The Australian Council of Trade Unions under the leadership of Secretary Sally McManus has been marked by ever increasing class collaboration in the union movement, particularly during the pandemic.
 Rank-and-file teachers were forced to fight not only the government but their own union to enforce key safety measures at work. We heard barely a peep from health unions as their members on the front lines were forced to work with inadequate PPE. Union leaders lifted barely a finger anywhere to fight for migrant workers thrown onto the scrap heap and forced to line up in the streets for food vouchers. 
The now disgraced leadership of the tertiary education union was defeated by their own rank-and-file as they attempted to do deals with university bosses to reduce workers’ pay and conditions. The United Workers Union and the Australian Services Union, with the backing and support of the ACTU, joined with employer bodies to reduce the award conditions in hospitality and administration. 
That then Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter referred to Sally McManus as his “BFF” last March gives you a pretty clear indication of what McManus and the ACTU represent to the ruling class.
For public purposes, the friendship with the government is now on ice. The Australian Unions Facebook page, run by the ACTU, has meme after meme criticising the Liberal National government.
This page should be an inspiring catalogue of the might of the organised working class, of our glorious movement leading workers against bosses. Instead it’s just lame, disingenuous trash, with heady statements like “united we bargain”—oh boy, let the ruling class tremble.
The resources the union movement wastes on social media work got me reflecting on the fairly modest things I’ve been able to achieve alongside my workmates in the rail industry and how we achieved them.
Things like getting maternity uniforms and sanitary bins into male-dominated workspaces, winning improvements to health and safety on the job, securing paid pandemic leave, preventing unfair sackings and winning pay rises, among other things.
What was involved in achieving these victories? Conversations, workplace meetings, petitions, marching through the streets, unsanctioned stop-works, picket lines, blockades, occupations of the bosses’ offices, forcing CEOs and senior management to face tens of angry workers and, crucially, strikes. 
What has never been important to any of these wins? Memes on the internet.
Sure, most of us in activist circles use them. Sometimes they’re a hit. But a strategy centred on them is never going to revive the union movement—especially when designed by the same geniuses who’ve presided over the movement’s decline for decades. 
When I looked up “Upcoming events” on the ACTU website, two of the three listed were for social media training. Never mind training for rank-and-file workers on how to map a workplace, how to organise, how to recruit to the union and build power. Nah, just teach officials how to write a snappy tweet. 
One fact that the Australian Unions Facebook page has been pointing to lately is the decline in wages growth, which it attributes to the last eight years of federal Liberal governments. And it’s one of the rare instances of the ACTU acknowledging the link between a lack of industrial action and low wage growth. 
It’s true that the Liberals are overseeing anti-strike laws. But the ACTU ignores a few important facts. First is that federal Labor governments also presided over anti-worker and anti-strike laws. Second is that, when unions do have the legal right to take industrial action, they mostly avoid doing so, instead opting for class collaborationist approaches to negotiations. Third is that most rights that workers have won throughout history came on the back of illegal industrial action under both Labor and Liberal governments. 
 Our unions are in crisis; fewer than 15 percent of Australian workers are members; wages have stagnated and are projected to decline in real terms over the coming year; insecure work is increasing; and there are constant wage theft and rorting scandals.
Yet all the ACTU gives us is memes, exhortations to call politicians, and photo-ops of union leaders standing outside of workplaces. It’s bad news.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The revival of the union movement will happen inside the workplace. Sometimes it will happen one conversation at a time, sometimes it will happen with a bunch of politicised workers taking an initiative. Sometimes it will happen in a seismic shift—as long as we aren’t drowned in McManus memes in the meantime. 
Every union revival has relied on something of a militant minority: a small but growing layer within the union movement that pushes to get organised, to build strength on the ground and, of course, uses that organising to strike—the only way we force serious concessions from the bosses and build confidence in our own side. 
Radical politics has been crucial to every union revival, from the syndicalists of the early twentieth century, the communists of the 1930s, who organised in situations long thought impossible, or the broad-based radicalism attached to the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 
This approach isn’t the easiest, and it can’t be done by hiring a few graphic designers and communications directors. But it’s the only thing that works. Instead of memes and bullshit artistry from the likes of McManus, we need to rebuild fighting, rank-and-file unionism. And we need to build a socialist movement to do so.

