By Barry Healy
SYDNEY — The ACTU urgently needs to change direction, a September 1 public meeting was told. The meeting, called by the Rank and File Alliance and attended by about 80 people, coincided with the ACTU congress and was organised on the theme "Trade Unions — the Future" to stimulate union democracy.
Len Cooper, a Victorian leader of the Communication Workers Union, said that the "realists" at the top of the ACTU think that class struggle is dead. However, the employers and their government never forget the class struggle and their interests in it. "There is a need for a change of direction of the ACTU", he declared.
Unions needed to remember their roles in preventing competition among workers, organising defence of workers' interests and building solidarity.
Cooper called for a strategic alliance of trade unions and community groups to campaign for such demands as shortening the work week to reduce unemployment, returning to the award system, rebuilding union solidarity and raising taxes on the rich.
Bill Deller, the former president of the Victorian State Public Services Federation, introduced a Charter of Workers Rights for discussion. The charter has been developed through discussions among Melbourne unionists to try to provide a framework for discussion among rank and file activists nationally.
Noting that the audience was drawn from many left tendencies, Deller said that he was pleased that a new tone of mutual respect was entering discussions within the left. "The process of drawing up the charter was a process of learning how to work together", he said.
He said that process could extend through joint activities on points of mutual agreement so that experience in action could be built up. Working together on picket lines — such as on the Toohey's picket — was a good place to begin. Deller hoped that a communist union alliance could be built that could construct a revolutionary leadership of the working class.
Peggy Trompf, an activist with the Public Sector Union, gave a hilarious account of listening to the speeches of Bill Kelty and Martin Ferguson at the ACTU Congress (see page 12).
Paul True, an activist from the Building Workers Industrial Union, said that the twin poles of the working-class movement were represented by the ACTU Congress and the meeting he was addressing. The "glitterati" of the movement were at the congress, with their portable phones and business suits, while the rank and file had to meet elsewhere.
The ACTU had been "white anted" by yuppie types who propose "new" ideas of how to run unions, and "left" union leaderships had capitulated, he said. An example of a left leadership which had sold out to the new notions of unionism was the fact that despite the building boom in Sydney of the late '80s, the BWIU had not held one mass meeting since 1987.
True pointed to the decline of the union movement under the Accord. "The line of the right wing has always been that the workers are to blame", he said. The opposite is the case, but it is up to the rank and file activists to rebuild the movement.
He said that the formation of the Rank and File Alliance was an important initiative and called for broad discussion and unity in action. He too pointed to the Toohey's picket as an example of action that could draw together the various strands of the movement.
The most controversial topic during discussion from the floor was the idea of disaffiliating unions from the ALP and trying to build a political alternative. Speakers from the Democratic Socialist Party and the Socialist Party of Australia called for disaffiliation while Sydney left identity Bob Gould and members of the International Socialists said that it was a diversion from the main struggle at the moment.