[This is abridged from a speech to the South Coast Labour Council by JOHN RAINFORD on August 12.]
The Erie Wicker Defence Committee was formed at a public meeting held in this hall and attended by more than 60 people in April.
Those attending were alerted by the local media to the fact that Eric had been charged with extortion — a crime which attracts a 10-year sentence — for his part as a painter and docker in a waterfront industrial dispute in Port Kembla in 1991 and 1992.
The matter is set down for trial in November in Wollongong.
Eric is charged with demanding property with menaces — commonly called extortion — in that, along with Stan Woodbury, he demanded work on eight ships in Port Kembla in 1991 and 1992 — as well as fining the owners of those vessels for work performed by the crew rather than by shore-based labour. Some crime!
There are serious flaws relating to the facts concerning six of the vessels in the indictment. Simply put, they've got it wrong.
But there was certainly a dispute on two of the vessels, and they could have named dozens of others in Port Kembla where the facts are not at issue. In other ports, there have been hundreds if not thousands of vessels subject to precisely the same dispute and the same action.
The dispute originated in 1946 in the port of Fremantle with the dockers' and shipwrights' unions. As it gradually spread to other ports, it involved the Waterside Workers Federation, Seamen's Union and the Firemen and Deckhands' Union.
In Fremantle, overseas ships — predominantly from the UK — would arrive to discharge cargo and then be fitted out for wheat. The fitting-out work was done by shore-based casual workers operating from a union-run pick-up.
The overseas shipowners demanded that a pool of labour be available, but they refused to guarantee a regular supply of work. Rather, they reserved the right to use ships' crews to do the work in order to save money.
This resulted in disputes which involved all maritime unions. In 1948, Justice Dunphy, president of the Western Australian Court of Arbitration, recommended that steps be taken to ensure that shore-based labour performed the work.
Thereafter in Fremantle and other ports the dispute flared from time to time. Overseas ships would periodically seek to use ships' crews for fitting-out, cleaning and lashing and unlashing work.
The ships would be banned, and eventually the owners would agree to shore-based labour doing the work. Things would settle down, and after a period of time, the employers would try it on again.
In the early '60s, the unions started to rethink their tactics. A ban on a vessel that had already performed the work would cause the shipowners some pain, but it didn't do anything for those unemployed, and it proved to be no guarantee that the shipowners wouldn't try it on again.
So in 1962 a new tactic emerged: banning ships that didn't both accede to the work being done and pay the award rate for the number of workers who should have been employed on work done by the crew.
The demand was for both the work and a "fine" distributed to those unemployed who should have performed the work.
It was effective. It didn't guarantee 100% success, but it was more successful than any other industrial tactic.
The ACTU became involved as far back as 1958. They convened meetings with the federal government in 1962 in an effort to get legislative initiatives to solve the problem.
In 1962, 1971 and 1975, ACTU executive and congress resolutions endorsed the proposition that crews of vessels of foreign registry should not be used to perform work that could be performed by shore-based labour.
In 1973 a royal commission was set up to deal with this issue — known as the Sweeney Royal Commission, after the judge who headed it. It recommended that the Navigation Act be amended to ensure that the work on foreign vessels be done by Australian shore-based labour. This was in line with legislation in other countries.
It also recommended that the"fining" vessels cease. Obviously, if the first recommendation had been accepted and enacted, the second recommendation would not have had any work to do.
In the event, nothing came of those recommendations. To the extent that employers continued to use, or try to use, ships' crews, the unions reacted in the time-honoured fashion.
It still goes on. The latest dispute I'm aware of was in Sydney last year, where a ship was "fined" by the MUA as a consequence of the ship's crew doing lashing and unlashing work.
Why, then, is Eric singled out? The explanation lies in the fact that this is a political prosecution, designed to be part of the demonising of maritime workers in the lead-up to and during the recent MUA dispute.
During the Liverpool dockers' dispute, the dockers published an address given to the H.R. Nicholls Society in Australia by Nicholas Finney OBE on how the National Dock Labour Scheme in the UK was dismantled. Finney had this to say in advising Australian employers how to attack workers:
"So we used every political body which had influence. We also used the press and media. We constantly searched out and supplied the media with anti-docker stories, headlines such as 'Welcome return even if the man's a thief' or 'Ghosts who keep vanishing', '20 things you never knew about fiddling dockers', 'They can't be fired'. These headlines were all designed to make it easier for the dockers to be isolated. By the time government acted, every national newspaper at one time or another had published an editorial calling for the government to end the Dock Labour Scheme."
If that isn't a template for what subsequently happened to the MUA, I don't know what is.
Workplace relations minister Peter Reith's form as a principal conspirator in the wider MUA dispute is well known — the courts decided that he had an arguable case to answer. His role in Eric's case is equally crook.
On January 9 this year, in a speech given in Launceston, Reith referred to the "illegitimate demands of hold-cleaning" being investigated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
On February 19 on ABC TV's Lateline, Reith again referred to the MUA and hold-cleaning being an "ugly problem".
At the Liberal Party conference in March in Brisbane, Reith continued his attack and indicated that the Australian Federal Police were investigating matters and prosecuting in one case — Eric Wicker.
The Lateline program in February was preceded by a documentary on the notorious Bill Longley. Longley served 14 years for his part in the murder of dockers' union secretary Pat Shanon in Melbourne. He was responsible for the setting-up of the Costigan Royal Commission with allegations that proved groundless.
The consultancy business that Longley set up with the policeman who arrested him appears to have had a role at Webb Dock after the National Farmers Federation was set up there — both of them were sighted inside Webb Dock when the blue started.
The prosecution of Eric Wicker is not just a political conspiracy, bad enough though that is.
If it goes ahead, it means that any official or delegate pressing a wage or some similar claim on behalf of their members, and threatening industrial action, will be liable to the same prosecution.
It's simply impossible, at law, to distinguish between such a claim and the claims made by the Maritime unions since 1946.
Eric is now an invalid pensioner as a result of a work accident and his former workmates — on whose behalf he campaigned — have been magnificent in both their moral and financial support.
[Contributions to the defence can be sent to: Eric Wicker Defence Committee, c/- 12 Auburn Parade, Cringila NSW 2502.]