Scully today agreed to put on hold the cuts to station staff that brought the state to a standstill on Tuesday after State Rail management refused to attend a hearing in the Industrial Relations Commission to avert the stoppage.
The move was described by Rail Bus and Tram Union state secretary Nick Lewocki as a "fairly significant backdown" and a "win for commonsense".
He says its now up to State Rail to negoatiate genuine reform based on service delivery to the public, rather than a crude job-cutting exercise.
Labor Council secretary Michael Costa says the union movement will not tolerate anti-worker activity by management in government instrumentalities and departments.
"Our preferred position is to negotiate and consult, but if management is heavy-handed and confrontational there will be a response."
More Trouble Brewing
Despite today's backdown, bans remain in place on the Closed Circuit TV's that State Rail plans to use to replace of station staff. Workers say they are expected to monitor up to 12 stations at one time.
Meanwhile, State Transit bus drivers have given the State Transit Authority two weeks to withdraw a claim under the Reith industrial laws to slash 48 award conditions.
The RBTU has described the move as "a sheer act of bastardry", with proposals including:
- a one week reduction in annual holidays.
- reduced sick days from 15 to eight.
- capping the number of accrued sick days.
- reduction in overtime that can be accrued.
- longer unpaid meal breaks.- lengthening ordinary hours of work by two hours per day.
- reducing preparation time for shifts.
If that's not enough, members of the Australian Workers Union and the Municipal Employees Union are livid about the RTA's push to contract out rural road gangs and are likely to sponsor a series of tough resolutions on the conference floor.
All up, it should be an interesting weekend for The Skull.
The NSW Council of Social Services, the Ethnic Communities Council and the Labor Council of NSW released a Joint Communique following a half-day conference on Social Well-being.
"We note the continual pressure upon governments to be fiscally responsible, whilst at the same time responding to the ever increasing demands for government services," the Communique says..
"We recognise that governments should not just be responsible for the economic, but also the social well-being of the community.
"We accept that in a complex, modern and culturally diverse society demands for the provision of government services are limited by the community's willingness to sustain the taxation base.
"This raises two issues that governments must resolve:
- the level of resources required to maintain a cohesive society.
- and the distribution of these resources.
"We believe that a social audit would be a useful tool in resolving these issues by mapping:
- new quality of life indicators
- the community's expectations in terms of the provision of government services, including the special needs of particular groups such as from NESB, indigenous Australians and those with disabilities
- the current level and distribution of these services
- any gap in the above
"Accordingly, we call upon the federal and NSW governments to implement a wide-ranging social audit to map the demands and priorities for social infrastructure and services across NSW."
A similar resolution is expected to be debated at the State Conference.
Panel Discussion: edited extracts of the panel discussion
1.What is a social audit?
2. What are the priorities and objectives of social development?/
3. What can we do and who should be doing it?
Tony Vinson, UNSW
1. The idea should be to audit resources available in NSW, then match them with needs - of people (individuals and families), and areas. This is not that difficult. On October 20 I'm releasing a report with the Jesuit Society Justice Unit on the distribution of disadvantage via postcode areas -it looks at indicators like low birth weights, mortality, child abuse, court convictions, leaving age from school, etc.
I would hope a Social Audit would look at cultural and social practices, both formal and less formal services such as the frontline services provided in South-Western Sydney by relief agencies like St Vincent de Paul. It should also look at how those services are organised as well as mapping where all the money has gone.This could be done historically, looking at where was the money going 20 years ago and where they go today. Other factors to look at include outcasts (prisoners, refugees etc) and outcomes - "generosity, diversity and respect".
2. At the State level, there's an educative function as well as a need to decrease the amount of blatant discrimination that exists in society. Three suburbs, for instance, account for 30 per cent of female prisoners. There needs to be less social control - a move away from concentrating the State's policing where we're turning our backs on the communities' needs. There is also the need for stronger communities. This means objective and ongoing measurement of the strength of social bonds.
3. There are four questions Neville Wran always asked - what is it? why should we do it? who's going to do it? and how much will it cost? We should bring together all the groups involved .The way forward for a social audit is to build a broad campaign in support of it.
Linda Burney - NSW Reconciuliaiton Committee
1.I'm not sure what a Social Audit is, but I do know that unless people work together, and across government, nothing will change. The present situation for indigenous people is unacceptable and seems unending, and without answer. Such complex situations are so huge and so challenging, people don't know where to start, but there's certainly no bloody need for more research. It's not just an issue of social justice for aboriginal people - it's about all of us, and how we see ourselves. There'll never be a feeling of peace in unless we come to terms with how this country came about. And how this country still is, especially the racism and paternalism rife in the way business is done with indigenous people. Two things are fundamental: equality and "the peace of the soul of this nation".
2.Equal outcomes, and finding a way to do things differently - there's been a lot of money spent, but not much change (as far as indigenous issues go). This leads to the notion of regional agreements, to pool lots of money. Partnerships and proper alliances are the way forward.
3. The answer lies in partnerships, proper and equal alliances in terms of stakeholders. It starts with indigenous people being able to meet with and reach out to Trades and Labour Councils, NCOSS and ECC-type groups. The very prevalent (and wrong) attitude when it comes to indigenous issues is one "hands off". Governments and NGOs also need to recognise symbols eg, flying flags, acknowledging country. Indigenous people also have a responsibility to get involved, and there's a reciprocal responsibility for agencies to give the indigenous people a voice. We have to bring people in from the margins, make indigenous issues part of the mainstream agenda. Consultation is no longer good enough - there has to be negotiation. Finally, another step we can take right now is to look at what joins us, not what divides us.
Chris Sidoti - Human Rights Commissioner
1. The starting point is the question "what is social?" Social has to have a hard edge, but it's clearly not economic. Social is human rights, and tangible things - health, education, nutrition. We must ask whether we are we getting better or worse? We must ask these questions both in global and micro terms, as the audit needs to be able to identify pockets of disadvantage. It's a progressive process, not immediate, but there is an obligation to go forward - so are we? Three steps are necessary: define benchmarks - life expectancy of individual groups, determining targets and measuring progress against the benchmarks and targets.
2. Priorities must be directed towards the attainment of four values - inclusion, participation, equality (true equality, that is not just treating everyone the same but making allowances if need be so that some people have a chance to get what others have), and community.
3 We should get community groups together to determine what are the key indicators for us. The Federal Goernment is committed to a National Action Plan on Human Rights, and reporting to the International Committee on economics and human rights. This would be a good place for communities to start contributing.
We should be aware of exactly what we are measuring.For example of a school bus run in the Northern Territory: one company did it in very efficient time, because if the kids weren't waiting it moved on, reaching the school with hardly any kids. Another driver stopped the bus, went and checked the kids were washed, fed and dressed, packed them on the bus and delivered them to school. Of course, he took longer (and was therefore less time-efficient), but achieved the purpose, which was to get aboriginal kids to school.
Percy Allen - Council fo the Cost of Government
1.. The Social Audit should be broader than a poverty or injustice inquiry, but narrower than a "spiritual" inquiry like that referred to be Clive Hamilton.. It should start by identifying the needs of a cross-section of the community , and - with the communities' help - assess the extent of provision. It should try to identify what people really need. And then look at how to fund them.We need to put in place a system to monitor outputs: performance indicators, social indicators, setting targets. We should also examine likely future changes in demand such as looking at the ageing of the population.
2.The market economy is here to stay. We have to become more efficient and clever, but the new knowledge economy means increasing inequity. The priority must be the "4 Es" - Balancing equity, efficiency, economic growth and the needs of the environment. The social priority must be to address poverty, especially amongst children. The recently released Blair Government report on poverty in the UK has some very useful indications to measure poverty that we could apply in a social audit.
3.There's a problem in that different groups are only interested in their own thing - you never see community organisations at a business lunch and vice versa. There needs to be more balance between the 4Es. You do have to identify areas of neglect, or the wider community won't realise there's a problem - unless it gets measured it won't get done. But the medium to longer-term outlook is also important. We should beware of making a Social Audit so big that nothing gets achieved. We should be asking clients what they want, then working backwards.
Eva Cox - UTS
1. Has recently worked on a social audit for The Body Shop . She fiound that 80 per cent of workers were proud of working there, and that's because The Body Shop "does good things". She introduced her notion of a "triple bottom line" - looking at financial, environmental and social indicators. The concept of the third bottom line is about making organisations acceptable to stakeholders - workers, customers, clients, suppliers, funders - amd asking what effect does the organisation have on the stakeholders?
2. A new debate is needed to put ethics back into work, we need action on the lack of leadership being shown and more respect for diversity, not tolerance.
3. Politicians don't want the information because it ruins a good policy! Disagrees with Percy and Tony - doesn't think tagging places as poor helps improve their situation leads to adhesion. Pouring resources into those identified areas doesn't give them a sense of control, but stigmatises them. We need to steadily build into those communities the idea that they're part of the wider community. We need to get up the idea of what is a society, not what is an economy.
A meeting of trade unions this week identified its priorities on key areas including a raft of industrial relations reforms which it says the government should introduce into Parliament as a matter of urgency.
These include forcing labour hire companies to pay employees the same rates and conditions as employees of the host company and giving the Industrial Relations Commission the power to set minimum rates for independent contractors.
It also calls on the government to allow workers to vote to charge a service fee for non-members who receive pay rises through the efforts of a trade union.
Other areas of agreement include:
- workers compensation reform with a firm position of no cuts to existing benefit levels.
- protection of worker entitlements - including the need for tougher legislation than that currently under consideration by the Howard Government.
- transmission on business and employment conditions - to ensure that recent court wins on contracting out flow through to NSW worker.
- competitive tendering in the NSW public sector - to ensure public sector workers have a reasonable opportunity to bid for contracts and that the social impact of such decisions are taken into account.
- support for a government wide review of social priorities (see lead story)
NSW Labor Council Michael Costa says the document represents unprecedented consensus within the trade union movement on critical policy issues.
"I hope that the document produced by the Labor Council provides delegates with a clear indication of the critical issues which the trade union would expect a Labor Government to address," Costa says.
The priorities document has been circulated to all affiliated unions and conference delegates.
by Noel Hester
Amid loud cheering and clapping about 800 members voted at South Sydney Oval to continue industrial action if restructuring and management inactivity on the enterprise agreement continue.
There was particular anger over Sydney Water's deliberate stalling on the enterprise agreement over the last 18 months.
Members gave management one month to come to the table with a constructive offer. If they don't another whole-of -Sydney Water stoppage is likely.
Members also left no doubt that the voluntary redundancy program offered to the entire workforce two months ago will lead to disputes within the different business areas.
ASU Secretary Alison Peters says management is obliged to follow a consultative procedure where it leads to significant restructure.
'The process for the voluntary redundancy program sees senior executives meet and look at individual applications. Eventually they restructure by default,' she said.
Members also committed themselves to broader union movement action, unanimously endorsing a public sector strike over continued job cuts.
ASU officials were pleased with the good turnout at Redfern Oval despite the transport difficulties on the day. 'We would have got 2000 only for the rail strike,' said Alison Peters.
According to a Public Service Association analysis, neither the Australian Bureau of Statistics nor the NSW Treasury can provide accurate figures on the size of the public sector.
For instance, while the ABS quotes 343,500 public sector workers in NSW, this includes workers employed in the state's 11 universities and all temporary, casual and part-time employees.
And the PSA says the NSW Government has not compiled a NSW Workplace data base since 1987 - although a fresh profile is due for release later this year.
