Wharfies receive enormous solidarity
By James Vassilopoulos
WEBB DOCK — "We had a 68-year-old widow send us 10 bucks and a solidarity message." According to Mick O'Leary, the wharfies on Webb Dock are receiving incredible public support.
Workers, high school students, seamen and even farmers have supported the wharfies in their struggle against the National Farmers Federation and the Coalition government.
A young woman sent this message: "I know you are standing up for your own rights but I guess in doing so you are also standing up for all Australian workers' rights. So for that I say thank you."
Louis Kirby, a farmer at Cobram, on the Murray River, told Green Left Weekly that the NFF going for the wharfies "stinks". He said that it was all about power and the NFF "getting rid of union". The NFF did not represent him, and a "handful of farmers" that he knew also opposed it.
Louis Kirby's son Louis, who had a car held up in the dispute and was allowed to retrieve it, told Green Left that the NFF was "a front for big business and the Country Party".
Working as a chef, he thought it was disgraceful that his award was being stripped back. He could understand the importance of the wharfies' struggle.
The MUA has received invitations to attend grassroots NFF meetings in Mildura and elsewhere to explain its side of the dispute. A farmers' group in WA has also sent solidarity greetings.
Many different workers have offered support. Five hundred workers at ACI construction sites close to Port Melbourne have had site meetings pledging industrial support when they are asked.
At a branch meeting of the CFMEU on February 5, state secretary Martin Kingham pledged that the union's members would raise $1 million to aid the struggle.
Carpet factory workers in the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union have visited the picket line. Pastry cooks, university academics and wharfies at other docks as far away as Geelong have attended the protests at Webb Dock.
Workers from the Camp Road Safeway construction site, the Gordonstone lodge of the mining division of the CFMEU, workers at the Australian Paper Manufacturers No. 5 paper machine construction site, the International Warehouse and Longshore Union in Vancouver, Canada, teachers at Kurunjang Secondary College and the National Union of Students have all sent solidarity messages.
Workers at the Mobil oil refinery, in the National Union of Workers, have had discussions about the possibility of wildcat strikes.
O'Leary was confident that other unions were prepared to support the MUA industrially and that the MUA would not be isolated. "If it [the dispute] comes to that (we hope it doesn't), we will ask the unions for a combined union effort to shut down the country."
Metalworkers from the militant Workers First group have been active in the protests.
Resistance, the socialist youth group, has collected hundreds of signatures of high school students who support the waterside workers.
A Victorian Trades Hall Council delegates meeting on February 10 at Dallas Brooks Hall, to be followed by a march to Parliament House, is the next step in building the solidarity movement.