Comment by Melanie Sjoberg
Next time you're having a conversation around the barbecue, ask your friends how they view the relationship between the Labor Party and the trade unions. You are likely to hear unions described as distant entities dominated by officials who are at best in cahoots with the ALP, or at worst waiting in the wings for a parliamentary post in which to end their glory days.
The most recent public example was the tantrum thrown by outgoing ACTU president Jennie George when the ALP leaders didn't preselect her for a safe seat. Simon Crean, Martin Ferguson, Lindsay Tanner, George Campbell and Bob Hawke have all made that personally fruitful transition.
Thirteen long years of the ALP in federal government, under Hawke and then Keating, gave us the richest examples yet of union officials subordinating workers' interests to the glorious goal of Labor's re-election. Key union leaders sold the Prices and Incomes Accord as the dividend that would give workers social benefits, but in exchange, claims for higher wages and better conditions were postponed — indefinitely.
More than a decade of sacrifice resulted in the greatest shift of wealth from workers to the pockets of big business in Australia's history. Packer, Bond and Skase became vulgar symbols of excess — and their parliamentary mates exposed any lingering doubts about where their true loyalties lie.
Union members are consistently promised the Golden Fleece in exchange for support and affiliation to the ALP. Through direct affiliation, union officials are supposed to control the ALP on behalf of union members. Unions with large numbers of members supposedly control the votes at ALP conferences and therefore ensure social and economic policies favourable to the working class.
In practice, this works in reverse. The parliamentary party and the organisational machine dominate the game by braying that the ALP needs to be reasonable (i.e. pro-business) in order to stay in government and "help workers".
The parliamentary party, in any case, has no real accountability to policy-making conferences nor to ALP members and affiliated unions. For instance, the 1992 ALP conference opposed the privatisation of Qantas. The Keating ALP government ignored this and sold it off anyway.
Even in unions that do formally affiliate, the bonds are formed through union officials holding individual ALP membership. Some unions will employ people, regardless of skill, only if they are ALP members. Many unions resort to election-time letterboxing campaigns in "marginal" electorates and act as little more than cheer squads for the ALP.
Since losing government in 1996, ALP leaders have piously declared the need to return to their roots and to convince the battlers that Labor will change course. This is a giant cup of froth without any coffee.
Labor in opposition has been little different from Labor in government: its main loyalty has been to its business mates.
The ALP agreed in August to a Coalition deal to keep youth wages. The ALP is now doing a deal with the government to cut corporate taxes. The current ALP policies on industrial relations, adopted at its 1998 national conference, do not include repeal of the Workplace Relations Act, do not oppose enterprise bargaining, do not get rid of individual contracts and do not call for a reversal of award stripping.
Is this the wonderful agenda that union affiliation to the ALP has guaranteed? Are these policies that union officials who are ALP members can enthusiastically endorse? Is this what having "good people" in the ALP can achieve?
Working people do need to be organised in unions, but we also need to think about what political aims our unions should have. Should those aims really be to re-elect a Labor Party that does not represent workers' interests?
It's time to cut the ties to Labor. We need a party that will fight to defend and advance our interests, that will supports the right of union members to freely determine the union's goals and policies and that will encourage campaigns and actions to mobilise the community for social justice and solidarity. The Democratic Socialist Party aims to build such a party.
[Melanie Sjoberg is the Democratic Socialist Party's national industrial coordinator.]