Sue Bolton, Melbourne
"Militancy hurting Victoria: PM", the November 27 Melbourne Age screamed across its front page. The headline was followed by the kicker, "Howard says investors scared off by unions".
While the federal Coalition government has consistently denounced militant unionism, this is the first time in a while that PM John Howard has specifically attacked Victoria's militant unions. It is no coincidence that Howard made his comment the day after a 6000-strong union street demonstration in Melbourne.
The protest, called by an alliance of 15 unions, demanded that Victorian Premier Steve Bracks' Labor government release from prison militant unionist Craig Johnston, jailed for nine months for the "crime" of defending workers' jobs.
Most of the unionists who attended the demonstration also intended it to be a sign that they will not accept the jailing of any other union leaders for carrying out legitimate union activity.
Although the protest was targeted at the Bracks government, it also represented the first challenge to Howard's anti-union agenda from the union movement since the October 9 federal election.
Johnston's message to the rally from his cell at Loddon Prison was one that both Howard and Bracks no doubt hope not many unionists heed. Johnston wrote: "With the re-election of the Howard conservative government, we will see a massive increase in the demonising of unions and many unions and unionists will be charged under more unfair, unjust laws...
"We must continue to overturn these unjust laws and we must continue to break these laws. If the law is wrong, break it and break it again and force the government to repeal it."
This, however, is not the approach that guides the thinking of most union leaders, particularly the officials of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Their thinking was expressed by ACTU assistant secretary Chris Walton at a Victorian Trades Hall Council briefing of union officials on November 23.
Walton told the briefing that it would be extremely difficult for the ALP to win the next federal election, in three years' time, because Labor had too much ground to make up after its losses in the October 9 election. Therefore, he argued, the union movement will most likely have to endure another six years of Coalition federal government.
Walton said that the biggest challenge facing unions would be that all "institutional support" for unions will vanish under Howard. He added that some of unionists are going to want to focus on a public campaign against Howard and that while such a campaign was needed, the fundamental response of he union movement should be focused on maintaining the individual unions' enterprise "bargaining power".
National Union of Workers Victorian branch secretary Martin Pakula told the briefing that at the last NUW national council meeting officials from some state branches had started to come up with all sorts of ideas about the sorts of campaigns the unions had to run to stop Howard's planned next round of anti-union legislation, including "shutting down the country".
Then he said: "Can anybody really imagine a press conference where Howard stands up and says the union movement's beaten me. I suppose it's possible, but it's extremely unlikely. The union movement is wasting too much of its brainpower in thinking about how we're going to stop the legislation. No matter how well we campaign, the likelihood is that the legislation is going to come in."
Pakula argued that the unions' "ability to belt the employers is going to be compromised. We need to be adaptive and be smart about how we do it. We have to find other ways to swing a cat." He reported that he and other officials had been to the US, where they had seen "a whole lot of the other non-industrial types of campaigns" that the US unions engage in.
He also said: "There are going to be circumstances when our members become frustrated because of limitations on their ability to take protected action. There are times they are going to blame the union and say 'what's the point of being in the union if we can't take action'."
At the briefing, Walton and Pakula kept emphasising, over and over again, the need for "unity" and "discipline" — by which they meant that individual unions should not break with the capitulationist approach adopted by the ACTU to the coming attacks by the Howard government on union rights.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 8, 2004.
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