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A people’s alternative to APEC - Seeing Howard’s IR Laws within the Bigger Picture…”

By Brian Boyd, VTHC Secretary
September 2007

It is no accident that John Howard fawned over George Bush at the official APEC in Sydney recently.

In the 1980’s he fawned over Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, frustrated he couldn’t deliver for them back then.

More and more Australians are beginning to see the links between the policies that come out of Canberra and the requirements of U.S. policy. 

Imposition of so called free-trade agreements, regular joint military training exercises, the over abuse of the environment and the curtailment of civil rights of citizens, to list a few of the issues, are all consequences of the creators of the APEC agenda. 

Particular aspects of the APEC agenda impact directly on the economics and civil rights in this country.

This is no more clearly illustrated than how the Howard government has systematically moved to impose the most draconian IR legislation in our history over the last decade.

Its purpose is to satisfy the economic requirements of globalisation and the big business policies of the APEC agenda.

To achieve this goal, working people need to be denied effective organisational and institutional structures like trade unions.

All of the recent IR legislation is essentially aimed at undermining the ability of workers to act collectively.  This ability is necessary to maintain and increase reasonable wages and conditions over time. 

Where necessary, workers’ rights are further curtailed by supplementary laws that weaken wider democratic and civil rights in society.

So official responses to terrorist activities are heavy handed, all sweeping and ill-defined. Normal protest activity in a functioning democracy is sneered at, even targeted in a purposefully confused way.

The shut down of Sydney for APEC was a disgrace. Taking precautions against real terrorists is one thing.  To clear hundreds of cells in NSW to put protestors in gaol without bail, is clearly an illustration of the ‘blurring’ of issues.

Returning to the IR laws – WorkChoices is becoming increasingly exposed for what it is – a legalistic, draconian mechanism to put more power in the hands of the employer and leave hardly any say for workers.

Collective bargaining via EBA’s is legislated to the back of the queue and made extremely difficult to achieve, while individual contracts (eg AWA’s in particular) are one-sided (weighted to the employer) and easy to create and put in place.

The reduction of workers’ rights is directly linked to the specific targeting of trade unions’ organisational processes and the long established industrial history of third party representation.

The attacks on union structures must be answered head on.  It is the collective nature of workers taking action together to achieve outcomes that is the target of the smear campaign against trade unions.

Another aspect of the attack is the victimizing of shop stewards, job delegates and OHS representatives.

With the advent of WorkChoices there has been an increase in reports of rank and file activists being singled out by employers for poor treatment, including the sack.

If anyone needs to see the inner thinking of the conservatives in Australia (and by definition the APEC agenda makers) you only have to read the desperate editorials in The Australian newspaper. 

 

Every week this newspaper gives bucket loads of gratuitous advice to the alternative government politicians (Rudd and Gillard in particular) about moving on from the IR debate.

The editorial writers say “now is not the time to take the hands off the levers of economic management”.  This is code for – Howard’s IR laws have been successful in stopping many workers getting some share via better wages of the relative prosperity in the national economy. 

It is also code for – we can’t afford to give “workers at the lower end of the spectrum a better deal via greater union involvement”… because it could cause inflation!

The focus is totally on the cost of labour when talking about economic management.  There is never any mention of record profits, CEO and management multi-million dollar salary packages, the price of raw materials and so on.

To reduce the cost of labour the target is collective bargaining and in particular union co-ordinated collective bargaining.  Since the advent and spread of AWA’s the statistics have constantly shown that collective EBA’s are superior in terms of the total value of wages and conditions.

 

 

This is not a question of ‘winding back… workplace reform’.  It is a question of ending draconian, anti-democratic, bad laws that have seriously affected working people’s ability to win fair wages and conditions and participate in society in a social and political context via that industrial organisation.

APEC represents the big economic forces of capital getting together to see how they can maximise their share of the markets, their slice of the cake.  They meet to sort out their disagreements on how to go about such matters. 

But they agree on one thing: if labour is too organised and demand more of a share in terms of wages and conditions or even worse, start to become politically vocal so as to affect the public debate about how the country is run, then that is not acceptable!  How dare workers have a view about where resources (including taxes) should be directed and how international relations should run (eg opposing war, military spending, in contrast to helping developing nations instead, eg the poor pacific ocean nations). 

This scenario really scares the powers that be.  No wonder so much energy is directed at attacking working-class institutions.

John Howard has a lot to answer for.