Len Cooper, the secretary of the Victorian Telecommunications Division of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, wrote to Victorian unions last August inviting them to take part in a discussion “aimed at leading to the formation of a campaign on the right to strike”.
The Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) endorsed the campaign as a sub-committee of the hall on February 10. It committed to back a motion on the right to strike at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) national congress, which takes place in Sydney in May.
The proposal to launch a campaign around the right to strike first arose out of a resolution from the Union Community Summer School. It was held in Melbourne in December 2010, and drew participation from across the organised left and union movement.
In his letter, Cooper said: “Without the right to strike many other rights remain vulnerable where we have them, and un-winnable where we do not.”
Cooper noted that several local union branches, some national unions, regional Trades and Labour Councils such as Geelong Trades Hall Council, the VTHC and the ACTU all have policies requiring compliance with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions on the right to strike.
Yet Australian unions have so far failed to secure this fundamental right. Why?
The unrestricted right to strike has never been guaranteed under Australian law. Successive Australian governments, both Liberal and ALP, have sought to restrict it.
However, militant sections of the Australian labour movement have organised to challenge the laws that restrict the right to strike.
One such challenge was in May 1969 when Victorian tramways union secretary Clarrie O’Shea was jailed for contempt. He disobeyed a court order that his union pay huge fines, under the penal sections of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act.
This triggered the biggest postwar industrial action — one million Australian workers stopped work to demand “Free Clarrie and repeal the penal powers”. Workers around the country took industrial action in defiance of the government and, in some cases, their own trade union officials.
The law was made unenforceable.
Five years later, Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser introduced the Trade Practices Act — now known as the Competition and Consumer Act.
Sections 45D and E of the original act outlawed solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts. These restrictions were tightened under the John Howard government.
But despite the introduction of these laws, Australian workers mobilised in big numbers. A one-day general strike by public servants against an attack on Medibank (the precursor to Medicare) took place in 1976. Between 1979 and 1981, a wave of strikes mobilised more than 4 million workers to fight Fraser’s job cuts and austerity.
During the period known as the Accord years, which followed the agreement between the Hawke Labor government, the ACTU and Australian business, there was a decline in union power and organisation.
Between 1981 and 1992, the level of unionisation in the workforce fell from 51% to 39.6%. By 1992 the number of work days lost to strikes had dropped to its lowest level in 30 years.
The militant Builders Labourers Federation, which dared to challenge the Accord and seek better outcomes for its members, faced deregistration in 1986 as a result.
The Enterprise Bargaining system introduced by Paul Keating’s ALP government in 1993 introduced a limited right to “protected industrial action” and lifted restrictions on industrial action by public servants. But solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts were still outlawed.
In 1996, the Howard Coalition government introduced the Workplace Relations Act, which put new legal and administrative restrictions on protected industrial action.
Howard also created the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) to target construction unions and to criminalise union organising in the building industry.
These building industry laws were widely condemned for breaching ILO conventions, but the current Labor government has kept the ABCC’s stiff penalties and coercive powers of interrogation in a proposed reform bill before Parliament.
The ILO Convention No. 87, Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise, was adopted in 1948 and ratified by Australia in 1973. It gives recognition to the right of trade unions, as organisations of workers set up to further and defend their occupational interests (Article 10), and to formulate their programs and organise their activities (Article 3).
The ILO Committee on Freedom of Association and the ILO Committee of Experts have also made repeated references to the right to strike.
The ILO’s Bernard Gernigon, Alberto Odero and Horacio Guido said in 1998: “From its very earliest days, during its second meeting in 1952, the Committee on Freedom of Association declared strike action to be a right and laid down the basic principle underlying this right, from which all others to some extent derive, and which recognises the right to strike to be one of the principal means by which workers and their associations may legitimately promote and defend their economic and social interests.”
We still live in a society where two laws exist — one for workers and one for the employer class. Under our industrial laws, unions must jump through virtual rings of fire before they can strike. But employers, such as Qantas and Schweppes, can lock out workers and cut jobs with impunity.
Australian law has never provided for the unrestricted right to strike. The first Australian industrial law, the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904, penalised Australian striking workers with fines and jail sentences.
Before that, Australian workers had to comply with the British Master and Servants Act of 1837. The Sydney Gazette in 1837 said that a worker could face jail if they were absent from work for an hour without permission.
A 1997 Green Left Weekly article gave an example from 1843: “A painter who got lost in the bush overnight was reported absent by his employer; all his due wages were taken, and he worked in chains in a treadmill for six weeks as punishment.”
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16183
We have come a long way since the Master and Servants Act, but one thing has not changed — the right to withdraw our labour is still fundamental to allow workers to defend their wages and conditions.
As the global economic and environmental crises worsen, it will also be necessary to defend jobs against industry closures, and to ensure a just transition to ecologically safe industries where workers’ rights are protected.
As capital tries to force workers to pay for the crisis by cutting the social wage and attacking living standards the right to strike will be essential to defending our social services and welfare, public health care, education and housing and to fight off further privatisation.
In 2006 in Britain, in the aftermath of a wave of industrial disputes and 100 years after the introduction of the 1906 Trade Unions Disputes Act, British trade unions launched a campaign to regain the right to strike through the introduction of the Trade Union Freedom Bill.
The Bill reached the parliament only to be defeated by two votes. But unions in England are still pursuing legal reform.
For the campaign in Australia to succeed, it will have to use a range of tactics — legal, political and, most importantly, industrial.
Legal reform may be slow in coming, but winning the right to strike on the ground is key. The lesson of the Clarrie O'Shea dispute is that a concerted, organised campaign to defy the laws and penal powers of the day can win.
The Right to Strike campaign has drafted a model motion for unions and community organisations, and is organising a National Planning and Action Symposium on the Right to Strike in Sydney on May 14, the day before the ACTU National Congress opens.
For more information, phone Dave Kerin on 0412 484 094.
Model motions for the Right to Strike campaign
Model resolution for all types of community meeting
“That this meeting of (name of organisation and status of meeting) supports the National Right to Strike campaign and declares that all Australian law must comply with ILO conventions 87 & 98. In particular with the guaranteed right to organise and strike at the time chosen, and for the purposes decided upon, by union members.
Further, our organisation demands that the ILO conventions pertaining to workers in unions being free to take solidarity action with communities, whenever they believe the cause is just, are complied with.”
Model resolution for all types of union meeting
“That this meeting of (name of union and status of meeting) supports the National Right to Strike Campaign and declares that all Australian law must comply with ILO conventions 87 & 98.
In particular with the guaranteed right to organise and strike at the time chosen, and for the purposes decided upon, by union members. Further, our organisation demands that the ILO conventions pertaining to workers in unions being free to take solidarity action with other workers by striking, be complied with.”
