[In 2000, the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union embarked on an industry-wide industrial campaign called Campaign 2000. The campaign won some of the best wages and conditions in the industry. This is an abridged version of a speech explaining the campaign given by Victorian AMWU secretary CRAIG JOHNSTON to the July 6 Socialist Alliance trade union seminar in Perth.]
Campaign 2000 was based on the idea that workers should not be in competition with each other for wages and conditions. After talking to some of our comrades in other unions about moving back to an industry-wide approach of "pattern bargaining", we [the Victorian branch of the AMWU] decided to raise the idea with our members.
In 2000, this may have seemed like a radical idea — after going through the Prices and Incomes Accord and enterprise bargaining during the 1980s and early 1990s. But industry-wide campaigns certainly weren't radical back in the 1960s and '70s. In fact, up until the early 1980s this was the way things would traditionally go.
The first thing we had to do, obviously, was to win support amongst the membership for it. And I have to say that wasn't too hard. Our members had had a gutful of being told that they had to be more efficient while employers' profits continually increased.
We drew up a strategy. We needed a common expiry date for enterprise agreements in the industry. We said we would not sign any new agreement that ran after June 30, 2000. It had to run out by that date so we could start to then generate common claims on common issues. We had a few battles over that, but predominantly employers did not resist it — I think they thought that we would run out of steam fairly quickly.
Then we started to discuss what wages and conditions workers wanted to get in this round of bargaining. We made it pretty clear to people that we felt that it shouldn't be just money. We also had to win conditions — particularly the conditions which we had traded off in the early '90s.
The metal industry in Victoria covers about 2000 workshops, and the AMWU has about 30,000 members (and other unions have members in the same area) so the union can't go to every workshop in a couple of days.
So traditionally in the metalworkers' unions have always gone to shop stewards and have had mass meetings right across the state. During the year of planning the campaign we surveyed the membership and we held mass meetings — five across Melbourne and all the regional centres, including Geelong, the La Trobe Valley, Shepperton, Ballarat and Bendigo.
The things we wanted to campaign for included a 15% pay rise over a three-year period, reducing the qualification period for long service to 10 years employment and ensuring that workers' incomes, including average overtime, were protected for two years after injury, despite the previous state Coalition government's attacks on Workcover. We also discussed regulating casuals and contractors and the training of shop stewards.
These claims were almost unanimously endorsed by stewards meetings, and then we took them to the mass meetings. All those meetings were held over two days. They were attended by about 10,000 members — that's out of a potential 30,000-35,000 members, but it was the biggest attendance we have had since the shorter hours campaign of 1979-81.
So we knew damn well by the beginning of the campaign that our members were starting to get fair dinkum — they were serious and committed to the claims.
And although I personally wanted shorter hours, there was clearly not enough support amongst members in 2000 to campaign for them. One of the things we learnt was that you have got to pursue issues that the members want to fight for and are committed to, rather than just what may be in some official's head.
But by having these mass meetings we ran foul of the laws.
The Australian Industry Group (AIG), if you like the "union" of the bosses, got 127 orders against the union. Well we get those everyday and we ignore them. So they went to the Federal Court and got injunctions — and we ignored those. So we finished up before the Federal Court charged with contempt.
Now some people talk about having to work within the system. But if bad laws are bad laws then the only way to change them in our view is to break them. We believe holding meetings with our members is the basic right of working people or any group in the community.
Even though workers only stopped work for four hours — we didn't think it was a strike — Electrical Trades Union Victorian secretary Dean Mighell and myself were fined $20,000 each — it's a great country we live in.
We wanted to get an industry-wide agreement with the AIG, but its representatives told us "no way", and said they would "fight it to the end of the Earth".
So we went to talk to our comrades in the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union about strategy, because they had been pattern bargaining for four or five years.
We met with a break-away group of employers — a number of major employers in our industry. We wanted to meet somewhere neutral where the employers wouldn't feel [uncomfortable]. We chose the Australian Council of Trade Unions — we thought that was pretty neutral.
We held these meetings once a week for about eight weeks and we came up with an outline of a proposal for industrial agreements. Then we went to stewards' and mass meetings at which people said, "well we reckon that's a pretty good thing". Within a couple of weeks we had more than 100 companies signed up.
But the hard part was getting everyone else set up. So we went back to tactics which may be illegal. We had a state-wide stoppage for the first time in 10 years, more than 1000 companies were stopped for 24 hours.
We faced all sorts of criticisms: "This is going to ruin the world, this is a kind of industrial holocaust." The federal Coalition government was talking about introducing more industrial legislation and we had to talk with the Democrats. We did convince them that what we were doing was not going to be the complete end of the Earth.
For all the rhetoric and bullshit that people say, not once during Campaign 2000 did we shut the vehicle industry down. We had stoppages and we did have some particularly bitter disputes — there are a couple of companies that wouldn't come to the party — but a lot less than we had had under the old enterprise system.
The other thing we had to do — through our national council — was bring in strike pay, after about 12 years of arguments. In several disputes — one in which workers were out on the grass [on strike] for 18 weeks — without that sort of money we would never have won.
We finished up with over 1044 agreements covering more than 45,000 workers.
Now next year, we're going to start again with Campaign 2003. This time the rest of the AMWU has said "they have had a bit of a go in 2001" and so we are looking forward to doing something nationally, not just in Victoria.
We think the most important thing we learnt last time is that there's not much point in saying we want to fight for issue "A" if the members aren't committed to it — if the members aren't on side then you are wasting your time.
From Green Left Weekly, July 17, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.