Kath Larkin

Memes won't save Australia's unions

Victoria has the highest COVID-19 infection and death rates in the country and a premier who has managed to maintain a left veneer despite his neoliberal and law and order agendas, which have resulted in the privatisation of vital services such as aged and disability care and an increasing imprisonment rate for Aboriginal people.
The Andrews government has come under pressure from the federal Coalition government and right-wing media pushing a pro-business agenda. Victoria’s previous restrictions had come close to eliminating the virus, but Andrews buckled and prematurely reopened the economy. 
It’s true that there are plenty of hypocrites from the right who, despite pushing for a dangerous reopening prior to the second wave, now criticise Andrews from the right. We should have no truck with these people. But the left can’t give Andrews a free pass just because he is being attacked from the right. The Labor Party has just as much muck and blood on its hands as the Liberal Party right now. Labor members on local councils, alongside both Liberal and Greens councillors, have privatised aged care services. The Andrews government privatised disability services. And just eight days after pledging to support low-paid and insecure workers, Anthony Albanese argued not only that JobKeeper should be cut, but also that many workers receiving the payments were undeserving.
The number of infections climbed and climbed before Andrews finally offered a support payment to those testing positive to COVID-19. Even then, it was days after the revelation that 90 percent of people were not self-isolating after first developing symptoms. The $300 payment to workers unable to access other forms of paid leave was welcome but long overdue and inadequate. No worker should be forced to use their annual or sick leave to take time off to ensure the health and safety of others. Governments and employers should provide paid time off.
Most of us looked on in horror and scrambled to find ways to help when, without warning or preparation, Victoria Police laid siege to the public housing towers. Many of those suddenly under guard were refugees with serious trauma from authoritarian governments and the inhuman mandatory detention regime of Australia. With no plans or preparations, public housing residents were forced to go days without food or necessary supplies. Family members and volunteers were initially blocked by police when they attempted to get necessities into the towers. It’s not just that the siege was done in a way that showed no respect for the rights of the poor – the long-term neglect of public housing was also exposed.
Labor’s planning minister, Richard Wynne, denied permission to have public health information disseminated in the public housing towers in the languages spoken by the residents. And there was inadequate protective equipment and cleaning to help prevent an outbreak in the first place. Long before this, Labor has been hell bent on selling public housing for the sham of “social housing”. Planning documents show that most of the public housing estates Labor is knocking down will be turned into private complexes, with just a fraction of the land set aside to construct new “social” housing.
Many larger homes accommodating families will be replaced with one- and two-bedroom units. The government is also giving no guarantees that new “social” housing will be managed publicly. Instead, indications are that it will be managed by non-government housing associations that aren’t required to give tenants the same protections they have in public housing.
The other scandal is that the government’s mismanagement of quarantine hotels is responsible for the spread of this deadly virus. Unions have been highlighting the problems of outsourcing and privatisation for years. But who did the government put in charge of this vital public health service? Dodgy security subcontractors. Whistleblowers have reported the lack of safety protocols, proper infection control training and access to safety equipment. Not only were workers’ lives put at risk by a government more focused on money than public health, but the entire community was put at risk. 
Due to their low pay, job insecurity and the fact that we’re in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, workers were not only under pressure to work while unwell but were also working multiple jobs, which led to the further spread of the virus. Andrews and the media have attempted to turn these vulnerable workers, some of whom have bravely come forward to blow the whistle, into the villains of the story. 
Refusing to call out the crimes of the Labor Party puts workers in more danger. Sadly, this is the case with the trade union movement, which is supposed to be our defence against the barbarities of capitalism. The unwillingness of most union leaders to criticise Andrews publicly or stand up to the priorities of business weakens our fight.
Trade unions should be seizing on this moment to fight for safety, job security, pandemic pay, bringing public services back into public hands and more. They should have backed teacher unionists crying out for the closing of schools. But rank-and-file teachers had to go it alone with no support from their union. We had the ridiculous situation in which the principals’ association – the bosses’ union – was calling for school closures while the workers’ union was against it. This is where the politics of standing with Daniel Andrews and the Labor Party leads.
And look at what’s going on in the aged care facilities. Long before the second wave hit, we had evidence of the dangers of potentially fatal outbreaks in aged care facilities. But decades of funding neglect and privatisation from both Labor and Liberal state, federal and local governments ensured that this vulnerable population was being cared for by overworked, insecure and low-paid workers. Like the security guards, many workers in aged care work several jobs at different facilities. That’s been a key way the virus has spread. We can’t get a better situation for working people in this state or elsewhere if we are not prepared to criticise the actions of leaders such as Daniel Andrews.
Fortunately, some workers and unionists have taken stop-work actions to protect worker and community health and safety. Coles cold storage warehouse workers stopped work to fight for pandemic leave and other vital safety measures. And JBS meat workers refused to go back to an unsafe situation. While these incidents have been isolated, there are workers fighting back. There are rank-and-file unionists attempting to organise, whether supported by their union officials or not, in schools, call centres, universities, hospitality, transport and more.
We need a new political force in Australian politics, one that stands up to the bosses, that is unafraid to take on politicians and governments of all stripes. The Victorian Socialists are running in council elections this year, as one part of building a socialist alternative to the Labor Party. It’s an alternative that puts health and life before profits. An alternative that’s based on the collective power of people who know how it feels to have to scrape together money to pay the bills, but who also know what it means to stand up to the powerful. It’s all of us – workers, students, pensioners, migrants, refugees, welfare recipients and public housing residents – standing together to declare that we’re sick of a politics built on screwing us over at every turn, and we’re here to change everything.

