BY PAUL BENEDEK
SYDNEY — A militant ticket — the Rank and File Group — will stand candidates in the NSW Australian Manufacturing Workers Union election. Dave Fox and Adam Leeman hope to win positions as national conference delegates on a platform of membership control of the union, a campaign against labour hire and for industry-wide bargaining.
Fox, a workplace delegate, has been involved in the fight against the encroachment of labour-hire companies in the metal industry for some years. He has been a leading member of the Sydney Labour Hire Action Group within the AMWU. He told Green Left Weekly that a serious campaign was needed to stop labour hire becoming predominant in the industry.
"More and more people are working as casuals or through labour-hire firms as companies cut costs", Fox said. "The AMWU has done some work and won a number of small victories, but it is still rampant. Labour-hire workers should have more representation and input into the decision-making of our union to get a real campaign going."
Some of the victories have included clauses in enterprise agreements, but Fox says this has not been enough. "We need to focus on campaigns to improve conditions for casual and labour-hire workers, making them permanent workers with union wages and conditions", he said.
Labour hire and casualisation pull down the wages and conditions of the rest of the work force. Fox and Leeman argue that the AMWU needs to unite permanent and casual workers and ensure that they are not divided by bosses.
Adam Leeman has been a shop delegate and is currently doing an adult apprenticeship as a fitter. Along with other members of the group, he has organised solidarity for other workers in struggle, including those involved in the Morris McMahon strike. He told Green Left Weekly that the group had formed out of these campaigns in response to the AMWU leadership's attempts to shutdown solidarity actions.
"The Morris McMahon dispute was an excellent example of the effect solidarity can have on a strike", Leeman said. "Hundreds of supporters were mobilised on a number of occasions. Maritime workers, construction workers, teachers and people from the general community. This played a significant role in keeping the issue of what was happening to those workers on the agenda and in the media."
Leeman is critical of the union's NSW leadership for being a block to the mobilisation of supporters. "The campaign wasn't widely built by the union", he said. "There were few mobilisations organised by the union and when people turned up at the factory gates wanting to block the scab bus, union officials spent their time hosing it down."
Industry-wide bargaining is another essential plank in the Rank and File Group's platform. The group's publicity is critical of the NSW branch's involvement in Campaign 2003, the national pattern bargaining campaign.
"Campaign 2003 has been very slow in NSW, with essentially the same demands we had in 2001", Leeman said. "We think pattern bargaining is a positive step forward from enterprise bargaining, but we are still fighting in our small shops, isolated from the rest of the union.
"The only way to ensure that the gains won through a campaign by the strong shops is passed onto weaker shops is to return to genuine industry bargaining. Conditions in weaker shops are pulling down the rest of the industry. We need to lift the conditions in all shops, not just those strong enough to make their gains themselves."
The Rank and File Group is seeking support from other members of the AMWU. Anyone interested in helping can call Adam on 0414 728 815.
From Green Left Weekly, October 1, 2003.
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