The wages share of the country's wealth has fallen from 61% to 53.5% since 1983. If Australia's 11 million workers had been able to maintain that 1983 share in 2004, we would have had $56 billion more in our pockets for 2003 alone. Workers are being ripped-off.
"To get back what's been taken from us we need militant unions and a political voice that puts workers and their families first", says Chris Cain, secretary of the Western Australian branch of the Maritime Union of Australia and a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive. Cain is one of several militant union leaders who have endorsed the recently published "Charter for Worker and Trade Union Rights".
Socialist Alliance members are in the forefront of the struggle to rebuild Australia's unions. The alliance acts in solidarity with those unionists in the front-line of the fight for wages and conditions. We are committed to increasing the membership, morale, organisation and fighting strength of the union movement.
Socialist Alliance unionists work with all unionists — ALP, Greens or non-party — who share this goal. Our worker and union charter sums up our stance on the critical issues workers face.
When union members elect militant, democratic leaders they can make enormous steps forward. By throwing out the careerists and dead wood they can begin the job of turning the union into an organisation that's strong enough to defend the interests of all its members against those of the employer.
But there's a problem. The party that working people have traditionally expected to advance their interests, the Labor Party, has let down its supporters time and time again. It has been the ALP that has carried out most of the dirty work of imposing "economic rationalism".
It was Hawke, Keating and Co. who deregulated the finance sector, cut wages through the Prices and Incomes Accord, flogged off public assets, cut the corporate tax rate and tried to crush militant unionism by deregistering unions. State Labor governments have attacked workers' compensation.
PM John Howard and treasurer Peter Costello intensified the attacks on union rights and working people's interests. It pays to remember these words of the infamous Peter Reith, Howard's former minister for industrial relations, in an address to a gathering of employers: "Never forget which side we're on. We are on the side of making profits. We're on the side of the people owning private capital."
The Socialist Alliance has the same starting point, but from the other side of the fence. We're on the side of working people — the vast majority — and our policies aim to defend the rights and interests of workers against the system driven by private profit. But we can't defend our interests if we just stick to "union" issues. There's a working-class view on every issue. We try to uncover that view, debate it and organise to fight for it.
Socialist Alliance was formed to build the working-class political alternative to the ALP. We argue for unions to take a stand on all political issues — from refugees to Aboriginal rights to Iraq, from alternative economic policy to women's rights — and to organise publicly for pro-worker policies. In this we strive to revive the best traditions of Australian unionism, from the wharfies' 1940s action in support of the Indonesian independence struggle to the NSW Builders Labourers Federation's green bans of the 1970s.
In the coming federal election, we are organising to throw out the openly anti-union Howard government. While we welcome the ALP's stand against individual contracts (AWAs), it's not enough to undo the damage of the past 20 years. We need to build union resistance to Howard and support all the struggles happening now, the better to prepare for the fight we will have against Labor in office.
If you agree with the Socialist Alliance's policies and approach, campaign with us or better still join us in the exciting struggle to create that new party that working people in Australia need!
Sue Bolton
[Sue Bolton is the convenor of the Socialist Alliance trade union working group, a member of its national executive and a Victorian Senate candidate. The Charter for Worker and Trade Union Rights is available at < http://www.socialist-A HREF="mailto:alliance.org"><alliance.org> or phone (02) 9690 2508 to order copies.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 18, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.