- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2116
CFMEU rally, Sydney, 16 September 2024.
The aim of the Albanese government’s attack on the union movement is to skyrocket corporate profits by cutting deeper into the standard of living of Australian workers. The neoliberal agenda is a global phenomenon. Its features include smaller government, deregulation, privatisation, trade agreements with the free flow of goods, services and capital, and the slashing of wages and working conditions.
The attacks Australian workers are experiencing are being faced by workers across the world. The scope and need for international co-operation and solidarity has never been greater.
To defeat this offensive, unions need to work together across factional divides. The emphasis of the campaign should include mass mobilisations leading to a strengthened and solid mass movement that embraces all forms of struggle, ranging from electoral pursuits to civil disobedience and defiant militant activity.
This could include a marginal seat campaign heading into the looming federal election, targeting both the Coalition and the ALP. For the growing number of unemployed and marginalised to vote for the Coalition would be to embrace the hangman: and social democracy as promulgated by the ALP is a fraud.
There is a long history of attacks on the construction workers and their union. The Rudd/Gillard Labor government retained the industry police force – the Howard’s government’s notorious Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) – which spent millions of dollars a year hounding union officials who attempted to enter workplaces over safety, underpayment, loss of entitlements, and other issues.
The employers want this fascistic cop back, with even more union-busting powers.
The ABCC cost unions millions of dollars in fines, while accusing the unions and their officials of “breaking the law”. The law they were “breaking” is the ‘right of entry’ law that prevents them from legally carrying out their legitimate trade union business, and protecting their members from criminal actions by employers who are rewarded with the guarantee of no more union visits. It is the law that prohibits or tightly restricts strike action over safety, wages, and working conditions.
For decades trade union officials freely entered workplaces, checked out working conditions of all employees, inspected wages and working hours books, attended to safety issues, assisted members with problems and ensured that employers were complying with their legal obligations.
They were free to talk to workers during meal and other breaks, and to actively recruit and organise in the workplace. They exercised one of the most fundamental basic trade union rights – right of entry.
Up until the mid-1980s a system of centralised union-negotiated, comprehensive awards governed minimum wages, and working conditions.
Awards not only covered wages, hours or work, penalty rates and many other important condition of work, but contained ‘Time Record’ and ‘Right of Entry’ clauses which gave authorised union representatives considerable rights to enter workplaces, speak to workers, and inspect time and wages records where a breach of the award was suspected. These awards covered multiple workplaces and industries or crafts.
The Hawke-Keating Labor governments commenced the process of dismantling the comprehensive system of centralised awards in the 1980s, with a shift in focus to enterprise-based determination of wages and working conditions. But it took the Howard government to emasculate the centralised system of trade union-negotiated awards, and gut awards to 20 ‘allowable matters.’
Amongst the key provisions that were not just removed from awards but outlawed in enterprise agreements were basic trade union rights including the right of entry and free access to time and wage records of all employees.
When the Rudd Labor government was elected in 2007 there were expectations in trade union circles that the right of entry would be restored. It was not.
The union movement still has a fight on its hands to restore the right of entry, and now in the courts against the attempt by the Albanese government to wipe the movement out.
The theft of the Construction and General Division of the CFMEU from its members is a taste of things to come.
