Working Life December 2014-January 2015

www.workinglife.org.auIssue 17, December 2014-January 2015

Your work. Your life. Your news & views.

2014The yearin review

A year after he goaded Holden to leave Australia, Joe Hockey still hasn’t learnt his lesson,writes PAUL BASTIAN

GET IN TOUCHWant to know more or get involved? Contact our newsdesk by email at [email protected] or phone (03) 9664 7266. Or get in touch by Facebook (facebook.com/ThisWorkingLife) or Twitter (twitter/thisworkinglife).

Editor: Mark Phillips. Responsibility for election comment is taken by Dave Oliver, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, 365 Queen Street, Melbourne 3000. .org.au

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A YEAR ago Australia witnessed a shameful spectacle when Treasurer Joe Hockey stood

up in Parliament and goaded Holden into closing its Australian operations, setting in motion the collapse of an entire industry.

Hockey’s rabid attack shocked Australia, especially Holden workers and their families, who witnessed the Treasurer throw their future under a bus.

As Hockey was delivering his rant in Parliament, Holden’s then Managing Director Mike Devereux was telling the Productivity Commission Holden wanted to continue manufacturing in Australia. He said the obstacle to making new investments and continuing its manufacturing operations was the government’s approach to the industry.

A year on, we have seen over 53,000 people join the unemployment queues while the economy has slowed to a near recession and our national income has actually fallen. Consumers are now as pessimistic about the economy as they were during the height of the Global Financial Crisis.

And this is all before we see the real effects of the auto industry’s closure. It’s estimated this will be a hit of $21 billion to the economy and at least 40,000 more people in the jobless queue. Others put this figure even higher, at between 90,000 and 200,000 people losing their jobs.

The incompetence we saw a year ago from Treasurer Hockey has been repeated throughout the year, with the worst Budget in living memory, countless broken promises, shambolic management of naval shipbuilding and a wholesale dismantling of industry policy.

Mr Hockey has presided over a disaster for workers: unemployment at a 12-year

high and Australians contemplating the first recession in 23 years.

The damage the government is doing to the economy and our industrial base should worry every Australian who cares about living in an advanced and prosperous country. But the damage being done to people’s lives is even worse.

The government’s approach to the people affected by its industrial sabotage can only be called callous indifference.

Automotive manufacturing workers live in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country, with much higher unemployment and worse job prospects than most people are used to. In Elizabeth in Adelaide, unemployment is at a staggering 32%, while at Broadmeadows in Melbourne, it’s 26%.

Rather than trying to make these people’s lives better by minimising the impact of closure, all we get is more planned cuts to automotive programs that threaten early collapse of the industry, mass layoffs and devastation for already struggling communities.

The government’s policy response to auto’s closure has added insult to injury.

Its so called ‘Growth Fund’ to support workers and businesses doesn’t include a single government dollar for re-training.

The lesson we learned a year ago was that Mr Hockey and the government weren’t just indifferent to auto workers, they were openly hostile. This is a lesson that has been reinforced at every turn through the year.

Now this hostility is being directed at our shipbuilders. It appears the government won’t be happy until they end all advanced and heavy manufacturing in Australia, leaving us as a farm, bank and quarry economy.

Joe Hockey and Prime Minister Tony Abbott may need to rethink this vision of the future when they contemplate the impact their policies are having on the opinion polls.

Recent electoral results in Victoria and South Australia confirm the Coalition is alienating voters at a furious rate.

Instead of dismantling industries, what Joe Hockey and the government should be delivering is an economy that’s advanced and prosperous, providing secure jobs and incomes for families.

At Work

Holden: an anniversary of shame

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Asbestos victims do not die by instalments, Hardie told

At Work

December 2014-January 2015

by MARK PHILLIPS

WITH estimates that more than 25,000 Australians will die from the asbestos disease mesothelioma over the next four decades, unions have ramped up demands that James Hardie commits to fully compensating victims by lump sum payments.

