Who constructed the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are full of names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
– sigh, sure, Bertolt Brecht, A Employee Reads Historical past.
Look, looking back, my concept for a fundraising CFMEU “Not WorkSafe!” glamour calendar was a misfire, and it’s in all probability good it didn’t occur. The idea got here from noticing how, on websites, there have been so many younger individuals, female and male, of a sure… magnificence, and suggesting that sultry photographs of them in situ, plus two of fats, grumpy previous geezers for December and January, for giggles, may increase funds for charity. By means of contacts, I despatched it up the road, do not know what occurred to it. Wouldn’t have helped I suppose.
However, amid all of the storm and fury concerning the CFMEU, and everybody operating round saying they’re shocked, shocked to listen to that bikies have been concerned in building union politics and massive builds, it’s value asking why my calendar concept was even doable. It’s as a result of there have been so many individuals on constructing websites, so many younger individuals, extra ladies, extra non-Anglos and non-Europeans, extra Indigenous individuals, and, sure, extra LGBTQIA+.
All on stonking wages and nice circumstances. Because the builders made enormous earnings, the CFMEU has ensured that these on their websites bought a good share. The Betoota Advocate, voice of sanity as at all times, had bought it proper with a headline a few lady employee wishing her union would get into mattress with bikies, so she might purchase a home, as many, many hundreds of CFMEU members have been in a position to do. (Half proper: Betoota had a nurse saying that. The nurses union has carried out fairly effectively for its members, in a much less beneficent sector than CFMEU is in. Shoulda been a Coles shelf-stacker.)
So, what’s fascinating concerning the present pile-on is how little curiosity there’s in making some form of evaluation as to how effectively or in any other case the development part of the CFMEU has truly represented its members. The dearth of curiosity on this, the shortage of debate — as a lot from individuals on the left, particularly these in non-manual work — is essentially the most putting factor about this difficulty. It’s notably putting as a result of CFMEU Development has solely managed to attain this — for its members, after which dragging up the sector as a complete — by working outdoors the commercial system, created by Labor within the Rudd/Gillard years.
So this sudden publicity is with out context. The context required is that the mix of the Honest Work Fee, anti-strike legal guidelines, and the energetic complicity of the right-wing unions, has turned Labor and the commercial system right into a clean machine for the suppression of wages, wage calls for, improved on-site circumstances, and the opportunity of industrial motion. The CFMEU’s chief rival, from which it needed to carve out territory, is the Australian Staff’ Union (AWU), Invoice Shorten’s union and the keystone of what stays of his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-type faction. The job on the CFMEU will now be carried out by Tony Burke, whose profession has been made on the again of the Store, Distributive and Allied Workers’ Affiliation (SDA) — which is to say on the again of the retail employees the SDA has “represented”, i.e. offered to the grocery store duopoly and the quick meals giants at a reduction.
Thus, a mythology of what occurred is being performed out. On this telling, the CFMEU Development (keep in mind additionally that is merely the Victorian and Tasmanian department) have been gifted an enormous discipline of organising by Victorian Labor, and have become violent and corrupt from thereon, feeding off the fats. The reality is that the CFMEU carved out territory, which required the main builders and Labor to cope with them, and to carve out some good offers.
That, in a great world, is just not the easiest way to do the redistribution of capital and wages. It’s higher carried out on a complete sector foundation. However we don’t have a separate, militant union motion. We’ve got a compromised one, integrated into state apparatuses, and with one in every of its largest sectors dominated by the SDA, managed by the fitting, whose self-appointed job, for many years, has been to self-discipline labour on behalf of capital.
Thus in Victoria, the rise of CFMEU Development occurred concurrently what has actually been a single, 25-year Labor authorities started in search of methods to fill the encroaching demand hole and manufacturing hole that now haunts all Western economies. What higher to fill a gap with, than a much bigger gap. Keynes well-known comment about burying bottles full of cash and tendering out digging them up got here to fruition with the Metro tunnel, the West Gate tunnel, and the weird Suburban Rail Loop, the cash within the gap being builders’ earnings — and the employees’ wages, which did extra to pump the native economic system than repatriated developer earnings did.
