BY MARCE CAMERON
& SUE BOLTON
BRISBANE — Perhaps inspired by the vicious anti-communist scare campaigns conducted by Coalition governments and right-wing trade union officials against militant union activists in the 1950s, officials of the Queensland branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) have sent a glossy brochure to all 12,000 members of the branch's metals division headed, "Beware the Extremists Trying to Take Over Your Union".
The brochure is published in the name of the Rank and File Defend the Union Committee, a front group for the incumbent AMWU officials, and makes a number of false and misleading allegations about the Queensland AMWU activist group Workers Unity, which is fielding candidates in the AMWU elections for state and national conference delegate positions. The brochure also makes slanderous allegations against the Socialist Alliance.
Workers Unity candidate and former AMWU organiser Brett Cardinal told Green Left Weekly he believes that AMWU officials have resorted to a campaign of slander and anti-socialist scaremongering in a desperate bid to discredit Workers Unity.
"They fear that rank and file members are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the way in which the union has been run down by the leadership in Queensland, and that many members will consider voting for Workers Unity candidates", said Cardinal.
Workers Unity is campaigning for the union to adopt the method of pattern bargaining so that there can be an industry-wide campaign to win protection of workers' entitlements and limits on the use of labour-hire workers and casual workers.
Workers Unity is also campaigning for the AMWU to hold industry-wide mass meetings to give members more say in their union, to more vigorously defend delegates when they're being victimised by employers, and to not shy away from using industrial action when necessary.
Another key plank of the Workers Unity platform is for all union officials and workplace delegates to be elected. The AMWU used to elect all of its organisers, but, around 10 years ago, most state branches started appointing them instead.
A large proportion of AMWU members in Queensland live in the regional cities of northern and central parts of the state. Workers Unity is campaigning for the union to have more regional organisers to address this situation.
In contrast, the glossy brochure put out by the incumbent officials' Rank and File Defend the Union Committee, and their four-page letter to workplace delegates, does not say anything about plans to take the union forward or what policies the candidates of the Rank and File Defend the Union Committee would support if elected as conference delegates.
The red-baiting scare campaign is designed to divert union members from comparing the serious proposals for an active union that Workers Unity is putting forward and the lack of proposals for how to take the union forward from the candidates supported by the incumbent officials.
Socialist Alliance
The Rank and File Defend the Union Committee election material claims that "both Workers Unity and [the] Workers First [leadership of the Victorian state branch of the AMWU] are brand names for the Socialist Alliance, which sees itself as the revolutionary front of Australian politics".
While Cardinal is a member of the Socialist Alliance, Workers Unity includes AMWU members who have a range of political affiliations but who are united in their campaign for the AMWU to become a democratic, fighting union.
In a letter sent to metals division workplace delegates by Workers Unity on October 20, Cardinal says he is "proud to be a socialist. However, Workers Unity is not a socialist organisation. Workers Unity is a rank and file group of concerned union members who have come together to try [to] bring back a democratic union that fights for its members, instead of a union run by ALP careerists.
"What they don't tell you is that the officials behind the Rank and File Defend the Union Committee are all members or supporters of the ALP National Left faction that controls the AMWU national office."
The Rank and File Defend the Union Committee election material claims that Cardinal "resigned [in 2002] as an appointed AMWU organiser after his fellow organisers lost confidence in his ability to seriously represent members" and that fellow organiser Maggie May was "made redundant [in 2003] because her position was no longer seen as the best use of the union's limited resources".
Cardinal, however, says that he and May were hounded out of their organiser positions as part of a witchhunt conducted by the AMWU national office against any official who failed to show blind obedience to the union's national secretary, Doug Cameron.
Workers First
The most serious allegations in the Rank and File Defend the Union Committee literature are made against members of the Workers First grouping in the AMWU's Victorian branch and against the Socialist Alliance.
The Rank and File Defend the Union Committee's slander sheet states: "When Cardinal's comrades-in-arms in [the] Socialist Alliance and Workers First had control in Victoria ... we had ... long-standing members being threatened and assaulted because they did not agree with [the] Socialist Alliance." It further claims that "union employees [won] sexual harassment and unfair dismissal cases against Socialist Alliance members".
These allegations against both Workers First and the Socialist Alliance are slanderous in the extreme and amount to outright lies. No evidence is provided to justify the claims — because they are totally false.
The Socialist Alliance has never controlled the Victorian branch of the AMWU and doesn't control Workers First. While some members of Workers First are members of the Socialist Alliance, others are members of the ALP or have no political affiliation.
Furthermore, no member of the Socialist Alliance or of Workers First has been convicted of any sexual harassment or unfair dismissal case involving any AMWU employee.
No examples of the physical assaults against "long-standing union members" by members of the Socialist Alliance are cited in the incumbents' brochure. These claims are pure invention.
Through the Victorian AMWU's pattern bargaining campaign in 2000, Victorian members, under the leadership of Workers First, won the best wages and working conditions of manufacturing workers in the country. The good outcomes were spread to many weaker metal shops.
Workers First, which won leadership of the Victorian branch in 1998, used pattern bargaining as a strategy to counter the fragmentation which results from workers in each workplace having to negotiate their own separate enterprise agreement. Workers First sought a common expiry date for enterprise agreements so that the union could launch industry-wide industrial campaigns around a common set of demands for improved wages and conditions.
The success of the Victorian branch's pattern bargaining campaign in 2000 prompted the AMWU national office to advocate pattern bargaining in 2001 and 2003. However, the national office campaign wasn't genuine pattern bargaining.
According to Cardinal, Campaign 2003, which was promoted by the national office, was "a complete flop". No mass meetings were called in Queensland to involve the membership in the campaign.
This makes the claim on the Rank and File Defend the Union Committee brochure that the idea of pattern bargaining was "stolen" by Workers Unity "from AMWU policy" a complete joke. Workers Unity wants a serious pattern bargaining campaign.
Beginning in 1998, Cameron's National Left faction tried all sorts of tactics to get rid of the militant and popular Workers First leadership. Having failed to unseat the Workers First Victorian AMWU state secretary Craig Johnston through democratic processes such as union elections, Cameron and his factional allies used their numbers on the AMWU national council to raise spurious and unproven allegations against Johnston in order to suspend him from the position of state secretary and appoint a factional ally of Cameron in his place.
The accusations of the Queensland AMWU incumbent officials against Workers Unity, Workers First and the Socialist Alliance can only be understood in the context of the iron grip which the pro-ALP National Left faction has over the union nationally.
Given the number of ALP National Left faction members who have made the transition from being AMWU officials to Labor MPs, AMWU members could be forgiven for thinking that the ALP uses the union as a jobs trust for future parliamentarians.
However, the ALP's control over the union is much more damaging than that.
Given that Labor usually implements anti-worker austerity policies when it is in government at state and federal levels, and given that the ALP always needs to guarantee a compliant union movement in order to win the backing of the corporate rich in election campaigns, the last thing it wants is militant unions which operate independently of ALP control.
An independent union that is committed to defending the interests of its members will put the interests of its members ahead of the interests of a pro-employer Labor government. That is why Cameron's Laborite National Left faction wants to maintain the AMWU as a union which doesn't rock the boat.
From Green Left Weekly, October 29, 2003.
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