MUA-Patrick deal: a great struggle faces betrayal

MUA-Patrick deal: a great struggle faces betrayal

By Dick Nichols

The draft terms of settlement of the dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia and Patrick Stevedores, released last week on the Age's web page, raise three questions:

 

1. How is it that the stirring fight of April-May, with its mass pickets, inspiring international solidarity, triumphant return to work and severe loss of face by John Howard and Peter Reith, could end up in such a miserable compromise?

2. Miserable or not, is this deal the best that could have been done in the circumstances?

3. If not, what should be done now?

The core of the deal is to preserve the MUA's coverage of the stevedoring industry at a huge price in terms of jobs, working conditions and, most importantly, MUA members' belief in their union.

True, the deal blocks the Howard government on a crucial point of its agenda for the waterfront (breaking the MUA), P&C Stevedores has been forced to sack its scab work force, and the Coalition is still to recover from the big political blows it took as its conspiracy with Chris Corrigan and the National Farmers Federation emerged. But look at the sacrifices.

There are to be 628 “voluntary” redundancies, nearly halving Patrick's permanent work force for an unchanged workload. This translates into reduced gangs and crane crewing levels. Health and safety must suffer through speed-ups, just as happened after the Waterfront Industry Reform Authority (WIRA) “reforms” of 1989-1992. And what happens if 628 “volunteers” for redundancy can't be found?

As well, Patrick wharfies will move to a 40-hour week, based on 35 hours plus five hours of overtime, with the highest rate set at around $62,000-65,000 a year. This is up to 30% less than existing pay. The only way to maintain existing annual earnings is through bonuses based on accepting Reith's productivity rate benchmark of 25 crane moves an hour, a rate long rejected by the union as impossible, or achievable only through ruining working conditions.

The deal also accepts outsourcing of 200 jobs, even if these are to be covered by the MUA. MUA workers will be given preference in filling the 160 outsourced maintenance jobs, but in the other areas the agreement is only that present Patrick workers won't be “precluded”. It may even mean that pay rates for outsourced Patrick work will undercut the existing industry standard.

With casualisation and increased control over allocation of workers to jobs, management's powers of victimisation will increase. The strength of the union's delegate and activist structure will be put at risk.

P&O Ports is already demanding that the deal negotiated with Patrick flow to it, with job losses of 450 to 550 and equivalent cuts in conditions. If the deal is accepted, there's no way the MUA can stop it from undermining the jobs and conditions of all other wharfies.

The price of obtaining $80 million in government money to fund redundancies is the dropping of the MUA's legal case. Reith, Howard and the NFF will get off scot free, and the main villain, Corrigan, will walk away better off, free from prosecution and with a rising Lang Corporation share price to cover his recent losses. As for the federal government, at the very least it will have removed a monkey from its back.

It is already becoming clear from establishment media comment that many big business players think that the clash with the MUA has turned out to be worth all the aggravation. The corporations look set to get cuts in waterfront staffing levels and speed-ups as great as those obtained through the Hawke-Keating WIRA reforms, but at a fraction of the cost to the budget ($80 million as opposed to $450 million).

Also, the MUA may well be “here to stay”, but it will be a tamer union, with fewer members who have less belief in the union's militancy. That will, in turn, demoralise other unions and workers. It will further reinforce the nearly universal sentiment that unions can ask for “too much” and that even the Corrigans of the world deserve a suitable profit.

Finally, it also betrays the massive outpouring of support for the MUA struggle, the sacrifices of those who stood on the picket lines in the rain, collected the money from other workers, argued the MUA's case with their friends, demanded that politicians take a stand or simply sent in their messages of support to MUA headquarters. Was it all for this “mess of pottage”?

A problem of politics

Why such a meagre result? Some say that the problem was the decision to suspend the mass pickets once the courts had found the Patrick lockouts illegal. They argue that, had these been maintained and the 100,000-strong turnout for May 6 in Victoria spread to the whole of Australia, Corrigan and Reith would have been forced to retreat further.

That's true enough. The increased turnout for May Day showed the potential to draw hundreds of thousands of workers into active support of the MUA and rejection of the Coalition's industrial relations agenda. But why wasn't such action undertaken?

The basic reason is that, throughout the dispute, the overriding concern of the central MUA leadership and the ACTU was the survival of the union and its coverage of the waterfront, as a partner with whom the waterfront bosses have to deal. That is, the basic problem was not one of industrial tactics, but of politics.

Once this was guaranteed through the High Court's endorsement of Justice Tony North's Federal Court decision, the prime concern of the MUA leadership was to extract a deal that avoided Patrick being liquidated. If that happened, there would be no money with which to fund the entitlements of the sacked workers.

So, despite their momentary lapse into class-war rhetoric about “the jobs not being ours to give away”, the MUA leaders never had any conception that the fight should continue in order to defend existing working conditions and jobs, regardless of Patrick's profitability.

If this had been their perspective they would have: made it clear to supporters of the union that they were being called upon to defend working conditions as well as coverage; maintained some form of picket line as a warning to Corrigan not to back out of serious negotiations; not been in a hurry to clear the backlog of containers; and kept the massive support (e.g. a telephone tree of 30,000 in Melbourne alone) on alert.

None of this was done because the MUA and ACTU leadership had no perspective other than self-preservation within the existing industrial system. That could only mean accepting Corrigan's “right” to an adequate return on investments through driving down wage levels, working conditions and entitlements. That's how the great struggle of April produced the misery of June.

The alternative

Despite their bravado, the thought of Patrick in liquidation made the MUA leaders' blood run cold, leading them to accept proposals in June that were close to those they had had to reject in May. For example, Patrick's original offer was to rehire 600 workers in permanent positions and up to 200 in contract services, but the final settlement is hardly any better — 687 in permanent positions and 200 in contract services.

Yet the threat of liquidation was nothing to be scared of. The unions could have responded to it with escalating industrial action (even Bill Kelty kept telling the ACTU executive that a general strike was part of his grand plan to defend the MUA).

Imagine the impact if, upon Patrick's liquidation, the wharfies had occupied the company's sites — with the union movement and the community providing financial, moral and physical support — with “peaceful assemblies”, this time to protect the working wharfies. How would the government have responded?

The army might have been brought in, but at what political price? The April mass pickets had the Howard, Kennett, Borbidge and Court governments all in retreat. In that situation, increased industrial pressure would have led to increased government pressure on Corrigan to settle with the MUA.

MUA members don't have to accept this paltry deal. They should demand that their union and the ACTU reopen negotiations with Patrick, put the solidarity movement back on alert and press ahead with the conspiracy case against the very vulnerable Reith and Howard.

If the ACTU is wary about relaunching the fight in a pre-election period, the MUA should look for allies in those unions which were the real backbone of the “peaceful assemblies” — the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, state branches of others like the Electrical Trades Union, the Victorian Trades Hall Council and the tens of thousands of rank-and-file unionists who rallied to the cause.

Now is exactly the time to reactivate that fighting alliance, when all unions are facing award stripping and the CFMEU has already had two national stoppages on the issue.

The MUA can do a lot better, and it must — for its own members, for the rest of organised labour and for working people as a whole. Otherwise, a magnificent struggle will have been squandered and big capital will soon be on the warpath again demanding sacrifices of us all.

[Dick Nichols is the national industrial organiser of the Democratic Socialist Party.]