More than 100 members and supporters of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) staged a spirited sit-in on 18 June at the Sydney offices of transport company Toll. The protest was called after the workplace death of MUA member Anthony Attard, who was killed on a Toll ship. It focused on the company’s role in blocking the adoption of a National Stevedoring Code of Practice (NSCOP).
The dozens of angry wharfies who occupied Toll’s inner-western Sydney office soon had the building echoing to their chants of “No more deaths on the waterfront!” and “Stop the death Toll!” Most of those present had just come from the MUA’s Bulk &amp; General Conference, where they heard a harrowing report of the death and Toll’s callous actions afterwards.
Attard, a MUA member and father of three, was killed in Melbourne on 20 May while working aboard Toll’s roll-on/roll-off vessel Tasmanian Achiever. He was crushed to death by a Mafi trailer while helping to load heavy cargo onto the ship. In the weeks after the tragic incident, Toll had the very same trailer transferred to its replacement vessel Longstone and welded to the deck as a guide rail.
This occurred despite a unanimous vote by MUA members to have the trailer removed from all Toll ships and scrapped. After wharfies on the Longstone recognised the trailer, a number of them were physically sick at the sight of it. The MUA is now demanding the removal of the Mafi from this vessel.
The callousness of stevedoring companies does not end there. On the day of Attard’s funeral, the Australian Logistics Council, which includes Toll, Qube, Asciano/Patrick and DP World, called for the scrapping of the proposed NSCOP safety regulation. Such heartlessness is nothing new. In September 2012, just one day after the death of Newcastle wharfie Greg Fitzgibbon, and just days before a draft code of practice was to be agreed, major stevedoring companies rejected significant parts of the draft. It took a national day of action at the end of October to get the NSCOP process back on track.
Nine MUA members have been killed on the Australian waterfront since 2003. On average, wharfies are 14 times more likely to be killed on the job than other Australian workers. The MUA has been campaigning for a code of practice since 2007. It would not grant new rights to wharfies or the union, but would outline best practice methods that conform to laws already in place.
Nevertheless, stevedoring companies have continually tried to scuttle the NSCOP from the word go. Their opposition comes down to cost and an unwillingness to consult with workers.
In the face of continued company opposition, the MUA is promising to escalate the waterfront safety campaign. A serious campaign of industrial action is needed. The action that occurred after the workplace death of MUA member Steve Piper is a good example of what is required.
Piper’s death on 14 July 2010 triggered an immediate walk-off at his workplace, P&amp;O Automotive and General Stevedoring (POAGS) at Melbourne’s Appleton Dock. This was quickly followed by a nationwide stoppage of all operations at POAGS (now known as Qube). Then on 23 July, a 24-hour stoppage shut down every wharf in the country. Hundreds attended nationwide memorial services for Piper.
This sort of determined action can win a National Stevedoring Code of Practice and a safer waterfront.
[For more information visit <a href="http://www.nscop4life.org.au">nscop4life.org.au</a> and <a href="http://www.mua.org.au">mua.org.au</a>.]
Australian wharfies killed on the waterfront: 1990-2014
Barry Gifford, Darling Harbour, Sydney – June 1990
Brian Greaves, White Bay – September 1991
James Cairns, Trans Ocean Terminals, Melbourne – March, 1991
Rex Lowday, Geelong – August 1992
Roy Audet, Boyne Smelter Wharf, Gladstone – October 1992
Bryan Paterson, East Swanson Dock – September, 1997
Mick Carabott, East Swanson Dock, Melbourne – June 1998
Bryan Paterson, Melbourne – May 1999
Billy Dixon, Tasmania – July 1999
Jeff Grey, Appleton Dock – Melbourne, June 2003
Dean Robinson, Port Adelaide – June 2006
Peter Ross, Appleton Dock, Melbourne – January 2007
Bob Cumberlidge, Westernport – March 2007
Brad Gray, Brisbane – February 2010
Nick Fanos, Port Botany, Sydney – March 2010
Steve Piper, Appleton Dock, Melbourne – July 2010
Greg Fitzgibbon, Newcastle – September 2012
Anthony Attard, Melbourne – May 2014

