Last
week, the numbers gathered for the community picket at Melbourne’s Webb
Dock swelled to over 1,000. They were protesting the Victorian
International Container Terminal (VICT) refusal to
renew the security clearance of a dockworker who – what a coincidence –
turned out to be an efficient and effective union organiser.
If the company’s behaviour strikes you as an act of personal cruelty, industrial pettiness and disproportionate hostility to the principle of free association, you are both right and making a handy summation of the present tenor of Australian industrial relations. We now have the most restrictive, anti-union legislative regime in the OECD, with fewer rights afforded to unions to organise than even our cousins in the neoliberal badlands of America, and yet for certain corporations, conservative yahoos in the media and the Turnbull Liberal-National government, every systemic advantage is still not enough.
Union pickets are now illegal – yes, illegal – in Australia outside of approved “bargaining periods”, so the ranks of the Webb Dock protestors have been drawn from volunteers, comrades and allies, attending the picket at their personal volition. Yet so favourable is the present regime to aggressive industrial paranoia that VICT has sought injunctions against not only the Maritime Union of Australia, but the secretary of Victoria’s Trades Hall, Luke Hilakari. Hilakari spoke at the Webb Dock rally last Friday. By the weekend, he’d been served legal papers at his home.
VICT’s allegation? That Hilakari and the MUA “wrongly and maliciously agreed to conspire and combine among themselves to injure” the company.
The wording is as archaic as the politics informing it. Australia’s conservatives loudly claim their fondness for the “father of economics” Adam Smith, but to get all the jokes, you really have to do the reading. Back in 1776, Smith discussed the incipient union movement without judgment in The Wealth of Nations. “When workers combine,” he wrote, their masters “never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”
And if there’s one characteristic of Liberal-National government under Malcolm Turnbull, it’s relentless assistance to corporations should we servant classes ever combine in unions to get ourselves uppity.
With support from minor parties on the senate crossbench, the Liberals and Nationals have disbanded one tribunal that maintained safety standards for truck drivers, but introduced another to initiate such perverse circuses as the AFP raid on the offices of the AWU, chasing a decade-old GetUp! donation. This government’s avalanche of restrictive legislation on union activity has provoked incidents as ridiculous as a miner being sacked for a ten-minute pose in his underwear protesting a company’s broken promise of a laundry service. Then there was the union sued at taxpayer expense when officials attended a workplace mental health event after a member self-harmed. Prosecutions were sought when two unionists met for a cup of tea. And businesses have been warned that if they sponsor the children’s face painting at an annual union picnic day that’s been running for 30 years, they risk fines and jail.There is no justification for such rigorous executions of new laws, beyond mere corporate greed. With corporate profits rising – and by stratospheric levels in the finance sector – there’s no grounds to claim union demands for better pay or fairer work conditions are unaffordable, despite the flurry of legislative activity from the government to prevent unions from making them. Precisely the opposite is true; the Reserve Bank claims a “crisis of low pay” and the lowest wage growth on record is undermining the potential for economic growth. A McKell Institute report released on Monday identified the wage cut delivered when penalty rates were reduced in July has been followed “by the weakest three months of consumer spending since 2008”. It’s not a coincidence that employment in the retail sector is also at a standstill – in what should be its busiest time of the year. Don’t be fooled by the PM’s bragging about the latest job figures; it’s Victoria and Queensland’s Labor governments whose spending on infrastructure projects, local procurement policies and increasing restrictions on the use of labour hire that are pushing the country’s largest jobs growth from these two states. What the federal government may claim as their leadership, jobs expansion doesn’t account for the number of public servants they’ve recently retrenched and hardly acknowledges that, due to immigration, jobs are “barely keeping pace with population lift”, according to the ABC. More than five percent unemployment is still more than one-in-twenty adults without a job – and with aprime minister publicly dedicated to fighting pay increases in growth areas like construction, it’s little wonder that despite what jobs are created, Australian living standards are threatened by record, stagnant, non-growth of pay. What does this mean? A breakdown of official ABS data shows that merely in the last year, the price of electricity has grown 539% faster than the consumer price index. Utilities 394%. Gas 356%. Car fuel 317%. Childcare 161%. Health 117%. Housing 83%.
The material results and their paypacket pinch are far a cry from the “jobs and growth” promise the prime minister made when campaigning for re-election last year. Despite Turnbull’s desperate, pre-Bennelong by-election insistences, the slogan is just another tactic from the non-achieving Liberal-National cohorts to retain their power merely for their power’s sake.
A tactic as desperate, perhaps, as the ongoing attempt to hobble the unions, however ridiculous the restrictions, whatever the risk to the Australian economy. After all, unions were the organisations whose political mobilisations almost brought the Liberal-Nationals down at the last last election and whose campaign efforts recently returned Labor’s Annastacia Palaszczuk to government in Queensland with an increased majority.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence. You can be certain to receive an expert economic assessment of anti-unionism should you request it of the community members currently blockading Webb Dock. They seem to have lived experience of some insights from Adam Smith.