The ACTU has gained endorsement from affiliate unions to take legal action to block any move to have asbestos victims paid by instalments.

It follows a warning from James Hardie in September of a potential shortfall in the Asbestos Injuries Compensation Fund, which was established in 2006 as a special purpose fund for victims with claims against the former James Hardie group of companies.

James Hardie is legally required to contribute up to 35% of its annual net operating cash flow to the AICF until 2045. But despite paying out dividends of US$743.6 million ($871.3 million) over the past two years and making a net profit of US$99.5 million ($116.6 million) last year, James Hardie now says a blow-out in compensation claims means the fund is on track to run out of money.

AICF has indicated it will seek approval in the Supreme Court to vary the compensation payments from lump sums to instalments. But the ACTU says it has strong legal advice that there is nothing to stop James Hardie from making a one-off payment to top up the AICF.

At the ACTU Executive on 26 November, unions voted unanimously to take legal action to block any attempt by the AICF to have asbestos victims paid their compensation by instalments.

They also want the NSW and federal governments to be prepared to make a loan to the AICF to ensure victims are paid full and prompt compensation.

Unions have flagged a community campaign to put pressure on James Hardie and governments to do the right thing.

“James Hardie has projected profits between US $205-$235 million in 2014-

15, pays little to no tax and its CEO earns $11 million a year,” said ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver. “It’s outrageous that its management is seeking to avoid its moral obligation to fully compensate the victims of asbestos-related disease and cannot shirk that responsibility.”

The ACTU announced its action on the seventh anniversary of the death of

the asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton, who died in 2007 from mesothelioma he contracted as a result of working for James Hardie in the 1970s.

According to the National Health and Medical Research Council, 600 mesothelioma cases are reported annually and this is expected to rise to more than 900 cases annually by the year 2020.

ADAM Sager was a fit, healthy 25-year-old man looking forward to representing Australia in a Korean martial art. Ten months later he was dead from mesothelioma that had been quietly lurking in his body for more than two decades.

Their son’s untimely death has turned Julie and Don Sager into campaigners to raise awareness about the DIY dangers of asbestos.

They believe that Adam probably breathed in asbestos fibres when they were sanding walls in their new house in Townsville in preparation for painting in 1983, when he was just 20 months old.

“He was only a tiny little fellow walking around following us when we were doing the work,” says Julie.

Don says hundreds of new homes were built in Townsville in the early-1980s with asbestos sheeting for internal walls. Asbestos was not banned from all building materials in Australia until 1987.

Both Don and Julie have been scanned and have no signs of mesothelioma themselves. It is thought that Adam’s young and undeveloped lungs as a child made him more vulnerable.

Adam died in April 2007 and since then his parents have sought to make home renovators aware of the need to take precautions.

“We don’t want it all to be focussed on Adam and people feeling sorry for us,” says Julie. “But we do want to raise awareness.”

Healthy at 24, dead at 25

Julie and Don Sager at an Asbestos Awareness Week event in Melbourne in November.

HOW will we remember 2014? Will it be for Joe Hockey’s Budget horror show in May?

The biased Royal Commission into trade unions? Or the ever-rising tide of unemployed Australians, especially younger people?

Of course, 2014 wasn’t all bad news, and the defeat of the Napthine Coalition Government in Victoria last month showed that the tide is already turning.

Here are some of the highlights – and lowlights – of 2014, as seen by the team at Working Life. And we’d love to have your verdict on 2014 as well.

