- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2141
Photo: Anna Pha
A wage rise has become an urgent need for the great majority of Australian workers. Since its election, the Albanese government, in league with some of the most reactionary and rapacious sections of big business, has been conducting a war of attrition on living standards and democratic rights. It’s time to fight back.
CFMEU ATTACK
It is no coincidence that the government’s declaration of war on the union movement, with its hostile takeover of the Construction Division of the CFMEU, came as employers increased their demands for wage cuts in real terms across the economy, including screwing down hard on the lowest income source of all, the minimum wage.
The Albanese government, responding to media allegations not tested in any court, removed democratically-elected union officials from their jobs, arbitrarily sacked union staff, and used union members’ funds to pay for the whole thing. The media campaign from Nine media ‘enthusiastically supported by the Murdoch press’ was so effective that even when police found nothing worth laying charges about, South Australia’s Premier still supported the administration in his state.
Everyone knows about the CFMEU, but what’s much less widely reported is that the big building employers are coming for the good conditions and wages the CFMEU and other unions won for their members. Employer groups are beating the drums about industry super funds such as CBUS, which far out-perform the commercial super.funds, and they never stop attacking wages and union bargaining powers.
THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU TOO
The agenda is not only an attack on the trade unions. It is an attack on all workers and, flowing from this, an onslaught on their families and other members of the community – including small business which will suffer when wages go down, pensioners whose payments are linked to the minimum wage, and sport, culture, charities, and churches which will be deprived of support when workers are forced to work longer hours.
Further, no institution, service, organisation or collective that contributes in any way to progressive and democratic ideals and practices has escaped the sword while the corporations are given open slather to sacrifice workers and services to the community to keep profits rising.
SPENDING PRIORITIES
During the course of Australia’s deepening integration in US war plans, far-reaching and draconian powers have been given to the military and spy agencies like ASIO, ASIS, and the Defence Signals Directorate, as well as to the Federal Police.
Both major parties have ignored calls to increase the rate of unemployment and disability benefits from the present extremely low rates. Calls to ‘raise the rate’ have been coming from major charities, economists, and even the government’s own independent Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee.
At the same time cuts have been made to welfare payments across the board using a variety of means. The unemployed are hit with major penalties for the slightest infringement of a raft of rules, some of them so extreme in their demands that they are logistically and financially impossible to meet for many jobless people.
The government is serving this system by making ordinary Australians pay to safeguard the super profits of the monopolies while preparing for an open offensive against working people. The ruling class supports their methods, for the moment preferring Labor to the traditional party of big business, the Liberal-National Coalition.
ORGANISE
Unity and organisation by workers will be crucial in the coming period: both broad unity and specific organisation with specific political objectives.
The existing two-party system in which the seat of government is alternately shared between the Liberal-National Coalition and the Labor Party has protected and perpetuated the rule of the major corporations.
It is necessary to build a left-oriented, politically progressive force strong enough to challenge and break the two-party stranglehold and establish a new type of government which will implement “people friendly” economic, political, social and foreign policies.
At the present time the concentration has to be on the further education and mobilisation of the workforce across Australia, including the majority of workers who are not members of trade unions and are unorganised.
Educate, Organise, Agitate – There’s a lot of work to be done!
The winning of the wider community to understand and support trade union actions is another step that needs to be taken over Australia’s economic and political life.
This alternative will arise out of the demands and mass actions of the working people. The creation of a left/progressive political alternative is an essential task.
The working people of Australia have many proud traditions and many achievements. It is time for hundreds and thousands of new participants to join the march for peace, for union rights, for job security and welfare rights, for the public education and health systems.
If you’re not in your union – join it. If you’re in one, get active! Keep reading the Guardian, The Workers’ Weekly to find out what’s really going on with our government, our economy, and our country.
Let’s get going!
Liberal Party ‘bastardry’ revealed
On the anniversary of the infamous waterfront dispute of 1998, fresh evidence has been unearthed by Dr Geraldine Fela and the ABC which indicates Prime Minister John Howard knew all along about the plans being hatched by Patrick Stevedores to train a workforce offshore, months before it was exposed in parliament.
Patricks trained a scab workforce made up of farmworkers and former members of the military, with the aim of sacking a unionised workforce overnight. The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) found out and the union movement swung into action. The union struggled hard, and prevailed.
The evidence and the event can be listened to on the ABC series ‘Conspiracy? War on the Waterfront’ series, available on the ABC’s iView. For more detail, search for ‘What did John Howard know’ online. Howard always downplayed his involvement in the dispute.
With a federal election underway right now in which Peter Dutton is pretending to be a friend of working class Australians, the MUA is urging all Australians not to forget that it was the Liberal Party that gave a green light to this illegal act of bastardry.
