23.04.1998

State hits dockers

Key class battle unfolds in Australia

Picketing Australian dockworkers - or wharfies - received a setback after the Australian federal court suspended an order demanding that the rogue stevedoring company, Patrick, reinstate the 1,400 workers it sacked on April 7-8. The suspension lasts until the end of legal proceedings.

The decision came after a fortnight of mass mobilisations by the Maritime Union of Australia and the Australian Congress of Trade Unions. Across the country there have been well supported and militant picket lines. In contrast to the virtual two-year isolation of the Liverpool dockers, the Australian wharfies have gained real trade union solidarity. Particularly at the Webb dock in Port Melbourne, at Port Botany in Sydney and at Fremantle in Perth, massed unionists and non-unionists have formed successful pickets. Moreover truck drivers from the Transport Workers Union have been respecting them, forcing employers to fly in their replacement workforce by helicopter. Scabs were secretly trained in Dubai last year under the auspices of Special Air Service personnel.

Late last week, the Victorian state Supreme Court issued an unprecedented injunction against the entire population, banning them from assembling within 200 metres of the Webb dock entrance. The order was met by a picket of 5,000, including the president and secretary of the ACTU. Indicating the widespread sympathy, the cast of ‘Neighbours’ have financially sponsored a wharfy’s family.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation has faced injunctions in the UK high court against its calls for worldwide bans on all Patrick-loaded ships. Dockers in Papua New Guinea and Fiji have already acted. Longshoreman in the US have also refused to handle Patrick cargo (see below). The International Transport Workers’ Federation seafaring affiliate in Japan, the AJSU, has donated one million yen to assist the families of the sacked dockers.

Ever since coming to power in 1996, the conservative Liberal-National coalition government of John Howard has had the militant Maritime Union in its sights. The wharfies have occupied a key position in the working class movement, similar to that held by the British miners until their defeat in the Great Strike of 1984-85. If Howard can beat the wharfies, the entire balance of class forces will be shifted.

Citing the necessity of increasing international competitiveness, the government, in collaboration with the reactionary National Farmers Federation, has been demanding waterfront restructuring and reform. (Interestingly, much of the language used is an echo of the previous Labor governments of Paul Keating and Bob Hawke.)

Late last year the ITWF blew open the Dubai union-busting scandal. The training of scabs was stopped after threats of a boycott.

Then in January this year, an ‘anti-terrorist’ operation was carried out on a Maritime Union of Australia-staffed freighter off the West Australian coast. Heavily armed Special Air Service troops selected out trade union activists.

The MUA could not but know that a fight with the federal government, the NFF and the employers was inevitable. However, rather than choosing the turf, the leadership has been content to let the enemy decide.

The MUA has been making all manner of concessions on ‘productivity’ - industrial relations code for screwing workers. These concessions started under the previous Labor government. When this latest dispute first broke on April 8, MUA secretary John Coombs called for the wharfies to ‘fight clever’ and win the hearts and minds of ‘middle Australia’. The leadership claims there is common ground between wharfies, stevedoring companies and the NFF on the need to improve productivity.

The spontaneous support for the picket lines and an intransigent attitude from the militant rank and file seems to have moved the leadership of both the MUA and the ACTU. Forced to act, the ACTU executive announced that it would ignore the Victorian Supreme Court’s injunction, urge illegal picketing and begin organising illegal secondary strike action amongst its affiliates. The traditionally rightwing and passive Australian Workers Union has threatened to close down the strategically important oil industry. Toyota Australia have already stopped production, unable to access spare parts. It has asked its entire workforce to take annual leave.

After the initial court ruling in favour of the wharfies, Paul Corrigan, chief executive of Patrick Stevedores, said: “We can’t afford one workforce, let alone two.” Patrick has binding contracts with the 400 scabs and an agreement with the NFF to provide union-free labour. Peter Reith, the minister for workplace relations, stated on Tuesday: “One court decision is not going to stand in the way of this country having a decent and efficient waterfront.” The subsequent judgement, effectively reversing the wharfies’ legal victory, should not have come as a surprise in view of such statements.

Throughout the dispute, the opposition Labor Party has posed as the force which can unite the country, branding the actions of Patrick and the Howard government, as ‘un-Australian’. Opposition leader Kim Beazley has said that Australia needs a ‘nonpartisan’ government. This stands in stark contrast to Kim Beazley’s attitude as Labor minister of defence in 1989-90 during the pilots’ dispute. The Labor government, in cahoots with the ACTU, backed the deregistration of the pilots’ union. Kim ‘bomber’ Beazley used Royal Australian Air Force pilots to defeat the union.

In short, Labor has put itself forward as the party of class peace. During the 1980s, it was able to tie the unions to a class collaborationist ‘Accord’ while pushing through many of the ‘reforms’ imposed in the US and Britain. Where Thatcher had to break the unions, Hawke and Keating got their voluntary subservience.

The wharfies’ dispute has ignited at a time when a number of other significant issues have emerged in Australian politics. The Liberal-National coalition is set to go to the polls later this year after the Senate rejected the government’s Native Title (Amendment) Act.

This dispute over Aboriginal land rights was given fresh impetus after a high court decision in 1990 which overturned the previous legal fiction of terra nullius - that Australia was an unoccupied continent when Europeans landed. A further case brought by the Wik people of Queensland found that pastoral leases for massive cattle stations on crown land did not necessarily extinguish native title.

The Liberal amendment to the act seeks to give preference to pastoral leases over native title. The forces supporting Patrick are the same reactionary sections of Australian-based capital with most to gain from the victory of the government’s native title legislation.

To fight an election over Aboriginal land rights will be highly divisive and racially charged. Coming on top of the current wharfies’ dispute and splits over whether Australia should be a republic or a monarchy, the stage is set for a watershed election.

This situation cries out for a political alternative which can generalise and unite the opposition to the union-busting, anti-Aboriginal, monarchist government. At present the Australian left only acts as cheerleaders in the wharfies’ dispute. A programme of revolutionary republicanism, for the right to strike, for recognition of Aboriginal land rights, in solidarity with the democratic movement of Indonesia and East Timor, is one which could capture the imagination of those drawn into the sectional disputes now flaring in Australia.

Marcus Larsen