Workers united will never be defeatedOnce again in 2014, we saw some great examples of how worker solidarity can get real results. In March, about 40 low-paid workers at a warehouse operated by the Super A Mart chain in Melbourne who wanted to negotiate their first collective agreement took to the road to directly confront the directors of owner Quadrant Private Equity in Sydney. And they won! We saw another long lockout at the Ausreo factory in Wetherill Park in Sydney in August. Dozens of unions backed in the workers there, and again ultimately they won a favourable deal. And just days before Christmas, about 150 Victorian workers employed by global elevator company Otis achieved a breakthrough in their seven-week dispute and lock-out, following a day of action that roped in unions from Ireland, New Zealand, the USA, Canada and Denmark. Verdict: good

‘A nation of lifters, not leaners’For far too many reasons than we have room to list here, Joe Hockey’s first Budget as Treasurer has already gone down in history as one of the most divisive, unfair and unpopular ever. In his Budget speech, Hockey sought to frame the Budget as an argument of “us and them”, borrowing a phrase from Sir Robert Menzies by declaring Australia had to become a nation of “lifters, not leaners”. And it was pretty obvious that it was the vulnerable, the poor, the sick and the elderly who were expected to do most of the lifting. ACTU President Ged

Kearney nailed it when she said: “This Budget is a recipe for the Americanisation of Australian society, with wide disparities of inequality and huge pockets of poverty and working poor. It is the biggest attack on the social wage this country has ever seen.”Verdict: ugly

Senate shenanigansThe arrival of six new minor party Senators in Canberra in July suddenly changed the dynamic of the Federal Parliament. Along with Nick Xenophon and John Madigan, the presence of three Palmer United Party Senators, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm, Family First’s Bob Day and the Motoring Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir meant the Abbott Government would need to secure the votes of at least six of them to get any legislation passed. Through astute lobbying of the new cross-benchers, unions have managed to prevent several legislative nasties being passed, including the Fair Entitlements Guarantee amendments and Christopher Pyne’s higher education changes.Verdict: sometimes good, often bad

Vale Gough WhitlamThe death of Gough Whitlam, aged 98, on 21 October led to tributes from around the nation for one of our greatest reforming Prime Ministers. Many made note of Mr Whitlam’s utter commitment to his program and determination to push through change, regardless of how unpopular it may have been. His legacy includes the introduction of universal health care scheme, abolition of tertiary education fees, formal acknowledgement of Indigenous land rights and self-determination, equal pay for women, ending Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and investment in basic infrastructure for the outer suburbs of the capital cities. And yet, 39 years after he was removed from office, many of those reforms were in danger of being unravelled by the Abbott Government.Verdict: Gough good, destroying his legacy bad

Wages down, unemployment risingIn August, we asked: what happened to the ‘wages explosion’ that employers and the Abbott Government have been warning us about? And little has changed since. December’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement by the Commonwealth Treasury again showed that growth of the Wage Price Index for the past year was just 2.6%, the lowest in the 17-year history of the

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Looking back at 2014

The good, the bad and the ugly

index. And MYEFO is forecasting that wages growth will be just 2.5% for the full financial year, the same as inflation, meaning real wages will remain stagnant. Even Joe Hockey has finally recognised what a drag this is on the economy. Meanwhile, unemployment is heading in the other direction, increasing from 5.9% at the start of the year to 6.3% by year’s end, and up to 6.9% in Queensland and Tasmania – that’s an extra 45,000 people looking for work now. Youth

unemployment is even higher. And it is only going to get worse with the MYEFO forecasting the jobless rate will rise to 6.5% and stay there for over a year.Verdict: bad

Presumed guilty . . . As if there was ever any doubt, as 2014 progressed it became increasingly clear just how much of a political weapon the Heydon Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance was. This was

all brilliantly summarised by ACTU Assistant Secretary Tim Lyons in a speech to the Chifley Research Centre in late October, which forensically dissected the political motivations and the inherent biases of the royal commission. “The proceedings have unfolded in a manner that reveals little or no sympathy for the purpose of trade unionism . . . I smell a fundamental clash of world-view,” he said. The flawed approach of the royal commission – and the media covering it – was probably best illustrated by the farcical appearance of Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana in September, whose lurid claims of links between the CFMEU and outlaw motorcycle gangs fell apart under cross-examination. The royal commission has now been extended for another year.Verdict: ugly

