“Unlawful conduct on building sites around Australia is holding back our economy”, according to Malcolm Turnbull. And what a surprise, the prime minister says that it’s unions that are to blame. 
Turnbull’s tosh about the importance of the rule of law is blatant hypocrisy. While there is plenty of unlawful conduct in the building industry, the criminals are on the boss’s side. 
The Liberal government is expected to force a double dissolution election over its legislation to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a body which has no purpose other than to attack trade unions and their members.
But the government and its regulators look the other way when construction workers are dudded out of wages and entitlements by unscrupulous employers. Right now, more than 50, mostly migrant, workers have gone without pay for more than two months after the subcontractor they worked for went into liquidation. They had been working on the Bendigo Hospital job, which is run by Lend Lease, one of Australia’s largest construction companies.
Many are owed more than $10,000. Lend Lease has taken no action to secure their wages. The company has kept the job running. The federal government has said nothing.
Instead, while these workers are struggling to pay mortgages and put food on the table, Malcolm Turnbull and employment minister Michaelia Cash were spotted sitting down for coffee with Lend Lease management at its Barangaroo site in Sydney. “I bet you they weren’t talking about how to get all these workers paid”, said John Setka, secretary of the Victorian CFMEU at a rally outside Lend Lease’s Melbourne offices.
Lend Lease is a known criminal enterprise. In 2012, its US arm was forced to pay $US54.2 million in penalties and restitution after the FBI uncovered what it called “a systematic pattern of audacious fraud”. Turns out the company, for years, had been falsely inflating the cost of works and overbilling clients, including on the job to build the September 11 memorial.
Just a year later, Leighton Holdings, another of Australia’s largest construction companies, was exposed in a joint Fairfax and Huffington Post investigation as being at the centre of a major bribery scandal in the oil industry. Leaked documents revealed that Leighton’s offshore company paid millions of dollars in bribes to influence Iraqi government officials to award the company lucrative oilfield contracts.
Will Turnbull’s ABCC look into the corrupt property developers and builders that give so generously to the Liberal Party? Will it investigate the unpaid wages of the plasterers on the Bendigo Hospital job? Not likely. Instead it will go after the only people who are fighting to get these workers what they’re owed, the CFMEU.

Patrick Araya

One law for the CFMEU, another for construction bosses

The shop steward announces that there will be a toolbox meeting after smoko. People joke that they hope it goes on for a while so we don’t have to go back to work. No-one suspects that the meeting has been called because a couple of hours earlier, on the other side of the city, a worker fell 20 metres down a lift shaft to his death.
Your heart sinks as you hear it.
Just the week before, we had a similar meeting about a worker who was seriously injured on another job. We all know the statistics about deaths and injuries in our industry, but it really hits home when something like this happens. When you hear a name.
Every time a worker is killed or injured someone is to blame. It’s the bosses.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on the job where the incident happened. In your head, you run through all the people you saw there. You wonder if it was any of them. Hope it wasn’t. “It could have been me”, you think, “if I was still there”.
Our job was shut down for two days as the union did safety audits.
Incidents like this show up the bullshit from bosses and the Liberal Party about the union using safety as an “industrial weapon”. If they had their way, occurrences like this would be even more common.
Because the only thing that is going to keep more workers out of body bags is our strength to stand together and say “no”, and if we have strong unions that are willing to fight for the right of every worker to go home in one piece.
This wasn’t an accident. Every time a worker is killed or injured someone is to blame. It’s the bosses. They are cutting corners to get jobs done faster and cheaper, and we’re paying with our lives and limbs.
As we walk out the gate, everyone is talking about safety; things they’ve seen that are unsafe or things they’ve done they reckon they shouldn’t have. It’s probably the only time we wish we didn’t have to go home, because that day there was one less worker going home with us.

Another worker dead: ‘your heart sinks’

In Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia, the construction division of the CFMEU has backed the campaign against the closure of remote Aboriginal communities in WA.
At the union’s March branch meeting, Victorian construction workers voted unanimously for a motion expressing solidarity with the communities under attack and pledging that no union member would participate in the demolition of the towns being threatened. A similar motion was also passed in the WA branch. In NSW, CFMEU members have participated in a social media campaign to highlight union support for Aboriginal rights. 
The cause has also enjoyed broader union support. On 21 April, the Australian Council of Trades Unions passed a motion condemning the closures. The peak union body called on “the Abbott Government to restore funding for Aboriginal communities and the Barnett Government to end the political funding games”.
The WA branch of the Maritime Union of Australia has also condemned the proposed closures, voting unanimously for a resolution moved by one of its Aboriginal members. The MUA has had a presence at rallies around the country. In Victoria, where protests have been the biggest, a number of unions have attended, including the Australian Services Union and the Health and Community Services Union.
The union movement has a long history of standing in solidarity with Aboriginal struggle. During the longest strike in Australian history – which started in 1946 with a walk-off of Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Pilbara – unions and trades and labour councils across the country sent money to support the strikers. In 1949, it was the action of the WA branch of the Seamen’s Union of Australia that helped force the dispute to a head when the union banned the transportation of scab wool from the Pilbara.
In 1980, during the fight to stop mining exploration on Aboriginal Land at Nookanbah Station in WA, unionised truckies refused to transport drilling rigs to the site. More recently, in 2012, members of the Queensland branch of the Electrical Trades Union linked arms in front of police to prevent the removal of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park.
Solidarity is a basic tenet of unionism. The same governments attacking Aboriginal rights have unions in their sights. We are stronger if we stand together.
Tony Abbott’s royal commission into “trade union corruption” is one example. It hasn’t produced a scrap of evidence of union misconduct, but the truth was never within its terms of reference. Similarly, the Northern Territory intervention had nothing to do with Aboriginal welfare or child protection, and everything to do with undermining land rights.
Both are free kicks to the bosses, as are the latest attacks on Aboriginal communities. The effect will be to push Aboriginal people off their land so Gina Rinehart and her ilk can make mega-profits digging up the earth, while smashing the working conditions of those who build and operate the mines.
The solidarity shown by unions so far is a good start. But more can and should be done. Pledges and motions must be coupled with a willingness to take action. 
A victory for our side would put the Liberal government and the bosses on the back foot. We should all encourage our workmates to come along to the rallies and our unions to throw their whole weight behind this campaign. An injury to one is an injury to all.

Aboriginal rights are union business

If they want to smash unionism in Australia, the Liberals know that they have to go after the strongest first. Thatcher did it with the miners in the ’80s; Howard botched an attempt with the wharfies in 1998. This time around, construction workers and their unions are targeted.
One of the federal government’s weapons of choice is the Building and Construction Industry Code, which will be considered by the Senate in coming weeks. The code is a major offensive against construction workers. The revamped construction industry secret police – the Australian Building and Construction Commission – will have the job of enforcing it. 
The code will mandate that bosses who tender for government projects strike dozens of conditions out of enterprise agreements on all their jobs. According to Troy Gray, Victorian state secretary of the electricians’ union (ETU), electricians in the commercial construction industry will lose 76 current conditions. The situation is the same for CFMEU members.
Under the code, affected companies will be banned from employing non-working shop stewards. In an industry where 211 workers died between 2007 and 2012, this will mean more deaths. How will a shop steward who is working all day, on a site with hundreds of other workers, have time to walk the job and raise concerns about safety? They won’t; it’s impossible. That’s the point. Big builders want to get their jobs done cheaply and quickly, cutting corners and putting lives at risk. They don’t want to be hassled by unions.
“If unchallenged, the code will make workplaces more dangerous”, the state secretary of the CFMEU (Victoria), John Setka, told Red Flag. “Abbott and his mates are kidding themselves if they think we’re going to let their anti-worker ideology put the lives of building workers at risk.”
The use of subcontractors is also expected to spiral under the code. Unions will be prevented from bargaining for clauses that set the terms of subcontractors. Bosses will be able to ignore enterprise agreements entirely and employ workers through labor hire companies on sub-par wages and conditions.
State governments have also tried using legislation to knock out construction workers’ conditions. The High Court recently overturned a Federal Court ruling which found that a Victorian building code was unenforceable – meaning the Victorian code is back in play.
Like the federal code, the Victorian rules require any company wanting state-funded work to remove “union-friendly” clauses in its agreements. “Union-friendly” conditions include the right to wear union stickers at work, to have a say over how people are employed (casual or full time), how they are paid and how many hours they work. Significantly, it also scraps unions’ ability to win ratios that dictate how many apprentices a company has to hire for every qualified tradesperson they employ.
Setka says the union will fight. “They believe that if they break the CFMEU, they break a major pillar of the union movement. But we’ve resisted successive attempts by all sides of politics and industry players to destroy us.” Beating these codes will be a major test of union strength in the coming months.