The left should criticise Daniel Andrews

Count the problems that working class people face in Australia. More than 100,000 homeless. More than 3.2 million living below the poverty line. Eighty-four percent of JobSeeker recipients skipping meals to save money, with nearly half skipping at least five meals a week, according to the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). The average income of the top 1 percent, at $11,862 a week, more than 26 times that of the bottom 5 percent, at $436 a week, again according to ACOSS. This was all before the pandemic and recession hit. 
For the better part of a century, these sorts of issues – the results of the exploitation of workers by bosses, and the bosses’ use of government and the state to increase their fortunes – animated hundreds of thousands to join, build and campaign for the Australian Labor Party. Mostly, they were people who didn’t want to rise above their class; they wanted to rise with their class. They knew that we are all stronger together.
Labor leader Arthur Calwell, himself no hero of the working class, prophetically argued in the 1960s that Labor would “either be a socialist party or we will finish up as a muddle-minded, middle-class, petit-bourgeois, status-seeking party”. And so it has come to pass. Welcome to modern Labor, in which party leaders know nothing of solidarity, but plenty about status-seeking. 
So perhaps the least shocking thing about the recent revelations of corruption and mafia boss wannabe antics within the party is that no one was shocked. After the Age and 60 Minutes revealed the branch stacking practices of Victorian member of the Legislative Council Adem Somyurek, I wondered how it would be perceived by my workmates. I work in the railways, a blue-collar industry with more than 90 percent union density. Most of my workmates are Labor voters, some even Labor members. The allegations were met with mostly “Meh, politicians – they’re all the same”. From a couple of the older ones who remember the days of real militancy, there was a bit more anger: “Those fuckers, they don’t care about anything except the rich bastards”. But no one was shocked, no one asked how it could have come to this.
Branch stacking may not be new, but there is something different about what we’re seeing today. Branches once were stacked by people who had genuinely held beliefs about what society should and could look like. You had ideological leaders who mobilised people who cared about something. Think of Bob Santamaria and his Catholic Social Studies Movement and its popularity with the “industrial groups” set up to combat the influence of socialists and communists in the union movement. When the groupers stacked, they bought workers – sure, right wing workers – but they knew they were showing up for a fight about much more than simply one person’s preselection.
Not any more. The stacking today occurs in the context of the breakdown of the old factional system. The left, the right, the centre – they are all meaningless labels in the party now because the entire leadership and potential leadership are interested only in running the capitalist system, not transforming it. In a 2005 speech, former party president Barry Jones noted that no significant public policy debates had occurred at any national conference since 1991. Former New South Wales MP Rodney Cavalier, in his 2010 book Power crisis: the self-destruction of a state Labor party, argues: “No force describable as a ‘left’ has engaged in active contest within the ALP over ideas, policies or a framework to respond to unfolding issues, since the mid-1980s”. 
Today it’s all empire building and horse trading by people with a solid commitment to one thing: their own careers. So, far from being an ideological leader, Somyurek appears to have had no policy goals, aside from the introduction of single member council wards to crush the ALP’s inner-city rivals the Greens and strangle at birth any new parties like the Victorian Socialists. A fellow MP describes him as being “without any policy bone in his body”.
All the party bigwigs say they are outraged at Somyurek’s antics. He was quickly sacked by Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. But the thing that seems to have been Somyurek’s undoing is simply that he was a better branch stacker than his rivals. It’s an open secret that pretty much everyone in a position of power in the party owes their spot to some “numbers man” organising fake members. And migrant communities are prime targets; when you hear Labor leaders talk about how much they love multiculturalism, there’s your reason right there. It seems that Somyurek was just getting too powerful. The man’s a creep, but, despite all the protestations to the contrary – all the fake outrage from party leaders – there’s no indication that he is qualitatively worse than the rest of them. 