The PSA says the lack of reliable statistics casts doubts on claims in the 1999-2000 Budget papers that employment in the Budget sector has blown out by 6.6 per cent between 1993 and 1998.
The union is also concern that Treasury's reporting of employment statistics "has become progressive less available to public scrutiny".
"The Association urges a cautious approach to any assertions by Government/Treasury regarding estimates of the size of the current NSW public sector workforce," PSA general secretary Janet Good says.
CFMEU state secretary Andrew Ferguson has written individually to all Democrat Senators admitting that the protests of the past month had been illegal under Peter Reith's Workplace Relations Act and that his Second Wave would make meaningful protests even harder.
"We believe that the industrial action that the union movement has taken has been one of many factors that prodded the government into finally taking action," Ferguson writes.
"Should the proposed legislation be passed we will be restricted to simply passing resolutions - and as the current tragedy has so graphically illustrated, words alone are of limited value."
Ferguson warns that under the proposed Reith changes trade union involvement on issues such as East Timor would be impossible.
"If, for example, such legislation had been in place during the 1970s, the Green Bans would never have happened. had they been attempted Jack Mundey and other would probably have spent years in jail," he says.
"And there are all the other different issues that unions have taken action on over the years, such as aboriginal rights, the environment, anti-Apartheid issues, the Vietnam war and many many more."
The Senate commenced hearings into the Reith amendments this week. See Jennie George's submission in 'From Trades Hall' column.
APHEDA Rep Surveys Dili
APHEDA executive officer Phil Hazelton has returned from Dili where he surveyed the extend of damage and looked at how Non Government Organisations are coordinating the relief effort.
He also witnessed the unloading of the East Timor Mercy Ship containing food, medicine and vehicles provided with the help of APHEDA donations..
Hazelton says while security seems to have been restored in Dili and the health situation is stabilising, about the half the buildings in Dili have been burned and many more looted.
However he says a number of major buildings are unscathed which is encouraging for the rebuilding effort.
Immediate concern centres around West Timor, where refugees are being stripped of their official papers and replaced with documents showing homes elsewhere in Indonesia. And there are still hundreds of people trying to get out of other parts of Indonesia such as Jakarta and Bali.
"The UNCHR must be pushed to allow East Timorese to register for immediate evacuation throughout Indonesia," Hazelton says.
Opera House Fundraiser
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is holding a benefit for East Timor in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House on Friday October 8 at 8.00pm.
Internationally acclaimed pianist Roger Woodward has agreed to perform at the concert, with all money raised going to the Catholic charity CARITAS. Tickets available at the Opera House box office.
STOPPRESS
The Transport Workers Union will launch an East Timor Appeal at the ALP State Conference - all proceeds to CARITAS
City office workers will be encouraged to clock off for the Big Lunch Break which will be held in Sydney's Hyde Park on Wednesday October 27.
Statistics show that office workers are working longer and harder with rising workloads forcing thousands to skip lunch every day. In the finance sector alone, more than one million hours of unpaid overtime are worked every week.
Labor Council organising co-ordinator Sarah Kaine says the day is a fun way to make a serious point - decent breaks make better workers.
"We're encouraging workers to take an active stand and take the breaks that are rightfully their's" Kaine says.
"There's are a law of diminishing returns in working through lunch - at the end of the day tired workers are not going to be efficient workers."
Key CBD unions including the Community and Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union, the Finance Section Unions and the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union will be involved in the day.
For further details contact Sarah Kaine at the Labor Council on 9264 1691
Bevis has written to the NSW Labor Council accepting the process could have been handled better, but maintaining the deal he cut was a good one.
"I accept that the process on junior rates was unsatisfactory," Bevis writes. " Since then I have met with senior officers of the ACTU at which additional procedures were agreed to ensure a similar problem does not arise.
"There is a shared desire to improve our communication process. I am personally committed to ensuring this is so."
Federal Labor outraged the union movement last month by striking agreement with the Howard Government that saw them overturn their plans to phase out youth wages.
Bevis says its important to recognise that Peter Reith had backed away from taking active steps to extend and entrench junior rates into new areas of the workplace.
And he says the deal still gives unions the opportunity to argue against youth wages through the Australian Industrial Relations Commission.
The policy was to have been based on regulations developed by a private body, Australian Standards, who set technical standards for household appliance. Federal cuts to Worksafe Australia mean there is no longer a public agency to develop such standards.
Both the NSW WorkCover Authority and the federal directors of Environmental Health voted against the standard when it was considered by a review committee. But representatives of employer and industry groups over-ruled them.
They say the Standard is inadequate because it is not based on health criteria and that evidence on the impact of passive smoking has not been taken into account.
Under the disputed Standard, hotel, restaurants and casinos would be able allow smoking in enclosed area, provided there was a minimum level of ventilation.
The Labor Council has called on the NSW Health Minister to put the new regulations on hold until the Standard is reviewed. It wants the matter referred to the Occupational Health and Safety Council, a state body comprising unions, employers and government representatives.
Labor Council safety watchdog Mary Yaager says the problems over the passive smoking policy highlight the pitfalls of allowing the private sector to set minimum occupational health and safety standards.
"It's regrettable that a well-intentioned government policy must be put on hold, but it's an important to get right," Yaager says.
These are the official results of a nationwide LHMU survey of child care work habits. The survey highlights problems of job insecurity and unpaid overtime.
Many child care workers complained that government funding cuts have forced them to do work-related shopping, programming, parent meetings and rostering outside their paid hours of work.
The majority of the surveyed child care workers also said that their workloads had increased over the past year. Fifty eight per cent say they are so overworked that they could not provide the right level of care.
Funding cuts to blame
Forty per cent indicated that they are now less satisfied with work than they were 12 months ago.
LHMU Assistant Secretary Cheryl Hyde says that employers had no legal right to force child care workers to do unpaid overtime. Hyde says the Howard Government's big funding cuts had thrown the industry into crisis.
'More than 100 centres have been forced to close. Many other centres have cut staff numbers in order to cope with the cuts,' she says.
Many parents have also withdrawn their children from centres after the fees went up to compensate for the cuts.
Union action plan
A recent national meeting of child care delegates and officials decided on an action plan for child care. The plan includes:
- leaflets to make child care workers aware of their rights, eg you don't have to work unpaid overtime
- a plan for the industry, including a better funding model
- recruiting more child care workers to make the Union stronger.
'Less staff, more stress'
Every week child care worker Kim Meeks works two hours of unpaid overtime.
'I just don't have time to do the weekly programming in my normal work hours so I do it at home on the weekend instead,' Kim says.
Kim is group leader at a community- based centre in Cairns. She says that the Howard Government cuts mean that her centre now has to do the same work with less staff.
'We are all more stressed now and not such a happy workplace any longer. But I still love working with children,' Kim said.
Because of the funding cuts, Kim's centre has also had to cut back on toys and equipment.
"It's a classic example that's no longer supposed to be happening in NSW, where the builder fails to pay the subcontractor and the subbie ends up unable to pay his workers' wages," says CFMEU organiser Brian Parker.
Samadi's tactics have allegedly resulted in subbies ending up being paid for less than 50 per cent of the work they've completed on the project.
The first and second formworkers are allegedly owed $100,000 and $75,000 respectively. A cement renderer is owed over $120,000.
"This is the kind of situation the Security of Payment legislation before NSW Parliament is supposed to be eliminating. But while we wait for the law to be changed, subcontractors are still being ripped off for work they have completed and workers end up losing their wages," said Mr Parker.
This exhibition, at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre is an opportunity to view a lifetimes work in one place, as well as being a significant event in the region's cultural history. The work is appealing and relevant, tapping into contemporary cultural, political and environmental events (works on endangered species, oil spills, economic inequality in North South "dialogue").
Also, in keeping with Aarons' lifelong struggle for the rights of working people, it is very democratic in nature so you don't need an arts history degree in some pseudo intellectual subject to appreciate the skills of the sculptor and to appreciate the power of his feelings for the events with which he is concerned. (based on exhibition essay by Elin Howe)
John Marsden, Chairman of the Casula Centre sums it up well when he writes that Eric Aarons "is a passionate man who has a commitment and dedication to his practice as an artist and to the political and social fabric of Australia. Aarons' work beautifully illustrates his physical relationship with the sensuality of both wood and stone while allowing us, as viewers, to connect with the organic nature of the world through his work."
(Life, Art and Politics: A retrospective exhibition by sculptor Eric Aarons. At Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (1 Casula Rd, Casula) until 17 October 1999)
I was wondering why there is so little news from the PTU in your otherwise excellent online publication. Though I have searched for it I cannot find our site and as we are in a protected barganing period with much happenning I wondered could we get a little news filtering through.
At a mass meeting in Redfern last week we decided to tell the spawn of the devil Peter Reith what we thought of his so called legislation.
It is the view of most bussies that if we do not fight now we will be back at the 'coal face' inside the next two years. I have a close working relationship with my depot delegate and would be pleased to provide information on where we are at from the drivers point of view.
Obviously I cannot speak for the PTU but I know the mood of my fellow slaves.
Regards
G.Evans
Brookvale depot
Ed's Reply Hope there's enough action for you this week!
I very much agree with your editorial on the 'meaningful contribution made by unions'. It appears that we have been convinced that the unions are here to merely make our life difficult and have contributed nothing. Timor, Green Bands and protection for basic human rights are three simple examples of what unions have achieved in our society.
The economic rationalism model states that there is no need for the union movement as 'the market' will find the perfect point of equilibrium. This translates that some magician will appear that makes everybody better off.
This is not to say that the unions have not made mistakes, but where would we be without the unions? Only by a balance of power between the various groups will we achieve an equitable solution. The next time someone complains about the safety of the rail system or the fact that the a restructure at work is causing havoc and people are losing their jobs, you have two possible responses;
1. Tell people not to worry about it, as the market is in a state of flux and will soon find its equilibrium if we pursue more rationalist policies. Then we will all find the perfect solution and job security will be guaranteed, because the market will ensure that supply equals demand! or
2. If we became a little more politically active (via the union movement or not) to drive our citizen rights and demand what is right, then maybe we could achieve a more equitable system.
I ask which is more likely to result in a more just society (and which is mere superstition)?
Nicholas Palazzo
On November 9, 1974 the State Employees of Rhode Island,USA (AFSCME Council 22 & 70) had a statewide strike. A woman crashed into the peaceful picket line killing one member, injuring another member who was wheelchair bound from that date on and breaking the arn of a third member. This occurred at the Rhode Island Medical Center in Cranston, Rhode Island.
The driver of the car was charged with manslauter. She was found guilty and sentenced to thirty (30) day in the Women's Prison. She donated blood therefore the state of Rhode Island allow her to leave prison after serving twenty (20) days. The life of a striker is cheap in Rhode Island.
This November 17, 1999 there will be a Memorial Service to remember these fallen member of AFSCME. It's keynote speaker will be the Internation Sec.-Treas. William Lucy. It is set up by AFSCME Council 94 (formerly Councils 22 & 70), Local 1350 AFSCME and the Rhode Island Labor History Society.
Richardson progressive and left wing?
Turn it up!
John Passant
*************
How can we get Peter Reith To WEST Timor where he belongs?
Barry Murphy
by Peter Lewis
On the Right - Eric
What are you hoping to get out of the discussion on the Party Branch structure?
