Cricketers hit out for justice
By James Vassilopoulos
It is sometimes in the most unlikely situations that class struggle bursts to the surface. An industrial dispute has developed in the green pastures of the "gentlemen's game", where the sponsor's beer is served in plastic cups, white bread rules the sausage sandwich, tomato sauce is the nectar of the gods and the corporate cowboys view the game from their boxes far above the plebeian masses.
The dispute between the employer group, the Australian Cricket Board (ACB), and the players' union, the Australian Cricket Association (ACA), has raised some of the most fundamental issues of democratic and workers' rights, including the right to negotiate a collective agreement and the right to strike.
The mainstream press has gone hysterical over the dispute. Headlines include: "Pampered pros hold game to ransom" and "Cricket strike: all out for a buck".
The media attacked the pilots in the late 1980s and the Hunter Valley coal miners in the same way. It is an attempt to isolate "elite" workers from the public, so that they will not achieve their demands. More generally, it aims to break down traditions of solidarity.
The top players in the Australian team do earn about $450,000 each year, but hundreds of other players don't get anywhere near those sorts of sums. Compared to the millions of dollars revenue that Kerry Packer makes through advertising profits generated from Channel Nine's broadcasting rights, the wages of even the best paid players are quite small.
Issues
Central to getting public support has been the players' demand that cricketers who play for their state in the Sheffield Shield competition should get a wage rise and some job security. These players get a minimum wage of only $24,000.
According to Tim May, ACA president, writing in the Daily Telegraph on November 25, the dispute is about the "ACA and its role in negotiations" — players having the right to a voice to represent them.
The ACB wants the ACA to have only a "role in terms of player welfare issues". The boss has no right to tell a union what it should and shouldn't be concerned with.
The dispute is also about the players' right to combine to increase and improve their bargaining power and fight for better wages and conditions. They want to have a collective bargain as an Australian Workplace Agreement, under the Workplace Relations Act, rather than common law individual contracts.
May writes, "As an individual the players are at the board's mercy for selection and progression", but the ACB opposes any collective agreement and the players' using the Workplace Relations Act.
Another issue is a "guarantee of a revenue percentage". Surely the players who create the wealth should be able to get a percentage of it. The ACB opposes this because it is not "sound business practice".
The issue of "players' control" can be generalised to the work force. Shouldn't workers control their offices and factories? Perhaps they should determine where the profits go?
The dispute raises the issue of what type of cricket people want. One possibility would be cricket which is accessible for all, which ploughs money back into junior and grade cricket, has low admission prices and pays the players sufficiently.
The other option is cricket dominated by Packer — where the rules of the game are changed to suit the sponsors (for example, eight ball overs being reduced to six to pack in more TV advertisements).
There has been an exponential increase in advertising in cricket. Last year, the Kentucky Fried Chicken West Indies played the Ansett Airlines Australian team. The match at the Sydney Cricket Ground had a record of 181 advertising billboards around the ground. Perhaps cricket could be called "Coket".
Channel Nine
Channel Nine has had a hands-on role in the dispute.
On November 21, the ACB leaked to the press that the ACA was gathering support for players to sign a document which called for a strike at four of the one-day international cricket matches in December.
This was designed to isolate the players from the public. Steve Waugh, vice-captain of the Australian cricket team, stated, "I'm sure we're pretty solid at this stage. I expect that all the players will sign it."
A couple of hours later, a Channel Nine executive had a meeting with Waugh and other leading members of the team who also happen to be contracted to Channel Nine as reporters — Australian captain Mark Taylor, Shane Warne and Ian Healy.
It is hard to know what happened at this meeting, but the next day Taylor was talking to the ACB directly and the ACA had called for a two-week cooling-off period, with no strikes in December.
The dispute is currently at a stalemate. An ACB meeting on November 26 has reportedly decided on another proposal to take to the players, but this may not be revealed for a while.