For years, the people running the show have proven themselves ready to sacrifice every sense of decency to get ahead. For former federal leader Kim Beazley, it was refugees. Tens of thousands have suffered cruel punishments and torture because of the ALP’s bipartisan asylum seeker bashing. For federal senator Penny Wong, it was LGBTI people as she held the line against marriage equality when in government. For former prime minister Julia Gillard, it was single mothers on parenting payments, who she kicked onto the dole under the cover of a parliamentary speech against misogyny. Bill Shorten climbed the ranks of the party by being an Australian Workers Union official who sold out the members he was supposed to represent. It was perfect training for someone wanting to lead the ALP, which probably explains why he became opposition leader so quickly. 
Anthony Albanese has been no different, essentially trying to slide into government with the Liberals. Under Albanese, Labor helped to wave through the Coalition’s massive $95 billion tax cuts, which will disproportionately benefit the richest 4 percent of taxpayers and lead to cuts to vital government spending on hospitals, education and public transport. No doubt the hearts of the so-called socialist left swelled when a party leader from their faction had Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott proclaiming: “Good to hear pro-growth agendas are now supported on both political sides”.
In Victoria, the Daniel Andrews Labor government’s tough on crime, law and order agenda – designed purely to please the cops and outflank the conservatives to the right – has had a devastating impact on Aboriginal people and African migrants. The imprisonment rate for Aboriginal people in Victoria almost doubled between 2008 and 2018. Aboriginal children have also been locked up in adult prisons. There has been no justice yet for the family of Tanya Day, a Yorta Yorta woman who died in police custody in Castlemaine in late 2017. She was arrested for the then crime of public drunkenness after falling asleep on a train.
Time and again, the whole workers’ movement has been sacrificed to keep big business onside so that Labor MPs can get power. The union movement ran a “Change the rules” campaign in the lead-up to the last federal election – most of the rules that need changing are hangovers from when Labor was last in government. It’s no surprise this $25 million campaign failed to inspire and mobilise workers even to the ballot box. This is the party that got rid of industry-wide bargaining and the right to strike outside the bargaining period in 1993, that brought in further restrictions on the right to take industrial action in 2009, that allowed the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission to continue under a different name and a slightly reduced budget, that opposed the reintroduction of penalty rates until it found it to be electorally useful. 
While the party leaders shit on the working class behind closed doors, in front of the cameras they make pious pronouncements about the “true believers” – working class people who the next Liberal government will drive further into poverty and misery. It’s all a lie. The true believers are just fodder, another talking point. We all know this, because we all know true believers: they’re in our families, in our workplaces. They, like the rest of us, are betrayed by every Labor government. 
All the talk by the leadership about the branches being the “heart and soul” of the party is rubbish as well. Somyurek himself can’t see why anyone would join the party. “By some stroke of amazingness, that some people joined [the ALP] of their own accord” wasn’t credible, he said, dismissing the idea that some of the people his operation signed up might have wanted to be members of the party. To be fair, he’s not alone. Barry Jones, again, thought similarly: “What incentives could one offer a prospective ALP branch member ...? Influence policy? Help choose MPs? Interesting branch meetings? Making a difference? (One would need a black sense of humour to even suggest it)”.
Andrews and Albanese’s solution to the breach of democracy in the party is to formally suspend democracy in the Victorian branch, the national executive committee being empowered to make decisions and disallow votes of party members. It sounds like killing the branches in order to save them. But it’s not even that. It’s clear that the branches were already moribund.
“Face the facts: Labor is stuffed. Its branches are rorted and its membership base is a joke”, wrote then federal leader Mark Latham more than a decade ago. He said that rank-and-file forums were moribund and made a rough estimate of 7,500 “real members” (those who spend at least two hours per week attending to party matters) around the country. When Cavalier wrote his book, he estimated fewer than 1,000 members were in any way active in New South Wales. Only half of those, he wrote, were “devoted in the way that was characteristic from the 1890s until about the 1980s”. And of those, 200-300 were on the payroll of the party, leaving only a couple of hundred committed rank-and-file activists in Australia’s largest state.
There are good people in the ALP, but they are fewer in number than at any point in the party’s history. And most of them are well past 60 years old. The party leaders don’t deserve their loyalty. We need a new party for working people, one that doesn’t tolerate careerists and doesn’t suck up to big business.

