BY ANA KAILIS
The Australian Council of Trade Unions has announced that it will carry out a "marginal seats campaign" during the next federal election, which is expected before the end of the year. But are such campaigns a winning strategy for the labour movement?
Marginal seats campaigns entail intensive campaigning in the individual electorates where incumbents only hold the seat by a very small percentage. These, presumably, are the areas where unions' efforts will have the largest impact on who forms government. Marginal seats campaigns seek to mirror the campaign priorities of the major parties themselves, which concentrate heavily on these electorates.
Several unions have carried out these type of campaigns in the past — either explicitly or implicitly with the aim of getting Labor elected. They often involve many hours out letterboxing and door-knocking by unionists.
In the 1998 federal election, for example, the Community and Public Sector Union called on its members to target a number of marginal seats by letterboxing postcards that highlighted government cutbacks to the public sector.
While such marginal seats campaigns may have some effect in replacing Coalition incumbents with Labor candidates, there is no truth in the claim that they also advance the interests of unions or of the working class more broadly.
For a start, the unions that have pursued marginal seats campaigns have frequently counterposed this form of campaigning to industrial action and political protest, which they label "old-fashioned".
Further, the impact of such campaigns has been to pacify, rather than activate, workers. The message is, after all, that workers' interests can be best met by just getting Labor elected and then letting it get on with its job; the message is not that workers can only defend their interests by organising and taking collective action.
This is very clearly the lesson of public servants' experience, thanks to the wrong strategy pursued by their union, the Community and Public Sector Union.
When the then newly-elected federal Coalition government took the knife to government departments and agencies in 1996 and 1997, there was widespread anger amongst CPSU members. There was at least a chance that, with some guidance and guts from their union, that there could be an effective fight-back.
Instead, members got a token industrial campaign from the CPSU leadership, which neither the government nor union members took seriously. Two hundred thousand public servants lost their jobs and thousands more left in the union in despair.
Rather than focussing on industrial action and grassroots organising, the eyes of the union's leaders were set on the next federal election and a marginal seats campaign. For the CPSU's leaders, the saviour was not collective action by the members but a re-elected Labor Party. When the marginal seats campaign failed to unseat John Howard at the 1998 election, pessimism within the union's ranks deepened, allowing the government to proceed even further with spending cuts and privatisation.
Marginal seats campaigns are also very limited in their target audience. Besides the fact that only a small proportion of the population live in marginal seats, such electorates also tend to be in more middle-class areas far from union heartlands. Again, the message is not that unionists should rely on their own strength and become a force in the elections but rather that they should seek outside saviours.
Most importantly, the goal of a marginal seats campaign, the election of a Labor government, is in no way a guarantee of a pro-working class government or even of the success of union movement demands.
It would certainly be gratifying to see anti-union politicians like Peter Reith and David Kemp thrown into the dustbin of history. But it would be a marginal victory if their policies continued to be implemented after they'd been ousted, as is likely under a Kim Beazley Labor government.
The ACTU's marginal seats campaign for this year's election is a case in point. The peak union body plans to raise a call for the abolition of individual contracts, legal recognition of the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike, the enactment of the 36-hour week, and the introduction of a levy on employers to fund workers' entitlements if a company goes broke.
But these demands will not be won without a sustained and militant industrial campaign, regardless of which party is in power. The Labor Party has certainly shown little or no interest in implementing any of these demands — it certainly didn't during its 13 years in government from 1983-96.
The actions of the nurses' union in the February election in Western Australia is a good, positive illustration of what unions can do during elections.
Rather than focus on marginal seats, the Australian Nurses Federation launched an industrial campaign for higher pay, better working conditions and more staff in the state's hospitals.
Not only did this make health a major election issue, it sent the Coalition government into crisis, as it floundered for a response to angry nurses who had the full support of the public behind them. While Richard Court was certainly unpopular on many issues, the health issue proved to be decisive — it was the nurses' extra-parliamentary action which consigned him to the dustbin.
If the nurses had contented themselves with a marginal seats strategy, health and nurses' rights would have been just one of a multitude of issues competing for public attention.
Because of their brave industrial campaign, the nurses are now in a much better position to fight for and secure their demands. Far more pressure has also been put on the Labor Party to resolve the nurses' dispute in their favour than if they'd mounted a marginal seats campaign.
This is the model the union movement should follow. An industrial campaign which agitated for the ACTU's main demands would be far more successful and impactful than its planned marginal seats campaign.
Drawing workers into industrial and political activity would build their confidence and willingness to fight. Unfortunately, it is this that the ACTU seems to be petrified of, as such industrial campaigns might damage Labor's ability to win big business' backing. But "playing it safe" like this will only ensure that whichever party forms government, the bosses will still run the country.
[Ana Kailis has been a workplace delegate for the Community and Public Sector Union. She is now a member of the Australian Education Union and is the secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party's Fremantle branch.]