Well, it's part of opening up the Party for greater participation and a bigger flow of ideas from the rank and file. It's an opportunity for any delegate to get up and just talk about where they see the future direction of the Party. I imagine we are going to get a whole different lot of contributions and I'm not really sure what people will say What I hope to get out if is is a lively debate and perhaps some good ideas on future debates for the officers to take up where we should go with the Party in the next century.
What are your views on some of those directions?
Well, as the Party Secretary I've got a number of items that are high on my agenda. A lot of those are really basic to the survival of the Party.
The first is a rejuvenation, re-opening up of the policy development areas of the Party, so we have now reformed the policy committees with a new structure. We've made them larger and we are really trying to break out of the factional mould and allow rank and file to participate on committees. Already we have had over 500 expressions of interest to go onto the committees, which shows there is keenness out there.
I think it is very important to promote training and actually skill up the membership and skill up our candidates and skill up the Party parliamentarians. We've embarked on the most ambitious training program probably in the last 10 years of the Party - training for new members of Parliament; media training; data base training for those who have to do data base work in campaigns; local Government campaigning training. We intend to do even more.
To what purpose?
I think you have to skill people up so that they can develop their own interests, whether it be policy or participation or both. We are a very broad political organisation and there's all sorts of way you can contribute. Some people just don't know how to get involved. They really do need a bit of training to be able to participate and make a good contribution. By increasing our training programme across the whole party we equip people so they can choose to become involved.
In terms of the activity in the branches, what sort of movements in branch membership have there been over recent times?
Well the Party membership's interesting. We are fairly static at the moment - between 23,000 and 25,000 members. I guess the problem is that we have a big churning of members. We get a lot of new members in a year but we lose a lot of members. And our biggest problem as an organisation is retaining members within the first two years. So if we can get them in, get them involved, get them interested we are halfway there to retaining them as longterm members, and that's really what the Party should be about. We have set a goal at the Administrative Committee to generate 50,000 members by 2005, which I think is achievable if we can get the mix right inside the Party.
Of course it's a question of the quality of member as well - whether it's someone who actually wants to be a member someone who's in there because of the stack?
Oh sure. Look, the issue of branch stacking is a really vexed one for the Party and has been for a long time. Realistically, NSW has taken some really strong action on branch stacking. We have the strongest anti-branch stacking rules in the country. Our model of anti branch stacking rules are being looked at by the Party nationally. It is much harder to actually qualify for preselection in NSW than any other State, and the truth is we have acted to really send the message to branch stackers. In the last couple of years we have refused or withdrawn the charter of six or seven branches on the issue of branch stacking. There are over 512 members in the Illawarra that had their membership refused at the local branches because of branch stacking. But it's an ongoing battle.
On policy, there is a feeling that no matter what resolutions are passed by Conference, the State Government will keep doing what it's been doing. Given that sort of set up when a Government is in power, how can you get a Conference that has any meaning?
Well, it's always hard to balance the Party structure against the Parliamentary structure. Because, now the fact is the Labor Party has a great structure for being in Opposition. When you are in Government things move a lot quicker than that and the Government needs to be responsive.
The key to the Conference is to make sure they set clear agenda issues and clear policy directions. Where the Government goes with those directions is really for the Parliamentary party to determine.
But before you were saying that policy was the hook to get new members into the Party. If it has no effect when you are in government what's the point of wasting the time, energy and formulating it?
Well, I don't accept that. If a resolution is passed at a conference and the government doesn't agree to it immediately, it doesn't mean that they won't agree to it in time. And it really becomes a task for the Party as an organisation, for the Party office to move Governments towards positions. People don't just dig in and lock into positions. Government is very dynamic and policy is dynamic, and often positions that a government may or may not accept initially, ultimately can be achieved in time.
What's your view of the weighting that unions have on the Conference floor?
There's some comment about the issue of 60/40. I don't really see it as a problem at the moment. It's a long tradition in the NSW branch. Other States have gone to a 50/50. I think in the long term it may be an issue in the NSW Branch. Some people have raised the problem that union membership in the workforce is around 30 per cent at the moment. There are some people in the Party that are questioning whether there should be a type of party membership that allows non-union members to join the Labor Party. Now, that's just something that's been tossed around and I really think there's a lot more discussion before anything seriously along those lines could be considered.
But if, as appears to be happening, unions start acting as a group rather than just factionally, that 60 per cent of the power actually increases ...
Yes and No. I mean, there are going to be traditional issues that unions will work together on - that's understandable. But I wouldn't underestimate the influence that the Labor movement has over the Party. I mean it was the Labor movement that created the Australian Labor Party, so it's only natural that they have a strong influence. But it's very rare that there is unanimous agreement on any issue at the conference.
If the Party was to move away from the union base what replaces it? What else is there that the Labor Party can represent?
I don't actually think you move away from the heritage or your roots. I think that's probably not the way to approach it. The truth is that we are a very different society to what we were 108 years ago, when the Australian Labor Party was created. Demands on society have changed. The pressures have changed. Unions have changed. Issues have changed. I don't think the class analysis of 108 years ago exists today in the way it did then. So, it's a different ball game. But the truth is that the Labor Party, particularly the NSW branch, is the most electorally successful party nationally. Now we have to continue, so we have to be prepared to change along with society. Now, what the future brings is hard to tell, but we do need to extend our membership. Part of our survival would be having a broad based membership, so that the Party's more reflective of society. I thing that's very important. But we will always have a very strong connection with the Labor movement.
Finally, what are your views on defactionalisation that has been promoted by the Labor Council?
I don't think it's really my part to comment on the Labor Council and defactionalisation. I think the issues that NSW Labor Council deals with and the way they operate lends itself in many cases to work across the factions. And really factionalism now is more about the Group you tend to line up with than about power. The Party is a little bit different. It is a very different structure to the Labor Council, and frankly I think that the faction system, with all its inherent problems and warts is really a system that's really allowed the NSW branch to have a very robust debate over a long period of time within an informal structure, which has been beneficial for the Party. The Party has been very successful electorally. Very successful, and you can't help that suspect that part of that is that we really have got internal processes - that allow debate and differences to be worked out in an informal way. And I think in some ways it strengthens the branch. So factions do offer benefits. The problems occur when people get carried away and start stacking branches. We must stop these escesses.
And on the Left - Damian
Monday's Conference has time allocated to a broad discussion of branch structure. What would you hope would come out of this?
This is not just about branch structure, it's about the future direction of the Party. It's a starting point for who we want to recruit to the Party. Who do we want bring into the Party who currently isn't in the Party? And in those areas I think the overriding proviso is everybody who joins the Party have to be supporters of the union movement. If we are recruiting we should be looking to members of unions who aren't in the Party, disillusioned Democrats, young people concerned about the environment, people who support a more tolerant open Australia. I don't subscribe to the view that we automatically gravitate towards small business people, although I wouldn't oppose them joining the Party provided they were pro-union - that is, a member of the union or, it you are an employer or self-employed, within the union that covers your sphere of work.
That's a key underlying point - when you think about recruitment you have to have a very clear idea about who you are targeting. It's no use trying to pitch our message to people in the community who aren't prepared to support the union movement. That's not the sort of Party we want - we want to trawl among those people you might call politically keyed in to our existing values.
What do you think is the single biggest problem the Party faces?
The single biggest problem is the influence of money. On the hand it's very clear to me that the union movement is finding for a combination of reasons - both political and financial - that there is less money out there for the Party. At the same time as the chasing of the corporate dollar is in full swing - I'm concerned that someone like Eric seems to spend more time with the opponents of our affiliates than our actual affiliates. I think that will have a bad long term impact on the Party.
But doesn't the Party need money to fight elections?
There's a need to find a way for a progressive political party that represents people and organisations that are not cashed up to the hilt, or are not profit making to find a way that we can compete successfully in politics without the need to be brought off by the corporate sector. I'm concerned that recent developments show you can buy your position on the Labor Party ticket if you throw enough money into the can. That's a very bad development.
How do you think talk of winding back factions in the industrial wing impacts on the running of the ALP?
It's a bit like Halley's Comet - even if Halley didn't name it or never even noticed it, it would still be there. Things happen whether they are talked about or not. I think factions per se will always exist but what does change over time is the structure and focus of those factions and the interrelationships of those factions. I think that at some early level, there are signs of a better level of co-operation between the factions. An example was the state election. I thought that once we kicked off the campaign that we worked very well and there was not a factional climate around the office. I've got to say that as soon as the election was over it returned and it is wrong to get starry eyed and think that somehow this Party is opening up. Since the state election there's been a number of appointments on the ninth floor, they've all been from this small elite group that represents less than one pre cent of the party. The other 99 per cent of the party can go hang. That's not a good development and there is still a general need for it to open up.
What would be a sign to you that things had changed?
It's the little things. On the surface there is a veneer that things are freer, but the reality is that since Eric has become general secretary he has started the process of Thursday morning right-wing official meetings - which means every official in the office except for me crowds into his office and has an almighty pow-wow about issues they don't want me to know about.
We've moved from the days where we had factional thugs with pencils to factional thugs with computers and we think that because we have a computer we've moved on and become more modern. Eric wants to call himself the "thoroughly modern general secretary" - but the reality is that he's brought in things that Della never did. There's a large part of the computer system that I don't have access to - but that the other assistant secretary and all the organisers do. All the other positions have keys to all the offices on the floor , including my own - but I only have access to my own office - not even a key to the photcopy room. Why is it that Admin Committee members don't get the business papers until actually after the starting time of Admin? In the scheme of things, they are little - but it shows how the office operates.
Finally you are putting up a couple of propositions for State Conference, what are they about?
The Left's putting up a whole heap of propositions at the Conference. I think we have common ground on issues like the Republic and East Timor. You also have the Left and the union movement coming together on a whole range of issues such as competitive tendering and the social audit. So one of the remarkable things about this conference is that there is a whole lot of common ground on important issues - and some of these won't please the government.
Of the more challenging issues, I'd pinpoint a couple - first the need for the social audit to find a source of funding. This is the proposition that recognises the need for fiscal restraint but says that a zero debt strategy is going way too far in the current environment. If that is relaxed then there is a source of funds to fund the social audit. The other one is the notion of Ministerial Accountability which hopefully we'll get common ground on to ensure there is a better cycle of accountability from Conference to Conference, with ministers more systematically required to account for the decisions passed at the previous conference. One of the weaknesses at the moment is things go through and they never get followed up. This actually arose out of a review of the policy committees and of how we make the policy committees more relevant. Hopefully that will really beef it up.
by Dr Clive Hamilton
In this address I would like to talk about a fundamental question - a question which is rarely talked about and yet underpins everything people like us do in our work. The question is: What makes people happy? Although we all talk as if our common objective is to improve community well-being, we rarely stop to ask just what it is that makes for a more contented society, and more contented individuals.
When we start to examine this issue, we are confronted with some very uncomfortable questions. For me the biggest one is this: Why do we as a nation invest enormous faith in the ability of economic growth to make us happier? Let's face it, the belief in growth is perhaps the most powerful belief shared by our political leaders, business people, and commentators. But, as I will suggest, the evidence to support this belief is hard to find.
But I am jumping ahead of myself.
Who is happy?
There has been some fascinating work around the world on measuring happiness or well-being. A number of surveys have reported measures of life satisfaction based on self-reported levels of happiness for various countries.
Who do you think are the happiest people in the world? Do we in Australia feel happier than people from, say, New Zealand, Japan or Argentina? A study of 48 selected countries reported 'average appreciation of life' ibn the early 1990s suggests that the Dutch are the happiest people in the world and the Bulgarians are the most miserable. Perhaps the Bulgarians, along with Eastern Europeans in general, are naturally lugubrious, or perhaps the surveys were taken during dark chapters in their histories. We in Australia appear to be reasonably happy by international standards but, as we will see, other evidence indicates that we are distinctly unhappy about where we are going.