Labor's leaders don't deserve true believers

Pauline Hanson is a dangerous, racist bigot. She is no friend of workers or our unions. Her party’s vote to defeat the federal government’s vicious anti-union “ensuring integrity” bill is a cynical attempt to shore up some working class votes. That Australia’s unions have relied on this bigot and her allies to save us from an existential threat speaks volumes about just how bankrupt the strategy guiding our movement is – and how urgently we need a change of direction.
The anti-working class agenda of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is no secret. The party’s parliamentarians have repeatedly voted in favour of tax cuts for the rich. Hanson has flip flopped on unpopular cuts to penalty rates, but in 2014 she argued they should be abolished “right across the board”. In 2017, she celebrated penalty rate cuts in the hospitality sector. Her party has consistently supported strengthening the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the anti union taskforce in the construction industry.
This is before we even get to her attacks on migrants, Muslims, women and other oppressed groups. For two decades, Hanson and her allies have been peddling the divide and rule and scapegoating tactics that our rulers have long relied on to keep our anger focused on our fellow workers and the oppressed, not the rich and their lackeys in politics. 
Even a single word of praise for Hanson in the wake of the vote normalises and strengthens vicious racism in this country.
Which is one reason I just can’t get in on all this whooping about the very narrow defeat of the “ensuring integrity” bill. Of course, I’m glad the government lost. Like most unionists, I breathed a sigh of relief that unions and workers won’t be subject to such draconian measures. But we also need to take stock: such a narrow win – courtesy of right wing scumbags – is tenuous at best. 
We can’t know exactly what motivated the right wing senators to vote the way they did. It could be that the recent revelations about large scale criminality at Westpac, one of Australia’s big four banks, added to the pressure. Hanson certainly cited this as a factor and the far right’s playbook has long involved whipping up hostility to the banks and big businesses as well as the poor and marginalised. This is part of their appeal and helps explain why, when there’s no credible left wing alternative on offer, workers and the poor can look to fascists and other far right figures when they become fed up with the betrayals of mainstream politicians. This is an increasing and worrying trend internationally, which is all the more reason why unions should not be bolstering these sort of figures. 
It is also short sighted – presumably if the government brings an anti-union bill to the parliament in a week when a major corporation isn’t in the headlines for 23 million breaches of the law, Hanson will be happy to vote for it. There is certainly no principle at stake for Hanson, she has indicated that a bill targeting militant unions such as the construction unions would be amenable to her. 
Hanson’s vote could also be in part due to pressure from organised workers, and lobbying from union officials. Insofar as this is the case, the union leadership, in particular the peak body ACTU, is congratulating itself. But it matters how we win.
I’m proud to be a worker, proud to be a revolutionary socialist and proud to be playing my role rebuilding union strength and radicalism alongside many other unionists. But when I see ACTU leaders patting themselves on the back and declaring a victory thanks to Hanson, I don’t feel pride. There’s nothing mighty about a union movement that goes desperately begging to racists to save our skins! It’s humiliating. I’m not proud that rather than mobilise workers on the streets, or organise in our workplaces the union movement turns to right wing politicians. 
Disastrously, all the ACTU’s eggs are in the parliamentary basket. Whether they’re wasting money and resources on a failed elect Labor campaign, or asking us to tweet far right senators, there simply is no plan B. Which is scary because this will not be the last attack, and our movement – with union membership at 11 percent, strike rates at historic lows, wages stagnant and safety declining in many industries – is perilously weak.
If passed, the “ensuring integrity” bill would have been a big step towards a union movement that exists only at the beck and call of the government of the day. Crippling fines, rapid-fire deregistration for unions, and (perhaps most tellingly) provision for government agencies to appoint administrators to a union able to exercise any power – including calling off strikes, selling assets, sacking organisers and running meetings. All of this is reminiscent of the sort of unions that dictatorships dream of.
Previous generations of unionists have fought on pickets, endured the sacrifices of long strikes and have gone to prison in order to build the union movement into an independent fighting force for the working class. By contrast, our current crop of union leaders responds to an existential threat with nothing more than a campaign of mild lobbying. We barely scraped through this time. And we’ve done nothing to show the sort of fight that would scare our enemies off coming after us again. 
It is 50 years since the illegal national general strike that freed jailed unionist Clarrie O’Shea, but it feels like a different epoch entirely. The strike was organised by a conscious left in the union movement, made up of communists and socialists of various stripes, and was set against a radicalised global political climate. The laws that led to O’Shea’s jailing remained on the books, but bosses and governments were too terrified to use them for decades after the strike. Most importantly, the strike reinforced workers’ confidence and gave them a sense of their own enormous power. 
The 1969 victory opened the floodgates. By 1971, 30 percent of workers were involved in strike action. Strikes levels peaked in 1974, as did the rate of unionisation two years later, at a record 56 percent. In the midst of this strike wave the share of wages as a percentage of the GDP rose to its highest level ever. Conditions like four weeks annual leave, workers’ compensation and the principle of equal pay for women were won.
If we are to make our work places safe, win dignity at work and lift our stagnating wages – not to mention bring about the social and environmental reforms that are so desperately needed – we need unions that look to the collective self activity of workers as they did in 1969, not to false friends in parliament.

