Let’s Not Get Complacent

At the Electrical Trade Union shop stewards conference in 2005 I sat and listened to speaker after speaker spelling out what it would mean for the Australian people since the Howard Government had taken control of both houses of parliament and could do whatever it liked with industrial relations. Their intended WorkChoices policies had the power to change the social face and fabric of Australia forever and its ultra-right wing ideologues were saying we would all be better off because of it.

In the Liberals I saw ideological greed causing a feeding frenzy; like pigs to the profit trough they could have more and they were going to. Nick Minchin was telling the H R Nicholls Society that once they won the next election they would go even further. Equally greedy employers couldn’t wait to win the next election before using WorkChoices to its best advantage. Employers such as the Cowra Meat Works, Spotlight, and Heinemann blatantly looked to strip workers of their rights and entitlements. Suddenly, WorkChoices became not just an issue for unions but for everyone. And we marched in the streets.

My experiences of our street marches were that they became family days; union and non-union people alike joining in protest; working people uniting to voice their opinions publicly; exercising our most basic right.

When we stood in the street campaigning against WorkChoices, we didn’t get the abuse expected; many people asked if we had something to sign. People wanted to become involved. I was approached by a well dressed woman attracted by my Your Rights at Work tee-shirt – lucky me! “Ï agree!” she said, “When my son went to uni he got a little job on $7 an hour, now, twenty years later, my granddaughter, has a small job and still only $7 and hour. It’s not right, we’re going backwards.”

Enough cannot be said about the response of the ACTU and its organised campaigns in the media and on the ground and in the twenty-two marginal seats across Australia. The ACTU campaign caught the Liberals on the hop. Members in marginal seats had the wind up their kybers and they knew it. And enough cannot be said about the individual unions, ours in particular, in those marginal seats and for the efforts they put into educating and galvanising members and turning them into ambassadors for a cause so important that the future of Australian life depended on its outcome.

At our first march against the IR laws I saw Kim Beasley wave WorkChoices and waffle when he spoke to the crowd. A year later he was shouting about how he was going to rip it up! At the MCG rally I shook hands with Kim and the very next day he lost the leadership of the party. It was not my fault! Kevin Rudd took control with Julia Gillard at his side and they looked an exciting alternative to the Liberal rhetoric treating us like fools, openly telling us they were removing all our rights in order to make us better off.

Then once Kevin Rudd came into his own, something had to be done with cuddly Joe Hockey who was media mates with Rudd; and the only way to cull any advantage that could be gained by Labor and the unions from this relationship was to give Joe, this puppy in training, the IR portfolio. But, in my view, that damage had been done and no cuddly puppy was going to make WorkChoices look any more appealing to the electorate than the dog’s breakfast it had become. And what an admittance of failure to then have to introduce a fairness test to go with the legislation that was supposedly never going to disadvantage people in the first place.

But there’s always a dark cloud to every silver lining. Kevin, in his new role as the next Prime Minister of Australia, went to lunch with Rupert Murdock, coming back and making noises that caused visions, in my mind, of Rudd and Gillard in a back room, putting the WorkChoices legislation back together with sticky tape, in a new cover with a different name.

At the 2007 ALP conference our union Secretary made a couple of statements people didn’t agree with but he did reflect the sentiment and frustration of those he represents. He got booted out of the party because of it. Oh, well! The Liberals were calling us thugs and Kevin was running scared.

At our shop stewards conference of 2007, Julia Gillard said she was opening a one stop shop where we could take industrial issues to be fixed, and then openly told us we would not be able to withdraw our labour and march in the street to voice our public opinion without it being illegal. I thought the ‘One Stop Shop’ Julia was spruiking would be better titled the ‘One Stop Two Dollar Shop’ because it seemed to me to offer little more. And I still think it’s a basic right to be able to withdraw my labour without it being a criminal offence! I walked out of that conference believing there was little to choose from between the two major parties; and I wasn’t the only one and our leaders knew it. They yelled loudly and clearly to remember that Labor was the better of the only two choices we had. As I stood on the street to argue against WorkChoices, I suddenly found it hard to find a better alternative to articulate.

The election result is now history and I believe the Liberals lost because they got so up themselves that they began wearing themselves as a hat and the electorate had had enough. Since then, their demolition at the polls has caused them to cave in over WorkChoices and the puppy in training is saying; “Woof-woof! I didn’t know people would be worse off under WorkChoices!” Sure you didn’t Joe. Still treating us like fools; your training is not going well!

Make no mistake, though, the fight was won by the unprecedentedly well organised efforts of the unions. People wanted to understand; people wanted to appreciate the alternative to the neo-conservative rhetoric; people wanted to voice their opinions. It was the outstanding contributions to the community from the union movement that provided the platform for it. The Howard government had every right to fear the unions because we were a voice of the people, at its best, during the two years leading up to the election. On that platform, expert, academic and layman argument and opinions were voiced in public. Detailed rationale and expert research showed the mood of the people. It made not just the Liberals but also Labor stop and realise that the will of the people will prevail when the greed gets too great.

But let’s not get too euphoric. We may still be getting just the same book with a new cover. And without the ability to take industrial action, our disputes will go around and around and around in Julia’s ‘One Stop Two Dollar Shop’. Our honorary members had a phrase for it in the old days; ‘Burying the fight in the graveyard of industrial disputes’. Our fight is not yet over!