BY JOE MCDONALD
I attended the [Western Australian] state conference of the ALP back in June. All in all, I've got to say that it was a pretty disillusioning experience — and it left me feeling frustrated as hell!
So I went back home and in the wee small hours of the morning I put on this CD I've just got hold of called "Gladiators of the Working Class".
It's about the "Wobblies" — the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] — who were very active around Australia and the United States, particularly in the first half of the last century. Their conferences would have been a sharp contrast to the one I'd just sat through!
Jim Larkin, who was instrumental in forming the Irish trade union movement was there, as was Joe Hill who was later framed and executed by the authorities in the US for his working class activism.
There's some great lines in the CD, like "Dare to fan the flames of discontent" and the whole idea of being "Gladiators of the Working Class".
And as I was listening, I had a few thoughts that I want to share with you. One was how the Wobblies in Australia were destroyed, not by the Tories, but by a leader, Billy Hughes, who was put into power by the workers, and, like so many since, promptly forgot where he came from and who put him there.
Today Crean seems to be on the same path — like Hawke before him.
The other was that if the people at the ALP conference are the best "gladiators" we can come up with, we're in a pretty bad way. No one was fanning the flames of discontent there!
I can honestly say I've seen more dash and more potential leadership at the average CFMEU site meeting than I saw there.
And as a matter of fact the CFMEU has got more members than the ALP. Maybe we should form our own political party and give all our members six months free membership!
I suppose all this comes out of the fact that I'm reaching the stage where I'd like to be more politically involved, but I keep asking myself where. I saw nothing at that conference to inspire me as far as the ALP is concerned — and, at the risk of upsetting some of the comrades, I don't think the Communist Party's got it either.
So I suppose I'd better just keep looking around and hoping I'm not the only one thinking like this!
One thing I'm sure of — the working class in this country has never been more in need of gladiators to fight for us, and apart from our union, I don't know where we're going to get them from!
[Joe McDonald is the assistant secretary of the Western Australian branch of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). This article is reprinted with permission from the winter 2002 edition of WA Construction Worker.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 21, 2002.
Visit the