En Passant

Why the difference in the treatment of the death of Phillip Hughes and that of building workers? In a word, profit. Safety on building sites threatens the bosses’ profit. Cricket on the other hand, as a business, reinforces the profit system, and makes its protagonists well known and loved. Let’s fight for a world in which everyone is safe at work. That means at its most basic more power to our unions, not less.

Our industrial dispute with Grocon has always been about safety. When we fight to protect the safety of building workers and the public, Liberal politicians call for our deregistration. Yet when Grocon pleads guilty to its role in the deaths of three young people, the same politicians are silent. Tony Abbott embraces Daniel Grollo as a member of his Government’s Business Advisory Council.

If Grocon wins it will be a setback for all workers. That’s why it is important for building workers to fight back in the way that has the greatest chance of success – striking and shutting down the building industry and cutting off the flow of massive profits to bludgers like Grollo and his ilk, and in doing that calling on other workers to join them to bury Labor’s anti-worker Fair Work Act.

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

In breaking news, Judge Bronstein of the Supreme Court of Never Ever Gunna Happen has issued an injunction against Daniel Grollo, ordering him to stay 100 metres away from any Grocon Construction site. His actions, said the Court, amount to thuggery and intimidation. His underlings have been ordered to allow the building union, the CFMEU, […]

The only protection we have from the Daniel Grollos of the world, and their contempt for our safety and our rights, is a strong union that is independent from multi-millionaires and their goons – the issue at the heart of the Grocon dispute. And we’ve shown in spades that, if we’re given a fighting lead, we’re prepared to do what it takes to defend it.

And of course, there’s the most basic fact. The fact that infuriates the rich and the powerful, and that drives their bought and sold apologists in the media into a frenzy. That is, as we demonstrated in the streets of Melbourne on Tuesday, we have the power to fight and win.

Having Grocon in charge of safety is like putting John Howard in charge of refugees. Only union reps on site can really help enforce safety. Only the ability to walk off the job without loss of pay over safety issues can really force the bosses to take the issue seriously. It has been a long long time since workers as workers have fought the bosses and their police so successfully and drawn in other workers in their own city and elsewhere. A long long time. What a great day.

Given the overwhelming rejection of WorkChoices in 2007 and the fear it still engenders, Tony Abbott cannot come out publicly in support of a return to this industrial relations ‘Golden Age’. So he hides behind weasel words about limiting union control and militancy – militancy when strike days are at historic lows! – and restoring industrial relations ‘balance’.

This is code for giving even more power to the bosses.

This is not a reason for defending Labor’s WorkChoices Lite. The alternative is to take industrial action to defend and extend jobs, wages and conditions. No to a return to WorkChoices. No to Fair Work which is WorkChoices Lite. Yes to the right to strike. Victory to the building union in its fight against Grocon.