- The Guardian
- Issue #2201
Ben Carroll, Victoria’s new Premier is a man in a hurry. The Victorian election will be held on 28 November this year and his party is down in the polls with media of all sorts expecting Labor to lose. So how did Carroll being his ‘new direction’ premiership? By kicking an effective union.
Right off the bat, Carroll announced a Royal Commission into the Building Industry, with a special prosecutor working in tandem. There are tactical reasons for this. Carroll wants to differentiate himself from Jacinta Allan, who he’s just replaced. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of Nine Media, Allan was associated with corruption and (if you read the Nine papers) nasty-looking big blokes in the CFMEU, so having a go at the unions (which is what the Royal Commission will amount to) is an obvious way to look like the anti-Allan. The CFMEU is already under an anti-democratic administration that uses union members’ funds to hound union officials, but that’s never enough for Nine.
Carroll may well be calculating that he needs some media onside fast and Nine is the one to go for (nothing he can do will bring the Murdoch papers around). For years, Nine has hounded the CFMEU with a campaign, ‘Building Bad,’ of demonisation and unsubstantiated charges. Building workers were blamed for everything, from high cocaine prices to the housing shortage.
The CFMEU has been an effective union, securing good wages and conditions, and making great strides on safety in one of Australia’s most dangerous industries. How is it possible, that Labor, set up by unions in the first place, and supposedly the party that takes the side of the workers is kicking an effective union?
It’s possible because the Australian system is set up to put the bosses’ interests first. The “big end of town” is always on the government’s mind. We’ve had a recent example with Carroll’s first day of premier. The Nine papers celebrated with a front page piece on the business lobby’s wish-list from the new Labor premier.
It’s easy for our media to demonise unions.
Unions come in all shapes and sizes, but basically a union is the working class when it’s organised. Unions were formed in the first place because workers understood that their interests are different to the interests of their employers.
Those interests don’t stop at the entrance to your work. Whatever you do for a living, you have interests in common with workers in other businesses, and other industries. You have class interests.
This is a hard message to sell nowadays. Having seen what happens when workers get together and work to change things, capitalism has worked hard to divide workers. Big business has casualised and separated workers, as well as working relentlessly to fun down unions.
One mission of this newspaper is to raise the profile of workers’ organisations. We report union wins every week. That’s easy to do because unions kick goals for workers’ interests almost every day, although you wouldn’t know it from mainstream media. Those are wins for the organised working class.
We don’t stop there. We’re working to raise class consciousness. Working people produce all the wealth this country has, but they don’t own it. The Communist Party of Australia is working hard to help workers understand the power they have.