The end of the road for Aussie manufacturing?Australians were still reeling from the shock announcements in 2013 by both Ford and Holden that they would be ending domestic car making operations when in early-February Toyota also said it would be pulling out of local manufacturing by 2017. You might have thought this would be a wake-up call for Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey that they urgently needed to develop an industry policy to deliver on their promise of a million new jobs within five years – but you would be wrong. Because at the same time, the government had rejected a request from SPC Ardmona for $25 million financial assistance to upgrade its Shepparton factory and save 700 direct jobs and thousands of more flow-on jobs. There was no relief for manufacturing by year’s end, and Defence Minister David Johnston almost sunk a bid by Australian Submarine Corporation to make 12 new submarines with insensitive comments that he wouldn’t trust the company to “build a canoe”. Thankfully, Johnston has now been removed from this portfolio.Verdict: bad

Now it’s over to you. Tell us what you think were the best and worst things about 2014.

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Looking back at 2014

The good, the bad and the ugly

IT’S less than 36 hours until Victorians vote and the Melbourne Trades Hall building is a sea of calm.

Any visitor expecting a last minute frenzy of phone calls, volunteers packing election day kits, or panicked attempts to fill rosters will be disappointed.

All the calls have been made, the crews have been assigned to their booths on polling day, and the coreflutes, posters and leaflets have all been distributed to the army of volunteers.

The dilemma is to find something meaningful to do for the volunteers rostered on election eve.

So well organised and precision perfect has the union movement’s election campaign been, that now all that is left is the waiting. Waiting for the day when Victorians will vote to turn Denis Napthine’s Liberal-National Coalition into the state’s first one term government for more than half a century.

The bluestone Trades Hall itself, one of Melbourne’s most imposing Gold Rush-era buildings on the corner of Victoria and Lygon Streets, is wrapped in about 50 metres of six-foot high red bunting carrying the message “Nap Time’s Over”.

Across the road in Lygon Street, the Liberal candidate for Melbourne, Ed Huntingford, has parked his sky blue Toyota in a futile attempt to counter the Trades Hall message.

He gets full marks for chutzpah, but will be disappointed to find a cheeky union soul has stuck flyers under his front and back windscreen wipers.

IT has been like this for the past month as the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s state election campaign has swung into the final straight to home.

The Trades Hall campaign slipped under the mainstream media’s radar. If you did not live in one of the six targeted marginal seats, you were probably blisfully unaware there was a campaign.

But for residents in the target seats, there was no avoiding it, and the similarities with the Your Rights At Work campaign have been remarked upon more than once. It carries profound implications for the future of grassroots political campaigning in Australia.

As he surveys the final preparations – dressed, as always, in black jeans and boots and a t-shirt bearing the message ‘This is what a unionist looks like’ – the recently-elected Trades Hall Secretary, 34-year-old Luke Hilakari, exudes quiet confidence about the result on Saturday.

Win, lose or draw, he knows that the union campaign has made a difference.

“Right now, it looks like the conservatives are screwed,” he confides.

“This is a very big campaign. We’re trying to do something really hard. We’re trying to knock off a first term government, and that hasn’t been done in Victoria for over 60 years. To do something that big we needed a pretty big response.”

The union campaign was launched in March, when the presence of the British singer-songwriter/activist Billy Bragg ensured about 1000 people spilled into the Trades Hall courtyard.

But its genesis probably goes back to when Hilakari – who earned his stripes as an organiser at United Voice – was first appointed Trades Hall industrial and campaigns officer in 2011.

The campaign launch was a blast – the beer flowed freely, the sausages sizzled, Billy Bragg posed for selfies and

afterwards everyone ended up carousing in the John Curtin Hotel well into the early hours. Indeed, under Hilakari, campaigning looks like fun, which is a critical factor in attracting so many volunteers.

But also, like everything in this campaign, the launch had a serious side. Every attendee had to sign up for the

Victorian Election

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Memo Abbott: we are union,

hear us roarIn the days before Labor’s stunning election win,

Mark Phillips went behind the scenes to discover the secrets of the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s campaign.