At a personal level, although we all say we would like to have more money, we also know deep down that it will not bring happiness. Economists and psychologists have studied this issue in some detail. The evidence strongly suggests that, at least in advanced countries like Australia, to the extent that income matters, it is not so much our level of income that affects our happiness but what our income is relative to other people's incomes and to our expectations about what our incomes should be.
At a national level, there is a weak correlation between a country's income and perceived well-being, but the relationship may be due to other factors such as the prevalence of political freedom and democracy, or tolerance of difference. Some evidence also suggest the reverse. For example, within Asia residents of wealthy countries such as Japan and Taiwan regularly report the highest proportion of unhappy people while the countries with the lowest incomes, such as the Philippines, report the highest number of happy people. Overall, then, it is unlikely that additional income would make much difference to well-being in developed countries such as Australia.
At the personal level, research over a long time by social psychologists has shown that we are not nearly as materialistic as the marketing society and political ideology suggests. People consistently place other aspects of life ahead of income and material wealth. These other aspects of life typically include satisfactions with friendships and leisure activities along with satisfaction with family, job, life-style and health.
The Australia Institute has recently published an analysis of perceptions of quality of life in Australia (Eckersley 1999). The survey shows that only 24% of Australians think that life in Australia is getting better; the same proportion believe that the 1990s have been the decade of highest quality of life. Over a third (36%) say life is getting worse, with slightly more (38%) saying it is staying about the same. About half say the 1970s or 1980s were the best decade.
The results of the survey contradict recent claims of a new mood of optimism in Australia, although they do suggest a lift in public mood within the past two years: in 1997, only 13% of Australians thought quality of life was improving, while about half thought it was declining.
Some more detailed research has broken down the variation of happiness levels between individuals into major components. Personal psychological factors (such as degree of extroversion and self-control) explain 30% of variation in levels of happiness. Life events such as divorce, the birth or death of a child and illness, account for a further 25%.
Social participation, including voluntary and paid work activities and marriage, account for another 10%. It is surprising to discover that income and material wealth account for only about 10% of the variation in personal levels of happiness.
While we might all dream of how our lives would be different if we won the lottery, in fact people who do win the lottery are no happier one year after the event than they were before. In one of the most thorough investigations of the determinants of happiness, the researchers concluded: "A sense of meaning and purpose is the single attitude most strongly associated with life satisfaction".
Is life getting better?
We often hear people talking about "progress" as if there is an inevitable historical process taking us to a better future. We see medical breakthroughs relieving suffering and prolonging life, technology allows us to do things better and faster, cities grow, athletes break records and our GDP keeps on rising. There is a presupposition that life should be getting better. But is it? What if we have plenty of progress but we are no happier, and are perhaps less happy, than we were 50 years ago?
The survey also found that 75% of Australians rated 'being able to spend more time with your family and friends' as very important in improving their personal quality of life, while 66% rated 'having less stress and pressure in your life' as very important. Only 38% rated as very important 'having more money to buy things'
Even though GDP keeps rising, most people believe that life is getting worse, even those who benefit most from economic growth. Surveys in the USA show that even though average incomes have doubled in real terms since the late 1950s the proportion of the population describing themselves as very happy has not increased and may have declined.
Economic growth
The broad conclusion from all of this is that as incomes rise, income and economic factors become less important in well-being. This has been described by the British economist Sir John Hicks as the 'law of diminishing marginal significance of economics'.
Yet despite all of the evidence, more than ever before, economic growth is the touchstone of policy success. Every newspaper, every day, quotes a political leader or a commentator arguing that we need more economic growth to improve our level of national well-being, to build a better society. The release of the quarterly national accounts unfailingly receives extensive coverage. Picking out growth in gross domestic product (GDP), journalists write as if they have a technical barometer of our nation's progress. Produced by some of our best statisticians using the internationally agreed system of national accounting, GDP appears to provide a measure of prosperity that is immune to argument.
If GDP reaches or exceeds expectations, government leaders crow about their achievements. If it falls below expectations, the Opposition seizes on the figures to attack the Government's poor performance. The fetish with the national accounts reached its zenith with Prime Minister Keating's comment on one quarter's figures: "This is a beautiful set of numbers". Few were persuaded that the reality was as beautiful as the numbers.
In the presence of sustained economic growth throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Australians have been strangely restive. They are disgruntled, fractious and suspicious of the claims by politicians that the economy is doing well. There is a widespread perception, confirmed by social researchers such as Richard Eckersley and Hugh Mackay, that life in Australia is not improving, but is in fact deteriorating. If growth is so good for us, how come it seems that things are getting worse?
The Genuine Progress Indicator
To shed some light on this question, the Australia Institute has developed the Genuine Progress Indicator as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of changes in national well-being. The GPI has been calculated for a number of other countries and is a very powerful device for raising questions about the preoccupation with growth and the lesser importance attributed to environmental protection and the social costs of the growth process.
The motivation for the GPI is the observation that GDP excludes a range of important influences on economic well-being and measures others incorrectly. GDP measures only the value of goods and services that pass through markets. It measures their value, and therefore their contribution to economic well-being, by the prices that markets attach to them. Yet we know that an economy with GDP growth of 4% with a high level of unemployment is not improving national well-being as much as an economy with GDP growth of 4% with a low level of unemployment.
Similarly, an economy growing at 4% is to be preferred if the fruits of growth are distributed more rather than less evenly, if output is associated with less rather than more pollution and land degradation, and if foreign debt is lower rather than higher. The 23 factors built into the GPI include income distribution, the value of household work, the costs of unemployment, the costs of commuting, the costs of climate change and ozone depletion and land degradation.
The GPI attempts to account systematically for many of these factors to provide a better measure of changes in national well-being.
The results of the GPI calculations over the period 1950-1996 tell a powerful story, one that contradicts the rosy picture of eternal progress that the GDP figures paint. Adjusted to eliminate the effects of inflation, GDP per Australian rose from around $9 000 in 1950 to over $23 000 in 1996, an annual rate of growth of 2.1 per cent. If we take GDP to be a measure of national well-being, then young people today are much better off than their parents were; life is much better than it was in the 1950s and has continued to improve in each decade.
But when account is taken of the 23 other factors included in the Genuine Progress Indicator, a radically different picture emerges. The GPI per person rises largely in line with GDP throughout the 1950s and 1960s; but everything changes in the 1970s. Since the late 1970s, the GPI does not rise at all. The sharp divergence between rising GDP and stagnant GPI since the late 1970s suggests that for the last two decades in Australia the costs of economic growth have outweighed the benefits.
The Australian GPI results mimic precisely the pattern in other industrialised countries, including the USA, Britain and several European nations. The decline in measured well-being since the 1970s reflects the impacts of globalisation, a phenomenon characterised by rapid financial integration of the world economy, huge and unstable capital markets, the emergence of stagflation and chronic unemployment and the dominance of economic policies premised on a belief in small government and unfettered markets.
Psychological research
There is a vast literature on each of these, work that has had little influence on policy makers. But one of the most interesting research programs of recent times has direct relevance for social change and public policy.
In a series of studies, Kasser and Ryan distinguish between two sets of beliefs about the sources of happiness. The first is the belief that the path to happiness lies in the pursuit of the external goals of wealth, fame and physical attractiveness. The second is that happiness grows from striving for intrinsic goals - deeper relationships, personal growth and contributing to the community.
The first set of beliefs is a self-centred system, one in which happiness is derived by extrinsic material rewards won in the outside world. Clearly, this is the modern myth of consumer society; we are bombarded every day with images and messages that attempt to persuade us that we can find contentment and fulfillment by acquiring this product or that one, or by pursuing a perfect body image or clawing our way up the corporate ladder. We celebrate the wealthy, the powerful, the famous and the beautiful.
After classifying individuals according to whether they operate on a belief in extrinsic goals or intrinsic goals, the researchers then ask which group is happier. The conclusions are unambiguous:
individuals oriented towards materialistic, extrinsic goals are more likely to experience lower quality of life than individuals oriented toward intrinsic goals (Kasser 1999).
Not only are those with extrinsic orientation in life less happy than those with intrinsic goals, but they make others less happy too.
Further, extrinsically oriented individuals are shown to have shorter, more conflictual, and more competitive relationships with others, thus impacting the quality of life of those around them. In sum, the pursuit of personal goals for money, fame and attractiveness is shown to lead to a lower quality of life than the goals of relatedness, self-acceptance and community feeling (Kasser 1999).
Although this research program has focussed on the USA, the results are beginning to be replicated in other cultures, notably Germany, Russia and India.
The implications of this new research for social development and public policy are far-reaching. The results suggest that the more the media, advertisers and opinion makers emphasise financial success as the chief means to happiness, the more they promote social pathologies.
In conclusion
In conclusion then, to question the use of GDP is to pose a simple but extremely challenging question about economic growth - growth of what? While this is a question that has been put most forcefully by environmentalists, in recent years thinkers and commentators from the conservative end of the political spectrum have begun to challenge the preoccupation with 'economic reform' and by implication the growth project itself. Writers such as B. A. Santamaria, Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson have been asking whether the social costs of the policies of economic rationalism have been worth the supposed benefits in terms of higher GDP growth. The US GPI researchers Cobb, Halstead and Rowe have made this observation on the discomfort with the growth obsession shared by the environmental and social conservative camps:
Much as this pursuit [of growth] turns ancient forests into lumber and beaches into sewers, so it turns families into nodes of consumption and the living room into a marketing free-fire zone. Both camps speak from the standpoint of values against the moral relativism and opportunism of the market.
The answer, then, is not to reject growth as such, but to go beyond the obsession with economic growth and focus on the things that really can improve well-being in Australia. The answer is to redefine progress in terms of the richness of our community and personal lives and the quality of the natural environment, rather than never-ending expansion of resource use and material consumption.
The problem with growth is that it can destroy the things that really improve our well-being in pursuit of the things that do not. The accumulation of financial capital has increasingly come at the expense of the destruction of our social capital and the natural environment. We need to remind ourselves that we live not in an economy but in a society embedded in the natural world, and that the purpose of the economy is to serve the people.
If we are to survive and prosper in the third millennium we need a revolution in the way we think about and improve personal and social well-being. At present our national accounting system promotes a profoundly misleading picture of changes in national prosperity in Australia. GDP fails to recognise that the growth process produces ill-being in addition to well-being, 'bads' as well as goods, yet it is the principal measure of success used by our political leaders.
The principal function of government in a post-growth society should be to protect, expand and enrich our human, social, cultural and natural capital. This demands an epoch-making transformation of political and social thinking, one that transcends the 19th century belief that economic growth and material consumption mark out the path to happiness.
Once they have overcome their preoccupation with growth at all costs, governments could do many things to increase social well-being. In the 21st century, governments committed to improving the happiness of their citizens will need to:
� redistribute work, both to provide jobs for those who do not have them and to relieve the pressure on those who are overworked;
� promote more satisfying jobs with greater emphasis on the intrinsic benefits of work;
� invest in developing the personal skills that make relationships survive the difficult times;
� genuinely redistribute income so that those living in poverty have adequate access to the material needs of life;
� refuse to sacrifice the natural environment on the altar of higher incomes;
� build the infrastructure for more supportive and trusting communities; and
� develop and apply better measures of social progress so that governments and communities can accurately determine where they are going.
