With Our Brothers and Our Sisters - Labour Stuggles and Lock Outs
So first there was the lock out of unionised workers by Qantas, followed by the undercutting of strike action by Fair Work Australia. Then Baiada used Police and private security thugs in an attempt to break the workers picket line, but ultimately failed, with workers winning better pay and conditions. Not to forget that the Victorian Government were secretly planning to lock out Nurses in response to any industrial action they may take.
Just last week POAGS, a stevedoring company owned by the notorious Union buster Chris Corrigan, locked out workers engaged in protection industrial action and broke the picket line by flying in scabs using helicopters. Now Schweppes has locked out workers indefinitely in the run up towards Christmas.
Despite all this, the Right continues to bleat that current industrial legislation is too tough on employers. Take the comments of Liberal Senator Eric Abetz:
[the] announcement that Schweppes in Australia will lock out 150 of its workers after rolling industrial action shows that there is a bigger problem with the Fair Work Act.
For Abetz, the FWA doesn’t grant enough rights for Bosses to break the industrial action of workers. But wait, it gets better:
We were told that Qantas’ actions were ‘extreme’ and showed ‘employer militancy’. Clearly there is a bigger problem where the union bosses are pushing for unrealistic demands and employers are being forced to take drastic action in response - and all the time not a single word about productivity.
Those damn radical Qantas workers and their unrealistic demands, such as moderate wage rises, the protection of safety conditions, reduced outsourcing and good faith bargaining. How was Qantas meant to pay for such demands at a time where it was making a 2010-2011 profit of $552 million? Qantas is seemingly strapped for cash at the moment, especially after it spent $20 million a day when it grounded flights, gave away another $20 million in free flights to customers as an “apology” for the delays, not even mentioning the $500 million Qantas plans to spend in order to expand into the Asian market. Yes, those Union demands are pretty unrealistic.
But clearly the problem is much larger than Qantas. Surely all employers are being held hostage to the ruthless demands of the Unions. After all, the bosses have only enjoyed 25 years of increasing their profit share:
This is what a wages breakout looks like.
Not too mention that Unions don’t even care about productivity increases, which have only outstripped wages growth for a quarter of a century:
This is what stalling productivity looks like.
And so we see what the true context of current labour struggles. For the last three decades, employers and corporations have seen massive gains in their profits, whilst workers have seen far slower, even if still growing wages. The result is that Australia has become a vastly unequal society, with all the signs showing that inequality will continue to rise. During this time, employers and Governments have become increasingly antagonistic towards unions and their members, as Bernard Keane explained in Crikey:
Let’s be clear about the long-term business agenda in Australia regarding industrial relations. It’s an agenda aimed not at improving productivity — as I and others have incessantly showed, the last round of IR reform led to a drop in labour productivity — but a more self-interested one aimed at reducing labour costs and neutering unions.
Business is quite tolerant of trade unions, as long as they do nothing that inconveniences business or increases labour costs. They can even be a useful form of alternative pressure on governments when industries set about rent-seeking. Neutered unions are quite acceptable. Real ones, that aggressively represent the interests of their members, aren’t. And ones that actually take industrial action, in particular, are regarded as outright enemies of business.
This is the ultimate thrust of IR reform — to pathologise industrial action, however legal, however justified. The point is to frame the right to withhold labour as an illegitimate form of economic vandalism, no matter what the circumstances.
Smelling a weak Government, the business community and the political right can sense an opportunity to renew attacks on the ability of workers to organise after the dramatic defeat of WorkChoices. Indeed, the inability of the ALP’s own legislation to protect workers from outrageous lock outs and attacks by bosses displays their own ineptness in combating the bosses.
This reality reinforces the importance of these current high profile labour struggles. The fight to maintain dignified conditions for workers is one that has always existed both inside and outside the Parliament. Whilst the lock outs represent an attack on collective power of workers, it also displays the clear conflict that exist between the owners and managers, and those who work for them. Furthermore, it opens up a space for the wider community to become involved, as was the case at the Baiada picket. The result is the possibility of building a broad base coalition of workers, unionists and community members that not only can defend proper working conditions, but are absolutely necessary in achieving that end.