However the CFMEU doesn’t have blanket protection of building on this state by any means. The AWU has a share, and plenty of websites, particularly smaller ones, are non-union. There, employees get a fraction of what they get on large builds, in circumstances of diminished security, lack of amenity, no sheds, no bogs — working both for small builders who’re near the margin, or bigger housing property builders who’ve over-leveraged. The sector is break up: the state-funded developments are completely secured. Contractor builders like Lendlease on the Metro desecration of the Flinders and Swanston Road block — historical past which might have been preserved, to get replaced by a mall that may start dying as quickly as it’s opened — can and do return to the federal government for top-ups each time they want.
The opposite builders are in a extra precarious state of affairs (cry no tears; it’s often as a result of they drain their very own firms of capital each time they get a win). The muscle appeared, from their aspect, earlier than the unions started to device as much as match it. “Safety companies” after which plain previous bikies started showing on websites on behalf of companies, exactly to maintain union organisers off-site. 9’s protection options some nasty tales of bullying and worse by a course of bought effectively out of hand. It has no protection of the on a regular basis intimidation of unrepresented employees on small websites throughout the state and the nation. And no-one with any investigative grunt has any curiosity in overlaying it.
Thus it has ever been. When the constructing unions first emerged as distinctive forces within the Sixties, they have been organising males on low wages and no circumstances, thought to be brute labour, pure metabolism. The chorus given to us in school within the Nineteen Seventies was “research laborious otherwise you’ll find yourself as a ditch digger”. Communists organised these unions, catapulting their members from the underside to the highest, combating the ridicule of the concept labourers ought to have a good wage, someplace to eat their lunch, or not work on scaffolding within the rain.
A lot has been made from the extraordinary and constructive upheaval created by the Nineteen Seventies Inexperienced Bans, and rightly so. But it surely’s a measure of our instances that the social motion features of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation’s (BLF) energy lingers as a lot within the reminiscence as does the relentless wrestle to enhance constructing employees’ wages and circumstances. Certainly, what’s change into most celebrated is the “Pink Ban”, when the NSW BLF stopped work on a Sydney Uni faculty that had thrown out a homosexual pupil — one thing many individuals really feel extra prepared to determine with than the fundamental employee and sophistication struggles that underpinned such motion. But it surely wasn’t simply that, then and now. The constructing unions have shifted the concept of what’s “deserved”, of who will get what and why. The stream of disapproval from Information Corpse and Nein is capital’s propaganda megaphone going full blast, saying, “ask for extra and that is what you get”.
So how did it get a bit of, er, off target? The ’70s and ’80s BLF was a mixture of muscle and politics, with the Maoist Communist Occasion of Australia enjoying a major function. The Maoists weren’t fussed about involvement with muscle, they usually had a selected evaluation that low wage Australian employees have been in a contradictory state of affairs — backside of the pole in a rustic that was each a part of the West and its underdeveloped periphery — and they also utilized guerrilla quite than mass ways to industrial motion. Probably the most spectacular motion was to depart a concrete pour on these boxy ’70s skyscrapers that took eternally to construct. The concrete would set unshaped on the twenty ninth flooring, requiring it to be jackhammered out and redone at unbelievable expense.
John Cummins, the Maoist de facto BLF commander of these days, was John Setka’s mentor, and a few of that survives within the CFMEU’s present ways. Not sufficient of the politics did, and to pre-empt the critics licking their pens, it’s honest to say that the Setka management took on the decadence not unknown to leaders within the Communist custom. The capper was in all probability Setka slapping on black bans and placing out a needed poster for a brand new AFL official who was ex-ABCC. Look, I’m sorry, I believed that was hilarious. But it surely was an indication that issues had bought uncontrolled.
That they had been for some time. The Victorian CFMEU, and the rail and tram union, and some others, had carved themselves out of the Victorian Socialist Left faction, and began up an “Industrial Left” faction. This was ostensibly to current a extra militant coverage on industrial motion, and they also did. They then turned fixated on the reason for getting the late Jane Garrett into the state higher home, after she’d been denied a winnable place by the SL, having reduce and run from her immediately marginal — and now Inexperienced — seat of Brunswick.
