Karen Fletcher, Melbourne
Five cramped busloads of workers from the Ford factory at Broadmeadows were among the quarter of a million people who flooded inner-city Melbourne on November 15 to rally against the federal government's radical attack on industrial and democratic rights, "Work Choices". A few months before, on June 30, they had only managed to fill one bus; this time they shut the plant for 24 hours, costing Ford the production of 520 vehicles.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) deputy shop steward for machinists at the Broadmeadows plant, Mediha Erdogan, had been building the rally, alongside her fellow workers and their families, for six weeks. They leafleted train stations, shopping centres and the massive Eid festival in Melbourne's northern suburbs that marks the end of Ramadan.
"This time everyone knows it important", she told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "Last time, people said 'No matter you go or no go'. This time everyone go. We do this for our kids so they can get good education, good job, good house, good health."
Mediha and around 20 other marchers — from Ford Broadmeadows, Holden Port Melbourne and a host of smaller vehicle parts manufacturers; and from Turkey, Macedonia, China, Vietnam and a multitude of other backgrounds — clasped a giant AMWU banner at the front of a massive contingent of hundreds of vehicle workers, one of the best organised and noisiest mobs on the day. Fists in the air, they shouted together in variously accented English, "The workers, united, will never be defeated".
Despite her success, Mediha was not completely satisfied. "Geelong plants better organised than us today", she said. "After Christmas we do another one. Next time better."
Giant video screens and bullhorns on every street corner in central Melbourne gave every one of the roiling crowd sight and sound from the platform. It was more than double the size of June 30, and technological organisation finally caught up with the size of the resistance.
People swarmed at every intersection along the length of Melbourne's main street around the huge screens, booing and jeering a grainy video of John Howard and emotionally cheering union veterans as they reminisced about the pitched battles that had won legal rights for workers over the last 100 years. Tears rolled down many battle-hardened faces.
Massive contingents of nurses and teachers predominated. Secondary school teacher and member of the Victorian State Council of the Australian Education Union Mary Merkenich also spent weeks building the rally, visiting dozens of schools to give talks on the dire implications of Work Choices for teachers. Her and her fellow unionists' work also paid off.
Around half of the state's teachers attended the rally — around 25,000 of the 50,000-strong work force. One hundred schools closed and hundreds more limped along with just a skeleton staff of managers. Mary's own school, Mill Park Secondary College, closed for the first time ever for an industrial action with all 110 teachers out.
Home-made banners and placards abounded, many drawing the links between anti-worker laws and the government's war on Iraq, on democratic rights and on refugees. "Arrest me, I'm feeling seditious about the IR laws and several other things", said one modest piece of cardboard held aloft by an unthreatening-looking woman. There were smiles all round as people realised they were not alone in their seditious intent. Even the police marched — three faces peeking out from a Victorian Police Association banner — rather shy of being photographed for GLW!
From the platform, ACTU secretary Greg Combet told the huge crowd: "We face these laws simply because the government has won control of the Senate and has the power to do what it wants". He added: "And in the next couple of weeks the government will abuse that power and ram these laws through. When it does so it will not signal any set-back for our campaign. Rather, it will signal the start of a determined, relentless effort to overturn these laws and put in their place decent rights for the working people of this country."
Combet said he would refuse to pay any fine the new laws impose "for asking for people to be treated fairly" and urged other union leaders to do the same, implying that union leaders may face imprisonment for such refusal.
As Combet spoke, cameras scoped the throng and, amongst a group of manufacturing workers the face of ex-secretary of the Victorian branch of the AMWU Craig Johnston was briefly visible on the giant screen — a reminder that one Victorian union leader has already been imprisoned for his leadership of a campaign to defend workers' rights.
The massive gathering waited patiently for more than an hour before they could march off to the Exhibition Gardens on the other side of the city. It would have been a good opportunity to hear some more strategic and organisational proposals for the coming struggle, but there was only recorded music.
In the gardens, a number of individual union officials gave less carefully crafted speeches, pledging themselves and their members to fight Howard's laws to the end.
People clambered aboard trams and trains with optimism, determination and fists full of postcards and bumper stickers. It would have been an even better day if they had also left with an industrial plan.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 23, 2005.
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