Building code aims to slash conditions

A small group of workers in Melbourne has had a big win. After six weeks outside the gates, 30 Super A-Mart warehouse workers have gone back to work with an enterprise agreement. They are the first warehouse in the company’s history to wrestle an above-award agreement out of their boss, who boasts about running “a minimum wage company”.
As part of the agreement, the workers, members of the National Union of Workers, have won a 10 percent pay rise over three years, a $750 sign-on bonus, a casuals’ conversion clause, improved redundancy entitlements, an OH&amp;S committee and union rights. 
“I’m just so proud”, said Craig Carlton, speaking to Red Flag at the union victory party held at the MUA’s West Melbourne hall. Craig says he’s been a lifelong union member and has been involved in one strike before this dispute – three weeks out at a Franklins supermarket distribution centre 15 years ago. Having been on strike before helped him this time around, he said, and others looked to him for guidance.
Many of the other workers now celebrating their win had no history of unionism before the dispute. “The ones I thought were going to pull out and not be in the union were the ones that … really impressed me the most”, Craig says.
Vaea Tuuu, now a delegate, had never been in a union prior to the lead-up to the dispute. Joining up was a “leap of faith”, he said. Months later: “I stuck my hand up [to be a delegate] because I’ve developed a confidence of being able to stand up in front of people and say what I have to say”, he explained.
The resolve of the group was evident throughout the dispute. After an initial employer lockout was lifted, the workers voted to stay out – not locked out, on strike and on their own terms.
They also got creative, keeping busy over the six weeks with protests outside Super A-Mart stores and companies linked to Quadrant Private Equity, the parent company of Super A-Mart. The union organised a “Low Wage Bus Tour” to Canberra and Sydney, where the workers confronted Quadrant CEO Chris Hadley.
“They [the company] would have thought that a few of the boys in the union would have folded due to their large families … but when we rocked up five weeks later to Sydney, they saw that these boys aren’t giving up at all, they’re going to keep fighting until they get what they want”, Vaea said. “And that’s what happened; we won – look who’s laughing now.”
The sense of strength derived from acting collectively is evident in nearly every conversation at the union party. “We’re like brothers”, Craig told me. Not only is the bond between the Super A-Mart workers stronger than ever, but the importance of solidarity between different groups of workers was clear throughout the dispute.
Donations flowed in, supporters passed by the picket and joined the workers in protest. “Everyone was blown away with the support from other union sites, out of their own pockets”, said Craig.
Not only have the workers won improved pay and conditions, but Chad Wyatt, the other workplace delegate, describes experiencing a “massive power shift” since they went back to work. “Before, there was a lot of bullying and intimidation aimed at workers … [the company] was playing the carrot and stick but never offering the carrot and so guys were getting screwed over.”
Now things have changed. “Management are trying to sweet talk us, they’re our best friend, they’re joking with us, you know, arms around the shoulders … The scabs have come up to us shaking the guys’ hands, saying how proud they are of us for winning … It’s amazing to see ... it reinforces the significance of what we were able to achieve.”
Vaea said that when the scabs challenged him on what they had won, he bluntly told them: “If you had been out there with us, we could have got more.” All they could do was hang their heads in shame and agree, he recounted. 
Chad summed up the dispute simply: “Your options are stick with what you’ve got or get better.” The Super A-Mart workers certainly got better. They’ve shown that there’s no such thing as a “minimum wage company”. If you fight, you can always get better.
As for what now, Craig says, “It’s only going to get better.” Vaea predicts more picket lines: “We know what it’s like to be out there and to have people supporting us, donating and everything like that; we’ll be doing the same for everyone else. Everyone now that’s going on strike, we’ll be doing the same thing, we’ll be supporting them, we’ll be rocking up to their picket line.”

Important strike win for warehouse workers

It’s 40 degrees and I’m balancing on the roof of a two storey house with a six metre drop in front of me. I’m trying to hold a nail gun in one hand and holding on for dear life with the other. There is no barrier or harness to catch me if I let go.
This was a day at work for me as an apprentice carpenter working for a small company. I was luckier than others. I never went home with anything more than cuts and bruises.
A few years ago, Kane Ammerlaan, a 16 year old tiling apprentice working in Melbourne fell off a roof while carrying a 50-kg bucket of cement. The cement from the bucket shot into his eye, dried, and left him blind in that eye. Kane’s boss didn’t call an ambulance. Instead, he laughed and took a photo with his phone.
Kane’s story is not uncommon for young apprentices. According to WorkSafe Victoria’s figures workers under the age of 24 are more likely to be seriously injured at work than any other age group.
But WorkSafe has done nothing to change this. It was left up to the construction union (the CFMEU) to take on Kane’s boss.
When you’re an apprentice, the boss knows that you will generally keep your mouth shut to keep your job. You’re pushed to ignore safety risks to get the job done quickly.
There is constant bullying, which also makes it tough to speak up. My boss would take any chance to have a laugh at my expense, telling me I was too slow and making a point of every little thing I fucked up.
You’re forced to do jobs that you just aren’t qualified to do. You’re made to feel like you have to prove yourself. But it can be deadly.
In 2010, Wade Braeckman, a 15 year-old apprentice had his arm ripped off by a lathe and later died in hospital. He wasn’t qualified to be using the equipment; he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the machine without supervision.
Kevin Hadfield, who owned the factory where Wade worked, later pleaded guilty in the NSW Industrial Relations Commission to the offence of failing to provide a safe work place. He was fined $30,000. That’s what a young worker’s life is worth.

One law for the CFMEU, another for construction bosses

Another worker dead: ‘your heart sinks’

Aboriginal rights are union business

Building code aims to slash conditions

Important strike win for warehouse workers

Young workers at risk

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