By Jonathan Singer
BHP's attack on the Pilbara iron ore workers can be beaten. In Australia, while big business pushes for individual contracts, millions of workers continue to want the union organisation and collective work agreements that the workers at Mount Newman and Port Hedland are fighting to keep.
The violent assaults by police on the workers' pickets at the two workplaces on January 18 and 19 provoked sympathy around the country. Four thousand BHP coalminers walked off the job for 24 hours (10,000 steelworkers had already struck in solidarity in the previous month).
The WA Trades and Labor Council has held a solidarity rally and activists are signing statements of support and starting to organise community actions in various cities.
Many workers are undoubtedly thinking about the union-busting exercise launched against the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) by the federal Coalition government and Patrick Stevedores. Working people won that fight on the picket lines (even though major job cuts were conceded by the union leadership in negotiations) when thousands of people joined the wharfies there or at rallies; the largest of these, a stop-work rally in Melbourne, was 100,000 strong.
Of course, the Mt Newman mine and the Port Hedland processing plant are more than 1000 kilometres from any major city. Taking part in the pickets when the workers strike is just not feasible for most workers. But there's still plenty we can do.
How the fight began last time
In the first stage of the MUA-Patrick dispute (February and March 1998), there was only one picket line — at Webb Dock in Melbourne, where Patrick had leased out a wharf for training scab workers. Most of the solidarity with the wharfies at this time was conducted, not at the picket line, but in the streets and meeting halls of cities and towns across Australia. All this helped pave the way for the support the MUA received when Patrick sacked its entire work force in April.
The MUA held its own stop-work meetings. Workplace meetings were held in various industries, some organised by union leaderships and others initiated by rank-and-file militant groupings, such as Workers First in the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
In Melbourne, a cross-union delegates' rally was called by the Victorian Trades Hall Council. Many union branches, such as the construction division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union in Victoria and the National Tertiary Education Industry Union at the University of NSW, pledged their support also.
Thousands of people rallied in Brisbane, Newcastle, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth and Lismore; the largest, in Brisbane, was organised through an open meeting. Green Left Weekly put on public meetings to publicise the workers' cause. The socialist youth organisation Resistance collected signatures from sympathetic high school and university students. Messages of support flooded in from young and old, and unionists throughout Australia and overseas.
ACTU going slow
This time around, the ACTU and its secretary-elect, Greg Combet, have assumed much of the responsibility for the workers' campaign against BHP. A meeting of national union leaders chaired by Combet on January 24 resisted the call of the Perth rally for an immediate 24-hour stoppage of all BHP workers; the ACTU is going to the High Court, hoping to force the company to start negotiations on a collective agreement.
Meanwhile, a new round of BHP members' meetings is being held around the country. Ostensibly, these meetings are to seek support for more stoppages if the legal case fails. However, union officials have also, according to media reports, approached BHP with a proposed agreement which concedes many hard-won conditions.
This compromise, the Australian Workers Union WA secretary, Tim Daly, told the January 27 Australian, would be "difficult to sell" to BHP iron ore workers — that is, the meetings are to try to get the workers in the Pilbara to accept what the union officials want, rather than to get the union officials to help the members' fight.
BHP has rejected even such a compromise agreement, holding out for more workers to sign individual contracts. "Industrial relations in this country is not a debate, it's war", Nigel Gould, the senior delegate of the Weipa unionists, who took on Rio Tinto's union-busting in 1995-96, wrote in a letter to the January 27 Australian Financial Review. BHP agrees. The question is: are we organising our side to win?
The ACTU's strategy is to wind back industrial mobilisation in favour of legal action — as it tried to do in the Patrick dispute — but a favourable court decision can't be guaranteed. The current manoeuvres and drawing out of the dispute by the ACTU and other union leaderships threatens to demoralise workers who are fighting or want to fight against individual contracts. And yet, at this moment, many workers' sympathies have been aroused by BHP's brutality.
What is to be done?
"It's a fight for the minds and souls of workers", Gould continued. The spirit of the BHP iron ore workers is a key issue, but this fight is not theirs alone; they need our support and we need to support them. Union and community activists need to turn their sympathy into practical expressions of solidarity through collective political and industrial action.
A BHP-wide strike needs to be called at the earliest opportunity — all BHP workers are immediately threatened by the company's push for individual contracts.
Trades and Labor Councils across the country can call rallies like the one in Geelong, planned for February 4. Where possible, these should meet at or march to BHP offices. Such rallies are most effective when combined with work stoppages.
Political and community groups can also hold actions and meetings, and take opposition to individual contracts into other sectors of society, such as high school and university students. Activists in trade unions, student unions and community groups can talk about the BHP dispute, get messages of support for the BHP workers and organise their groups for action.
Unions and international solidarity networks need to continue to mobilise.
Anti-union and other undemocratic laws are a threat to all this solidarity, but unions have had to fight anti-union laws ever since the Master and Servant Act was passed last century. These laws can hurt isolated unions, but actions by masses of workers, such as the 500,000-strong strike against the jailing of Victorian tramways union secretary Clarrie O'Shea in the 1960s, can overthrow the laws. The unions should treat the law the same way the employers do — to be recognised only when it helps their cause.
This solidarity work will not only aid the BHP iron ore workers. It will prepare us for the struggle when the bosses — whether it is BHP nationally or any other company — renew their push for individual contracts. And if we win at BHP, then all workers can take heart at the possibility of winning the right to collective agreements.
Our own political voice
The ACTU's approach buying industrial peace with the bosses by trading off conditions and guaranteeing productivity improvements doesn't prepare unions to oppose big business's central agenda of maximising private profits. The ACTU wants to preserve at all costs its alliance with the pro-big business Labor Party, but doesn't help us.
Workers need not only a new, more militant policy for defending their rights. They also need a new politics — a workers' party — to express a powerful idea: that workers united can not only defend their interests against the rich and powerful, but can also build a completely different society, one which upholds social justice, and protects the environment and workers rights.
In fighting, and taking our best shot at winning, we can take a much-needed step towards this new party, and towards turning the tables on the big bullies like BHP.