Dick Nichols
Solidarity with the Sydney wharfies!
With the intervention of industrial relations and transport minister Laurie Brereton into the Sydney wharf dispute, the grounds are being laid for an outcome that would not only make it very difficult for the wharfies to defend their jobs and conditions, but would also undermine the fading strength of organised Australian labour.
At the heart of the dispute lies the waterfront employers' "right" to hire and fire and to structure the work force into permanent and casual workers as they think fit, regardless of the impact on working people, families and communities.
Inevitably, the wharfies are being painted as throwbacks to a bygone industrial age, as obstinate defenders of a job for life, as the last exponents of a "corrupt labour culture" for daring to resist the casualisation of their work.
Yet they clearly grasp the real issues. When the employers have the power to construct work rosters, it's a simple enough business to conjure up an "excess" of permanent workers and a "need" for a bigger pool of casuals.
The fact that a casualised work force will erode the union's ability to defend jobs and conditions and that 21 of the 55 workers sacked at Port Botany are union representatives is a pure fluke, of course!
The stakes in this dispute are as big for the employers and the Keating government as they are for workers. That's why industrial relations minister Laurie Brereton intervened after only a couple of days of picket lines. (Wasn't enterprise bargaining supposed to have reduced the need for ministerial rescue missions of this sort?)
The spectre haunting Canberra is that of a wharfies' win. That would show that the agenda of big capital can still be resisted successfully. The continuation of the fight on a national scale would have drawn other unions like the Transport Workers Union and the Public Transport Union into action. Even in their present weakened state, such a union combination would be no pushover for a single company.
Hence the Labor government's move to isolate the dispute to Sydney and smother it in the sands of arbitration. Hence the ACTU's rush, once again, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, even though this will, if unresisted, almost certainly mean acceptance of the initial 55 sackings.
Remember the 1992 APPM dispute in Burnie? There the workers' victory on the picket line was converted through stealthy and exhausting negotiation into the same loss of jobs and conditions that the company had wanted to bring about through frontal attack.
The same threat hangs over the Sydney wharfies. If Brereton gets his way, the Labor government's "consensus" approach (death by 20 cuts instead of one) will have triumphed again; Australian Stevedores will have established their "right to hire and fire"; and the ACTU and some union officials will have rid themselves of some militant workers who've been disturbing their beauty sleep.
That's three more very good reasons for giving the Sydney wharfies the fullest solidarity and support we can muster.
[Dick Nichols is the editor of Solidarity.]