This is an edited copy of the keynote address from this week's Social Well-Being Conference, jointly sponsored by the Labor Council, NCOSS and the EEC.
The principal object of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 is "to provide a framework for cooperative workplace relations which promotes the economic prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia."
Any objective assessment of the Act and its operations must give weight to:
� industrial considerations - what is going on in our workplaces, and how workers are being treated in their working lives;
� social considerations - how different sections of the community are faring and how this impacts on all of us as a society; and
� economic considerations.
It is not sufficient to just consider macro economic variables such as the rate of inflation, aggregate wages growth and productivity outcomes in isolation from the actual impacts on people and whether or not the benefits of economic growth have been fairly distributed.
The ACTU hopes that our submission will shed light on some fundamental issues that confront working people in their everyday lives.
Firstly, how has it affected working people and their families?
- Do they believe conditions of employment have improved?
- Are they secure in their employment?
- Have they lost conditions and suffered wage cuts?
- Are they provided with adequate protection in bargaining with employers?
- Has agreement making been fair and were they provided genuine choice about individual contracts or collective agreements?
Secondly, what impact has the Act had in broader terms:
- Has the legislation produced a fairer society?
- Is the industrial safety net continuing to protect those who are most vulnerable?
- Is there a proper balance in the bargaining relationship between employers and workers?
- Have we effectively used the institutional framework for conciliation and arbitration which has worked well for our society since Federation;
- What are the real issues for employees and employers in a changing labour market and does the legislation address them adequately?
When I appeared before this Committee on July 4, 1996 in relation to the Bill then before the Parliament, I argued that the proposed legislation would:
".......significantly reduce fairness in the workplace, leave the weakest in the most vulnerable situation, erode established practices and values supported by the community and inevitably lead to a widening of income and social inequalities."
Regrettably, the ACTU's predictions have come true. Since the 1996 amendments we have witnessed a range of negative outcomes, including
� erosion of the Award system with significant entitlements lost
� a facilitation of the growth in precarious employment, especially in full-time casual and temporary employment
� growing job insecurity
� lack of adequate protection of employee entitlements
� workers working longer and harder, which has impacted negatively on the balance of work and family life.
� inequities in the distribution of work
� a widening of income inequality
� wages growth per hour has been less for part time and casual workers than full time workers
� the gender pay gap is widening in overaward payments and in a range of industries
� many vulnerable workers have experienced wage cuts, through the loss of financial compensation for non standard working hours
� a dual labour market has emerged, with the most vulnerable workers in the most precarious forms of employment and on lower wages
In 1996 I also pointed out that our industrial relations system was crafted at the turn of the century to deal fairly with the conflicts which inevitably arise in the employment relationship, and to take account of the inequality of bargaining strength which is inherent in that relationship.
The ACTU argued that the Government's promotion of the notion of "choice" and "fair agreement making" was mere rhetoric.
I said,
"Many workers, particularly women, young people, part timers and workers in labour intensive service industries will be stripped of award protection and pushed into individual agreements offering substantially lower wages and conditions."
And regrettably, again, this is exactly what has occurred. In case after case there has been no choice in agreement making. Workers have been coerced into accepting individual contracts and at times provided inducements for accepting AWA's. Despite the lack of public scrutiny, researchers report that overall AWA's and non union agreements "are far more likely than union agreements to contain provisions which reduce the compensation for non standard working hours... and provide for no wage increases." (ACIRRT)
In 1996 we also argued that
"The Bill is intended to begin the process of wage reduction for the most vulnerable and prepare for the next stage by weakening the Commission and attempting to minimise the role of unions in the industrial relations system."
The traditional functions and powers of the Commission have been weakened; unions and their members have come under increasing attack as witnessed in the MUA dispute, ILO Conventions on collective bargaining and the right to organise have been breached, and collectivism undermined at every opportunity.
The proposed amendments to the Act can only exacerbate the situation.
They are patently unfair, unnecessary, unjust and unworkable.
No case has been made by the Government for the proposed legislation either on economic, social or industrial grounds.
The Bill should be withdrawn.
The nation's political leaders would be well advised to listen to the concerns of ordinary working people and consider seriously the ACTU's proposed amendments. They seek:
� to ensure that the Industrial Relations Commission has the powers it needs to resolve disputes;
� to give workers the security of a strong award system with fair wages and conditions;
� to enable workers to be able to choose to be represented by their union in collective enterprise agreements, if that's what they want.
The ACTU does not believe that Australians want a society where the balance has moved so heavily towards employers. Where the Industrial Relations Commission has no power to assist them reach agreement with employers, or decide matters where agreement cannot be reached. Where they have no effective right to strike, or any other way or having their claims heard and decided.
This Bill reflects the partisan and divisive approach which the Minister has taken to industrial relations issues, epitomised in his role in last year's waterfront dispute.
The ACTU urges the Committee to recommend that any legislative change is directed towards increasing balance, fairness and justice in our industrial relations system.
by Sarah Fitzpatrick
In the Solomon Islands the lawyers for the Earthmovers Inc continue to keep the workers in the courts - even though each decision over the last two years has been in the workers' favour. Meanwhile, at least one child has died of malnutrition.
Striking workers are without food for their families. With support from many unions and organisations in Australia and around the region, the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers has been able to provide subsistence level supplies and many people have established small food gardens.
Even these small gardens are problematic. Most of the workers are Malaitams who have come to the main island of Guadalcanal so many are planting on other people's customary land. As the economic situation in the Solomon Islands comes under pressure there is mounting ethnic tension which recently erupted into violence.
The striking workers are asking for a new collective agreement and for an increase of 11.8% on the US25c per hour they were paid by the Malaysian company which sends round logs directly our of the Solomon Islands. The company is logging virgin forests. It pays minimal tax and royalties. No wonder they are opposing trade unionism.
The impact of the nearly two year long strike is being felt by over 400 families. In the early stages, SINUW reached agreement with many schools to waive fees because education is not freely provided in the Solomon Islands. Children are paying the price of Earthmovers Inc unwillingness to recognise the union and to pay even the little more the workers are asking. Many of the children are now out of school. The company can calculate freely on there being extra pressure on the workers from families who are in desperate straits, seeing their children's' need. Family units suffer under such pressure. Domestic violence can increase, there can be calls to forget the long term gains of trade unionism and go for the short fix.
In a range of tactics, Earthmovers Inc had evicted many workers from even the slum houses they previously inhabited. Management has been "cleaned out" so many Malaysian workers have left the country - and they have left behind the Solomon Islander women whom they had taken as wives - and the children they had fathered. The very basis of local culture had been attacked. An old man died in one of the logging camps. This company worth millions and millions of dollars would not pay for the body of the elderly worker to be taken back to his home for burial.
The company has been able to afford this long battle because, with the Asian economic crisis, prices were down and it had a massive stockpile of logs to move.
The company can afford it. The children, families and workers can not.
Australians are ranged on both sides of the legal battles. Earthmovers Inc have been employing expensive high profile barristers and solicitors. There are many rumours of bribery and pressure on local officials in the Solomon Islands.
Now, Stephen Howells and Judith Bornstein, barristers form Melbourne are volunteering support for the workers, Labour lawyers Orm Thomas and Bob Whyburn are representing SINUW and have, together with the CFMEU, been fundraising to help cover costs and provide food.
Many union within Australia have contributed to help supply food and basic medical supplies over the past two years. The International Federation of Building and Wood Workers to which SINUW is affiliated wishes to thank all those who have responded to its call for solidarity.
by Neal Towart
* January 1892 - Twenty-one delegates attended, small by today's standards, but this set the foundations for the future of the ALP. A broad view of party membership was adopted. All men and women who subscribed to the Platform and paid their dues of 4 shillings per year. The central executive committee would be "the executive body of the league and the tribunal to which all disputes and all matters affecting the general welfare of the league shall be submitted for decision".This might not sound exciting but the mere fact that women were allowed and encouraged to be a part of the political process was practically unheard of (concrete results for women and real equality in the party were some time off, still being fought for in fact).
The Pledge is consolidated at this conference. The rudimentary Pledge adopted by the Labor Council in March 1891, and George Black's Pledge of July 1892 were combined and strengthened.
� Members nominated for selection as candidates shall, before a ballot is taken, give a written pledge (a) that they will not contest the seat in the event of their not being selected by the branch, and (b) also a written pledge to uphold the Platform of the League if elected to the Parliament of the Colony, and to vote on all questions as the majority of the Parliamentary Labor Party in caucus may decide, or resign their seats.
These and other decision were the strongest moves by the Party to assert its independence from its founding body, the Labor Council.
* 1907 state conference Fighting Platform
Calls for closer settlement, graduated land tax, water conservation and irrigation, and a State bank. Other planks called for concessional freight rates on the railways, free education at technical and secondary levels, with the university [Sydney], to be open, on a bursary system, to all who could pass a qualifying test; and pensions to be payable at sixty. The industrial relations plank called for workers' compensation and regulation of working hours.
* 1910 Conference Fighting Platform for the election.
Constitutional reform high on the agenda with "abolition of the Legislative Council and the substitution of initiative and referendum" the first plank.
* 1916 anti conscription resolution (moved by Arthur Rae)
That this conference solemnly pledges itself to oppose, by all lawful means, conscription of human life for military service abroad, and directs all Leagues and affiliated unions to take immediate steps to oppose all Labor members who vote for or otherwise support conscription, so as to make this matter the issue between the forces of democracy and despotism.
* 1922 NSW Labor, chiefly the AWU, rejects the incorporation of the Socialist Objective, adopted by the federal Conference in 1921, into the NSW Platform.
* 1923 federal Labor begins its fighting with the NSW party. Also the ousting of the executive lead to Jack Lang becoming leader, and the arch manipulator held sway for many years after.
* 1939 Unity conference enshrined the supremacy of the conference, the authority of the Party executive, the rights of the parliamentary party and the primacy of the parliamentary leader.
* 1980 "The NSW Labor Party in government must acknowledge as its priority in the social welfare field the establishment of a policy of responding to social injustice in our society on a rational priority basis....the Government must quickly establish a clear picture of the areas in need and proceed via adequate funding and planning to meet those needs. After acquiring a picture of needs via adequate demographic and social indicators, the next and most important step is the establishment of a consultation process with local people and their community workers".
* 1989. State conference called upon to reiterate its previously expressed intent that the University of Western Sydney be named Chifley University, and that immediately on resuming government that this initiative be put in place.
Opposes the sell-off of government owned public enterprises.
Commits to the protection of contract workers.
(based on Cause for Power: the official history of the NSW branch of the ALP by Graham Freudenberg (Pluto Press, 1991); and ALP (NSW Branch) annual conference papers to 1989.
by David Chin
The 1996 Senate inquiry submissions made by ICTUR in respect to the Bill that became the Workplace Relations Act 1996 were vindicated by subsequent findings of the Committee of Experts of the International Labour Organisation.
The ILO Committee of Experts has found that the 1996 Act contravenes fundamental ILO standards on freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining in a manner foreshadowed by ICTUR in its 1996 Senate submissions.
Australia should be seen fully to comply with international obligations because Australia plays an important part in the community of nations and it is important that Australia demonstrates leadership in the observance and application of international human rights instruments
ICTUR urges the Senate Committee to recommend that the government takes steps to comply with its international obligations, and to introduce amending legislation to comply with all relevant ILO Conventions, including Conventions Nos 87 and 98 and the Termination of Employment Convention. ICTUR also urges the Senate Committee to recommend that the government desist from implementing the proposals in the 1999 Bill that would compound Australia's breaches of its international obligations and generate further criticism from the supervisory bodies of the ILO.
