy towards the WRB would be reliance on the Democrats' "balance of power" in the Senate. The August 19 "Cavalcade to Canberra" was organised as a mass lobbying of Democrat Senators. "We wanted to point out to the Democrats and the other members of the Senate that it was important to defeat aspects of the legislation which were going to affect workers and their families", explained NSW Labour Council secretary Peter Sams.

The ACTU refused to call a general strike to allow all workers to participate in the cavalcade or the rallies in other cities. There were no broad organising committees, no serious attempts to involve the ranks of the union movement and other sectors in the organisation of August 19. After the ACTU's bureaucratically controlled mass lobbying exercise got out of control at Parliament House, the bureaucrats killed of any further opportunities for unionists to take action in their own right.

From the start, the ACTU aimed only to convince the Democrats in the Senate to ameliorate the WRB. That is why ACTU secretary Jennie George's first reaction to the announcement of the Democrat-Coalition deal was that it was a "victory". But the Democrats' amendments — supposedly aimed at making the legislation "fair to bosses and workers" — do not substantially disarm the WRB. Even as amended, the WRB still:

  • restores the anti-secondary boycott sections 45 D and E of the Trade Practices Act (which outlaws solidarity actions);

  • increases punitive powers against unions;

  • introduces individual contracts in the form of Australian Workplace Agreements;

  • allows bosses to cut apprentices' and trainees' wages; and

  • weakens the unfair dismissal laws.

This result was predictable, as Green Left Weekly pointed out, on the basis of the declared industrial relations policy of the Democrats. But even confronted by the failure of its leave-it-to-the-Senate strategy the ACTU still refuses to mobilise the union movement. This is total betrayal.

As a matter of political principle, all Democrats in federal parliament should defy Kernot's dirty deal with the Coalition and vote against the bill in its entirety.

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