Sue Bolton
It's hard to think of any unionist in recent times who has been more vilified by the mainstream media than former Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) Victorian branch secretary Craig Johnston.
The previous most vilified trade union leader was Builders Labourers Federation Victorian secretary Norm Gallagher, when the state and federal Labor governments were deregistering the BLF in the 1980s.
In Johnston's case, the corporate media have been hostile from the time he was elected state secretary of the AMWU metal division in 1998, with the hostility stepping up when he was elected state secretary of the whole Victorian branch of the union in 2000.
The media vilification of Johnston has served two purposes. The first has been to denigrate him as a union leader and destroy his popularity among union members. The second has been to equate union militancy with violence and macho behaviour in order to deter workers from engaging in militant union action.
While all of the corporate media have been hostile to Johnston and other militants in the AMWU's Victorian branch, the Fairfax Press' Melbourne Age has been the most vicious. Johnston puts this down to some successful industrial campaigns which the union has won at the Age.
In 2001 there were two disputes at the Age. In the first, AMWU members backed up the journalists when they were in dispute, giving the journalists a victory. In the second dispute, the printers, who are members of the AMWU, stopped an edition of the Age from leaving the printing plant.
AMWU officials say that until the election of Johnston and other officials from the Workers First caucus and Jim Reid as state secretary of the AMWU's printing division, the Age had never failed to print and distribute an edition as a result of industrial struggle. Since 2000, industrial action by the AMWU has resulted in the Age failing to put out three editions, with millions of dollars lost in profits.
As well as reflecting the viewpoint of the media owners, the media hostility has faithfully reflected the viewpoint of the state Labor government and the manufacturing industry employers.
The media vilification campaign has also been assisted by Johnston's opponents in the national office of the AMWU and in the ACTU. There is often no difference between the line put by the mainstream media and that put in letters to AMWU members by the union's national secretary, Doug Cameron, and other officials in Cameron's National Left faction.
The media, and particularly the Age, faithfully report sourced and unsourced rumours from Johnston's factional opponents from the AMWU national office and sometimes the ACTU, without any genuine attempt to present a balanced point of view. By sympathetically reporting the views of National Left leaders like Cameron while vilifying Johnston and the Workers First faction, the Age and other media are pretty blatant in indicating which faction they'd like AMWU members to vote for in union elections.
The most recent of these types of articles appeared in the August 22 Sunday Age. Journalist Paul Robinson had even rung AMWU metal division state secretary and Workers First member Steve Dargavel on August 20, asking how the union was going and asked for a phone number, but never once mentioning that he was doing an article about Johnston and Workers First.
Robinson never gave Dargavel an opportunity to respond to the allegations that would be raised in the Sunday Age by AMWU national president and National Left faction member Julius Roe.
Dargavel says that the article "either rehashed old news or referred to unsourced rumours. The comment in the article came from one source only, from one of the key figures in the National Left faction of the union who criticised Craig Johnston. Those sorts of comments and the backgrounding of media by union officials about other union officials is quite damaging to the union and very unhelpful to the cause of collective struggle."
Passing on tidbits of information about internal union politics to journalists is an important weapon that the AMWU national leadership uses against Johnston and the other militants in the Victorian branch. In most cases the journalists just report the allegations without appearing to investigate whether there is any truth to them.
For example, after Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks wrote to Cameron in November 2001 about his concerns about the militancy of the Victorian AMWU leadership, the AMWU national council set up an internal union inquiry with a view to expelling Johnston from the union.
The inquiries have "investigated" spurious allegations, and are certainly not fair or unbiased. In one case, Johnston took the allegations against him to the police in 2002. Despite the police finding no evidence to justify the allegation, the AMWU national council continued to treat it as fact and, on this basis, suspended Johnston from his state secretary position in 2002. Then it expelled him from the union in 2004. The allegation was still reported in the corporate media as being credible despite the result of the police investigation.
Another example of the close working relationship between the corporate media and the AMWU National Left faction and the ACTU is the treatment of the story about Cameron being attacked by someone outside his home on November 18. All of the big business media consistently linked militants in the AMWU's Victorian branch with the attack.
