°Workchoices
So, around half a million poeple turned out for the rallies against the latest changes to work laws, ironically called ‘Workchoices’. The largest - an estimated 150,000 - being in Melbourne (above). More at Melbourne.Indymedia, on the rallies and the laws.
I’m allergic to union rallies and so didn’t go. The whole experience of being herded about by megaphones, the grand symbolic gesture of the mass rally which symbolises nothing more than the ability to amass, and I can think of a hundred better ways to spend my time. Though, I did appreciate the free tram rides. And, to be sure, for many (non-casualised, regular) workers the rally was a de facto strike.
Does anyone have any impressions of the rallies to share?
I’m allergic to union rallies (and unions and rallies) too. As you say, it’s the feeling of the herd - so dismal and claustrophobic. Brings out the ol’ Nietzschian in me…
Shannon [November 16, 2005 @ 7:42 pm]
I was initially drawn towards one… then someone starting singing a hideous song about advancing fairs, so I cringed and rode on by.
Patrick [November 17, 2005 @ 8:41 am]
lol. Patrick, that’s funny because it’s so true. And hey Shannon.
(Here I was thinking I might try and upset someone. Failed dismally.)
s0metim3s [November 17, 2005 @ 10:19 am]
Why would it upset anyone? Did you see the email the ACTU sent out after the rallies?
differenzmaschine [November 18, 2005 @ 9:44 am]
Oh, puke, for so many reasons: “Together, we vowed that we would not be the first generation of Australians to leave our children with fewer rights at work than we inherited.”
What’s with this segue to a rights discourse? What about income, conditions?
Since it was recently suggested I was “socially-mobile”, I’ve been doing a casual bit of research and trying to think of anyone I actually know who has more assets and/or a higher income than their parents did at the same age. Now, it’s likely that it has a lot to do with who I know, but I honestly can’t think of anyone, myself included, who has been upwardly mobile relative to their parents. Or even remained at a similar level. The number of degrees might be higher, but otherwise, it’s all been pretty downhill.
And my memory isn’t so bad that I can’t recall that the organisers of these rallies (ACTU/ALP) played a big role in this erosion of conditions, pay rates and ‘rights’ (whatever that means) of - as my sample goes - those two ‘generations’, because the biggest statistical shift to informalisation, casualisation and related rise of crappy jobs happened in the early 1990s, under the ALP.
I can’t see that the rallies are anything more than attempts to save union official’s jobs, the ALP’s funding base, and a gear up for the next election campaign. But the advertising companies and various lawyers must be making some money …
s0metim3s [November 18, 2005 @ 10:30 am]
You can see exactly what the rallies are about in the email: collecting money, registering public support for the unions. They have a lot to do with demobilizing people who are genuinely angry and also very scared, painting a veneer of respectability over growing antagonism. All that they offer is: here, send us some money, we’ll put more ads on telly. That’s actually worse than pointless rallies.
Not all rallies are without a point, and it is difficult to envisage what kind of strategy would actually stop the changes right now. My guess is that the rallies, if large enough, would make it easier for government people to defect from a bill that is apparently not supported by the saner end of the Howard faction - witness Pru Goward’s astonishing testimony. On the one hand, it is debasing to have a public action which is essentially there to tip the balance very slightly amongst Liberals; on the other hand, it could conceivably work.
I think it is obvious the unions are also in the business of getting the ALP back into office, which they might just succeed in if the bill goes through in its present form and there is a recession. But it’s not like they need to do anything should that come about. As Kevin Andrews never ceases to remind us, the market will take care of everything then.
Getting the ALP into office would at least sink this bill, which is unusually harsh. Of course, the Unions and the ALP were terrible in the 1980s - they went to town on the poor sods who voted for them. But I can’t see them putting some crap like this through. The overall differences are small, the packages of goods and evils different, but there are important benefits.