This is what a unionist looks like: Sharan Hart on the steps of the Victorian Trades Hall building.

campaign by providing their name, email address and phone number, and they have all been contacted and coerced into volunteering in one way or another since.

Hilakari’s enthusiasm is contagious and he could never be accused of not pulling his sleeves up and pitching in himself. He and a group from Trades Hall are at every union rally or event, and the favour has

been reciprocated by affiliates, who have lent staff and resources.

With campaigns officer Wil Stracke, who comes from the Australian Services Union, at his side, Hilakari set out with three clear goals when he began plotting the 2014 election: changing the government, building the union movement, and improving Trades Hall’s internal campaigning capacity.

“Changing the government really wasn’t our number one goal,” Hilakari says. “Our number one goal was to build a movement and for us the election was just a vehicle to make that happen. We want to be stronger at the end of the campaign than we were at the start.”

This meant not only building the size of the movement’s activist base, but also improving how the Trades Hall communicated and mobilised them.

WHILE desperate Liberal advertising sought to target Labor leader Daniel Andrews as being a puppet of the union movement in the time-honoured manner of union bashing – even photoshopping a CFMEU hard hat onto him – the Trades Hall campaign was unashamedly badged as ‘We Are Union’.

“We are proudly union at Trades Hall and we want to pull all our unions together to be just as proud as we are,” Hilakari says.

In fact, the overly-negative anti-union advertising probably worked in reverse and damaged the Liberals more. It also served as an extra motivator for the campaign activists.

Having decided on four key issues for the campaign – jobs, health, education and emergency services – Trades Hall then identified who they wanted to persuade to vote progressive.

At an early stage, a decision was made to focus on just six target seats, all held by the Coalition by very slim margins. This was partly due to lack of resources and wish to avoid being spread too thin.

They settled on the “sandbelt” seats of Carrum, Frankston, Mordialloc and Bentleigh, leafy Monbulk in the Dandenong ranges, and the coastal seat of Bellarine south of Geelong, both of which had been deemed marginal Liberal after redistribution. In the finely balanced Victorian Legislative Assembly, the Coalition only needed to lose four of those seats to lose government.

Lacking the financial resources to commission a large-scale electronic or

print media blitz like the Your Rights At Work campaign had, the Trades Hall campaign was always going to succeed or fail on whether it could mobilise enough grassroots supporter/activists to engage in a targeted ground war.

And this is where state trades and labour councils excel.

Trades Hall set an internal target of recruiting 2000 volunteer activists to help on the campaign. They exceeded that with 2191 volunteers signed up who have done at least one activity as part of the campaign.

“Those activities had to be something physical, whether it be phone banking, doorknocking, handing out at a railway station, marching in a rally,” says Hilakari. “It wasn’t good enough for us just to click on an online petition.”

This year, union campaign volunteers have knocked on 93,000 doors, convinced about 30,000 people to sign pledges or petitions of support, held 211 street stalls and 152 train station blitzes, where they handed out 37,000 flyers.

Continued page 10

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Victorian Election

This is what a unionist looks like: Sharan Hart on the steps of the Victorian Trades Hall building.

Changing the government really wasn’t our number one goal. Our number one goal was to build a movement.

“

“New VTHC Secretary Luke Hilakari

EARLY in the morning on 27 November, while Australia was deep in shock over the freak incident that had felled cricketer Phillip Hughes two days earlier, Jorge Castillo-Riffo clocked on as usual for his job as a concreting labourer on the $2 billion Royal Adelaide Hospital construction site.

Less than 90 minutes later, Jorge also was fighting for his life. Later that day, it was announced that Phillip Hughes had died; about 24 hours later, Jorge Castillo-Riffo was also dead.

In an eerie parallel with 25-year-old Phillip Hughes, Jorge’s death was the result of a traumatic workplace injury.