Hanson won't save us

On 19 May the Rail, Tram and Bus Union lost a stalwart and comrade, Marty McGrath.
 Marty started working in the railways in 1991 as a shunter and continued in the industry working on various projects in various roles until illness forced him into retirement in 2015.
 He held a number of positions in the union including delegate, divisional representative, divisional secretary/organiser, union trainer and both branch and national councillor.
 I met Marty when I was hired by Melbourne Metro in 2011. He was my delegate when I first got to Flinders Street Station. He always backed us when we wanted to have a fight – even if it was controversial. When I started, I had the privilege of walking straight into a safety dispute. When the company docked the pay of some of our members for taking illegal industrial action, Marty bought a bottle of whisky and raffled it to cover the lost wages.
 He ran the delegates training that I was part of and devoted a considerable section of the course to talking about the history of rebel women in the union movement. He told stories about migrant workers and generally explained why unionists had to oppose all forms of oppression. He could bring to life stories of “the old days”, which inspired you to devote yourself to the rebuilding of a militant rank and file.
One of my favourite stories was from his time as a shunter. The workers discovered that the bosses had much nicer toilet paper than them. “Are our arseholes not worth as much?”, they asked their delegate. After some failed negotiations, Marty introduced the union members to some Irish history, and the workers conducted their own version of a dirty protest – from memory, in the bosses’ luxurious bathrooms. They got their toilet paper. “The only dignity we have at work, is the dignity we fight for”, he said.
Marty got it. He knew that power didn’t lie in the Labor Party, the halls of parliament or even the union offices. It’s us that mattered, rank and file workers. We never felt like an imposition or that we were wasting his time. Rank and file power wasn’t rhetoric – it was real. All of us trained by him have the great privilege of carrying some of that legacy. 
Our movement has too few fighters like Marty.

Our movement has too few fighters like Marty

More than 250 people attended Socialist Alternative’s Union Activism and History Conference, held at the Victorian Trades Hall on Saturday, 15 October.
Union delegates and activists present were drawn from a variety of industries including transport, the public service, logistics, construction, health care and education.
It was a fantastic day of discussion and debate about the history and politics of unionism in Australia as well as the issues confronting the trade union movement today, including what strategies are necessary to rebuild rank and file power.
A favourite session for many was the packed plenary: “Fight back against Coles: stories from inside a warehouse strike”. National Union of Workers delegates and strike leaders Curtly Tuala and Ryan Laws spoke about the dramatic three-day Polar Fresh warehouse strike that crippled the Coles supply chain for more than a week in July.
In a period characterised by low union density and strike rates, high levels of job insecurity and stagnating wage growth, it was refreshing to hear how rank and file activists organised their shed to strike successfully for a significant pay rise and job security.
Other program highlights included: Denis Evans, long-time militant and 3CR presenter, an organiser with the Transport Workers Union in the ’80s. He spoke about the brief tumultuous years when a reform leadership group rebuilt a militant rank and file union that posed a challenge to the Prices and Incomes Accord.
Teachers and others came to hear from Melbourne teacher Cameron Rowe and Chicago teacher Caitlin Sheehan on “How to organise and win – a lesson from Chicago teachers”.
Health worker, delegate and recent strike participant Madilyn Gorman presented “When women workers revolt: the 1986 nurses’ strike”. She told the story of this important example of militancy, fighting sexist stereotypes and challenging the ACTU.
The day concluded with conference participants taking a solidarity photo and passing the hat around for the sacked CUB workers’ fighting fund.
Organisers were pleased with the conference turnout, which was the largest since the conference began three years earlier. Its success has quickly cemented the Union Activism and History Conference’s place on Melbourne’s industrial calendar. While details are yet to be confirmed, the conference will be held again in 2017.