Shane Bentley

MUA members stage safety sit-in at Toll

A month-long strike wave that hit ports up and down the length of Chile’s coast came to an end on 25 January after port bosses signed on to a government-brokered agreement with leaders of the Unión Portuario de Chile (UPC – Dock Workers’Union of Chile).
Port bosses agreed to make one-off payments of 1.5 million pesos ($3,000) to dockers and to reinstate all those sacked during the strikes.
The strike began on 23 December in the port of Angamos in Mejillones, northern Chile. Dockers were fighting for a pay rise and for employer recognition of the right of casual dock workers (eventuales) to be represented.
The latter demand is significant and helps to explain the explosive nature of the strikes. Eventuales are hired day by day as required for 7½ hour shifts and are denied health benefits, pensions, paid vacations and other benefits. They have no legal right to strike or to be a part of collective negotiations.
Chile’s current export boom has brought a surge in the use of eventuales; they now make up 80 percent of the country’s 12,000 dock workers. Yet they are denied union recognition and negotiation rights under the still operational anti-worker Labour Code put in place by the Pinochet dictatorship.
The Mejillones dock workers were the catalyst for a strike wave last year, when they demanded payment for their half-hour meal breaks (colación). Payment for meal breaks became law in 2005, but stevedoring companies refused to comply. A militant 23-day strike included a wave of illegal solidarity strikes that affected 85 percent of Chile’s ports. Those strikes were successful and the Mejillones dockers won their demand for colación pay.
Both strike waves were met with police intimidation and repression. Dock workers awoke on New Year’s Day to the news that their fellow worker Luis González Fuentes had been severely injured near the picket lines and was sent to hospital in a coma. Despite police denials, there is little doubt as to who is responsible for the attack.
Three days later workers struck at the port of San Antonio in the central Valparaíso area. Dockers were demanding full back pay for the colación breaks denied them from 2005 to 2013.
From this point, the trickle of illegal stoppages quickly turned into a flood. On 6 January, the UPC in the north called a strike in support of Mejillones comrades. Ports in Antofagasta, Iquique, Tocopilla, Chañaral and Huasco stopped work.
The following day, police brutally assaulted picket lines at Angamos. Military-trained police and Special Forces units used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets in an attempt to end the blockade. The dock workers resisted, and the police were forced to withdraw.
In response to the police repression, the UPC in the Bío Bío region called a strike on 8 January. Work at the ports of Lirquén, Penco, Coronel, San Vicente, Calbuco, Corral, Puerto Montt and Chacabuco stopped. Other actions took place at different ports across Chile.
For the next two weeks, the government of conservative President Sebastián Piñera, employers in strike-affected export industries and the big business press were as one: for the good of Chile’s international image, the strikes must end, they said.
These same people showed a remarkable lack of concern about the image that the police state of siege sent to the outside world. Flashbacks to the Pinochet dictatorship are apparently no problem, but images of striking dock workers are.
The dockers won support and active solidarity from bank workers and copper miners, as well as the student movement. No official support was forthcoming from the leadership of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile (United Workers’Centre, the main Chilean union federation). Communist and Socialist Party leaders did not want to embarrass the incoming centre-left “New Majority” government of Michelle Bachelet.
On 22 January, the Labour Ministry held a tripartite meeting with UPC leaders and port bosses. An agreement was eventually reached. The results were mixed.
After initial union demands for eight million pesos ($16,000) per docker for years of unpaid colaciones, a one-off payment of 1.5 million pesos ($3,000) was agreed to. More importantly, union leaders failed to bring the central demand of the Mejillones dockers – recognition of the rights of eventuales – to the negotiating table.
In the space of 12 months, and in the face of the bosses’ intransigence and police repression, Chilean dock workers have twice used the weapon of solidarity strikes – illegal under the current Labour Code – to paralyse the country’s ports. It is more than likely, given both their newfound strength and the fact that the question of the rights of eventuales remains unresolved, that these workers will once again be taking action in the not too distant future.

