Australian wharfies: Solidarity checks union busting

Submitted by Anon on 30 June, 1998 - 4:13

In the aftermath of the Australian dockers’ strike — a struggle in which the Australian government set out to smash the dockers’ union — Murray Kane reports on the next phase of the waterfront war.

The Australian waterside workers’ union, the MUA, and Patrick’s are still negotiating over their future operations. According to the Sydney Morning Herald of 11 June, “A settlement involving hundreds of redundancies, outsourcing, and an end to the ‘overtime culture’ on the wharves” is likely soon.

Greg Combet, assistant secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), “refused to comment” on “outsourcing” (which means that waterside jobs like cleaning and maintenance are contracted-out and thus taken out of MUA control), but told the Herald that, “the use of non-union labour on the wharves would not be countenanced by the MUA.” However, P&C Stevedores, the non-union labour-supply outfit set up by the National Farmers’ Federation, told the Australian Financial Review (10 June) that it was confident of being able to operate at Webb Dock in Melbourne and some smaller ports.

Creditors’ meetings for the deliberately-bankrupted Patrick’s labour-supply subsidiaries — which at one point looked likely to reopen the whole dispute, by closing down those subsidiaries on 25 May — have been repeatedly postponed, most recently to 20 July. Meanwhile wharfies, back at work since 7-8 May, have faced a difficult situation. The union agreed that they would not claim wages until the labour-supply companies had an income. (The first pay packets since early April were due today, 13 June, but it is still unclear whether they will appear.) Some dozens of workers have been banned from the wharves by Patrick’s on the pretext that they are a security risk. In many ports Patrick’s management are deliberately turning away work to their competitors, P&O, in order to increase pressure for job cuts and, probably, close some terminals, including Hamilton in Brisbane and Darling Harbour in Sydney.

There will be great pressure on wharfies to accept any deal their union leaders cut, even though it may mean serious job losses, further casualisation of the industry, and a foothold for non-union operations. Wharfies may pay dear in years to come for not using the industrial strength they had in April and May to push a victory to the maximum.

On 4 May the Australian High Court ordered Patrick Stevedores to reinstate their union workforce. It was a major victory both for the waterfront union, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), and for a labour movement that has in recent years become fragmented and intimidated.

Patrick’s is Australia’s second-biggest stevedoring company, after P&O, and the two companies between them dominate the waterfront. At midnight on 7-8 April Patrick’s sacked all its 2166 unionised waterfront workers — permanent and casual, crane operators and clerks — and began replacing them with scab labour. Patrick’s boss Chris Corrigan said that the workers were employed not directly by Patrick’s, but by four labour-supply subsidiaries — and those subsidiaries, thanks to adroit financial manipulation by Patrick’s, were bankrupt.
The nature of the campaign for reinstatement has reawakened thousands of unionists to the possibilities and significance of class solidarity. Against the background of Enterprise Bargaining — case-by-case productivity bargaining, which in recent years has increasingly replaced the system of industry-wide, union-negotiated, legally-ratified “awards” as the way for Australian workers to get any pay rises — and draconian industrial legislation introduced by the conservative Coalition government elected in March 1996, this is very, very timely indeed.

Politically, the MUA has defeated a worst-case scenario that had every chance of occurring before the mass mobilisation to blockade the Patrick terminals at Melbourne, Sydney and Freemantle, in conjunction with a growing international boycott on ships loaded by Australian scab labour. The worst-case scenario was that more than a quarter of the unionised workforce on the waterfront, a workforce renowned in Australian labour history for its militancy, organisation and progressive politics, could at one blow be replaced by scab labour across an entire industry of strategic importance to Australian capital. Ultimately, the industrial campaign forced the government to back down. Growing pressure on federal Workplace Relations minister Peter Reith, and prime minister John Howard, to resolve the issue, came from large and small business affected by the blockade of the ports, and presented them with the option of escalating the dispute into a full-scale industrial war or distancing themselves somewhat from Patrick’s boss Chris Corrigan and letting the courts deal with it.