Jorge Castillo-Riffo, 54, wasn’t a famous sportsman and the fatal moment that caused his death was not televised, or replayed ad nauseum to millions of viewers. He was alone when, for reasons still not fully understood, the scissor lift he was working on crushed him under a concrete slab.

While the outpouring of grief for Phillip Hughes was magnified by his fame and that a fatality is so unusual in cricket, deaths on building sites like those of Jorge Castillo-Riffo are depressingly all too common, and rarely make more than a brief snippet in the news.

He is the 26th person to be die in a workplace incident in the construction industry this year, according to the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.

A coroner will investigate the circum-stances of his death, but for now his family and workmates can only remember the man that Jorge Castillo-Riffo was.

At his funeral on 9 December attended by about 300 mourners at Adelaide’s Centennial Park, Jorge Castillo-Riffo was honoured as a big-hearted man who lived life to the full.

He was a passionate and proud member of the CFMEU who never missed an opportunity to remind workmates of the importance of being in a union and the valuable role unions play as advocates for

workplace and social justice.Having suffered political persecution

under the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet in his native Chile, Mr Castillo-Riffo knew more than most the importance of unions in a democratic society.

“He was a good member, very politically-savvy and politically-educated from Chile and from the struggle against the fascists and Pinochet,” said Aaron Cartledge, SA Branch Secretary of the CFMEU and a friend for almost 20 years.

“He was always a good bloke to have on a job because you could have a good yak with him and he got what the union was about and was active in encouraging other lads to join the union.

“He was a great one to spot an injustice on the job, but he didn’t just sit there and

moan about it, but would set about fixing it, and he got results.”

In a statement released the day of his death, family and friends said Mr Castillo-Riffo was “an honest, loyal, caring friend and family man who believed that all workers should have safe working conditions”.

“He worked, lobbied and agitated for justice in the workplace. He especially looked after the younger workers and made sure they had safe work equipment.

“Jorge was a man of fun, humour and compassion, loved by all . . . His death should not have happened. His life will never be forgotten. In his name we say: ‘the struggle continues’.”

Mr Castillo-Riffo worked for sub-contractor Structural Systems on the Royal Adelaide Hospital site.

He was found by workmates about 7.10am on 27 November. He was discovered crushed between the scissor lift and a concrete slab, and although efforts were made to revive him, his injuries were so serious he passed away about midday the next day.

The CFMEU says the death of Jorge Castillo-Riffo is the 26th in the building and construction industry so far this year, a 53% increase on 2013.

Like Phillip Hughes, Jorge went to work and never came home

At Work

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A big-hearted man: A makeshift memorial to Jorge Castillo-Riffo (pictured left) outside the front gates of the Royal Adelaide Hospital building site on the day of his funeral.

by MARK PHILLIPS

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I HAD been working at the ACTU Working Women’s Centre from 1979 and, deciding it was time to move on

I went to the other side of the world.I had no idea when I left Melbourne

that the miners’ strike was on, but as soon as I arrived in the UK it was impossible not to know. I spent a couple of months in London where; outside every Tube station, on many street corners, in pubs, outside gigs, and at any festival or outdoor event people collected for the miners.

They were distinctive with their yellow plastic ‘Coal not Dole’ collection tins and they were usually covered with round yellow stickers and assorted badges. They carried pages of these paper stickers and every time anyone put something into one of the collection tins they were offered a

sticker which was proudly worn to show the world support of the miners.

There was no fence sitting during the miners’ strike: everybody had an opinion.

I went to TUC Congress and spoke to miners there who invited me to visit their pit village.

I travelled to Blidworth (pronounced Blid’th) in Nottinghamshire where the pits were still working and the strikers were a minority. After two weeks I had witnessed for myself the police violence

on the picket lines, the bias of the courts, the hostility of the scabs.

I had also witnessed the organisation and commitment of the striking community and the way that had changed their lives and their view of the world. Suddenly they heard themselves described by their Prime Minister as ‘‘the enemy within’’, they became aware that the media coverage of their battle was not only biased but full of lies.