Chilean dock workers end month-long strike

MUA member Shane Bentley responds to an article by Red Flag's Tom O'Lincoln. 
Articles about a western European country in the throes of revolution, such as Tom O’Lincoln’s on Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” (Red Flag #13) are always an inspirational read. However, sadly lacking from the article is a discussion of the role played by the groups of the Portuguese far left, and questions of tactics and strategy that arise from the events of 1974-6.
The only far left group mentioned was the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat, the group that the International Socialists of Britain had fraternal links with at the time. Described by O’Lincoln as the “most promising” group among the Portuguese far left, this 1970 Guevarist split from the Communist Party – better known as the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat - Revolutionary Brigades (PRP-BR) – had confused, ultra left and semi-anarchist politics.
The PRP-BR carried out armed attacks on military and government targets right up until April 1974. It refused to take part in the April 1975 Constituent Assembly elections – the first after five decades of military rule – and instead raised the slogan, “No to bourgeois elections” (arguably not the best way to combat illusions in parliamentary democracy). Yet only one year later, it enthusiastically campaigned for a bourgeois military figure, the leftist Armed Forces Movement (MFA) leader Major Otelo de Carvalho during the June 1976 presidential elections.
To be fair, the PRP-BR showed promise. It helped to form Soldiers United Will Win (SUV) which promoted rank and file organisation within the armed forces and set up a number of “revolutionary councils of soldiers, sailors and workers” (CRTSMs). But the SUV collapsed in the aftermath of the 25 November 1975 attempted coup, and the CRTSMs were set up over the heads of the existing workers’ commissions and did not take up the tasks that motivated these commissions.
The fact the PRP-BR earns the label of “most promising” group in O’Lincoln’s account says more about the rest of the Portuguese far left than anything else. For instance, the various Maoist groups, when not denouncing each other, combined the wildest Third Period-style denunciation of the Communist Party as “social fascist” with the crassest appeals for an alliance with “progressive”, “anti-monopoly” business owners in the name of “national independence”.
Portuguese supporters of the Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) were hopelessly divided in two. The Internationalist Communist League (LCI) was aligned to the USFI’s International Majority Tendency (IMT) of Ernest Mandel and Livio Maitan, while the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) sided with the USFI’s Leninist-Trotskyist Faction (LTF) of Joseph Hansen, Hugo Blanco and Nahuel Moreno.
On major questions of tactics and strategy, these two groups rarely saw eye to eye. When workers at the República newspaper took control of the printing presses from its Socialist Party owner in May 1975, the IMT hailed the move as an example of workers’ control. The LTF saw the action as an attack on the Socialist Party’s freedom of the press and responded by reprinting Trotsky’s 1938 article “Freedom of the Press and the Working Class”.
The IMT glossed over the bourgeois nature of the MFA. The LCI took part in the July 1975 “MFA – People’s Power” demonstration that called for the dissolution of the newly-elected Constituent Assembly. It joined the Front for Revolutionary Unity (FUR) and its calls for a “government of revolutionary unity” (whatever that meant). The LTF forces generally did the opposite. Brief moments of unity included the LCI and PRT both calling for a vote for the Communist Party candidate during the June 1976 Presidential elections.
Driving the division between the two was the question of which forces the USFI should orientate to. The IMT chased the “new mass vanguard” of the nebulous far left in the hope that it would be an adequate instrument for revolution, while the LTF’s “defence of the democratic conquests” of 1974 saw it develop a marked softness towards the right wing Socialist Party leadership.
Neither side developed the tactics and strategy that would consistently defend democratic rights, win over the ranks of the Communist and Socialist Parties, and develop the existing workers’ commissions into bodies that could directly pose the question of working class power.
What is outlined above is not a revelation. The PRP-BR’s shortcomings are well documented in the writings of Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall (available at marxists.org) and in Colin Barker’s Revolutionary Rehearsals.
The point of raising this is not to indulge in left wing trainspotting, but to pose questions about how socialists should respond to a pre-revolutionary situation like Portugal 1974-6.
Should socialists have taken part in the 1975 Constituent Assembly elections, or instead raised the slogan “No to bourgeois elections”? Was the MFA bourgeois or not? Was the República affair an example of workers’ control or an attack on freedom of the press? Should socialists have joined the FUR or stood outside of it? Should the MFA’s Major Carvalho or the Communist candidate have been supported in the June 1976 Presidential elections?
Tom O’Lincoln’s inspiring article would have served Red Flag readers even better if questions of tactics and strategy such as these had been discussed.

