The union movement must take urgent action to end the ALP's backflips on industrial relations.
We can all see what is happening. First, the big mining, energy, media and construction corporations' lobbying campaign has succeeded in getting Labor leader Kevin Rudd and his deputy, Julia Gillard, to renege on Labor's promise to abolish all Australian Workplace Agreements (individual contracts) and the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Then, all union leaders from Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Greg Combet down have remained tight-lipped for fear that, if they protest and Labor loses the next federal election, defeat will be blamed on them.
Of course we need to vote Prime Minister John Howard out, but what is the gain if the Labor Party keeps adopting Howard's policies with the roughest edges rubbed off? The ALP won't commit to restoring any of the worker and union rights that Howard took away with the 1996 Workplace Relations Act and it will keep the Coalition's draconian Welfare to Work legislation.
It's high time for the unions to stop relying on the ALP to be the answer to the anti-worker Howard government. Rudd and Gillard's recent policy backflips and their attacks on building industry unions as "thuggish" make it clear as day that they have accepted the biased propaganda of the big corporations.
What Australian workers and communities urgently need from their unions is a mass industrial campaign for the repeal of all anti-worker laws brought in by the Howard government. That campaign must be independent of the ALP.
Until the union movement commits to such a strategy, the corporations will demand more, Rudd and Gillard will carry on reneging and the promise to "tear up" Work Choices will become a sick joke.
To restart serious action against Work Choices, the union movement needs to immediately launch plans for another national day of mass protest. But more than one protest will be needed. Unless the unions also kick off a campaign of industrial action, the voice of workers and their unions will be completely missing from the current media debate about industrial relations.
The experience of Labor backsliding on its policies before it is even elected makes it crystal clear: the ALP is interested in our rights at work only as far as these don't interfere with the corporate "right" to make megabucks from our labour.
The urgent challenge before all of us who say we stand for workers' interests is to work out how to build a new party that really does represent working people.
[Sue Bolton is the Socialist Alliance national trade union coordinator.]