By Grant Holden
In the summer of 1938, my grandfather, Frederick Holden, worked for a brewery. He carried bags of malt up a stairwell and deposited the malt into a giant vat. At that time, you wore a canvas hood which covered you from head to waist so that the coarse Hessian would not rub through your shirt onto the skin. You were supplied with one hood, and it was your obligation to look after it for the year.
One morning Holden overslept and in his rush to get to work, forgot his hood. Without the hood, the bags rubbed his back red raw, he caught a chill, then a severe cold, then pneumonia and died.
Now there is a proposal to supply all maritime workers with a pair of washable leather gloves. It will be the worker's responsibility to care for them for a certain period of time. What will be next?
The employers and Liberal government's new catch phrase is "mutual obligation". It is also propagated by a spurious and rapacious media. The politics of envy has risen like the kraken.
The Labor Party's counter to this cancer has been to promote the brightest and most charismatic minds to shadow cabinet or the executive, where policy is exclusively formulated. This is also true of many trade unions: we elect officers to the executive, and they formulate policy and have it ratified by the members.
What usually results from this is a melange of rhetoric and compromise (not pragmatism) with an air of elitism, which purports to be the will of the working people. But where do they hear the voice of the people? Not from a posh harbour-side restaurant, not from a smoke-filled boardroom, not from a 747 at 35,000 feet, not from a Hilton hotel somewhere, and certainly not from a small clique of like-minded reassuring people, convinced of their own righteousness.
The only places to truly hear the voices of the people is at the workplaces, from the shop committees, from the delegates, from the rank-and-file meetings, from the members' partners, their children and their teachers. When given all the facts in a fair manner, the people invariably know best and will point the way.
The one question that haunts me to my soul is: who is going to be the next Frederick Holden, when union and Labor Party leaders speak their solemn epithets, aim rousing invective against our greedy ruling class whose pitiful retort is that they have to compete with transnationals that use child and slave labour.
So still we ask: "Wither goes labour?"
[Grant Holden is National Rank-and-File's candidate for assistant national secretary in the forthcoming Maritime Union of Australia election.]