The “Industrial Left” then joined with the magical travelling Merry Pranksters faction, the “Centre Alliance” that Adem Somyurek had arrange with… the AWU (all detailed in my Crimson Brotherhood At Conflict sequence, from just a few years again), an outfit which regarded prefer it may get management of the get together, earlier than journalist Nick McKenzie took that aside too, with some military-quality surveillance tapes of Somyurek stacking branches, like a kind of sped-up movies of a mouse constructing a nest.
This was after all entwined with the cleaning soap opera of John Setka and Emma Walters, his high-powered Labor insider spouse, performed out throughout years, amid fusillades of leaked textual content messages, accusations and convictions for home violence, Walters drunk driving throughout the state, Setka pitching an iPad at her, accusations of sustained household violence, separation, and the finale of Walters convicted of constructing a menace to kill Setka and escaping a recorded conviction.
That is notably regrettable, as a result of sufficient of the CFMEU’s radicalism has survived to make sure that the management has made sustained drives to get extra ladies on websites, extra Indigenous employees, to push again towards residual sexist attitudes on websites. The 9 press has to date spoken to everybody besides rank-and-file CFMEU on web site. One can solely admire their advantage on not letting their story of corruption, bullying and alleged betrayal not be polluted by any investigation of what the union truly thinks of its personal management.
However that could be very a lot the solid of the entire story. The precise employees being represented matter zero. The 9 investigation has turfed up some ugly and misguided particular person actions, such because the alleged CFMEU involvement within the office bullying of Ben Nash, a younger Gunditjmara man whose employer the CFMEU was allegedly shutting out, and who suicided the day after being handled badly. It’s a ghastly story. However the CFMEU’s involvement stays a sequence of accusations by Ben Nash’s mom, but to be examined in a coronial inquiry. Younger employee bullying is one thing to be worn out, however is much less frequent (although probably extra impactful) than it as soon as was.
But it surely’s a tenuous story to base accusations of an empire of thuggery, corruption and many others on, and it appears apparent that the Indigenous angle will, and is probably supposed, to stampede progressive individuals away from CFMEU help. Class, in our period, barely exists in a “actual” capability (besides in every part you do). However gender and race are paramount.
The diploma to which these single tales are being republicised and recirculated suggests to me that they don’t have a complete lot to throw at them. Folks additionally want to recollect the teachings of Abbott’s royal fee, which noticed the CFMEU accused of innumerable crimes, the smallest fraction of which got here to precise cost and conviction (it backfired on Abbott, although: Blue drongo a la TURC)
Yesterday’s story in The Age is an indication of simply how a lot militant motion is being dodged up as criminality. The headline: “CFMEU fined $150,000 after bullying employees at West Gate tunnel undertaking”. The precise story? Two CFMEU organisers held up work on the West Gate tunnel for six hours till they have been introduced with proof WorkSafe had signed off on the positioning. In response to the story, the organisers have been responsible of “remonstrating” with officers. Oh no! Not remonstrating! On grounds of security! We should cease this remonstration outbreak earlier than it spreads!
So it’s a beat-up, as a part of the marketing campaign, the kind that’s now, sadly, as typical of 9 print as it’s of Information Corpse. Even when there have been a… tactical component to the CFMEU’s actions, this isn’t thuggery. This isn’t bullying. That is industrial motion, energy towards energy.
With out casting shade on the journalists who put this collectively, the entire investigation appears to be a part of 9 print’s relentless centre-right politicisation (humorous for it to be throwing stones concerning the ethical corruption of said function), with the goal of doing what the broken-down Victorian Liberal Occasion can’t do itself: edge the Labor authorities out of energy. What the investigation has to date revealed is a few remoted critical incidents, some kickbacks — to the union, not people — and the superb, merely superb revelation that Sally McManus, the top of the ACTU, headquartered in Melbourne, didn’t know there have been bikies tied up with the CFMEU.
Why does this strike one as so overblown, misplaced and po-faced an investigation? Most likely as a result of, I imply, the entire Victorian building trade is a large, large boondoggle. It’s a sport during which a Labor authorities has created high-volume infrastructure tasks of doubtful optimum utility, contracted them out with value-capture real-estate planning waivers to main firms, who then pay regardless of the CFMEU, ETU and different unions ask for, after which return to the federal government when extra taxpayer cash is required to finish the undertaking.