Chapter 1 - Restructuring the Commission, Conciliation & Mediation
Proposed ss 16(1) and 16(1A) of the 1999 Bill propose the establishment of a system of fixed term appointments to the AIRC. This will have the effect of removing the long entrenched provisions of the 1996 Act which provide for tenure of members of the AIRC to age 65.
In ICTUR's submission proposed ss 16(1) and 16(2) unnecessarily threaten the impartiality and independence of the AIRC. In particular:
(a) it is fundamental to the effective operation of the AIRC that the public perceives that decisions of the AIRC are made independently. The introduction of fixed term appointments has the potential to disturb this perception by giving rise to concerns that the AIRC is not adequately protected from external governmental influences;
(b) the provisions in proposed s 16(1A) permitting repeated reappointment of members to the AIRC increases the likelihood of the public perceiving members of the AIRC to be more inclined to uphold decisions that they otherwise would have considered inappropriate in order to secure reappointment; and
(c) the provisions in proposed s 16(1A) permitting repeated reappointment mean that members of the AIRC have no ongoing job security. There is a risk therefore that an AIRC member may become reliant upon parties who have appeared before him/her for future work in the industrial relations sphere.
(d) Moreover, the provisions of the 1999 Bill do not accord with a number of fundamental tenets of international law which recognise the importance of the independence of decision makers: see in particular Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and principles 2, 11 and 12 of the Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary.
The provisions of the 1999 Bill which provide for the establishment of a system of voluntary conciliation make it clear that the voluntary conciliation procedure is of limited application: see in particular proposed ss 88AB(1) and 88AC(3).
In ICTUR's submission the fetters imposed by proposed s 88AC(3) are unnecessary. The express requirement that the AIRC make a preliminary determination as to whether the matter before it falls within the scope of proposed s 88AB(1) introduces unnecessary complications to the conciliation process and has the potential to inhibit the AIRC in assisting the parties to expeditiously resolve the matter in issue.
Moreover, the provisions of proposed s 89A(1)(a) which provide that the AIRC can deal with an industrial dispute by compulsory conciliation only if it is about allowable award matters will effectively curtail the proper functioning of the AIRC by severely limiting its compulsory conciliation jurisdiction.
The introduction of a system of such complexity should not be entertained. Industrial disputation needs to be resolved as quickly as possible so as to ensure the continuation of productive working relationships and to minimise the damage to the Australian economy that can arise from industrial disputes.
Chapter 2 - Awards, Certified Agreements & AWAs
Collective bargaining is the prime means by which workers are able to redress the inherent imbalance in bargaining power between employers and individual employees. In Australia, collective agreements between unions and employers have been traditionally reflected in awards that were largely the product of agreement and, more recently, in certified agreements.
The right to collective bargaining is regarded internationally as a central component of a select cluster of "core" labour standards that form a subset of internationally accepted basic human rights.
The 1996 Act established a clear bias in favour individual agreement making in the form of AWAs. In 1998, the ILO Committee of Experts found that the 1996 Act contravened ILO standards in the following ways:
i.The 1996 Act fails to promote collective bargaining as required under Article 4 of the Collective Bargaining Convention No. 98 owing to the primacy given to individual over collective relations through the AWA procedure.
ii. The Act contravenes the principle of voluntary bargaining by favouring single-business agreements over multi-business agreements.
iii. The Act is inconsistent with the principle of voluntary collective bargaining in that it limits the scope of negotiable issues, in particular, the issue of strike pay.
ICTUR's submission to the Senate inquiry into the Bill that became the 1996 Act explicitly warned that the subordination of collective agreements to AWAs would result in a fundamental breach of Australia's international obligations.
The provisions of the 1999 Bill would take Australia's non-compliance with its international obligations to a new level. It would do this by:
i. further downgrading the award system by significantly reducing the range of "allowable award matters", including the deletion of employee benefits on termination;
ii. enhancing the supremacy of AWAs over certified agreements by ensuring that new AWAs will always prevail over existing certified agreements and by preventing certified agreements from containing any "anti-AWA" provisions;
iii. extending the preference for enterprise-level agreements by narrowing the definition of "single business"; and
iv. further inhibiting the ability of unions to intervene in the certified agreement process.
The primacy now accorded to the AWA system and which the proposed amendments intend to enhance, is to be understood in a context where the individual contract system in place is deficient and in the following respects, the proposed amendments will make it more so:
i.The role of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission in the approval of AWAs is removed;
ii.The no-disadvantage test, a test which applies the relevant award as a benchmark for the approval of an AWA, is to be diminished or excluded in a number of ways. Principally and of greatest concern, the no-disadvantage test may increasingly be supplanted by an amorphous "not contrary to the public interest" test applied by staff of the Employment Advocate.
iii. The current obligation on employers to offer an AWA in the same terms to all comparable employees is to be repealed. The repeal will encourage the application of differential terms and conditions of employment and will result in discrimination particularly against women and migrant workers;
iv. A number of verification and due process provisions are also proposed to be removed.
Chapter 3 - Industrial Action and Secret Ballots
Both existing Australian law and the 1999 Bill are in glaring breach of Australia's international obligations on the right to strike.
The right to strike in international law derives primarily from jurisprudence developed by the ILO supervisory bodies; it has been implied from the principle of freedom of association, a founding principle of the ILO - particularly as enshrined in Articles 3, 8 and 10 of ILO Convention 87.
This jurisprudence on Convention 87 applies by virtue of membership of the ILO - all members are therefore obliged to provide for the right to strike.
As ICTUR argued in its 1996 submission to the Senate Committee, Australian law (including the 1996 Act's provision of limited immunity from civil liability for 'protected' industrial action) does not satisfy the ILO jurisprudence on the right to strike.
These views have been upheld by no less a body than the ILO's Committee of Experts, which found in March 1999 that Australian law restricts the right to strike contrary to Convention 87, because:
i. it excessively restricts the subject matter of strikes (ie. to bargaining in respect of single-business agreements, with no scope for multi-employer or industry-wide agreements);
ii. it prohibits sympathy or secondary industrial action;
iii. it restricts the taking of industrial action beyond permissible limits on strikes in essential services
The 1999 Bill, if passed, will increase Australia's level of non-compliance with our international obligations in this area.
The Bill's provisions on industrial action (Schedule 11) and secret ballots (Schedule 12) will result in greater recourse to litigation, rather than dispute resolution.
The proposals in the Bill dealing with section 127 orders amount to an unacceptable encroachment on the right to strike - they unfairly increase the susceptibility of unions and workers to civil liability.
The prohibitions on 'pattern bargaining' in the Bill would result in an amplification of a major breach of Convention 87 identified by the Committee of Experts in its recent findings, ie. the existing restrictions on industrial action in support of multi-employer or industry-wide agreements.
The increased notice requirements and other limitations on 'protected' action contained in the Bill focus attention on the already unacceptably narrow nature of the right to take industrial action.
When added to existing limits on strike activity, these new provisions would impose manifestly unreasonable conditions on the taking of industrial action in Australia - combined with the secret ballot provisions, they would make it practically impossible to take any form of legal industrial action at all.
The provisions in the Bill broadening the circumstances in which a bargaining period can be suspended or terminated again fly in the face of the ILO Committee of Experts' March 1999 findings.
The Bill's complex requirements for the holding of compulsory secret ballots as a further precondition to the taking or organising of 'protected' industrial action are onerous and unnecessary.
The secret ballot provisions provide fertile ground for employers to obstruct and delay, through litigation, the exercise of the tightly constrained 'right' to take protected action.
These provisions would amount to an unacceptable interference with unions' rights to regulate their own internal affairs (see Article 3 of Convention 87).
ILO jurisprudence requires the legal procedures for declaring a strike (eg. ballots) to be reasonable; not to place substantial limitations on the means of action open to trade unions; not to be so complicated as to make it practically impossible to strike; and specifies that such procedures are acceptable only when they are intended to promote democratic principles in unions.
The secret ballot provisions in the Bill violate each of these principles - they are unnecessarily complicated and inflexible; their true purpose is not to promote democracy in union decision-making, but to make the exercise of the right to strike almost impossible, and where possible of little or no effect.
Far from rectifying Australia's lack of compliance with international labour standards, the 1999 Bill (particularly as it relates to industrial action) will result in an even greater degree of non-compliance and (inevitably) another rebuke from the ILO.
The Bill is irreconcilable with the Minister's recent speech to the ILO, where he pledged the Australian Government's firm support for the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (which includes freedom of association as a fundamental commitment) - instead, the Government seeks through the 1999 Bill to place greater restrictions on the right to strike than ever before, in blatant disregard of its obligations as a member of the ILO.
Chapter 4 - Termination of Employment
The Termination of Employment Convention and Recommendation were adopted by the ILO in recognition that workers must be protected against arbitrary and unjustified dismissal and that appeal rights in respect of such dismissal are intrinsic to the rights of a worker.
The 1996 Act stands in breach of the letter and spirit of the Termination of Employment Convention in that it:
i. fails to provide the required level of protection for probationary employees and those whose employment is governed by special arrangements or whose employment raises special problems of a substantial nature;
ii. discourages employees from pursuing their legitimate rights in respect of unlawful dismissal and unlawful termination by:
(a) in many cases requiring them to institute two separate proceedings;
(b) imposing an application fee; and
(c) providing for costs to be awarded against an employee;
iii. excludes vulnerable and dependent workers who fall outside the restrictive common law concept of "employee" from obtaining redress for harsh, unjust or unreasonable dismissals by requiring employees to be covered by a Federal award. In this regard a recent decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia has held that the Termination of Employment Convention applies to workers beyond "employees" under the common law (Konrad v Victoria Police). The effect of the Full Court's decision is to highlight Australia's failure to comply with ILO standards.
The provisions of the 1999 Bill would place Australia in further breach of the letter and spirit of the Termination of Employment Convention by:
i. circumscribing the test to be applied in determining whether a dismissal has taken place by subverting the concept of "constructive dismissal";
ii. denying employees a remedy where operational requirements may not be the only reason for their terminations (ie. where conduct and/or performance are also taken into account);
iii. placing additional jurisdictional obstacles in the path of an employee who lodges an application out of time;
iv. broadening the power to award costs; and
v. allowing for an order for security for costs.
The Unfair Dismissals Bill would place Australia in breach of the letter and spirit of the Termination of Employment Convention by:
i. imposing a qualifying period of employment before employees could access an unfair dismissal remedy;
ii. excluding new employees of businesses that employ no more than 15 employees.
Chapter 5 -Entry and Inspection of Premises by Organisations
The proposed changes to the right of entry provisions would convert a scheme which confers a limited right of access into a scheme of access to workplaces by invitation only which also requires a substantial degree of co-operation from the employer or occupier of the workplace. ICTUR submits that the Bill:
i. unfairly shifts the burden of monitoring compliance with complex industrial regulation onto union members;
ii. seeks to introduce excessively formalised, legalistic procedures for exercising right of entry;
iii. places impracticable and inappropriate requirements on permit holders to identify and particularise grounds for investigating suspected breaches before gaining access;
iv. equips employers and occupiers with means of denying access and therefore avoiding proper scrutiny;
v. gives employers and occupiers unwarranted control over the location of permit holders' meetings with employees;
vi. needlessly increases the range of penalties against unions and individual permit holders.
