Sue Bolton, Melbourne
Craig Johnston, the former Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) Victorian branch secretary, goes on trial on May 10 on charges arising from an industrial dispute in 2001. The dispute was over the sacking of 29 workers and their replacement with labour-hire workers from Skilled Engineering.
Thousands of construction and manufacturing workers will stop work to protest against the victimisation of Johnston on the first day of the trial. The protest will begin at 9am outside the County Court on the corner of Lonsdale and William streets.
"In the late 1970s, I was working in a factory and I saw a bloke get badly hurt", Johnston told Green Left Weekly. "I also saw number of other unfair things. No-one seemed to give a stuff, so I put my hand up to be the delegate. That's how I got involved in the union movement.
"Some things are massively different in the trade union movement now, but some things never change. The ACTU was right-wing controlled in the 1970s and now it's supposedly left-wing controlled, but it's just as ineffective now as it was then. I'd say it's even worse now because the ACTU never mobilises workers.
"Most trade unions now, with the exception of a few in Victoria and a couple in other states, run all industrial disputes through the [Australian Industrial Relations] Commission. There have always been unions like that, but in the 1960s and 1970s there were many unions that were prepared to strike and take on the bosses, and mobilise people to get involved in political as well as industrial campaigns.
"In the late '70s, the metal workers, and a whole range of other unions, organised people to march in the streets against uranium mining. There were tens of thousands of us marching on a Friday night then sitting and blockading Swanston and Flinders streets. We did it several times. You don't see that any more. There are unions that support some of the political causes but there are very few unions that want to mobilise their membership for them."
When Johnston led the AMWU's Victorian branch, it had supported the Nike protesters, International Women's Day and the East Timorese independent struggle. "Several unions gave a lot of support to the East Timorese, but for a lot of unions, it was too hard. It shows a lack of broader political understanding or even a lack of political interest among union officials.
"Unless you've got good social conditions around you, it doesn't matter how much money you make, because money soon evaporates. If you're getting $2000 a week but you've got to pay $500 a week for your kids' education or $1000 to see a doctor, $2000 means nothing. I believe that you should be involved in social movements to make a fairer society. And the only way to do that is to use the industrial and political muscle that unions have because individuals can't make a lot of difference. Collectives can make a lot of difference.
"Solidarity is an extension of unionism on the job. If you can't do something as an individual, you join a union and the collective does something. It's the same across the board. On different jobs and in different industries, some unions have more muscle than others. If the strong help the weak, it will come back 10-fold and others will help you, and if people keep doing that it will multiply.
"No-one can convince me that you can win anything without fighting for it. If you're not militant you get done over. That's been proved over hundreds of years. I've seen militant industrial action in the old metal workers union, in the Builders Labourers Federation and from different unions in different areas where they've made big gains through militancy."
Johnston argued that the federal Coalition government is trying to criminalise industrial action. "They're trying to move everything out of the industrial section of the law into the criminal section. When an organiser goes onto a site, the government is trying to say that it is trespass, a criminal offence. If a union organiser says to a boss, 'You owe a worker money. You've ripped them off. Pay up or I'll have a stoppage', that is considered coercion and threats so it's a criminal charge. The government is doing this because they want to say that unions are third parties. They want employers and employees to negotiate without unions."
He criticised a resolution recently adopted by the ACTU executive which condemns "criminal conduct" in industrial disputes, saying: "My great concern with the ACTU's latest resolution about criminal conduct is that if the Liberals get back in, this will come back to haunt the ACTU. The government will say that the ACTU has passed a motion condemning criminal conduct so it should also condemn workers standing on a picket line refusing to let scabs in because that's criminal conduct. That is a dangerous thing and it will come back once again to disadvantage workers.
"The reality is that industrial action has never been legal in Australia. The [industrial relations] act has never allowed for the legal right to take action. But for 150 years, it didn't stop us from making a massive gains in wages, conditions, living standards and achieving social changes by taking industrial and political action.
"Why did we suddenly need protected industrial action? It was introduced to put collars around unions to limit what they do. [Under the Workplace Relations Act] you can only take protected action in very specific circumstances.
"By introducing the notion of protected and unprotected action, the [previous Labor federal government] convinced a whole range of new trade union leaders, who had become union officials during the [prices and incomes] accord period [in the 1980s and early 1990s] and who had never been involved in open industrial warfare like it was in the old days, that you couldn't take unprotected industrial action because that was illegal.
"The problem is that many of these leaders are very timid and they tell their members: 'You're not allowed to take action because that's breaking the law.' They put the idea in workers' minds that you can only take action when it's legal. Now if you look at any country in the world that's fought against an oppressive regime, whether it was South Africa or India or any other country, they have to break the law. If the law's unjust, you've got to break it."
Johnston was also critical of the ALP's approach o industrial relations. "The Labor opposition is not committed to repealing the Workplace Relations Act. All they've committed to do is to make some minor changes. The only way that the Workplace Relations Act will be brought down is if there's a full-on onslaught of civil disobedience and breaking the law with political and industrial action. But we don't have the leadership at the national level in most unions that would be prepared to do that. And even in Victoria, there's only a handful of unions that are prepared to push that. So regardless of which party wins the federal election, the union movement will still be faced with the same sort of laws."
From Green Left Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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