It must not be thought that the substantial issue of reinstatement would have been settled legally if Reith and Howard had refused to back down. At the beginning of the dispute, deputy prime minister Tim Fischer announced on the BBC while in Britain that, “this is our Wapping”, i.e., that the government would give Corrigan 100% backing to smash union labour in the stevedoring industry just as Thatcher gave it to Murdoch in the British newspaper industry in 1986. It is of great importance to all unionists in Australia that this offensive was beaten back.

In the warm, civil afterglow of the legal victory in the High Court, it is easy to forget the atmosphere generated in the first two weeks after the eviction and lock-out of the workers. Virtually all the mainstream media were suddenly mobilised by Reith and Howard as a propaganda machine to brainwash a nation about the evils of unionism and the virtues of productivity. Reith described the waterfront workers as people “getting $70,000 [£28,000] a year to sit in a crane for 14 hours a week”, while in fact the workers’ basic pay is around $17 [£6.80] an hour and work weeks of 60 hours or more, with compulsory overtime, are common. Cheryl Kernot, of all people — the former leader of the liberal third-party Australian Democrats, who defected to Labor last year — was warning of the dangers of fascism.

We must realise that the Australian labour movement passed through a genuine crisis here. We have returned to the “normal” rhythm of the slow squeeze on working conditions, and the attempt to sink the fangs can be passed off as a rather bizarre event, an anomaly, a political mistake. But without the sheer force of the industrial campaign by the MUA and the thousands of unionists who flocked to their banner, there is no doubt that we would have experienced a qualitative shift to the right in Australian politics. The anomaly would have become the law.

The struggle against the union-busters on the waterfront is of course a long way from over.

The original decision of the Federal Court to take the parties back to the situation before $70 million was withdrawn from Patrick’s stevedoring operations in September 1997 — to create the pretext of bankruptcy — has been overturned by the High Court. Operations at seven ports will not be reopened unless Patrick’s themselves decide to return the capital to the labour hire companies and reopen. There is also the grave possibility when the administrators and creditors of the labour hire companies meet on 25 May that some or all of those companies will be declared unviable and the workers thrown outside the gates again.

If this does happen, it will mean that the reinstated wharfies have been led into a trap. It will have been very convenient for both Patrick’s and the government if the huge backlog of containers held up by the blockade gets shifted by waterfront workers on double-header shifts (two shifts worked one after the other, without a break) without pay prior to sacking them for a second time. (In order to undercut the pretext of bankruptcy, the union agreed that the labour-hire companies could suspend wages until they had returned to commercial normality.) Now P&O, the other big stevedoring company, have weighed in to the dispute, foreshadowing 450 redundancies, by which they mean the replacement of permanent workers by casuals.

The struggle takes on a different complexion in this war of manoeuvre by the stevedoring industry and the government against the MUA, for both MUA leader John Coombs and federal Labor leader Kim Beazley have expressed their approval in principle for limited job cuts. The Patrick’s shock troops may have been repulsed for now, but the heavy artillery of a ruling-class offensive explicitly backed by the Australian Labor Party is now being put into position.

With a second phase of attack about to begin, it is crucial that unionists reflect on the fact that Reith’s industrial legislation has not been enforced when opposed by large numbers. Workers stopping work and walking off the job to join mass mobilisations at picket lines have clearly breached both the new Workplace Relations Act and the older sections 45D and E of the Trade Practices Act, which attempt to ban solidarity action on pain of crushing daily fines.

But they have gone unpunished, as have the blatant acts of mass disobedience against court injunctions to ban the pickets in Melbourne. In the face of such militant solidarity action the government has shied away from enforcing the anti-union penal powers contained in the legislation. It is Reith and Howard who have appeared weak in this first phase of the dispute, and not the unions.

As the second phase of the war on the waterfront begins, we should note well that Reith’s law was rendered a dead letter when solidly opposed, and it is up for grabs if the labour movement mounts a solid challenge to it. We have already broken Reith’s law. In the months ahead it will have to be smashed altogether.

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