For these reasons, the effect of the Bill, if passed, would be to:
(a) prevent unions from providing the services which members seek for their representatives:
(b) reduces unions' access to prospective members and reduce non-union members' freedom of association by reducing their access to information about the benefits of union membership;
(c) breach Australia's obligations under international law to uphold freedom of association and the right to organise.
Chapter 6 - Freedom of Association
The Conventions of the ILO specifically provide for the right to form and join trade unions and make express provision against anti-union discrimination.
ILO jurisprudence makes clear that the right to union membership is not restricted to the right to hold a membership card. In terms the right to membership also involves the right, through union membership, to protection of the members' interests by the union including the right to take strike action in the last resort. This right to union membership expressly involves the right of employees' representative unions to participate in collective bargaining and the obligation of member States to encourage and promote collective bargaining.
The 1999 Bill proposes to amend the definition of "objectionable provisions" (which are provisions that must be deleted from awards and agreements) in such a way as to be inconsistent with Convention No. 98. The amendments to section 298Z(5) in the 1999 Bill extend the definition of "objectionable provisions" to include provisions in a collective agreement or an award which indicate support for persons being members of a trade union, and provisions which require a person to encourage others to become or remain members of a trade union.
Therefore, any provision in a certified agreement which enables or encourages legitimate industrial conduct and recruitment activities by a shop steward or union official contrary may be considered to be "objectionable provisions".
This would be clearly contrary to the principles of freedom of association and in particular, the rights guaranteed by Article 3 of Convention No 98.
The proposed amendments will impose legislative constraints on the range of matters that may be negotiated by employers and employees and their unions (eg. "objectionable provisions") which is in conflict with Australia's obligations under ILO Convention No 98.
The 1999 Bill seeks to prohibit the establishment or maintenance of a "closed shop" which is defined in such a way as to lead to an unreasonable interference with the right of workers to join a trade union of their choice. The practical effect of the amendments is likely to be a prima facie presumption that a closed shop exists where a union has organised 60% or more of the workers of a particular employer.
The exclusion of enterprise unions from the definition of a "closed shop" is a clear infringement of the freedom of association principles which have the effect of prohibiting governments from according differential treatment to a given organisation over other organisations. In effect, the 1999 Bill provides that an employee can be required as an express or implied condition of his or her employment to be a member of an enterprise union. This provision nullifies any right for an employee to join a trade union of their choice.
It is conceivable that trade union officials and their members, whilst engaging in legitimate trade union activity of organising workers, could be found to be acting with an intent (in part) to establish a closed shop, and thereby incur a substantial penalty under the proposed legislation ($10,000 for trade unions and $2,000 for individuals). The prospect of such penalties being imposed on legitimate trade union activity is a clear contravention of the right to organise workers contained in Convention No 98.
This is the exectuive summary of ICTUR's submission to the Senate inquiry into the Workplace Relations Act
ERNIE KEMBREY, ON THE OPEN HEARTH
I started in the mould yard in late 1960 as a general labourer. From the mould yard you went to where you actually worked on the Open Hearth in the various positions: there was demolishing, a bricklayer's labourer, a helper on the floor. You were more or less a spare team of blokes that was just waiting to be placed into a permanent position. There was a vacancy came available on what they call the crane cleaners on the old Open Hearth and I took that on for a while, only about three or four months, that was enough. I had a bit of a scare up on the cranes where I nearly fell off the crane track one day and I said, "Well, this isn't for me."
And I came down off there and I run into a metallurgist by the name of Jack Risby - he eventually became the Manager of Newcastle plant - and I ran into Jack and I asked him was there any chance of transferring to the floor as a helper? and he said, "Yes, my word. Start straight away." So I went and I started off as a third helper on the Open Hearth itself, on the furnace floor.
It was a place that you enjoyed coming into work. It just had that feeling about it, that you were part of that industry. It just always reminded me that you had a big pot there and you were going to make a cake type of thing, you know; and you're mixing it, you're putting the ore in, you're putting the scrap in, you're putting all the chemicals that have to go into that particular mix. And then you tap it out, and you see it, you see that coming out, you've worked and you've put that in there, and it's coming out and then you see it being loaded into ingots.
The metallurgist would come down and tell the first helper what charge he had to put in: x amount of pans of limestone, x amount of pans of iron ore, x amount of pans of coal scrap. Your first helper would tell you what he wanted, and you and the second helper then went and got that stock around the back of your furnace. Once we put all the stock in, the first helper would then adjust his heat on his furnace till he got to the stage where he was ready to take hot metal.
Once they were ready to tap the furnace, it was then the second helper and the third helper's responsibility to tap it out. I was really keen to tap my first furnace, and I'll never forget the excitement when the second helper said, "Okay, you can dig this out." You'd go down and you'd dig the serpentine out of the tap hole and you'd break the plug - the serpentine used to build like a plug type of thing, see. You had to use an oxy hose, and burn it out. You'd use this long 3/8 oxy pipe, just ordinary water pipe it was, connected up to the raw oxy, light it up and you would then push that up into the hole and it would gradually burn through the crust into the bottom of your hearth, the bottom of your furnace where your tap hole was. Your experience told you, by watching the glow, that you were just about ready to break through the crust on the inside of your furnace. Once that happened it'd just go, Whoosh! And it would blow out, come out through the runner, down into two ladles.
There were fourteen furnaces on the open hearth and they were split into groups, and you would probably have the crews of three furnaces come and help you on yours, and you would help them when they tapped theirs. Now, the blokes handled all that themselves, because if you didn't come down, you know, the second helper or the first helper would really give you something, unless you had real trouble on your own furnace, like sometimes they might have had a breakout in the slag and they couldn't leave their furnace; that was understandable. But they would come down and let you know, and then some blokes would go one side, some would go the other side, because all the stuff that went into the ladles was put in manually. You had no mechanical devices, it was shovelled in, into a great big hot ladle of metal.
It was very hot around there, very hot. We used to have to wear those heavy army pants and heavy flannelette shirts. That's why it was important that you had blokes off the other furnaces around to help you, because you only had a short time to get that stock shovelled into your ladle before it was filled right up, because you might have had to put chrome or coke or aluminium or stuff like that into the heat to give the metallurgist what he wanted in a particular heat to make a particular sort of steel. There was no really high technology in it, it was just a straight out gut busting shovelling.
Then the pit cranes in the open hearth pit, they'd pick the ladle up, take it to the teeming platform and pour it into these ingots. Then it was the responsibility for you to remove the runner that was on the back of the furnace. You would remove that runner and commence to block your tap hole up again to get ready for the next charge.
You had to keep you furnace clean, They were very particular about that. You could clean your furnace up and next thing you'd get a lot of red hot slag would come out over your doors, through your doors, and you'd have to then quench that down and shovel it up again. There were no mechanical devices, you would shovel it up into barrows and take it around the back and tip it down into the slag shoot, and that used to nearly break your bloody heart. I mean, you'd clean it all up, your furnace would look great, you would hose the floor off and you'd sit back and say, "Well, good shift now, we haven't got any furnaces to tap, might have one to do." So you'd go down to help them, and next thing your furnace would spew it all out the front again. I've seen it 12 inches high, right across the floor, burning hoses.....
There was always an element of danger in the open hearth, always. But as you gained experience you became aware of the danger and you treated it with a lot of respect, you didn't go doing stupid things like going looking into a furnace door without your glasses on and wandering around without a hat on and those type of things. You knew what the risks were, and you treated everything as hot, because nine times out of ten you never had gloves on. Gloves were available to you, but nine times out of ten you shovelled without gloves, because your glove could get caught on your shovel and pull your arm. You always tried to eliminate the risk, so you didn't do anything stupid. When you were coming out around behind the furnace, there was always equipment moving up and down, the mechanical chargers that were there. You'd get your wheelbarrow wiped out of your hands, but it's best to see the wheelbarrow crunched up and not you. Sometimes you would be shovelling stuff into the furnace after you'd tapped, and the shovel would slip out of your hand, and you'd just watch it melt in the bottom of the furnace. But it's better to see that than to see you in there. That's why it was always an advantage to not use gloves, because if it was going to grab, it'd grab your glove and pull you too. So you didn't use them while you were shovelling.
When you raked the furnace out, when you tapped the furnace, you had to have gloves on then, of course, and your glasses, because the heat was tremendous. We never ever had a full on mask, you just had your little furnace glasses.
When you were tapping the furnace, you were very close to it. Actually you were right at it, you were so close to hell you'd know where it was.
I still get feelings about it, you know, that it was a hard job, it was a hot job, it was a dangerous job, but you knew the danger. So you kept that danger at arms length, and you looked out for one another. You had to alert your mate to everything: you were there helping him and he was there helping you, and that was the thing that you liked about it. You couldn't have met a grater bunch of blokes than what you worked with there. I had utmost respect for every man that was on that floor, even though I didn't know all of them. They were a terrific lot of blokes.
The thing that you liked about it, too, was that you could go home and say, "Well, I was satisfied with what I did."
Extracted from "Tailing Out", produced by the Workers Cultural Action Committee
by The Chaser
"People will feel a lot safer at the Olympics due to this re-prioritisation of funding," said Police Commissioner Ryan. "At least those that survive the intermediate state of anarchy will."
Despite initial skepticism towards the plan many community groups have come out in support of the cutbacks.
"Harassment of Aboriginals in the street has plunged severely since the police cutbacks were instituted," said a spokesperson from the Redfern Legal Centre.
Organised crime has been hit hard by the reduction in police salaries. With their usual salary police were able to work for the Mob at a highly subsidised rate.
"Previously the police were already getting paid when they did business for us. Now we have to pay the full price for a crooked cop," said one disgruntled crime boss.
The cutbacks are only one part of the efforts to ensure safety during the Olympics. "Experience from Atlanta suggests that nearly 60% of people feel safe in their cars, and let's face it, that's where Sydney siders will be spending most of their time during the Olympics," said a spokesperson for Olympics minister Mr Knight.
Mr Knight also claimed that safety had been increased due to ticket rescheduling. "Terrorists will have no chance to plan sabotages as they will get as little notice about their tickets as the rest of people."
by This Working Life
Australians work on average 1866 hours a year, which is 100 hours less than their US counterparts and only 23 hours less than Japanese workers.
Workers in Europe, on the other hand, are logging progressively fewer hours at work. Workers in the United Kingdom clocked up 1731 hours annually, more
than their counterparts in France (1656 hours), Western Germany (1560) or Sweden (1552 hours).
The figures were collected by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as part of their comprehensive study on labour trends. The study, Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 1999, surveys labour market and productivity trends through analysing 18 key indicators of labour market activity.
The full text of the report is available on the ILO's website http:www.ilo.org/public/english/60empfor/polemp/kilm/index
by L D Bronstein
East Timor was, until 1975, a Portuguese colony. In 1974 a revolution in Portugal overthrew the fascist dictatorship in that country.
Portugal's colonies began to unravel. Left-wing forces in East Timor, under the banner of Fretilin, looked as if they would come to power and form a popular Government.
Suharto was president of Indonesia. He ordered the Indonesian army to invade East Timor. It is clear he had the support of the US.
Hours before Suharto gave the go ahead he met with US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Jakarta.
After the defeat in Vietnam in April that year the US establishment feared that East Asian countries would fall like dominoes to the "communists". They gave the green light to Suharto to invade.
The Indonesians occupied the country and killed around 200,000 East Timorese - about one-third of the pre-invasion population.
