Sue Bolton
There have been several industrial disputes since the Howard government's anti-union Work Choices amendments to the 1996 Workplace Relations Act came into effect on March 27 in which workers have defied the legislation and scored some wins.
When the owners of chemical carrier MT Stolt Australia threatened in July to sack 36 seafarers and replace them with a lowly paid crew from overseas, the seafarers went on strike and occupied the vessel. The workers defied a return-to-work order from the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and saved their jobs.
In May in Melbourne, a community assembly outside Finlay Engineering succeeded in getting three sacked workers reinstated.
This month, University of Ballarat staff have won their 12-month battle for a collective agreement after fighting off an aggressive management attempt to push staff onto AWAs.
However, the number of industrial disputes and the number of working days lost due to industrial disputes fell in the first three months after the introduction of Work Choices.
According to a September 7 Australian Bureau of Statistics report, 27,900 working days were lost due to industrial disputes in the 2006 June quarter, a decrease from 30,100 in the previous quarter. The education, health and community services sector accounted for 50% of the total number of working days lost in the June quarter.
During the year to the end of June 2006, there were 187,100 working days lost compared with 243,000 in the previous 12 months.
The number of disputes also fell, with 23 industrial disputes occurring during the June quarter, 78 fewer than in the previous quarter. In the 12 months to July 1, there were 352 disputes, 217 less than in the previous 12 months.
However, the number of people involved in disputes was 37,500 in June quarter, almost double that of the March quarter.
There is no doubt that the extremely restricted circumstances in which unions can take legal industrial action is largely responsible for the decline in the number of disputes. Most union leaderships have abided by the legal framework of Work Choices for fear of bankrupting their unions if they engage in illegal industrial action.
Also, most unions that had enterprise agreements expiring in early 2006 busted a gut to get as many agreements signed as possible before Work Choices came in. In some cases, this led to the acceptance of lower outcomes in order to avoid conducting an industrial dispute under Work Choices.
Many union leaderships hoped that if they could get new three-year agreements signed before Work Choices came in, they could avoid having to confront Work Choices by getting a federal Labor government elected next year.
Despite the caution of the union leaderships, it's too early to say that unions won't fight under Work Choices and that industrial action is permanently in decline. Unions and employers are both testing out the legislation.
In their pay dispute, ACT teachers decided to turn their two-hour stop-work into a four-hour stoppage when they found out that Work Choices meant that they would be docked a minimum of four hours pay for any industrial action.
When Heinemann Electric workers in Melbourne decided to start their protected action for a new enterprise agreement with an overtime ban, the company decided to test out the new legislation by docking workers a full five-days pay for time already worked. If this proves to be the accepted interpretation of the legislation, there won't be any point in industrial bans. Workers will have to strike instead of putting bans on.
As well as the directly anti-union laws, the bosses and the government have other weapons at their disposal. The new Welfare to Work legislation is designed to force anyone on Newstart, sole parents pension or disability pension to accept low-paying super-exploitative jobs on pain of being cut off from all Centrelink payments. If a worker is sacked, he or she has to wait eight weeks to get Newstart Allowance.
Some employers are now taking advantage of guest worker visas to massively undercut wages and working conditions. Unlike previous generations of migrant workers, guest workers are denied democratic rights because they are not citizens or permanent residents.
Many guest workers live the life of an indentured worker. In some cases, the guest workers earn less than they were earning in their home country. If they protest about their conditions, they are immediately deported. In many areas of the economy, the "skills shortage" really amounts to employers who pay substandard rates of pay and can't find enough workers who are prepared to accept them.
There are many "Rambo" employers who are using the new anti-worker laws to experiment with how far they can push their workers.
An urgent task for the workers' movement is to widely publicise examples of where workers are succeeding in resisting "Rambo" employers, including where workers take industrial action in defiance of the laws. These examples are needed to give more workers the confidence to resist so that the tide can begin to be turned back against the bosses.
The national days of action are also important. When workers see that hundreds of thousands of workers are prepared to mobilise against the anti-worker laws, including by taking illegal strike action to attend, that gives a lot of confidence to workers to put up resistance in their workplace.
It was very telling when Australian Building and Construction Commission boss John Lloyd found it difficult to justify why the ABCC was suing 107 Western Australian construction workers for taking illegal strike action, but was not suing the more than 100,000 workers who took illegal strike action to join the ACTU's June 28 national day of protest.
A federal Labor government may or may not get elected in 2007, and if it does, it may or may not restore all of the rights that have been removed by the Howard government. What will make a difference is if progressive activists build resistance to Work Choices in their own workplace and their own unions, support other workers' picket lines, and help mobilise hundreds of thousands for the next national day of protest on November 30.