Hundreds at Socialist Alternative’s union conference

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed the incredible strength of working class people. After just three days on strike, 600 cold storage workers brought the seemingly mighty Coles Supermarkets to its knees.
One of the best things about the strike was how clearly it showed up the sneering middle class conception of the Australian worker. While politicians carve out careers based on the racist barbarities they inflict upon refugees and the scapegoating of migrants, many blame racism and other backward ideas on “bogans” in the suburbs.
Suburbs like Laverton in Melbourne’s west, where hundreds of Polar Fresh workers – men and women drawn from around the world – stood side by side on the picket line. They linked arms, cooked and ate together, sang and talked.
Strikes bring people together as fighters against their own oppression and exploitation.
Many women, in particular, stood out as strike leaders. A minority in the workforce, women were disproportionately represented on the picket line. They were at the forefront of debates about tactics and strategy throughout the strike and often were the hardest and most determined to stand up to scabs, who threatened to run over them with trucks.
I had many discussions with women workers who reflected on the impact the strike had on their confidence and their sense of their own power and that of their workmates.
The core of the strikers and the majority of Polar Fresh delegates are from a Maori and Pacific Islander background. These workers carry a proud history of anti-colonial struggle, and some bring experience of industrial battle. Gee, a Maori woman, had been part of a 13-month strike before moving to Australia. I remember her being the last to leave, reluctantly, one of the secondary pickets blocking the entry to a scab warehouse set up by the company.
Many of the Filipino strikers played a crucial role in maintaining the strike camp, setting up an additional kitchen and providing entertainment. These tasks are critical for the success of a picket and keeping morale high. Some of these workers had visited friends and family involved in the Philippine Airlines Employees’ Association strike, in which unionists maintained a protest camp outside Manila’s international airport for two years.
Migrant and women workers are disproportionately affected by pay and job insecurity. The Polar Fresh workers’ action struck a blow against both hazards: winning an average 4.75 percent pay rise each year and a significant increase in full time and permanent positions.
In a period in which many on the left have given up on the class struggle, when the working class is often written off as ignorant and backward, the Polar Fresh strike highlights a tendency we see time and again. In struggle, workers unite. Strikes bring people together as fighters against their own oppression and exploitation. Together, workers can win real victories.
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For more discussion on the history of migrant and women workers in struggle, come to Socialist Alternative’s Union Activism and History Conference in Melbourne on 15 October 2016.
Sessions include: 
- When women workers revolt: the 1986 nurses’ strike
- Migrant workers fight back: Ford Broadmeadows 1973
For more details visit: <a href="http://www.redflag.org.au/unionconf">www.redflag.org.au/unionconf</a>.

Workers united

Fifty-five maintenance workers are nine weeks into a dispute with Carlton United Brewery after being sacked by the brewer, owned by SABMiller. The workers – all members of the ETU or AMWU – were told they could reapply for their jobs on individual contracts, with no union protections and a 65 percent pay cut. 
Refusing to be cowed, they declined the offer and instead set up a protest camp outside CUB’s iconic Abbotsford brewery. The company has since been bringing scab labour onto the site to maintain the plant and continue production.
However, the sacked workers are receiving solidarity from many quarters. Members of the ETU and AMWU have voluntarily levied themselves to support the workers and their protest financially. 
Hundreds of unionists have visited the workers’ protest site. At a solidarity rally on 4 August, a vast array of union flags – from those of the teachers’ union to the maritime union – flew over the crowd as speakers delivered messages of support. Members of the construction union, working on a nearby site, marched off the job and entered the protest chanting: “CUB: Shame! Shame! Shame!”. 
Fresh off their recent industrial win, some Polar Fresh workers were also there to back up the CUB workers. They had earlier in the week arranged for the delivery of a truck full of firewood to help keep the fires burning at the protest. National Union of Workers members at Polar Fresh received a boost on the first day of their strike when a delegation of CUB workers turned up to help. 
A list of work sites and unions that have donated to the solidarity fund was read out. Local council workers brought homemade cakes. A special mention was made of the regular visits the protest camp receives from an old age pensioner who lives in the public housing towers close to the brewery. He donates $5 to the workers’ fighting fund every week. 
Unionists came out again on 11 August, when hundreds rallied in support of the sacked workers, including a large and vocal contingent of maritime workers. Smaller solidarity protests have been held around the country, and a fundraiser recently held at Victorian Trades Hall raised thousands for the sacked workers. 
This sort of solidarity is the lifeblood of the union movement. However, while the protesting workers’ brave stand has garnered widespread support, there has been no public indication that the company – Australia’s second largest beer supplier – is buckling under the pressure of the negative publicity surrounding their treatment.

