Just eight months of Howard control of the Senate has produced:
- The Building Improvement Act, which puts coppers on work sites and fines workers $22,000 for refusing to incriminate themselves.
- The Work Choices legislation, which gives employers and government the power to destroy the entire union movement.
- "Anti-terror" laws denying suspects access to a lawyer.
- The sell-off of a massive public utility, Telstra.
- "Voluntary student unionism", which will destroy the right of students to organise.
Howard still has two years' control of the Senate. We can't wait for an ALP election win — by then we may have lost our civil rights and our unions.
We're the majority — let's show Howard what democracy means!
We can win — let's not roll over
ACTU research shows that less than one in four Australians support the Work Choices laws, and almost 70% believe that they will benefit big corporations and hurt ordinary families. Let's make sure our unions act to give the majority a voice!
We can win with an industrial as well as a community campaign. Remember how we stopped their plan to wipe out the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998? We need to make the employers who try to use Work Choices pay with a loss of profits and by being shamed before the whole community. Combine industrial action with mass protests to build community support and the majority will prevail.
If Howard faced a united movement of all Australian workers against Work Choices, his laws would collapse like a house of cards. That's why he tries to divide us on other issues, always trying to spook us about "threats" from terrorists, Muslims and refugees. Let's not be fooled.
Leave it to the ALP pollies? No way!
In Canberra we have a corrupt, lying, anti-worker, pro-war government on the rampage, but the ALP "opposition" can't lay a glove on it. Even if Labor wins in the 2007 election it may be far too late if we do nothing in the meantime. By then our unions will have been cut to pieces. That's what happened in New Zealand right after the Employment Contracts Act became law in 1991 — entire unions disappeared as union membership shrank to a shadow of its former self.
If we don't fight now we'll have to fight in much worse conditions. If they get away with implementing Work Choices, they'll come at us again. Remember, finance minister Nick Minchin last month promised the H.R. Nicholls Society a further round of attacks on workers' rights: "There is still a long way to go ... awards, IR Commission, all the rest of it."
ALP industrial relations policy is still anti-worker. Kim Beazley said the ALP will rip up Work Choices, but he also caved in to pressure from corporate Australia and said Labor will keep Australian Workplace Agreements (individual contracts), which business has used to undermine collective agreements and which paved the way for Work Choices.
Let workers run the campaign
When this battle first started, the ACTU wasn't convinced about the possibility of protest. Only pressure from committed unionists (including Socialist Alliance militants) and Victorian Trades Hall Council got the ACTU moving.
Last year, mass delegates' meetings in Melbourne and Perth were crucial to mobilising 300,000 people in June-July and 560,000 in November. Such meetings should be held in all states and become the motor of the campaign.
Sooner or later a point will come when a union or worker refuses to pay a fine and the whole union movement and community will need to provide a wave of solidarity. We need to prepare for this now. Our unions, community organisations and union-community networks must be ready to swing into action as soon as this happens.
We all need to be active. Whatever decisions are made by unionists, implementing them will require us all to get more active and more organised. Then we will win.
[Adapted from a statement circulated by the Socialist Alliance at union delegates' meetings that have recently been held in some states.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 12, 2006.
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