22 October 2018
Many workers across Australia will take part in union rallies on
October 23 to express their opposition to the corporate offensive
against jobs, wages and working conditions, and the assault on social
spending being prosecuted by the federal and state governments. However,
the openly stated aim of the “Change the Rules” protests organised by
the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is to channel these
sentiments into the election of yet another big business federal Labor
government.
The entire campaign is fraudulent. In its material, the ACTU leadership and its
secretary Sally McManus have highlighted soaring inequality, exemplified
by the fact that the richest one percent of the population owns more
wealth than the poorest 70 percent. The union leadership have denounced the
prevalence of casual and contract labour, which now accounts for up to
half the entire workforce, and condemned to stagnant and falling pay.
Left out of the ACTU top's rhetoric is the reality that all these
conditions that workers face are the outcome of the decades-long
collaboration by the union misleaders with the corporations and successive
governments, both Labor and Coalition.
The very “Fair Work Australia” industrial legislation the unions
claim to be fighting to change were imposed by Labor with their support.
In 2007, the ACTU and its affiliates launched the “Your Rights at
Work” campaign, upon which “Change the Rules” is modelled. The aim was
to channel hostility to the Coalition government of John Howard, and its
Work Choices industrial relations regime, into the election of Labor.
One of the first acts of the new Rudd-Gillard Labor government was to
pass the Fair Work legislation, which retained most of the draconian
provisions of Work Choices. The laws, which illegalised virtually all
industrial action and cleared the path for continuous pro-business
restructuring, were praised and fully backed by the unions.
Ever since, Labor and the union leadership have invoked the Fair Work
legislation to suppress any political or industrial struggle by workers.
Time and again, the union mileaders have insisted that workers end strike action,
accept wage cuts and acquiesce to sackings, because they have been given
the green light by the pro-business Fair Work Commission, which the
union apparatus asserts is an “independent umpire.”
The Fair Work regime itself was the outcome of the assault on the
conditions of the working class that was launched after the coming to
power of the Hawke-Keating Labor government in 1983.
The so-called Accords between the Labor government, the ACTU and the
major employers facilitated a vast restructuring and deregulation of the
economy. As part of this agenda, the union leadership enforced the destruction of
hundreds of thousands of jobs and abolished the shop stewards’
committees and other forms of rank-and-file workplace organisation that
called for opposition to the demands of the corporations for
“international competitiveness”.
The result was the fastest growth of social inequality since the end
of World War II and a social disaster in working class areas. Entire
generations of workers and youth have been condemned to a future of
precarious work and low wages.
In the 1990s, the ACTU leadership backed the Labor government of Paul Keating
when it introduced the modern system of enterprise bargaining. This
ended industry-wide negotiations over conditions, and tied workers to
the immediate profit demands of their individual companies.
The complicity of the union leadership in the attack on the working class is
starkly revealed in the virtual disappearance of strikes, the most
elementary form of workers’ struggle against the employers. Since the
introduction of enterprise bargaining, and especially since the
imposition of the Fair Work legislation, the number of strikes has
fallen to its lowest level in Australian history.
The unions misleaders have presided over one enterprise agreement after another
which have slashed real wages, eliminated conditions and destroyed jobs.
The Australian Workers Union leaders, for instance, including when it was led
by current Labor leader Bill Shorten, signed secret agreements with
major employers that cut wages and abolished penalty rates for some of
the country’s lowest-paid workers, including cleaners and agricultural
labourers.
Across the fast-food and service sectors, penalty rates are virtually
a thing of the past, along with sick and holiday leave and a living
wage, after years of sweetheart deals between the unions leaders and major
transnational companies.
In the manufacturing sector, the unions misleaders have overseen the shutdown of
the car industry and the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs at
the ports, in the steel and mining sectors, textiles and other
industries.
The ACTU officials running the “Change the Rules” campaign apparently
hope that workers suffer collective amnesia and have forgotten their
bitter experiences with the Labor Party and the unions leadership over
the past 30 years.
In a speech this month, McManus declared: “We have so often turned to
the Labor Party to enact legislation that ensures working people have
the rights they need.” She claimed that Labor was “the party of full
employment” and “has the track record on reform that benefits the
workers of Australia.”
As the record demonstrates, these are transparent and shameless lies.
If Labor returns to power, it will be a government of, for and by big
business and the wealthiest layers of society, no different to the
Coalition. Amid the deepest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the
next government will cut education, healthcare and welfare, escalate
Australia’s alignment with the militarist US-led confrontation against
China and intensify the attacks on democratic rights, including the
persecution of refugees.
The changes to industrial relations laws that the ACTU leadership is proposing a
Labor government introduce are not intended to improve workers’
conditions, but assist the corporations continue to drive them down.
In her recent speech, McManus reiterated the ACTU’s call for the
abolition of enterprise bargaining and the re-establishment of
industry-wide agreements. She said that this was necessary because
enterprise bargaining was no longer delivering sufficient boosts to
“productivity,” i.e. cuts to employers’ costs and ever-greater profits.
Industry-wide bargaining, McManus declared, would allow “business
owners” and union leaders “to come together to improve productivity.” McManus
called for even greater powers for the Fair Work Commission, declaring
that it should be able to arbitrate disputes to “make bargaining more
efficient and resolve situations when groups cannot see past their own
conflict to the point of common ground.”
In other words, McManus is advocating for an industrial relations
system in which a handful of union officials, Fair Work bureaucrats and
corporate representatives come together and impose cost-cutting
agreements upon tens of thousands of workers across entire industries.
McManus has previously cited Germany, where union officials sit on
company and state boards alongside government employers, as a model to
be emulated.
The fraudulent rhetoric over social inequality by the ACTU leaders is simply
an attempt by the discredited union apparatus to try and keep control
over workers. The unions leaders are terrified by the resurgence of the class
struggle internationally, which this year alone has seen mass strikes by
teachers in the US, lecturers in the UK, nurses in New Zealand and
millions of workers across the Indian subcontinent and China—in
opposition to the official trade unions misleaders.
In every struggle that emerges internationally, the unions misleaders function
as strikebreakers and company agents. In an era of globalised production
and capitalist crisis, the unions leaders, based on a nationalist and
pro-capitalist program, operate as the representatives of their “own”
national ruling class. They seek to ensure that national industry
remains “internationally competitive” by forcing down wages and
eliminating conditions.
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