Solidarity rolls in for sacked CUB workers

It’s unlike other pickets I have visited. There’s a steady and sure confidence about the 54 Australian Manufacturing Workers Union members on strike at Bitzer. They are rounding out their third week out the gate. Their picket runs 24 hours a day outside the cooling equipment manufacturer’s Sunshine factory in Melbourne’s west. 
The mood of National Union of Workers members at the Pinnacle bakery in Altona, a few suburbs away, is different. Their anger is palpable. They weren’t out indefinitely like the Bitzer workers, but when they struck, a genuine excitement was evident. 
Both groups of workers are renegotiating their enterprise agreements. Both are facing employers keen to seriously erode wages, conditions and job security.
Many of the workers are from migrant backgrounds and carry with them radical traditions from their home countries, which include India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
Joey, a delegate at Bitzer, describes the company’s plans to introduce two rates of pay for workers doing the same job, reduce redundancy pay and cut rostered days off and other forms of leave.
A two-tier workforce is on the cards for workers at Pinnacle as well. Andy Giles, NUW organiser, says that the company wants to pay new starts as little as $18 an hour, or around $500 a week. Pinnacle is one of the country’s biggest pastry and doughnut producers. It wants to be able to make its casual workforce permanent but pay these workers around $4 an hour less than existing permanents.
At Bitzer, the workers’ confidence is born of an awareness of their strategic importance to the company. Bitzer’s Sunshine factory is a key site in production for a company that supplies evaporative cooling units to commercial enterprises around the globe. Many of the workers are from migrant backgrounds and carry with them radical traditions from their home countries, which include India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
They have fought and won in the past and know they can do it again. In the last 10 years, Bitzer workers have struck four times, the longest running for six weeks. “It’s just what you do”, Pardeep, who has worked there for nine years, told Red Flag. “You want better conditions, you have to come out and fight; otherwise you just have to take what they give you”, he said. “Once we go on strike, we really should be raising the pay demands every week to make up for our sacrifice.”
Lynn, one of the first female welders at the site, seemed to share the ethos of picket line veterans even though this was her first strike. When asked how long she thought the strike would last, she shrugged and said with a smile, “As long as it takes, maybe six weeks, maybe more”. 
Over at Pinnacle, many workers were also striking for the first time. According to Giles, they were outraged by the company’s claim, which amounted to a real wage freeze and an attack on important conditions.
When union members walked out on strike, managers openly mocked them, saying, “We don’t need you anyway”. Later, when scabs were prevented from leaving the factory at the end of their shift, the same managers were forced to negotiate their passage with the strikers and had to retract earlier threats about repercussions for striking. 
Bitzer workers have already voted to reject an improved but unsatisfactory new offer from the company. Pinnacle workers are expected shortly to vote on a new offer.
Both struggles are an example of the fight needed to improve job security. These workers know that it’s not quiet compromise that will protect their jobs and conditions but an open and determined fight.

Fighting for job security in Melbourne’s west

“How many more people will we have to clean off the tracks when people lose their jobs and have to go half a year, every year, with no money”, asks one of my co-workers. We’re talking about the social security cuts announced in the budget and she’s referring to the suicides that occur every month on railway tracks. We work at Flinders Street Station.
She wasn’t the only person at my work who was angry after the budget was announced. “We’ve got to get this bastard, squeeze him and his piggy friends into a little box, close the lid and sit on it until they take back the budget or die,” said another.
When others in the lunchroom laughed at what they saw as uncharacteristic aggression she said, “No! It’s true. He wants us to pay to see the doctors. I’m not bloody going to pay. And make medicine more expensive? What about my husband [who is dying of cancer]? What are we going to do?”
While her last question was posed as much in despair as anything, it’s the question that socialists and political unionists have to try to answer.
It started on budget night for me. As soon as Hockey had finished his speech my co-workers took to Facebook. I joined in, shared my own angry response and started making political arguments: we can’t rely on anyone in “official” politics to save us; we need to get active, force our union to demand that Labor and the Greens block supply.
I put it to my union (the Rail, Tram and Bus Union) that it needed to relate to the anger of its members. The union’s initial response to the budget had been to highlight the lack of spending on public transport infrastructure. This was a fine thing for the public transport workers’ union to point out. But in many ways it missed the mark.
My co-worker, also a union member and single parent, was clear on what the budget meant for her. “I earn $400 a week and have three children living under my roof. I rely on government support to get through. They want to take that away? What am I supposed to do – kick the kids out?”
This budget is a major attack on the working class. Unions need to lead the fightback. In every union, at every work site, we need meetings to talk about the budget and our response to it. We have to use all our strength to get union members out onto the streets and push for a serious response.
Over the next days and weeks, along with other rank and file activists in my union, I’ll be visiting work sites covered by the RTBU to hand out information about protests and collect signatures on a union petition calling on the Greens and Labor to block the budget. We’ll move motions to this effect in upcoming branch meetings.
The union has agreed to have RTBU contingents at upcoming protests against the budget and to get delegates building for them. This is a start and something to build from.

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Workers united

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