There is talk of starting rolling strikes going; something like that is obviously a plausible hard left strategy, but it’s not easy to pull off, and you’ll probably be fighting the unions more than the government. It isn’t obvious that this is the best course of action. Strikes are not always the best way of building resistance, which would have to be done almost from scratch here - they are difficult to sustain, would probably make it impossible to split the government, and so could only succeed with massive adherence and activism. It is very difficult to see that happening - the unions oppose it, there are no worker’s organizations outside the unions that could do it, no networks of support.
We should give it a shot. You are all welcome to come to my Nuova Australia experiment in the backwoods of Rio Grande do Sul in 2008, if it all blows up!
differenzmaschine [November 18, 2005 @ 4:19 pm]
What grounds do you have for imagining that a subsequent ALP Government would overturn the legislation, or at least overturn something more than those aspects that provide for union coverage? All indications from every other similar instance would suggest that’s unlikely.
As for strategies, the only real ’strategy’ at the end of the day is declining (or stalling) productivity. That’s not reducible to the strike (and not everyone is in a position to strike), but neither is it reducible to a certain kind of organisation. Declining productivity occurs in and through a variety of ways, and fear or exhaustion is not always the best motivator.
s0metim3s [November 18, 2005 @ 11:29 pm]
No, I don’t think the ALP will overturn this. I should have been clearer on that, but you know that I have few illusions about them. But I don’t think they would be able to initiate a bill like this, much as some would want to. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic, but Howard has made it clear that this is only the first of a series of reform packages. If they can get away with it, there will be more. Even after these changes, work conditions in Australia will be more carefully controlled and friendlier to unions than those in the US - in which workers are nevertheless under constant attack. There is a long way to slide down. The ALP would slide down more slowly, and it is conceivable that this would give some wriggle room to build an effective alternative.
On the other hand, I think part of the present struggle is a struggle against the union bureaucracies. I wrote about that on differenzmaschine.
Declining productivity as a strategy? Hmm. The likely result of that is hardcore captialist reaction - like these we see now. How do you propose dealing with that? I can’t see how it can be done without some kind of organization. There is no teleology to this, it is what we make of it.
Primero Hermano de Nuova Australia [November 19, 2005 @ 9:46 am]
the only indication is that Beazley has stated he would ‘rip up these laws on the steps of parliament’ or something like that. empty promise? who knows?
these laws are really shit. my hatred of the (neo)liberal party grows everyday.
I am not sure if anyone is aware that WA has had similar laws for a while. They were introduced when the liberal govt was in power at the state level. WA has the most militant unions in Aust.
I was employed as a servo dude for 4 years on ‘workplace agreement’. I worked the graveyard shift for 2.5 years with no extra benefits. Admittedly I am a hoon with expensive hobbies, but it was the only job I could get that had sort of fulltime hours and let me go to uni. While working at the servo I would often hear rumours about mystical eastern states servo dudes who got paid over time and penalty rates, etc.
The only good thing is that there will be three main groups of workers: unskilled, skilled, and others. Skilled workers are becoming more and more skilled and specialised, everything from air conditioning engineers with little vans and small businesses to IT freelancers and so on. Unskilled workers will be primarily in the service industries and will in fact be highly skilled in service-type jobs. The skilled workers have something to lose, while the unskilled workers only have their ’selling-power’ to sell. The militant unions, such as the CFMEU (of which I was a memeber for a short while) primarily represent the skilled workers in certain industries. I am pretty sure I fall into the ‘other’ category as a journalist/postgrad. The ‘others’ have little to do with this fight because we are such a minority, except for assisting in the externalities, like articles getting published and so on.
The ads and election campaigns are to win over the other 10 million people or so that the ALP and unions need to win over to get into office, not the 500k or so that turned out to protest. Calming workers down is probably a good thing lest some fuck who will do well out of these sink or swim laws with a comfortable lifestyle thinks that militant union striking is ‘taking away their pleasure’.
Glen [November 19, 2005 @ 10:03 am]
I don’t hate the Liberal Party - they’re doing exactly what I expect employers to do. And I don’t really understand the point of the distinctions in skill levels, or most of your remarks for that matter, Glen.