The invaders met strong resistance. The "humanitarian" West responded by increasing the supply of arms to the Suharto Government.
Within a year of the invasion US military aid to Indonesia had doubled. The US and Britain supplied Bronco and Hawk jets to Suharto. This gave the Indonesian military a decisive advantage over the East Timorese resistance.
No country supplied arms to the East Timorese.
British Labour foreign secretary David Owen allowed the export of the first Hawks in 1978. The latest consignment arrived a few weeks ago. The Indonesians have used these Hawks to kill East Timorese people.
Australia is no innocent in this process. After the Dili massacre in 1991 the number of Indonesian officers to get training in Australia leapt from five that year to 400 in 1997.
Australian arms exports to Indonesia increased fourfold between 1994 and 1996.
The Australian SAS has trained units of Indonesia's murderous Kopassus commandos in "hostile interrogation". These units have been active in East Timor.
Annexation was the result Western Governments wanted, even if it meant the murder of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese.
Given Suharto's history, the bloodshed in East Timor was entirely predictable. Suharto came to power in a coup in 1965 which saw him kill up to a million people, supposedly for being Communists.
Robert J Martens was an official at the US embassy in Indonesia at the time of Suharto's coup. He later said, "The Indonesian army probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad."
George Bush was then head of the CIA. He supplied the names of 5,000 supposed senior Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army. This was a death sentence for those people.
One Australian Conservative Government Minister dismissed the slaughter in Indonesia at the time as being of little consequence because those being murdered were only communists.
The West has consistently supported the dictatorship in Indonesia and the invasion of East Timor because it has been in "our" interests, economic and political, to do so.
Now the rules of the game have changed. The brutality of the Indonesian army's response to the East Timorese vote for independence has provoked anger and revulsion among ordinary Australians. It was this reaction which forced the Australian Government to organise UN intervention in the country.
However it would be a mistake to think that sending in Australian and other troops under the banner of the UN will overturn the effects of thirty years of Western support for the Indonesian dictatorship.
Having been pushed into action, our Government has its own reasons for intervening. Concern for the East Timorese is not foremost among them.
Successive Australian Governments have done more than any other state to bolster Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. We are the only country to have recognised the Indonesian annexation.
We have economic interests in Indonesia which may be threatened by "instability" in the region. Australia is the fourth biggest investor in Indonesia.
There are significant deposits of oil under the sea bed between East Timor and Australia. Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas in 1989, dividing up the spoils.
But it is not just oil. Australian intervention under the UN banner gives our Government the opportunity to become the major power in the region. Saving the East Timorese is just an excuse for this dangerous militarist adventure.
But there is hope. The revolution last year which overthrew Suharto is far from complete. There are students now fighting the dictatorship in the streets of Jakarta.
A popular movement of the Indonesian people against the military and its puppet politicians offers the way for the East Timorese to free themselves from the yoke of all foreign occupiers.
The buzzword has taken centre stage in most weeks of the competition (except maybe for Grand Final week) but the debate intensified this week.
North Sydney, a part of Sydney's rugby league life since 1908, faces a tough few weeks as they strive to keep their place in the greatest league comp in the world
The all powerful National Rugby League have them placed below 14 rival clubs in criteria rankings and now, like Souths, are fighting for survival.
Survival of which kind we do not know.
Suggestions brought forward on 2KY's Big Sports Breakfast this week leave supporters in limbo.
Just like the punter who sits and waits for the photo to come down in a desperate finish at the races, North's fans can only hope.
David Hill, former president of the Bears and prominent spokesperson for the "Save The Bears Campaign" told 2KY the future lies with appointed administrator Max Donnelly.
Hill said that if the Bears members wish to stay alive and fight for the right to part of the NRL competition in the year 2000, talks must continue with the administrators.
Indeed, that is a fact.
Norths Sydney president Ray Beattie and his board of directors resigned last Wednesday and placed the club in the hands of administrators whose job it is to find a way out of over $4 million debt.
Donnelly has publicly stated that the he favors a merger with Manly, traditional enemies of Norths for many years.
Donnelly told the press this week; "It's my view the club cannot stand alone next year in the competition on a financial basis,"
He went on to say that Norths had little option but to merge, with Manly or another club.
The "other clubs" are Newcastle and Parramatta and while Newcastle Chairman Michael Hill met with the administrators he told the Big Sports Breakfast that the ground (Marathon stadium), colours and name of the Knights are not negotiable
Parramatta Leagues boss Denis Fitzgerald has never hidden the fact that that he would support a merger, remains open to more debate
The David Hill group will have no part of a merger.
North's supporters want to stand-alone.
Donnelly is open to that idea but only if the debt is repaid.
There is no doubt he believes a merger is the best course of action.
It's been a busy week but there's so much more to come.
Greg Radely presents the Big Sports Breakfast with Ian Trent each weekday on 2KY
I have been arguing for some time that change needs to occur in the ways the Party and factions operate and this weekend's debate is a chance to talk about this in a constructive way.
I'm not advocating any binding resolution out of conference, merely the beginning of a process to open the party up and engage with the new demands of a rapidly changing post Cold-War world.
I concede that calling for Party and factional reform, particularly from someone who has been closely associated the Party machine, has understandably raised howls of scepticism from some and sniggering questions about my sanity from others.
But in an era where fewer people are committing themselves to organisations of any kind, these are issues that must be addressed. My prime motivation comes from a realisation that the trade union movement, at a time of crisis, must devote all of its resources to its own survival through organising.
The challenges facing the trade union movement will not be easily overcome. Unions face years of struggle to re-establish their central role within our society.
For those of us from the Right it is not a question of giving away our power to another faction.
More, it is a question of looking at how we spend our time and effort and asking ourselves if there are better ways of doing things. I would rather that activists focus on organising workers than wasting precious resources on internecine conflicts.
I would expect a process of defactionalisation and Party reform to be even more challenging to the organised Left, which is premised on the notion of structured oppositionalism.
Some on the Left have recognised the merit of change, but others are struggling to come to terms with a world where previous ideological certainties have collapsed.
The current structure of the Party and the factional system was an important organiational innovation. It allowed the labour movement to manage its Cold War tensions in a manner that didn't destroy the movement.
Trade unions, because of their historical role in establishing ALP and their continuing support in the Australian community (a recent Labor Council-Newspoll found 70 per cent support for unions), they will always remain a core constituent of the ALP. Whilst I am sure the trade union movement is open to the discussion, initiated by the Premier, on broadening the Party's base, a fundamental precondition for the trade union movement support of this is Party reform. Trade unions are democratic institutions, officials are subject to independent financial and legal controls. Party branches are subject to nothing other than Party rules which are routinely breached.
Reform of the branch structure is all about making branches more relevant and accountable. The current suburban structures could be replaced be wider electoral districts. This would allow rank and file members to vote for conference delegates, replacing the current collegiate system. These branches would meet quarterly, rather than monthly, and would have greater responsibilities in terms of fundraising, policy formulation and education.
- Financial targets would be set for each branch - these would be substantial, but realistic and form the basis of party activities. The branch chook raffle would be replaced by larger scale activities that connect the branch with the broader community.
- Meaningful policy forums should be held in each branch, with MPs taking greater responsibility for informing branch members on the policy positions of the Party. Without this type of effort, any move to give greater weight to rank and file members at State Conference would be resisted. - Member education should be a priority. All new members should be required to attend an induction course, possibly over a weekend, which would provide them with a history of the Party, its current structures and its policy positions. Members would also be expected to attend a biannual refresher course. Attendance at these courses would be a prerequisite for voting in preselections, a move which would significantly limit branch stacking.
The final area of review is the Proportional Representation rule, which allocates votes according to factional size. The PR rule institutionalises factions, forcing people to make choices early in their careers about what factions they will join. It is common knowledge that most rank and file members align themselves with the faction which controls the branch they join, it is seldom a conscious ideological decision. This also results in the alienation of potential members who want no part of the factional system.
Preselection for election candidates is the area where these distortions cause the Party the most damage. Branch stacking, paper members, phantom meetings - they're all about winning preselection for one of the factions, to maintain its strength up the chain. One hundred per cent rank and file preselection should be replaced by a panel system comprising local members, a central panel and the Parliamentary leader or a nominee. The details of proportions need to be discussed, but 50-50 would be a good starting point, with the Parliamentary leader having a veto.
We should also look at facilitating a greater turnover of MPs, so that the parliament party's talent pool is constantly topped up. We should look at term limits on all non-Ministerial, shadow minister or Parliamentary Secretary MPs, which could be overridden by the party if it was deemed to be in the Party's electoral interest, for instance a popular member in a marginal seat. Again, this is about re-connecting members with their branches. Three terms would be a reasonable limit.
In every part of our lives the shift from and industrial economy to an information economy is seeing hierarchical structures replaced with flatter networks. The Party reforms I am advocating are completely consistent with this shift and would be an important step in ensuring Labor remains relevant into the next century.
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Memorandum: Resistance PolitBuro,Command Post,Chippendale
To: Comrade Operative 089221 aka Akerman
From: The Chairman
Re: Instructions for week beginning 27/9/99
Revolutinary greetings on behalf of the PolitBuro,
General Comments:
In recent week's you have been producing some of your best work. With the federal government floundering on East Timor your work at heightening hysteria has been most useful. Industrial action from the unions will also provide opportunities to provide a platform for the re-unionisation of the workforce. But remember, there's no room for complacency, these are revolutionary times.
Specific instructions:
East Timor: We need to create a climate of xenophobia, with maximum fear and loathing directed at Indonesia. This will force the government to build up an arms stock that can then be turned against the state. Play up any of the anti-Australia propaganda coming out of Jakarta, but be sure to match it with your own. Use of terms like "corrupt Indonesian military regime", "Nazi Germany", "Khmer Rouge regime", "apartheid" and "sleazy bunch of thugs" should be maximised.
At all costs defend the PM. He's our best chance of seeing some serious chaos develop on the home front. Even now we have operative within the defence Department formulating the Howard Doctrine Mk II - this is the one that castes Australia as the last bastion for western civilisation amongst the Asiatics. If we are serious about creating external threats to destabilise the domestic government, we must push Howard further. Your line on the "US deputy" was a nice one - but we must go further if we are serious about disengaging with the region.
Industrial Action: Our primary objective is to support the revolutionary struggles of our comrades on the railways. Sure, they may have alienated the public by calling a snap strike, but now we must help them. As usual your influence over editorial writers will be important in defusing the situation. Make sure they run the usual lines about "industrial bastardry" - this is important in polarising opinion and setting the scene for further unrest.
If you can, it would be useful to tie the unrest into a broader conspiracy by the union movement. Don't be scared to implicate Trades Hall. There's some proposal about pay-for-service unionism that you can throw in too. If you can slip all these elements in, the line will be so scatterbrained that it won't mean anything to anyone.
And don't forget to compliment any union that doesn't take part in the action, While this may seem out of character, it will ensure they are never tempted to take the same moderate position again.
Concluding Instructions
Comrade, as the bourgeois continue to wage their war of hatred and greed against the international proletariat it is important we don't get demoralised so that we may continue to wage our fight for the glorious socialist revolution. In the words of Leon Trotsky: "To face squarely, not to seek the line of least resistance, to call things by their right names, not to fear obstacles, to be true in little things as in big, to base one's program on the logic of class struggle, to be bold when the hour for action arises - these are the rules of communists today"
Your work is an inspiration to us all. We will be in contact again in seven days.
Yours in Revolutionary Spirit,
The Chairman
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