ACTU: rhetoric versus reality
This week the ACTU is holding its biennial congress in Brisbane. If previous congresses, and the agenda of this one, are anything to go by, delegates (very few of them from the grassroots of the union movement) will be treated to lavish dinners, early election speeches from politicians and a heap of left-sounding rhetoric about workers' rights, workers' power and the need to fight — from union bureaucrats more concerned about their career prospects than these noble values.
Number one bureaucrat at this congress is, of course, Jennie George. Few of us can forget George's first ACTU congress as president-elect, where her stage entrance at the opening session was accompanied by Helen Reddy's 1970s hit "I am woman, I am strong" blaring from the loudspeakers.
That was two years ago — two long and painful years for millions of women workers in Australia.
The myth that getting women into positions of power is a victory for feminism because they will use that power to benefit all women has been thoroughly debunked by George's record.
George used to be a feminist (she probably says she still is). As leader of the NSW Teachers Federation a decade and a half ago, George condemned the ALP's efforts to erode workers' rights, in particular women workers' rights, through enterprise bargaining.
Fifteen years later, her eagerness to do deals with the employers and their representatives in government has played no small part in rendering the average woman worker today poorer (both in real terms and in relation to male workers); more likely to be in part-time, casual and short-term contract work; less likely to be in a union; more vulnerable to sexual discrimination and harassment at work, and to dismissal if they dare to complain; and less able to get paid maternity leave or good quality, affordable child-care.
George might be strong, but she is no feminist. Under her "leadership", the position of women workers has been seriously weakened.
Of course, George is not the only one to have been bought off. Over the last two decades, the mass women's movement in Australia has been fragmented, demobilised and depoliticised — primarily via the cooption of its leaders by the ALP. The role in this process of the trade union bureaucracy — the ALP's main arm in the social movements — was crucial.
In the end, only the trade union movement has the power to force feminist change. Organised workers' (male and female) ability to withdraw their labour, to hit the employers where it really hurts (their profits), is the strongest weapon against all forms of the exploitation and injustice perpetrated by capitalism.
Without the backing of a strong trade union movement committed to women's unqualified right to equal and reasonable pay, maternity leave, decent working conditions, freedom from sexual harassment, good quality child-care and so on, the women's movement will be very limited in what it can defend and achieve for all women.
The trouble is that, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, the ALP-controlled trade union leadership, even with a woman at the helm now, has no such commitment.
If it did, it would not condemn, isolate and help destroy every sign of real resistance to Labor and the Coalition's attacks on workers (such as the August 19 events at Parliament House last year).
If it did, it would not invite Cheryl Kernot ("an admirable woman", says George) to be a keynote speaker at its congress after her party ensured that the Coalition's draconian Workplace Relations Act would be passed in parliament.
All workers, but women workers in particular, desperately need to replace the Georges of this world with a new trade union leadership — one that is independent of politicians, democratic and accountable, committed to justice and equality and, most importantly, that puts the interests of workers, almost half of whom are women, first.
Such a leadership would do more to protect and improve women's working lives than a thousand so-called feminists like Jennie George in positions of power.
By Lisa Macdonald