Why wouldn’t The Age, the paper of the large finish of city, make a extra complete investigation into building as a complete, as an enormous enterprise? As a result of it’s the large finish of city wot’s doing it, after all. John Holland and Lendlease, the main firms behind Metro and different tasks, don’t have to be shaken down by the CFMEU to pay any fee going. They’ve lined as much as do it. Documenting and anatomising the great state/capital/large union sew up might need been extra revealing, and a higher public service, than just a few gotchas on a union management. Which is, after all, why The Age and 60 Minutes didn’t do it that manner.
Possibly a few of these lending their help to this imagine that by clearing the bottom of a management who admittedly appear to have gone on the flip, they are going to permit an area for brand new shoots and many others and many others to develop. Nicely, don’t depend on it. The lesson supposed for the general public on this particular is just not that dangerous individuals can take over unions, or corruption can flourish unchecked, however that any industrial exercise outdoors the legislation — a legislation, introduced in by Labor governments, that’s nearer to nineteenth century master-and-servant legislation than it has been at any time since 1907 — is thuggery, is improper, is breaking dangerous. Maintain your head down, pay your dues, watch the coed politicians slide into administration positions in your union, after which into politics, after which into consultancies and directorships, and take what they let you might have whereas they declare to characterize you.
The CFMEU Development department and its predecessors have stood towards that, and carried out what radicals are speculated to do — combat for individuals who the system takes as nothing however their labour, a system that when provided a home and a life, and now presents everlasting renting, a bed room of your personal, and a half-full buying basket. The CFMEU’s predecessors bought solidarity. The CFMEU is getting rather a lot much less, particularly from these within the information class, a lot of whom have melted away. No matter the brand new gender combine on web site, the management continues to be very male, very blokey, and heh, very Croatian, one other story in itself. The rainbow flag waves over each web site, and a photograph of Ante Pavelić sits on a thousand mantelpieces, superb.
What’s rotten and really a lot a win by the fitting is that many hundreds of individuals will likely be tut-tutting whereas they learn concerning the doings of this “thuggish” union — stopping work taking place! breaking the legislation! — at the same time as they endure by means of working circumstances creating lifelong precarity and steady exhaustion. The regular squeeze on thousands and thousands of employees is handled by ironic humour, in sectors from hospitality to academia. But it surely covers the total tragedy of what has occurred.
Jobs that when promised a full life for diligent work now provide a strained and restricted existence, life passing by consumed by responsibility, or by the combination of worry and parsimony dictated by the low-wage short-term contract. Does one actually imagine that wage theft in bars and eating places would have been so open, so gluttonous, so merciless and detached, had hospo and retail had a significant union as militant because the CFMEU? Or would, with a little bit of a reminder, a thousand venues immediately have discovered some money and advantages they forgot to pay over, lickety-split?
By means of all this, one comes neither to bury John Setka nor to reward him, nor to romanticise any violence which can have arisen, nor to lastly adjudicate whether or not this state department has carried out extra hurt or good to the federal physique it’s a part of. The management is a collective, and who did what, good and dangerous, is as a lot a thriller to outsiders as is any merry band of bruvvers. However now’s the time to indicate some fundamental solidarity, the thirteenth rule of strife being should you can present it, as you must, for individuals half a world away, after a brutal and nihilistic terrorist assault made of their title, you must have the ability to present it for a union in your metropolis, your nation, whose most important crime seems to be to have gained, fairly probably, the very best deal for guide employees within the historical past of the world.
Except one retains the bourgeois phantasm that one deserves to be paid extra due to having carried out a level in semiotics and movie noir, nonetheless being paid off, the success of the CFMEU needs to be taken, by employees in all places, extra as an affirmative lesson, not a warning. Neglect the nonsense about lollipop signal holders and many others and many others. Development stays laborious, lengthy, typically harmful work. Good luck to anybody who bought a share of the earnings of it, by the CFMEU. Solidarity could be constructed from it, however it’s made, not given, by the laborious labour of organising. We’ll see how a lot of it the Victorian CFMEU Development department has to name on — from members and others — as this goes into the following chapter. From A Employee Reads Historical past, let Bert play it out:
Every web page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Each 10 years a fantastic man,
Who paid the piper?
For anybody searching for assist, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Past Blue is on 1300 22 4636. To talk to a First Nations disaster supporter, name 13 YARN (13 9276). In an emergency, name 000.
