Susan Price
Will the ALP start to back away from its workplace relations policy under pressure from the Business Council of Australia?
The response of ALP industrial relations spokesperson Craig Emerson to the Access Economics assessment of the ALP's workplace relations policy (commissioned by the BCA) was telling — more for what it didn't say than for what it did.
Emerson says the ALP won't cut the minimum wage and will abolish Australian Workplace Agreements. That's good, but it deals with only a very small part of the Access Economics critique, which is, in effect, a call for Labor to return to the days when the Hawke and Keating governments led the charge for "labour market deregulation".
Given that Labor is backing down on every front, from gay marriage to withdrawing troops from Iraq, will it start to wobble here as well? You have to wonder when Emerson rushes to reassure business that "Labor introduced enterprise bargaining and will maintain it at the centre of the system" and that "we believe in productivity, we believe in making profits".
Unionists need to ensure that they do three things in the run-up to the federal election.
The first is to do everything they can to throw out the Howard government, which, if re-elected, will feel justified in unleashing the next wave of anti-worker and anti-union legislation that's been held up in the Senate.
The second is to keep a very sharp eye on the Labor Party to see that it doesn't backslide even from its very mild workplace relations platform.
The third is to make themselves familiar with a policy that really puts working people's rights and needs first — the Socialist Alliance's charter of worker and trade union rights, which will be launched in the very near future.
[Susan Price is the Socialist Alliance candidate for the federal seat of Sydney and a National Tertiary Education Union executive member at the University of New South Wales.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 14, 2004.
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