The well-dressed young man who Cameron said punched him has never been identified or apprehended so it uncertain whether the attack was a random act of hooliganism, or motivated by robbery, or a result of internal NSW ALP factional politics or some other motive.
There has been no evidence that the attack was in any way connected to the internal dispute in the AMWU and yet the November 22-23 Australian ran an article headed "Militants under suspicion as union displays its fractures". A November 21 article on the News Limited website was headed "We'll weed out thugs: ACTU", implying that the attack was carried out by unionists.
A consistent theme of the media reporting about Johnston, Workers First and other militants in the Victorian AMWU branch has been an attempt to paint them as violent. The incident in which Cameron was punched was used to justify this theme. The media have also used their reporting of the court case around the Johnson Tiles/Skilled Engineering dispute to paint Johnston and others as violent.
The corporate media regularly use the words "rampage", "office invasions", and "thug" to refer to this dispute, clearly in order to create the impression that the unionists involved in the protests against these companies were violent towards people during the protests.
Thus use of the words "office invasion" and "rampage" create the impression of a half-hour long rampage. The fact was that the walk-through protest at Skilled Engineering only lasted around 3-4 minutes, and the protest at Johnson Tiles only lasted 10-15 minutes.
The use of the words "violent workplace invasion" and "dark-age union thug" by the corporate media implies that violence was used against people during the protests. That was never the case.
Even the TV soapies joined in the vilification campaign with a couple of episodes of Channel Ten's popular television series The Secret Life of Us being based on the Johnson Tiles/Skilled Engineering events before Johnston's court case was concluded. The Secret Life of Us depicted the incidents in the same prejudicial way as the rest of the corporate media.
But the media's concern with the militant leadership of the Victorian AMWU branch isn't really because of fictitious allegations of violence. Their concern is because of the Johnston leadership's effectiveness in leading struggles to improve the lives of thousands of manufacturing workers. For example, when Johnston received a suspended sentence for his involvement in the Johnson Tiles/Skilled Engineering protests, the May 24 Australian ran an editorial headed "New-age penalty for dark-age union thug" which castigated "Johnston's dream of a return to industry-wide bargaining".
The December 6, 2002, Australian Financial Review headlined an article "Union madness hurting exports", in which Johnston and Workers First were condemned for pattern bargaining. The December 12, 1999, Australian ran the headline "Throwback union tactics inhibit manufacturers" on an article reporting the industrial successes of Workers First leadership.
And when Workers First members were first elected in 1998, the July 24, 1998, Australian described them as representing a "return to mindless industrial action". It derided the Workers First message as being "no trade-offs, no productivity targets, for across-the-board wage rises, irrespective of capacity to pay...". However, this militant approach made Workers First and Johnston popular among union members because it won real improvements in their working lives.
Despite the media's presentation of the Johnson Tiles/Skilled Engineering protest as being violent, journalists have not been able to find any evidence of actual violence committed by Johnston. Age journalist Andrew Rule trawled extensively through Johnston's past - interviewing family, schoolmates, workmates and other union officials - in the hope of finding some evidence of violence or corruption, however small. Rule failed to find any.
Rule was left with little option but to report that even Johnston's enemies admired his "integrity". Rule even quoted someone from Johnston's school days saying that Johnston had developed "an embarrassing sense of justice. He is not motivated by greed at all."
With Johnston being committed to workers' rights and not being motivated by greed, the only way that the media could tarnish his reputation among workers was to try to build a case that militant unionism is "violent" and "macho". Thus, in his September 14, 2002, article on Johnston, Rule referred to the Workers First leadership acting like "feuding bikies".
There is, of course, nothing "macho" about militant unionism. Female members of the Victorian branch of the AMWU are just as militant as their fellow male unionists. And, despite the media's attempt to portray it as such, militant unionism is not necessarily a blue-collar thing. In 1986, Victoria's nurses engaged in a successful six-week strike that was very militant.
From Green Left Weekly, September 15, 2004.
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