Some unanswered questions about the 'Carnation Revolution'

Drastic change is set to hit Sydney’s Port Botany. With the spectre of automation looming over the waterfront, the stevedoring industry will experience a shake-up as radical as the late 1960’s move to containerisation.
Asciano, owner of Patrick stevedores, is leading the charge. The company first announced its plans to automate Patrick Port Botany in July 2012. Asciano wants to cull 270 jobs from the workforce of 511 by August 2014. At no time were these plans ever mentioned during the protracted 20-month round of enterprise agreement negotiations with the Maritime Union, which were finalised only two months before the automation announcement. The other half of the traditional waterfront duopoly, DP World (formerly P&amp;O Ports), is also pushing ahead with automation.Patrick’s Brisbane terminal was first automated back in 2005. Next in line is DP World’s Brisbane site, which will be “semi-automated” with eight automatic stacking cranes and 14 semi-automated manned shuttle carriers by the end of the year. DP World is still weighing up its options for Sydney and Melbourne.
A new third operator, Hutchinson Port Holdings (HPH), should be up and running in Sydney and Brisbane by the beginning of 2014. HPH will use similar “semi-automated” technology to that used at DP World Brisbane.
MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin summed up the union’s response to automation in a letter to the Australian Financial Review last year. “[A]ny decision to impose automation without negotiation will be opposed”, he wrote, reminding readers that “the MUA and previously the Waterside Workers Federation have reached agreement for many decades on the introduction of automation”.
The MUA argues that Asciano’s decision to automate at Port Botany without consulting the union is a breach of the enterprise agreement. The union took Asciano to the Federal Court and Fair Work Australia, but dropped its Federal Court proceedings in November 2012. Union-company meetings moderated by Fair Work began later that month, but to date have achieved little.
Asciano’s automation plans are still sketchy. However, DP World’s are not. The company wants to use automation to casualise and de-unionise the Brisbane workforce. The company plans to halve the workforce, from 282 to 140, by slashing permanent positions from 97 to 25, cutting semi-permanent positions from 149 to 80 and maintaining “supplementary” casual numbers (increasing their proportion from 12 to 25 percent). Maintenance job losses and handing over traditional MUA jobs to management are also planned.
On a brighter note, wharfies at DP World Brisbane whose job loss is “specifically related to the introduction of a new mode of operation” (i.e. automation) will be paid an extra 12 weeks’ redundancy.
MUA relations with Hutchinson are quite different. MUA officials have finalised a new greenfields enterprise agreement with HPH, which includes the phased introduction of permanent jobs and a 30-hour week roster. A wharfie at HPH on the 30-hour week roster will earn $94,800, compared to a wharfie at DP World on a 36-hour roster on $107,000.
In the struggle against stevedoring automation, better redundancy packages are good. A 30-hour week is better. But why should wharfies bear the costs of automation? Why cop reduced salaries as the trade-off for a shorter work week?
Australian stevedores are highly profitable. A recent ACCC report proves it. Since the 1998 Patrick dispute, real costs in the stevedoring industry have fallen by 45 percent.
Wharfies should not bear the brunt of the stevedoring companies’ insatiable lust for profit. If we want to save our jobs and our livelihoods, the only option is to fight for a 30-hour week with no loss in pay. The stevedoring companies can well afford it. Wharfies cannot afford to fight for anything less.

MUA members stage safety sit-in at Toll

Chilean dock workers end month-long strike

Some unanswered questions about the 'Carnation Revolution'

Waterfront set for automation shake-up

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