Steve Dargavel
It's important for us to understand the lead-up to the court case against [former Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Victorian branch secretary] Craig Johnston. The election of the Kennett state government in 1992 and the Howard government in 1996 was a radicalisation for employers. Victorian awards were abolished. Federal awards were stripped. Conditions were lost wholesale in many areas of manufacturing, in the blue-collar heartland. The set-backs and industrial defeats that blue-collar workers suffered in the AMWU in the period leading up to the election of Craig Johnston were many.
Members sought a more active, more militant response. It was an inevitable response to the militant attitude of the employers. And we started to see the election of more militant tickets, not just in the AMWU, but in a number of unions. The AMWU was reorganised and became far more aggressive in its industrial and political approach.
The stories stopped being about a number of unfortunate defeats and the story became more about employers complaining bitterly about this militant bunch of people down at the AMWU who were making it hard for investors and hard for business.
One example of a sad defeat that occurred before Craig became prominent in the AMWU was a dispute at the Melbourne Age some years ago when the employer locked the union members out. Kennett was in power. The riot police went down there. We got beaten up. And it was a pretty nasty dispute. The printers suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Fairfax, which had the strong support of the state government. The printers were starved into submission. They went back to work on average $10,000 per annum worse off.
And when people like Jim Reid from the printers (now AMWU printing division state secretary) came to the fore, and Craig came to the fore in the metals division, we had a square-off match down at the Age. And we stopped the newspaper — the first time in 150 years that an edition of the Age had been stopped.
Workers who were scared, who were threatened with a lock-out if they misbehaved, who were cowed, whose bosses wandered around in T-shirts saying "I worked at Wapping" and would stand over people and threaten them, all of a sudden, the dynamic changed. Workers walked back in there, completely on top of the situation — psychologically, politically and industrially.
And it's because people like Craig, with relationships across the labour movement, were able to mobilise 500 people up the road in the middle of the night and they went down to the Age and delivered what was needed — unlawful industrial action. We were alleged to be in contempt, it was action that arguably had all the elements about breaking just about every law that you could think of, and an action that delivered industrial justice.
Powerful enemies
It's a good example because in that action, Craig garnered some very powerful enemies. When you fight a media organisation, you attract enemies. And Craig, in his style, being uncompromising, was quite happy to attract that enemy, as he was quite unconcerned about attracting enemies in the state government when he took on the Saizerya battle. The Victorian Labor government did a deal with food multinational Saizerya that the AMWU would be excluded from its traditional work, and the work given to a tame union.
Craig was quite unconcerned about attracting enemies from the national office of my union when we stood candidates against national officials, something that hadn't happened for decades. He was quite unconcerned about taking on major corporations and defeating them industrially with members.
When I was still in the Labor Party, I went to the national conference in Hobart some years ago and there was a lobbyist employed by Shell who was parked in the bar with an expense account. His job was to do a job on Craig Johnston. He entertained people and he worked the Australian Labor Party caucus and certain figures within the ALP to complain about Johnston.
The amount of political effort that has gone into trying to destroy Craig has been considerable. Those are but tiny examples.
Craig's been attacked, not only by employers and politicians, but also within the labour movement.
There are a couple of things I would say in response to some of those comrades in the labour movement. When there were key causes going on, Craig would often be there, for them, across the spectrum. And when some causes were not yet popular, Craig Johnston would be there, trying to mobilise, politicise, and engage workers around progressive issues.
When the Indonesian militia were butchering the East Timorese, it was people like Craig who didn't think twice about running around the airport, and I mean the runway, to stop Garuda flights. Now those officials, or people in the labour movement who find it convenient to criticise Craig Johnston, and would no doubt sit in cafes and bemoan the activities of the Indonesian militia slaughtering the East Timorese. We didn't see too many of those comrades running around the runway stopping airplanes.
It's people like Craig who had the fortitude, and the guts, and the organisational ability to take on those key fights in the left. And only people who are prepared to have the same guts to do those sorts of things have the credibility to be able to criticise Johnston. Those who don't take on those fights don't have the credibility to make the criticisms that have been made.
I'd like to turn to some comparative examples of misdemeanours committed by unionists and employers. One was an industrial dispute, some years ago, that perhaps went wrong. There were some scabs working on a construction site. They were doing the work of labour that was on strike, and an official of my union, not Craig Johnston, entered that site. It was alleged that the scabs ran off and the equipment that the scabs were using was smashed. The official of my union was charged with offences related to that event. It was very similar, in its character, to the Johnson Tiles/Skilled Engineering events — with charges of riot, affray, property damage — and that official was fined $100. And that official is held in high esteem by all political tendencies within my union.
Another example was a fracas in Sydney I remember seeing on television, where national officials from a range of unions were involved in a punch-up outside the ALP's NSW headquarters. No-one was charged, no-one was thrown out of the union, and the matter was thankfully forgotten about.
Corporate criminals
The misdemeanours on the other side are far more numerous and far more serious. I was called to the Hoechst dispute in the 1980s by one of my comrades. The Hoechst dispute was about health and safety. It was about members who'd been exposed to PCBs, many of whom unfortunately subsequently died as a result of cancer.
We were fighting the good fight — Craig of course was at the forefront of that fight. But one night, scabs, employees of the company, with the knowledge of the company, took to the picket line with iron bars. Workers, picketers were severely hurt and one of the members had his jaw broken by a scab with an iron bar. The scabs were filmed in the process of this action. They were charged, they went to court, and no-one was jailed.
And of course James Hardie. We could stand here all night talking about the actions of employers. Thousands of people were killed by that company, thousands of people dying by that company's products, and by that company's knowing actions. And at best, all the Australian authorities can find to investigate about James Hardie is an allegation that they misled the share market. Not that the company killed people, but that they misled the market. None of the James Hardie directors are in jail.
The court jails property offenders and doesn't jail employers for their actions in either maiming workers like happened down as Hoechst, or their products killing workers such as is the case with James Hardie, yet they can jail a courageous, fearless industrial campaigner like Johnston. That is why I said outside the court on the day that Craig was jailed that this law is not a workers' law. This law is the law of the rich.
[Steve Dargavel is the secretary of the AMWU Victorian branch's metals division. This is an abridged version of the speech he gave to a September 23 public meeting in Melbourne calling for the release from prison of Craig Johnston.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 6, 2004.
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