Communist Party backs waterfront deal
By Dick Nichols
How do you think a party which calls itself "communist" would assess the deal between Patrick, the Maritime Union of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, endorsed at mass meetings of Patrick wharfies last week?
Wouldn't it detect one of those "intolerable and treacherous compromises, such as embody an opportunism that is fatal to the revolutionary class" and "exert all efforts to explain and combat" it (Lenin in "Left Wing" Communism)?
And what if such a party held positions in the MUA? Wouldn't it explain in detail how the deal would set back the workers directly affected and threaten to undermine conditions across the waterfront? Wouldn't it seek to rouse and organise the fighting spirit of all those opposed to it?
Not if it were the Communist Party of Australia, it wouldn't. The CPA (formerly the Socialist Party of Australia), which has some influence in the MUA — and whose member Jim Donovan is the deputy secretary for the central NSW branch (Sydney and Port Botany) — recommended the deal as "acceptable if not totally satisfactory" (CPA Maritime Bulletin No. 20).
"Acceptable if not totally satisfactory"! That's not how MUA members at their Melbourne and Sydney meetings (and outside in the corridors) described the document they received. Their most printable comment was that it was "toilet paper".
No alternative?
The CPA's Maritime Bulletins glided over the essence of the deal. Plain words like "job cuts", "speed-up", "casualisation", "increased management power" and "undermining conditions" didn't make an appearance.
Sometimes, even the most militant unions have to cop rotten deals because members and resources are exhausted or outside support has deserted them. Or, at times it can be smart for a union to take only a portion of its desired gains — so long as it retains the initiative and can be sure of returning to the fray stronger than its opponent.
Neither of these conditions applied in the Patrick dispute. First, the fighting spirit of MUA members and supporters was far from exhausted; secondly, having accepted the Patrick deal, the MUA will be forced into further retreats.
MUA national secretary John Coombs argued that the deal was the best achievable. This was why a majority accepted it. They saw no alternative because they were given none.
But an alternative did exist. And if the CPA had fought for it in alliance with those who wanted to resist, that alternative would have had a very good chance of getting up. When a deal is rejected by as much as a third of the workers (as in Melbourne), it's a near certainty that, given some leadership, it can be defeated.
Remember that when the High Court decision came through, the MUA support movement was still growing. At that point, $1.7 million had been donated, and with a more democratic and involving style of organisation, more could easily have been raised.
Nor would there have been trouble sustaining the "peaceful assemblies". As the struggle continued, the "troops" were extending well beyond the original core of unionists, activists and the left. New faces were beginning to appear — university and high school students, workers, housewives, pensioners — all keen to defeat the anti-MUA conspiracy.
Legal and illegal tactics
The assemblies didn't just reduce container movements to a trickle: they also helped the legal case fall the MUA's way. What's more, if the Federal and High Court judgments hadn't favoured the MUA, the union would have had no choice but to continue breaking the law, making the mass pickets even bigger and pressing for more support from other unions and workers.
In contrast to the MUA-ACTU approach — basically a legalistic strategy with a place for industrial action as a last resort — the alternative would have focused on building industrial action and union and community solidarity — while still making use of any legal openings.
Such a line would have worked out industrial and mass-action countermoves to all the predictable ploys of the enemy and would have included stoppages, occupations of Patrick sites and waterfront strikes and bans.
Of course, there was no way the MUA-ACTU leadership was going to develop such an approach. But what about the CPA? Why did it have to capitulate, doing its bit to deliver the Patrick wharfies bound and gagged to the deal?
You can pore over the CPA's Maritime Bulletins for justification, but it's as thin as their description of the deal itself. None of the facts demanding analysis — the mood of the workers, the strength of the union, the degree of support from other unions and the strengths and weaknesses of the government — rate a mention. The possibility of continuing the fight isn't seriously posed at all.
That leaves the reader guessing at the real motives for the CPA stance. The stated reason is that "the time now is to wind up the dispute and face the fact that other issues are already at hand". These "other issues" are "the emergence of the One Nation party as an important feature in the political life of Australia".
How pathetic! The MUA fight had to be dropped so the unions could focus on fighting Hanson. This not only assumes that the unions can't walk and chew gum at the same time (yes, true of some), but also ignores that while the MUA fight was at its height, Hanson was most exposed and lost for words — torn between her anti-union farmer base and her desire to find support among "battlers".
This "argument" is nothing but cover for the CPA's entanglement in the ACTU-ALP politics and strategy that dictated the running of the MUA dispute.
Unity for what?
Amongst all the CPA's weasel words, the one that gets a big thrashing is "unity". Unity for what? The MUA-ACTU leadership wanted to maintain unity in support of a deal that would keep Patrick operating profitably. That MUA leadership also got up to a few old bureaucratic tricks to ensure it got the deal through. At the regular stop-works in the week before the vote, MUA members were not given copies of the draft settlement, even though it was available on the Age's web site.
The vote on the final draft was by Patrick members only — despite the fact that it had huge ramifications for P&O Ports, other wharfies and the MUA as a whole.
The CPA "preserved unity" with this deal and these methods of getting it through.
MUA members were divided over the package. In Melbourne, at the beginning of the discussion, about half, mainly older wharfies, wanted to take the payout and the other half wanted to reject the new working conditions. Nearly everyone hated letting Corrigan off the hook.
Given this situation, it was the duty of the CPA to try to build unity on the basis of rejection of the deal, a plan to fight on and the demand for a national stevedoring authority to replace the Patrick and P&O duopoly.
Of course, such an approach would have meant an open clash with the leadership of the MUA and the ACTU-ALP. It would have meant that CPA officials and members in the union would be targeted for that tender treatment reserved for "splitters". But that would have been a very small price to pay for helping to revive a principled, fighting unionism.
[Dick Nichols is the national industrial organiser of the Democratic Socialist Party.]