You’re right T that some kind of opposition to the ACTU et al is in order, but this opposition has been played out as a largely ’silent’ defection for the last two decades, at least.
s0metim3s [November 19, 2005 @ 1:16 pm]
The problem with defection is that when surveyed, lots of workers say they would like to be in a union. The reason they are not is that the union doesn’t particularly want them, or maybe they want them but they are very hard workers to get organisers out to , or there is actual fear. The contractor model is pretty terrifying for that reason; it could put a lot of building workers in the position outworkers now find themselves in, which is abysmal. Defection isn’t the whole story - there is a lot of exclusion in there as well.
That’s one problem. The other, I think, is that while I agre with you in reading defection from unions partly is political - that was my personal experience also - I think that that alone isn’t enough. I know I will be hammered for making the refusers of work into ‘raw material’ yadda yadda, but I feel a little more confident in this context since I am the raw material myself. My experience is that you just need some kind of organization, ideally that would come from the workers themselves, but frankly, in the heat of the moment I would not have cared if the structure had been installed by the soviets. I remember when I realised my union, the NTEU wasn’t going to do squat for me in your run of the mill RA-versus-boss-academic-member dispute, I felt awful, completely disempowered. What was I supposed to do? By myself, there was close to nothing I could do. I could whinge to friends, and eventually there has been more of a RA and tutor organisation building at Usyd, but without that, you’re just an atomised spec with a lot of anger and nothing to do with it.
differenzmaschine [November 19, 2005 @ 1:47 pm]
The defection began occuring in a significant way on the late 1970s in AU, for a lot of reasons. And the play between exclusion and defections is probably impossible to disentangle. My earliest recollection of this was as an infant, the defection of mostly migrant car workers from Ford after the wildcat strike.
And I’m not celebrating atomisation. But a clear focus on shifting the line between profits and incomes is hardly what union organisation has been preoccupied with. And, I haven’t heard much that’s good about the NTEU. It always amazes me the extent to which unions concern themselves with the most priveliged in those sectors they purport to cover. Strategically, it just seems so obvious that the worse conditions are going to function as the benchmark.
s0metim3s [November 19, 2005 @ 2:15 pm]
the distinction between skill levels of workers is necessary as it has been my impression that the unions are only worried about protecting and representing skilled workers. the main reason for this is because they have something that can be bargained with (skills). They are less concerned with protecting and representing unskilled workers (in a relative sense, ie an RA or a TA or an anything-A will have a different skill set to the person who they are assisting). The perfect model of this is the old battle between nurses and doctors and the AMA (allegedly the ‘peak medical body’). the exception here is if the union has an iron grip over things ie the stevedore situation of a few years ago. the dudes I have met who have worked as warfies had no special skills at all!!
my point is if you don’t understand why people were out marching with the unions (’symbolises nothing more than the ability to amass’), then this isn’t your fight, ie you are in a different skill set (the ‘others’) and already are a product of post-fordist, neo-liberal regimes of labour rather than having your industry and workplace transformed by them.
most people don’t care about unions because they already live a comfortable life and feel relatively unthreatened, therefore they don’t need the support. but I am wary of any knee jerk reactions that denounce unions or organised labour activities.
Glen [November 19, 2005 @ 4:36 pm]
Glen, no amount of blue-collar performativity will avoid certain unpleasant facts.
That the hierarchy of skills in the labour market is not given by nature, but by competition and protectionism. That this protectionism, not organisation, is what unions for the most part have been engaged in. That the MUA traded away conditions for the protection of union officia’s jobs in that dispute you mentioned. That by and large anglo nurses did not in fact battle with the doctors, but gained higher pay and better conditions through credentialism and by sloughing off particular tasks to mostly non-anglo orderlies and cleaners. And, not least, that bargaining power comes not from skills, but from social power, including how this translates into the capacity to withdraw one’s labour, leave the job, etc.
