Paul Howes, the rat’s rat

With his speech to the National Press Club slamming “unsustainable wages” and calling for the unions and ALP to shut up about Abbott’s attacks on workers’ rights, Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), has proven himself the worst kind of traitor to the labour movement.

This is a man who has built his entire career off the backs of working men and women. After a few short years on the factory floor as a teenager, Howes was picked up by the right wing NSW Labor Council as a research officer at the age of 18.

Two years later he was made an organiser for the AWU. Shoehorned into the national secretary’s position at 26 by Bill Shorten, Howes has been enjoying a fat salary and mixing in business circles for the past six years.

He is currently engaged to Olivia Wirth, Qantas’ head of corporate affairs, despite the fact that he is paid to represent the interests of workers in Qantas maintenance hangars.

He has afternoon tea spilling his guts to Financial Review journalists at Melbourne’s posh Windsor Hotel and hobnobs with senior politicians and generals at meetings of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue.

Like Michael Costa, former treasurer in the Carr ALP government, and another right wing traitor to the NSW labour movement, Howes likes to play up his downtrodden background.

He was adopted as an orphan and left home and started work at 16 without finishing school. He was also, like Costa, a member of Resistance, a left wing youth organisation, for a few years.

But Howes worked out that he wasn’t going to get ahead this way. Following his return from a trip to Cuba in 2000 he ditched the socialists and threw his lot in with the Labor Right. This was the start of his rapid rise through the union hierarchy.

Howes claims some liberal cred for his denunciation of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ persecution of refugees and for his support for same sex marriage rights.

But this is just baloney, a cover for his right wing agenda to convert the labour movement into a handmaiden for business.

By spruiking for a “Grand Compact” with business and trying to hose down criticisms of Abbott, Howes hopes to garner the support of the bosses for what will likely be his pitch for the ALP leadership in coming years.

Sod the members, personal ambition is what it’s all about.

This treachery is not limited only to speeches but underpins the entire industrial strategy of his union.

The AWU has for years sucked up to the bosses in order to squeeze out other, more militant unions.

Shorten also did this, and Howes continues the ignoble tradition. In the name of defending jobs, he has also joined the big polluters to smash environmental opposition to their toxic practices.

The labour movement would be better off without scum like Paul Howes, leaders who make a good living for themselves from their positions but who denounce our side in the heat of the battle.

When you’re praised by the likes of Peter Reith and Tony Abbott you know that you’re a rat.

Greek philosopher Aeschylus had it right 2,500 years ago when he wrote: “I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery.”