BY SUE BULL
MELBOURNE — Craig Johnston, the secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), may be under attack, but along with the rest of the militant union branch's Workers First leadership, he is still gearing up for industrial struggle.
After a well-attended campaign meeting of 200 AMWU stewards on May 29, Johnston spoke to Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly about the union branch's 2003 wages and conditions campaign and its dispute with the AMWU national office about the union branch's relationship to the ALP.
In 1999-2000 the union branch, under Workers First leadership, ran a wages and conditions campaign called Campaign 2000. Massively supported by AMWU members, it won some of the best working conditions in the country. The Victorian AMWU is now aiming to repeat this success in the coming year.
"We're in the early stages of this campaign", Johnston explained. "We've sent out ballots to stewards about what the key issues are, like we did for Campaign 2000. Then, the things that the members were prepared to struggle for were better wages, income protection, accrued long-service leave, regulation of casuals and contractors and paid union training — those sorts of things.
"We achieved those things with more than 1000 agreements covering 40,000 workers. In about 85% of cases we got the whole package [of demands]. We think that's the best result [the union has won] since the shorter-hours campaign of the late '70s and early '80s."
Johnston explained that the union also won a "pattern agreement", which means that 1000 agreements will all expire between March and June 2003, allowing the AMWU to run another united industrial campaign, using the workplaces where the union is strongest to set standards able to be enforced across the industry. They "have about a year's momentum" to plan such a campaign, Johnston pointed out.
Johnston described the members' involvement in Campaign 2000 as "the best in 20 years". "It got to the stage a few years back", Johnston explained, "where we would call a mass meeting in the Springvale area — where we might have 5000 or 6000 members — and you might get 100 members to turn out. In late 1999, more than 2000 people came to a campaign meeting in Springvale Town Hall. People were excited that there was actually going to be some real gains for workers."
When asked why the response was so good, Johnston argued that it was because the union made sure that "the issues we are going to campaign around are issues that workers support. There is no point having something that we think is a great idea but the members are not committed to it. I guess that was one of the weaknesses of the national campaign."
Johnston describes the AMWU's national industrial campaign — which did not emphasise pattern bargaining, long-service leave and income protection to the extent of the Victorian campaign — as "spasmodic". While the national campaign did demand better employee entitlements, almost nowhere did it win the Manusafe entitlements scheme it demanded. Johnston told GLW he had seen figures indicating that just 500 people had entitlements in Manusafe — 250 of which were employed by the union.
Despite his criticisms of the national campaign, however, Johnston supports more coordination between state branches for the 2003 campaign. "We would hope to work in a cooperative way", he said. "But we are not going to allow the negotiation to go off somewhere and [for our members to] finish up with nothing. A number of national campaigns in the past have been total fizzers and we don't want to set our members up for some big fall."
The conflict between the Victorian branch of the AMWU and the union's national office over ALP affiliation has been public and controversial. Johnston explained that many members, stewards and officials in the union are unhappy with the ALP, especially since the November federal election. "The most strident critic of the ALP has been the national secretary, Doug Cameron", he pointed out.
At the Victorian AMWU conference in April, the union branch decided to stop its affiliation for six months, based on a log of claims to be put to the ALP. Based on the results from this process, the branch would decide on whether to be affiliated at a special conference in December.
"For some reason the AMWU national office, despite being all critical of the ALP, doesn't want to do that", Johnston said. "It wants to ride roughshod over the views of the union's rank-and-file — continuing in the ALP without even testing the party's credentials.
"The national office still being affiliated has made it harder for us to extract some commitments out of the ALP. If we're going to stay affiliated, then at least we should get some commitments from the ALP to do something for our members around manufacturing, apprenticeships, common-law rights, industrial relations and some of the broader issues like education and health."
The move away from ALP ties has been popular. "I haven't heard one member say 'Oh you've done the wrong thing'", Johnston said, pointing out that a lot of AMWU members think that the union "pays an extraordinary amount of money for such little return".
"The Labor Party is supposedly the political wing of the trade unions", Johnston went on. "It's not the other way around. It's not that the unions are the industrial wing of the Labor Party. The trade unions created the Labor Party and if it doesn't serve the interests of workers then what's the point of it?"
Against the wishes of the Victorian branch, which sought an injunction to stop him, Cameron appointed a "Victorian AMWU" delegation to attend the May 18 Victorian ALP conference. Despite the injunction filing, the attempt was unsuccessful. Michelle O'Neil, state secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia moved successfully at the ALP conference to uphold the Victorian AMWU's decision not to attend. All but one of the delegations from left-wing unions and three right-wing union delegations broke their caucus in order to support the motion and uphold the democratically made Victorian AMWU decision. Several court cases are pending as a result.
Johnston thinks the political discussion among AMWU members about this and other issues is positive. "A lot of members welcome it", he said. "Some members don't. Some say we should just purely focus on wages and conditions. But when you debate with them about how various political decisions affect their lives, a lot of them get over that and become supportive.
"Our role has been to try to open [members'] eyes and broaden their views. Not necessarily convince them that what we say is always right. But to get people to see an alternative point of view, because unfortunately most workers, like most other members of the community, only read the bullshit in the Herald Sun or the Age — and that's a pretty narrow view of politics."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 5, 2002.
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