Neighbours, friends and family members who were still working turned against them; police occupied their village arresting people willy-nilly and starting fights on the picket lines; their phones were tapped and the courts were clearly and openly biased against them; and special legislation was introduced to

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Keeping alive the spirit of the British miners’ strike

World News

From picket lines to battlelines: Police and picketers clash in South Wales in 1984. Photo: flickr/MuseumWales Below: Lynn Beaton.

Thirty years later, Melbourne author Lynn Beaton revisits the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, which she first depicted in her book, Shifting Horizons, published in 1986.

Continued from page 7

Back at Trades Hall, 172 phone bank shifts were held, with 30,000 conversations held with union members in marginal seats.

Online and social media has also been a crucial part of the campaign.

In any public contact, a key worker – such as a nurse or a firefighter in uniform was paired up with an “orange person”, a volunteer so-named for their orange t-shirts.

“The messenger is as important as the message,” says campaigns officer Wil Stracke. The same happened with phone calls, where a specialist worker would be assigned to talk to a voter about the issue they most cared about.

“The whole basis of our campaign is around the authenticity of our work,” says Hilakari. “A firefighter will be believed every single time over a

politician having a conversation. Same with a metalworker talking about a job in the Geelong region. Same with a paramedic, a nurse, a teacher, all these professions have been doorknocking and having direct conversations. They are the most powerful conversations and the most persuasive conversations.”

SHARON Hart, a psychiatric nurse who lives in the seat of Frankston, has arrived at Trades Hall on Thursday afternoon to pick up her equipment for election day.

She is wearing her orange ‘We Are Union’ t-shirt under her jacket. Although a union member her entire working life, she has never been involved in something like this, and over the past few months has done phone calls and handed out leaflets as well as the election day activities.

She has found it an empowering experience.

“The unions have been decimated by the Liberals, and divided and conquered and people are running scared, and it’s time to tell people don’t be scared, don’t apologise for being a union member,” she says.

The campaign didn’t end with Labor’s win. Unions in other states are looking to replicate the techniques for the New South Wales and Queensland elections next year.

And after Victoria’s triumph, there is another Liberal leader in their sights.

“We have volunteers in place who are ready to turn ahead,” says Luke Hilakari. “If they didn’t like Denis Napthine, they hate Tony Abbott. They just want to go him.”

Continued from previous page

prevent them getting any welfare support.All this made them realise that simply

because they were standing up for what they considered was their right to employment and their right to live in a viable community they had been denied many of the benefits of British citizenship.

One day when I was there the news was showing violent demonstrations in Poland and one of the children sang out: ‘‘Hey Mum and come and see, we’re on the news again’’.

My intention when I went to Blidworth was to write a few articles for Australian trade union journals, but after a few days, I realised that the full extent of the situation, both the hardships and the amazing strengths found by individuals in struggle could not be told in an article. I was overwhelmed with the need to share what I was witnessing and I realised that would need a book.

I discussed the writing of the book with the community who welcomed the suggestion and offered me accommodation in a caravan at the back of Pauline’s house. As I began to gather information I realised that my own understanding was deepened by the fact I was fast becoming friends with many of the community. I decided then, that the best way to tell the story was up close and personal so that the reader might feel as

they too, had become friends with two of the women from the striking community.

I chose women because theirs was the greater transformation from apolitical non-unionised factory workers to politically-aware individuals who travelled the length and breadth of Britain on speaking tours to raise funds and organised the entire village. The latter involved attending to all the collective needs of the strikers and their families.

When the strike ended it was devastating for those who had given their all in its success.

But they were not and never would be the same people that had entered the

strike. The extent to which individuals are transformed in struggle, finding strengths they were unaware of, realising the class nature of the society in which they live, was a legacy of the strike.

On the other hand, the defeat opened the gates for Thatcher to take on other unions one-by-one and then to introduce the neo-liberal policies that bear her name. Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan introduced the same polices and the world therefore has been dominated politically and economically ever since.