I said nothing about “not understanding why people were out marching”. You can be as suspicious as you like, but your defenses of Fordism (protectionism, security, etc) really aren’t synomymous with a defense of workers.
s0metim3s [November 19, 2005 @ 6:11 pm]
please, it is not a defence of Fordism, only the realisation that its passing (or, rather, rise to dominance of other forms of production and labour that already existed, just as fordism rose above the guilds and so on) involves different people in different ways. I am trying to understand how ‘protectionism’ gets translated into a neo-liberal post-fordist economy, and not simply dismissing the correlative transformations out of hand because I am employed in a different segment of the economy and have a different skill set.
obviously, i am reacting to your post’s contemptuous Maoist tone through use of the words such as ‘herded’ and phrases such as ‘nothing more than the ability to amass’ and so on.
I think the demonstrations were, at the minimum, a worthy attempt in the current climate of political apathy to counter the impending passage of the legislation.
you have misunderstood my use of the term ’security’.
Glen [November 19, 2005 @ 9:19 pm]
“my point is if you don’t understand why people were out marching with the unions (’symbolises nothing more than the ability to amass’), then this isn’t your fight, ie you are in a different skill set (the ‘others’) and already are a product of post-fordist, neo-liberal regimes of labour rather than having your industry and workplace transformed by them.”
No, because I know people who do ‘tradtional’ labour, or what you’re talking about as ‘unskilled labour,’ who likewise were not thrilled at the thought of attending the rally. Or any rally, for that matter. Unskilled or blue-collar worker = obvious contenders for rallying is a pretty big assumption. See, the question here is not critiquing organised industrial action per se but the union form itself. Is unionising the only way to fight for better pay, conditions and finally not to work at all? Probably not.
I would say, most people don’t care about unions because they wouldn’t be protected by them even if they were members — including but especially people in jobs that are cash in hand or ‘illegal’ because they, themselves, don’t have the right papers or language skills to negotiate ‘proper’ conditions.
So, how does protectionism translate into a post-fordist economy? Sharan Burrow’s emphasis on ‘Australian working families’ is a good place to start: the protection offered by unions will only be granted to those who reproduce heteronormativity and who require decent conditions because they are married with children, or white, or have the right ‘cultural’ attributes/behaviours. Which is, really, a repetition of the same old situation — also implying that this model of a mass chronological, if unevenly spread, move from ‘fordist’ to ‘post-fordist’ modes of production, is rather flawed. (Which is a whole nother ballgame, admittedly, and not one I have the Marxist chops to really cover effectively.)
‘Maoist tone’ — wha? I can’t see Ange as a fish swimming in a school of peasants, myself…
az [November 19, 2005 @ 11:12 pm]
I very much doubt anyone could imagine me waving around Mao’s Little Red Book and preparing to encircle the cities - or indeed could reasonably find grounds in anything i’ve said to think so.
The accusation is incomprehensible, except that according to the referral stats and the comment logs for yesterday, Glen headed over to this discussion after reading this one. Which explains something, but makes it no less wierd for all that.
s0metim3s [November 20, 2005 @ 10:22 am]
hey gang,
Good luck with all that, the whole scenario sounds atrocious. On the plus side, if the laws there become equivalent to the ones in the US maybe we can leverage that into a more porous border for those of us who want out of this place…. probably not, and a poor attempt at a joke on my part. Angela, I’m confused by what you say about declining productivity without organization. Presumably everyone (or many someones) declining productivity together is a trype of organization (in the sense of organizing). Do you mean rather that there’s not a need for formal organization or for one organizational/organizational form that we all cotton on to? As you put it, the needed element is always social power. I think one may be able to occasionally luck into that on one’s own, but generally my intuition is that that actively building more of it is most likely going to come through some kind of activity involving doing things with other people (which is what I mean by organization, in the most expansive sense). I don’t know the Australian situation at all, but I do know the US one regarding the official labor movement, and the bureaucrats here have played a big part in eroding the social power - ie, organized members - that underwrote their positions. Once the bosses started to realize that and go on the offensive the bureaucrats’ organizations have been steadily losing ground. It probably does make a difference for the individuals who are members of those unions too, but it’s more a part of a larger trend than a shockingly new event.
take care,
Nate
Nate [November 23, 2005 @ 3:02 am]