Ding dong

Eleven long, dark years of Liberal (read Thatcherite) rule have come to an end. Today we can look forward to a bright new dawn of Australian Labor Party (read Thatcherite) government. Triumphant ALP leader, Kevin Rudd, has, after all, proclaimed himself an ‘economic conservative’. In his victory speech, Rudd asserted ‘I will be a prime minister for all Australians’. And there’s no mystery about what he means by that – his government will work for the ‘national interest’ - profitabilty of Australian business – ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, a rising tide lifts all boats, prosperity trickles down…

[AFP photo]

For the past six weeks, the Liberal Party has bombarded us with adverts proclaiming that 70% of the Rudd front bench will comprise ‘anti business’ former union officials. You’d expect the Labor Party to have countered by pointing out that 100% of the Liberal front bench comprises people not with historical links to the labour movement, but with current, active, real, material vested interests in businesses. I surmise the reason this never happened was that those union thugs themselves have business interests of their own.

When Bob Hawke led the ALP to victory in 1983, the received wisdom was that because of the links between the ALP and the union movement, organised labour would tolerate attacks by an ALP government that we would never have tolerated from the Liberals. That turned out to be correct. It was the ALP that over the following 13 years proceeded to tame the union movement through its Prices and Incomes Accord, offering the union officials the seat at the bargaining table they’d always coveted. Rank and file union activity came to a virtual standstill, while the government smashed the militant Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, privatised Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, and many other publicly owned services. It was the Hawke and Keating Labor governments that introduced ‘enterprise bargaining’, which precluded workers organising on an industry wide basis and forced us to reach agreements from a position of weakness on a workplace by workplace basis. This smashed down the door and strew rose petals in the path of Howard’s ‘Workplace Relations’ agenda that eviscerated minimum award pay and conditions, marginalised unions, and forced many to work under inferior non union ‘certified agreements’ and individual contracts.

Almost everybody associates the atrocity of detaining refugees in remote concentration camps with the Howard government. In reality, it was ALP left winger, Gerry Hand, who as Minister of Immigration in the Keating government introduced mandatory detention in 1992.

The union officials have been running a campaign under the slogan, ‘Your rights at work – worth fighting and voting for!’ It goes without saying that the bit about fighting is just empty rhetoric. All industrial issues have been unceremoniously relegated to the back burner while they devoted their efforts to the electoral campaign. Now that the election is over, there is little cause for optimism either that a Rudd government will implement radical changes to industrial relations or that the unions will mount the kind of fight that can win such changes. With union membership at an all time low of about 20% and Australian working class militancy a dim memory, it’s still going to be up to us to act in our own interests and win back our rights at work.

But all is not gloom and doom. The silver lining is that the incumbent PM, the execrable John Howard, W’s ‘deputy sherriff’ in the Pacific, appears to have made history as the first sittiing Prime Minister to lose his own seat since Stanley Bruce in the 1929 Federal election. The latest results, with one booth left to count, show former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, held a lead of 51.84% on a two party preferred basis. The Liberal pundits on tv last night warned against writing Howard off too soon, projecting that uncounted postal votes could deliver an extra percentage point to Howard, but McKew’s lead is big enough to accommodate that, even if it eventuates.

May he enjoy a very uncomfortable retirement.,

'Majestic impartiality'

Back in May, Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) conference decided to hold a series of discussions among members about the call by Palestinian unions for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt opposed the motion and immediately distanced herself from conference’s decision.

Now, a UCU press release dated yesterday reveals

the union’s ‘strategy and finance committee unanimously accepted a recommendation from UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, that the union should immediately inform branches and members that:

· A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented

· UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings

· The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended.

While writing this, I note that Mark Elf has already reported this over at Jews sans frontières.

The union’s legal advisors opine,

'It would be beyond the union's powers and unlawful for the union, directly or indirectly, to call for, or to implement, a boycott by the union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions; and that the use of union funds directly or indirectly to further such a boycott would also be unlawful…to ensure that the union acts lawfully, meetings should not be used to ascertain the level of support for such a boycott.'

This backdown is troubling for a couple of reasons.

First of all, my suspicion is that the basis of the legal advice is the Race relations act (1976). I also suspect that the interpretation, whether of the Race relations act or whatever, relied upon the tendentious legal reasoning of such eminent luminaries as Harvard Professor of Torture, Alan M Dershowitz. It would be bad enough if the union accepted such a bogus interpretation, and I sincerely hope that UCU members will challenge this decision on the part of the bureaucracy. The refusal even to cite the legislation they base their advice on suggests a lack of confidence. But what’s really frightening is that they could be right. Even though the arguments Dershowitz and Julius present that hold all Jews responsible for Israel’s crimes are themselves antisemitic, they are meeting with broader and broader acceptance. The EU Monitoring Commission’s ‘Working definition’ of anti-Semitism makes precisely the same anti-Semitic assumptions. While it has no legal standing as yet, it appears to be increasingly influential and could be part of the basis for a judgement, even if it is not yet formally adopted. Indeed, such judgements could lead to formal adoption. That would expose virtually any proPalestinian or antiZionist activity to the risk of prosecution. Note that it is not just carrying out the proposed boycott, nor even just calling for it or furthering it, that the UCU’s legal team have determined would be illegal. They reckon it would put the union on the wrong side of the law just to ‘ascertain the level of support’ for the boycott.

The other thing is that the union bureaucrats had no compunction about publicly overturning a conference decision without reference to the members. Doubtless the officials have a responsibility to advise the members of the probable consequences of any action they decide to take. But in a democratic union, where the officials are accountable to the members they are supposed to represent, it would be up to the members whether to accept the risk.

Apart from that, it signals an unnerving proclivity on the part of the officials, widely observed among union bureaucrats everywhere, to want to ‘play by the rules’. ‘The law’s the law’, after all. But in reality, the law comprises the rules that the ruling class prefers. Whenever industrial struggle slackens, the bosses hurry to claw back any gains we’ve made in the past. Nor are they ever satisfied. Whenever the government enacts or amends legislation to reduce or threaten our employment, our conditions, or our pay, the employers call for more ‘certainty’ that they can sack us at will and the like. So when our officials tell us we can’t take such and such an action because we have to be ‘smart’ and ‘beat them at their own game’, all it really means is that they are content to lose. The important thing for them is to restrain any rank and file action or initiative that could challenge their credibility as intermediaries. So unless members stand up for their decisions, suspect legal advice will continue to trump them.

To paraphrase Anatole France, The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the bosses along with the workers to organise in the workplace, mount industrial action, or discuss an academic boycott of Israel in union branch meetings.

(Thanks to John E Richardson of JAZ for the link to the UCU media release.)