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Issue No. 148 | 16 August 2002 |
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Peak Performance
Interview: Labor Law Unions: Critical Conditions Bad Boss: Shifting The Load History: Peeking Out Safety: Flying High Corporate: Salaries High, Performance Low International: War on the US Wharves Review: And the Signs Said... Poetry: Tony Don't Preach Satire: Latham Dumps Rodney Rude as Speech Writer
Politics The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Human Rights
 Miranda's Not Fair on OutworkersAnother Capitalist Party?Justice For All?Kill the Photos!Right Wing Lackies
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Letters to the Editor Justice For All?
Dear Sir While it is gratifying and reassuring to read the various stories in Workers Online in which unions have gained improved working conditions and/or wages for people in certain industries, there is a story that I don't think has ever been promoted, and which used to make me swell up with rage. In the decade or two prior to the Hawke/Keating administration, unionists in certain industries which put them in a position to do so, regularly held the country to ransom in order to obtain ever increasing wages and improved working conditions. One group which stood out for employing this tactic were the petrol tanker drivers. Waterside workers were another group which, while in earlier times had legitimate claims to improve their wages and conditions, also soon learnt their unique power to blackmail the country ... at a cost of millions of dollars lost in potential exports. In fact I am sure most of you will remember the days when some countries became reluctant to engage in trade with Australia because of the continual disruption on the waterfront. There was a time ... so long, long ago ... that trade unions were essential to achieve even basic rights for exploited workers. But there came a time, especially during the period I have earlier referred to, when union officials (paid administrators as distinct from the hard working labourers whom they represented) apparently felt obliged to legitimise the much higher salaries which they earned above the people they represented, to take regular industrial action as a matter of inevitability. And perhaps the media was a party to this as, from a particular point in time, wage gains by unionists were published only as a percentage increase, with NO mention of the actual money involved. During my lifetime I have seen the standard of living enjoyed by many blue collar workers achieve a (material) level to which my father, a high school teacher, who used to have to moonlight to provide the basic essentials for his family, would never have dreamed of aspiring. The never ending upwards wage push brought with it things like one-man buses; the disappearance of driveway service at most service stations; and of course supermarkets. Wages paid to Australian workers made it necessary for much of our manufacturing industry to be moved offshore. Compared to other countries, both industrialised and developing, Australia started to price itself out of the international market. The only union to which I have belonged was the Australian Journalists' Association ... a piss-weak union that hardly deserved the title. The union called a strike from time to time, but only over wages, never over improved working conditions which were in fact archaic in the sixties and seventies. But during strikes, non-union staff managed to keep publishing a passable newspaper, so that the journalists never really had any serious bargaining power. I now "work" as an unpaid freelance journalist and, if I chose, I could ... for what seems to me an exhorbitant sum ... join the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. But I certainly wouldn't get my money's worth of protection and support. And so, because of the quite high standard of living enjoyed by many labourers and tradesmen ... especially in two-income families ... what originated as a desperate cry for a fair go, has lost its meaning as more and more union members are identifying with the callous, self-interested greedy aspirations represented by the ideology of the worst Federal Government this country has ever known ... that led by Howard and his hooligans. How, indeed, is Labor to develop a readily identifiable alternative to the conservatives when such a large proportion of its members and traditional supporters have, through material well-being, completely lost sight of (and interest in) the basic Labor ideal of a fair go for everyone? Julian Hancock
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