If the company’s behaviour strikes you as an act of personal cruelty, industrial pettiness and disproportionate hostility to the principle of free association, you are both right and making a handy summation of the present tenor of Australian industrial relations. We now have the most restrictive, anti-union legislative regime in the OECD, with fewer rights afforded to unions to organise than even our cousins in the neoliberal badlands of America, and yet for certain corporations, conservative yahoos in the media and the Turnbull Liberal-National government, every systemic advantage is still not enough.
Union pickets are now illegal – yes, illegal – in Australia outside of approved “bargaining periods”, so the ranks of the Webb Dock protestors have been drawn from volunteers, comrades and allies, attending the picket at their personal volition. Yet so favourable is the present regime to aggressive industrial paranoia that VICT has sought injunctions against not only the Maritime Union of Australia, but the secretary of Victoria’s Trades Hall, Luke Hilakari. Hilakari spoke at the Webb Dock rally last Friday. By the weekend, he’d been served legal papers at his home.
VICT’s allegation? That Hilakari and the MUA “wrongly and maliciously agreed to conspire and combine among themselves to injure” the company.
The wording is as archaic as the politics informing it. Australia’s conservatives loudly claim their fondness for the “father of economics” Adam Smith, but to get all the jokes, you really have to do the reading. Back in 1776, Smith discussed the incipient union movement without judgment in The Wealth of Nations. “When workers combine,” he wrote, their masters “never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.”
And if there’s one characteristic of Liberal-National government under Malcolm Turnbull, it’s relentless assistance to corporations should we servant classes ever combine in unions to get ourselves uppity.
With support from minor parties on the senate crossbench, the Liberals and Nationals have disbanded one tribunal that maintained safety standards for truck drivers, but introduced another to initiate such perverse circuses as the AFP raid on the offices of the AWU, chasing a decade-old GetUp! donation. This government’s avalanche of restrictive legislation on union activity has provoked incidents as ridiculous as a miner being sacked for a ten-minute pose in his underwear protesting a company’s broken promise of a laundry service. Then there was the union sued at taxpayer expense when officials attended a workplace mental health event after a member self-harmed. Prosecutions were sought when two unionists met for a cup of tea. And businesses have been warned that if they sponsor the children’s face painting at an annual union picnic day that’s been running for 30 years, they risk fines and jail.There is no justification for such rigorous executions of new laws, beyond mere corporate greed. With corporate profits rising – and by stratospheric levels in the finance sector – there’s no grounds to claim union demands for better pay or fairer work conditions are unaffordable, despite the flurry of legislative activity from the government to prevent unions from making them. Precisely the opposite is true; the Reserve Bank claims a “crisis of low pay” and the lowest wage growth on record is undermining the potential for economic growth. A McKell Institute report released on Monday identified the wage cut delivered when penalty rates were reduced in July has been followed “by the weakest three months of consumer spending since 2008”. It’s not a coincidence that employment in the retail sector is also at a standstill – in what should be its busiest time of the year. Don’t be fooled by the PM’s bragging about the latest job figures; it’s Victoria and Queensland’s Labor governments whose spending on infrastructure projects, local procurement policies and increasing restrictions on the use of labour hire that are pushing the country’s largest jobs growth from these two states. What the federal government may claim as their leadership, jobs expansion doesn’t account for the number of public servants they’ve recently retrenched and hardly acknowledges that, due to immigration, jobs are “barely keeping pace with population lift”, according to the ABC. More than five percent unemployment is still more than one-in-twenty adults without a job – and with aprime minister publicly dedicated to fighting pay increases in growth areas like construction, it’s little wonder that despite what jobs are created, Australian living standards are threatened by record, stagnant, non-growth of pay. What does this mean? A breakdown of official ABS data shows that merely in the last year, the price of electricity has grown 539% faster than the consumer price index. Utilities 394%. Gas 356%. Car fuel 317%. Childcare 161%. Health 117%. Housing 83%.
The material results and their paypacket pinch are far a cry from the “jobs and growth” promise the prime minister made when campaigning for re-election last year. Despite Turnbull’s desperate, pre-Bennelong by-election insistences, the slogan is just another tactic from the non-achieving Liberal-National cohorts to retain their power merely for their power’s sake.
A tactic as desperate, perhaps, as the ongoing attempt to hobble the unions, however ridiculous the restrictions, whatever the risk to the Australian economy. After all, unions were the organisations whose political mobilisations almost brought the Liberal-Nationals down at the last last election and whose campaign efforts recently returned Labor’s Annastacia Palaszczuk to government in Queensland with an increased majority.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence. You can be certain to receive an expert economic assessment of anti-unionism should you request it of the community members currently blockading Webb Dock. They seem to have lived experience of some insights from Adam Smith.
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