By Dick Nichols
As John Howard faces his first wave of protest from students and education workers, building and waterside workers, his response shows that he's not yet confident of success. Faced with broad fronts like that of university vice-chancellors, the National Union of Students and the National Tertiary Education and Industry Union, the prime minister is already wooing the most "reasonable" elements with protests of his deep love of university education.
This shows that Howard understands full well that in order to rule he must first divide. It's one thing to have a big majority in Canberra: it's an entirely different matter to maintain support in the real country for policies which will make a lot of people the very opposite of "relaxed and comfortable".
This reaction contains a clear message: Howard can be defeated, but this will above all require unity and solidarity among all those who come under the Coalition gun.
Here the August 19 actions called by the ACTU and state labour councils should be seen as only the first step in a campaign of industrial action to immobilise a Howard government that has no mandate whatsoever for its attacks on our living standards.
However, if its purpose remains simply to put pressure on the Greens and Democrats about Reith's industrial relation legislation, it will fail even in this partial goal.
A serious and continuing campaign of strikes, bans and solidarity actions, coupled with a well-funded drive for public opinion, is indispensable to successful resistance. What is needed is to "talk French" — a movement along the lines of last year's French public sector strikes, which were a model of what organised labour can achieve.
It's also the best way to start the long-delayed revival of the union movement itself: when there's action, and some wins, it will become clear to tens of thousands of sceptical workers why they should belong to unions.
However, there's a still more basic problem: even if the Howard agenda can be slowed or stopped by industrial action, working people, students, Aboriginal people and people on welfare will always be on the defensive, waiting for the next attack —unless working people develop their own solutions to the problems that Howard is trying to solve in favour of big capital.
Solutions like:
- a shorter working week with no loss in pay and a program of public sector expansion against unemployment;
- against falling living standards, not just the ACTU's mooted living wage campaign, but union wage campaigns to retrieve at least some of what was lost under the Accord;
- a program of upgrading and modernising the public sector under the democratic control of workers and consumers, involving the re-nationalisation of the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, as well as defence of Telstra against privatisation;
- a massive program of environmental restoration and technology conversion;
- opposition to Labor and Liberal support for the "New World Order", especially such criminals as the Indonesian Suharto dictatorship.
There's more. A good program is next to nothing without an organisation — a party — to fight for it. Today, this is the vital missing piece in the jigsaw as resistance to Howard gets under way. Because without it even successful resistance can only usher in a right-wing Beazley government resting on an Accord by another name.
Unions that are serious about resisting the Coalition should be promoting a broad membership debate on how they can help to create such a party. And unions that are presently affiliated to the ALP should submit that affiliation to membership discussion in the light of 13 years of Accord grind. [Dick Nichols is industrial spokesperson for the Democratic Socialist Party].