The defeat of the British miners sent a shiver through union movements around the world, but it should have shaken them up. Since this defeat, unions in Australia and most other countries have lost members and lost strength.

Now that the result of neo-liberal policies is clear, our need to fight them is paramount.Here in Australia our way of life is under threat from the Abbott Government. The government was elected largely because of a political apathy among the electorate.

The story of Doreen and Pauline brings hope in a bleak landscape because it shows us that once individuals begin to struggle for their communities and their dignity – they are transformed.

Shifting Horizons is available as an ebook for $3.50 from Lynn Beaton’s website: http://lynn-beaton.net/shifting-horizons/

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Last Word

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Educate! Agitate! Organise!

IN the decade before the birth of Organising Works, the trade union movement was facing many challenges.

The era of globalisation had arrived.A new form of economic crisis called

stagflation was upon us.The trade union movement was under

attack and membership was in decline accelerated by the ending of closed shops which had inflated the level of conscious unionism. The corporate Right was mounting a campaign to “Americanise” the Australian economy and our industrial relations system and our system of democracy.

Industrial relations was moving from centralised award bargaining to enterprise bargaining.

To meet these challenges, the ACTU developed a strategic plan, part of which was an Accord Agreement with the Hawke Labor Government to tackle the economic crisis.

Another part was to create 20 super unions and later Organising Works became a key part of the strategy.

The Accord Strategy:WON government for Labor;ENDED stagflation and repositioned the

Australian economy to face globalisation; HALTED the corporate Right’s anti-

union offensive for 13 years which gave the trade union movement the time needed to create super unions and build unionism at the grass roots.

The strategy achieved major social reforms such as Medicare, Award redundancy pay, a world best minimum wage standard and universal superannuation which has changed the fabric of Australian society and is the envy of the world.

Organising Works was able to unite the trade union movement in support of the “organising model” which was about uniting and empowering workers at the workplace.

Organising Works took the then existing

“left model” of organising which was a mixture of workplace democracy, centralised leadership, struggle and solidarity and enriched that model so as to make organising a science.

It became a science when all of the elements of the OW course were put together, including the importance of strategic thinking and planning, the dominant role of strategy as against the supportive role of tactics.

Organising Works recognised that strategy was about maximising power and understanding that power has many forms which could be utilised to our advantage or to our opponent’s advantage. It recognised the need to develop union consciousness and take workers to a new level of commitment and leadership capacity.

Organising Works created the greatest affirmative action initiative ever undertaken by the trade union movement – about half the 850 trainees have been women, and a significant number were from Non-English Speaking Background.

Those trainees went on to become union and community leaders. People like Bill Shorten, George Wright, Sally McManus and Lisa Darminan.

As a result, the composition of the leadership of the trade union movement now more accurately reflects the composition of the workforce.

Organising Works made a major contribution to end the Cold War mentality that had divided the union movement for

decades into “left” and “right”.Organising Works helped build the spirit

of comradeship across the movement. At the yearly Award Presentation Night there is always a wonderful spirit of unity.

Organising Works has fast-tracked the development of capable new union leaders. The influence of Organising Works trainees can be found in many places; some have become national or state union leaders or occupy other important positions in their union.

Others have become academics or taken up law. Some have become political leaders, like Bill Shorten. Some others have become leaders in local government and in various people’s organisations.

And we are all proud of the key role played by Organising Works trainees in the defeat of WorkChoices.

Organising Works is a key part of the ACTU strategy for building a different type of society to the neo-liberal models championed by Thatcher and Reagan.

The working class are indebted to those that had the vison and capacity to create Organising Works.

Over the last 20 years the trainers, mentors, trainees, elders and others have enriched the course to what it is today.

This is an edited extract of a speech Tom McDonald gave to a symposium on the 20th anniversary of Organising Works in Sydney on 20 November.

by TOM McDONALDOrganising Works Elder