MUA fight: the CPA failed a crucial test
By Dick Nichols
My articles in Green Left Weekly issues 322 and 323 on the deal between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia were aimed at stirring up some open debate about the most critical clash between capital and labour in Australia in the last 30 years, as well as about the role of the Communist Party of Australia in it.
That deal has provoked heated discussion, but it's been confined to the corridors and the pubs. That's why CPA national secretary Peter Symon's defence (Guardian, July 15) is welcome: at least it gets the debate into the open.
Symon argues that the settlement, while containing losses that "are not palatable to the union leadership, its members or the CPA", was the best possible in the circumstances. Even if the CPA, with its presence in the union, had opposed the deal and obtained substantial support for rejection, "this would be a very bad situation in which to continue a dispute. It would signal big divisions in the membership.
"If the dispute were resumed in these circumstances ... the full weight of the punitive clauses [of the Workplace Relations Act] would be applied.
"The divisions among the union's membership would be sharply aggravated, creating very favourable conditions for the government and the employers. Community support for a divided union which was seen to repudiate significant achievements would soon drop away."
But would this have been the most likely scenario? Maybe Chris Corrigan, who won a doubling of productivity through the deal, would have been persuaded by an unexpected show of opposition to moderate his greed. And even if he spat the dummy and the administrators were forced to wind up Patrick's labour hire companies, this need not have been the terrifying prospect it obviously was for the MUA leadership.
The reserves of support — industrial, financial, political and community — were far from exhausted. Indeed, many were never even brought into battle. Once its core concern of retaining union coverage was won, the MUA leadership simply chose not call upon them.
The Queensland Maritime Unionists' Socialist Activities Association bulletin, quoted by Symon, confirms this: "Although industrial action was offered through the ACTU we did not, in the end, accept and won through the generous financial assistance from other unions". (Emphasis added.)
A battleground
Symon's scenario doesn't seriously address the real situation; he just repeats the truism that industrial action can't be turned on and off like a tap, without bothering to explain how this applied in the MUA fight.
But imagine if CPA leader Jim Donovan, as deputy secretary of the NSW MUA branch (Sydney and Port Botany), had organised a clear statement of opposition (which would have won the support of hundreds of other wharfies) and developed an alternative resolution calling for new negotiations with Corrigan and putting supportive unions and the community solidarity networks back on alert.
Given rank-and-file anger, this would, at the very least, have won significant minority support nationally. It would have shown that the wharfies weren't prepared to have their jobs and conditions cut to ribbons.
Why, in such a case, would union and community support "drop away"? Does Symon seriously believe, when politics is dominated by unemployment, that an MUA call for support in the fight for jobs would fall on deaf ears? Or that defence of conditions wouldn't strike a chord with other unionists who are getting it in the neck?
Even if we accept that "the full weight of the punitive clauses would be applied" (not a foregone conclusion given the splits among the protagonists at the height of the dispute), that simply tells us that the union movement must be prepared for their possible use, not that these laws can't be beaten.
The mass pickets neutered anti-union laws during the dispute, and these laws may still have to be confronted. Indeed, the MUA fight was the perfect opportunity to tackle the WRA.
Symon echoes the ACTU line that the MUA was "clever" in avoiding a national strike and thereby avoiding giving Reith a pretext to use the WRA. This is a half-truth, at best.
The union's tactic of allowing scab training to go ahead was always on the brink of demoralising the membership and supporters. It was only when the "peaceful assemblies" became real pickets by another name that morale was restored.
It wasn't "clever" for the union movement as a whole not to follow the lead of the Victorian Trades Hall Council May 6 stoppage and rally. That brought 100,000 on to the streets and showed that the power was there to blunt any use of anti-union laws.
Industrial struggle
Of course, rejection of Corrigan's deal would have brought a new barrage of media abuse — "the bloody-minded MUA is blocking poor Corrigan from getting a decent return on investment".
Here the union would have to reply that, while prepared to entertain a new private owner, it would be better for all workers and the community if stevedoring (like telecommunications) was not in private hands but managed through a democratically run national stevedoring authority.
Symon asks, "Is it seriously considered that with the Howard government in office this could be implemented as an immediate aim?". Obviously not, but that's not its purpose. It's role is to advance a working-class — a union — alternative to the treadmill of privatisation and restructuring in the name of competitiveness. Since its 1994 fight with the Labor government over the Australian National Line, the MUA leadership has abandoned this demand.
Yet, if the union doesn't have this strategic perspective and educate its members in it, it will have no choice but to meet the requirements of the only other option — stevedoring run by private capitalists whose profitability is sacred.
Just because there wasn't a peep from the MUA (or the CPA) about public ownership during the fight doesn't mean there was no chance of doing better than the final settlement.
Had the battle continued, it would have become a political clash with the Howard government, and the demand for a national stevedoring authority would have been a key propaganda point. It would have won popular support and played a role in the swinging the industrial and political balance of forces in favour of the union and helped improve whatever final deal emerged.
It was here that the MUA leadership failed most, simply because it has no alternative to the ACTU-ALP line of "light" restructuring, vindicated by ACTU negotiator Greg Combet in the June 26 Financial Review: "[This agreement] could have been achieved last year, without all the turmoil and cost of this dispute, if there had been some good faith on the company's part".
Even if you believe that there was no industrial alternative to accepting the deal, any party calling itself communist should, at a minimum, have told wharfies the truth: "This deal stinks, but we can't fight on because our fair-weather ACTU and ALP leaders will desert us".
The CPA's tone is the exact opposite: "The CPA cherishes its unity with the MUA membership and leadership which reflects our aim to build the unity of the working class in its struggle against capital". (Emphasis added.)
But the MUA leadership has no political perspective other than trailing behind the ALP, and the ranks are divided, angry and confused. So what's it to be? Unity with John Coombs' wing or unity with those wharfies and seafarers who want to resist the attacks on their jobs and conditions, but lack an organised leadership or a clear political perspective? All the standard CPA noise about "unity of the working class in its struggle against capital" means zero when its practice is to bloc with a leadership that is trapped in Labor's embrace.
Nobody denies that the MUA won a victory in restoring its position on the waterfront, in contributing to the downward spiral of the Howard government and in reviving the morale of broad layers of the working-class movement. That was stated repeatedly in Green Left Weekly and remains the assessment of the Democratic Socialist Party.
However, the struggle had the potential to achieve much more — in immediate gains for MUA members, but also in putting the brakes on the Liberal-Labor agenda of economic "rationalist" restructuring. The CPA had a chance to make a difference: but it failed a crucial test of leadership.