[PEN-L:2472] Re: [Australian] Unions

[Peter Colley / Cathie Sherrington]

Paul Phillips comments on trade unions (PEN-L 2412) are some of the more
sensible comments on trade unions I have read so far in my 4 months on this
list.  I don't agree with all that he has said, but he displays a greater
understanding of the fundamental dynamic that unions must operate in.

My experience of Bill Mitchell, on the other hand, is that the only
positive comment he has made on a trade union was about a dead one.  I also
recall, perhaps wrongly as I haven't kept the post, that Bill once said
that existing unions should be wiped out and we should start afresh.
Forgive me for feeling a little piqued by these comments, and for not
considering them to be a practical, useful or constructive contribution.

Unions can be radical agents of social change, but not always and are only
intrinsically so in one limited but important sense.  To the extent that
any practice of collective bargaining represents a challenge to managerial
prerogative they are perceived by capital as a potential or actual obstacle
to further accumulation.  Hence business, and particularly business which
places high priority on management rights, is generally opposed to the
existence of trade unions, especially where they organise (as in Australia)
on a cross-workplace and industry basis.

Most union members expect their elected officials to deliver better wages
and conditions in the near future rather than a whole new world sometime in
the future after an immensely costly battle to the death against
capitalism. To give one example close to home, one of the unions that has
amalgamated into the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union here
is the Miners' Federation.  This union was led by communists for most of
the post-war period and has staged some legendary strikes (ranging from the
1949 coal strike where the Australian Labor Party sent troops into the
mines to the recent Weipa strike where one bosses' spokesperson accused the
ACTU of using mineworkers as the battering ram of the broader union
movement).

However, the vast majority of members were never communists and did not
vote communist in elections for government.  They elected communists to
their union leadership because communists were very good organisers and
were able to deliver results on the ground in terms of cleaning up
dangerous workplaces and getting better wages and conditions.  Oz
mineworkers can and do engage in broader struggles (eg. we did significant
work with mineworkers and COSATU in South Africa) but the bottom line for
most union members is not how pure the union's long term vision is but what
can be done to get a better deal right now.

In this context, what makes unions "radical" and "progressive" is not the
nature or type of causes that they advocate or take action on, but the fact
that workers / union members are able to take action at all in a situation
where they are employees who have sold their labour power and who are
required by capitalist law to work as directed.  Unions sometimes pursue
the wrong cause or have the wrong line. (In the 1970s and 1980s Oz union
adherence to centralised wage fixing was called a betrayal of the working
class by some leftists, whilst in the 1990s the move away from centralised
wage fixing has also been branded as a betrayal. I would argue that in each
case what unions did has been oversimplified and the critiques of it even
more so.)  To use an example of a "wrong line" from history, Oz unions
campaigned hard at the turn of the century for the "family wage" concept.
They won it in the "Harvester judgement".  It was regarded then as a
victory of the working class against attempts by capital to destroy the
family and to commodify all aspects of human existence.  These days, that
same judgement and that policy is condemned as entrenching gender-based
unequal pay and making women marginal members of the workforce.  Again due
to the campaigning of the union movement, that judgement was overturned in
"equal pay" cases and legislation in 1969 and 1972.

What is radicalising about unions is not the goal but the act of organising
collectively.  This fits in with what some have said on the list (eg Maggie
Coleman? ) that  major strike and other collective actions have a cathartic
effect on individual consciousness, almost regardless of whether the issue
is won or not.  Of course, it is up to us all to work to ensure that what
unions choose to campaign on is progressive rather than conservative.  But
getting stuck into unions because they do not have the correct line and do
not always or often fight the grand fight for a new society is to miss the
point of what the intrinsic merit of unions is.

Peter Colley
Construction, Forestry, Mining & Energy Union
Sydney, Australia
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

PS. I'm having a break from the list for a while due to holidays.