Unions and community groups resolve to have the Fair Work Australia Act become ILO compliant to protect the right to strike.

First is a broad based education campaign to highlight the necessity of Australians to have the right to strike.

PM Gillard retained the restrictions and penalties on industrial action in WorkChoices and these sanctions must be removed.

The push is on Minister Bill Shorten to remove all of the penalties against withdrawing your labour power.

We want a right to strike – full stop.

We want a right to strike firewalled so the employers’ corporate lawyers cannot get an injuction to stop the industrial action.

Please prepare your own arguments.

Here are some sugestions; eg letter

Dear Friend,
The National Right to Strike Campaign (NRSC) is writing to ask you to support the campaign’s aim to have all Australian law
comply with International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions.
Contained in this correspondence are a 10 Point Proposal and model resolution. We ask that your organisation adopt the resolution.
Currently a number of unions, union branches, peak union bodies, as well as community organisations from neighbourhoods,
faith-based, environmental and social movements are considering similar resolutions.

If your organisation agrees to support this most fundamental of human rights, as defined by the ILO, you will be formally added
to the national list of supporting organisations, in an effort to
build the confidence and unity necessary if Australians are to achieve these rights:

MODEL RESOLUTION FOR ALL TYPES OF UNION MEETING
“That this meeting of (Name and status of union meeting) supports the National Right to Strike Campaign and declares that all
Australian law must comply with ILO Conventions 87 & 98. In particular with the guaranteed right to organise and strike at the
time chosen, and for the purposes decided upon, by union members.
Further, our organisation demands that the ILO Conventions pertaining to workers in unions being free to take solidarity action with other workers by striking, be complied with.”

Please see articles on the right to strike on this blog.

Here are TEN POINTS CONCERNING THE RIGHT TO STRIKE
AUTHORISED: NATIONAL RIGHT TO STRIKE CAMPAIGN VICTORIAN TRADES HALL:

1. All Australian law must comply with the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions.
2. The ILO Conventions state that the right to withdraw labour under-pins our democratic rights.
3. The ILO Conventions state that the right to strike is one of the es-sential means available to ‘seeking solutions to economic and social policy questions and to labour problems of any kind which are of direct concern to workers,’ and en-sures that working people and their unions can show solidarity with each other and with their communi-ties.
4. Australian law must uphold the ILO Convention to guarantee the rights of unions to negotiate about anything that is deemed to be in their interests. This is the same right that employers already have when they determine the price and conditions of sale for the goods they sell.
5. The ILO Conventions guarantee the right of entry for unions to enter in workplaces. This must be respected by Governments and employers, so that workers can exercise their freedom of association.
6. If unionists had the right to strike in solidarity with one another, we could have stopped pri-vatisations, casualisation and the offshoring of Australian jobs.
7. Australian workers should be equal before the law with employers. When employers use an alternative workforce (scabs), they are using second parties to achieve an industrial outcome. The law is unequal where workers cannot support each other with solidarity actions.
8. The ILO states that the right to strike protects all other human rights. Only unions with the freedom to act, in the same way as employers are free to act, can redress the imbalance of power.
9. Workplace flexibility has gone too far. This has led to casualisation, insecure employment and sham contracting. An unfettered market, not contained by the workers right to strike, re-duces conditions and the take home pay of working people.
10. Only through the right to strike will restrictions on their ability to trade freely be lifted on workers, allowing them to operate as freely as employers in the pursuit of their interests within the economy. In this way unions will be able to live out their purpose in the protection and advancement of all working people and their communities.

NRSC

NRSC letter to all types of of union meeting

http://securejobs.org.au/

I recommend two changes for more secure work.

1. Amend the Fair Work Act to have an effective right to strike.

2. Amend the Fair Work Act to restrict casual and other forms of precarious work to a limited period and apply more secure contracts of employment. Fair Work Australia is to have the discretion to conciliate and arbitrate the transition to the more secure employment contracts.

1. The right to strike

I submit the lawful strike is essential for beginning to enable employees and their unions to respond to dire precarious work of existing capitalist labour relations.

The international capitalist crisis daily worsens putting more pressure on business to further move to precarious and exploitative work.

In response, there is a driving imperative for employees to have the FWA balance the more powerful corporate and government forces by amendments that protect the right to strike.

I have written on this blog for a right to strike, firewalling industrial action for protection for employees and their unions.

I argue the right to strike is vital for employees in all the forms of non-standard work.

Arguments are strong for amendments to the Fair Work Act to protect the right to strike. I urge as necessary the repeal of the Australian Building and Construction Act, and the ABCC functions and powers.

All of the existing provisions from the earlier Workplace Relations Act and Work Choices still in the current repressive regime against strikes are to be deleted.

Instead, a broad legal protection for all forms of industrial action is inserted.

At a minimum, commonly accepted ILO principles protecting the right to strike are to be adopted. The history of such ILO principles and their non-application by Australia is well known in the industrial relations and labour law community.

Similarly, labour law critical analysis by Shae McCrystal ‘The Right to Strike in Australia’. I recommend Keith Ewing’s research on the right to strike and Tania Novitz (see this blog).

There is much criticism of the failure of the current FWA to have an effective right to strike in writings by industrial relations specialists, labour lawyers, the ACTU and unions.

Firewalling the right to strike I submit is essential to assist strategies for secure jobs.

2. Job security in the Fair Work Act

The overall merit evidence from employees’ adverse experiences in precarious work and the unjust impact socially at many levels in the Australian community requires Fair Work Act amendments for job security. Here are some recommendations.

2.1 One amendment is to clearly restrict casual employment to only short periods, such as 4 hours daily and no more than fortnightly.

Then a provision that compels employers and allows employees the transition from existing casualisation to more permanent on-going employment contracts.

Such a provision has bargaining rights for precarious workers to change to secure employment with the terms to be negotiated and agreed. The clear right exists when not being able to reach an agreement for the employee(s) to access conciliation and arbitration from FWA to gain process steps for more permanent work.

The same applies to ending many short-term contracts. After two short term contracts, then the employer is required to move to more permanent, on-going contracts.

Special attention is to support any employee with service e.g. more than seven years who is to be on a permanent contract, as is an existing employee with 10 years before retirement. Other non-standard employment sectors could be protected such as in the disability sector.

2.2 The next new section is to ensure that labour-hire contract provisions are not attractive to employers for lowering costs. The aim is have protections against precarious work in the labour-hire industry.

Such provisions are to ensure the same wages and conditions in the user firm in similar work employees from must be hired permanently for not less than two years. There is a formal written contract with the same rate and benefits. The worker may join the user firm’s union. Labour-hire is to be implemented ‘generally for short-term, supplementary and substitute positions’.
Provisions for transition and
compliance need to be put in place.

2.3 Strengthening enforcement provisions by employees and unions to ensure that employers pay legal wages and comply with all employment conditions of the contracts of employment, with speedy measures for exploited workers to recover wages. Increased penalties and damages against non-complying employers.

2.4 A provision that deems for compliance that legal minimums exist in contracts of employment so that those entitlements can be enforced even if there is no evidence of a written contract of employment.

2.5 Amend the unfair dismissal section so that the right applies to all employees, irrespective of the employee’s status or contract of employment or the size of the employer’s workforce.

The big lie that employers may not employ was made up by Peter Reith’s press secretary and is repeated ad nauseum in the media, but is to be rejected.

Even precarious workers ‘dismissed’ ought to have an opportunity to state their case about why they were unreasonably dismissed before a user friendly FWA conciliator then arbitrator for reinstatement or not.

2.6 For strengthened redundancy provisions in a new minimum entitlement that has a provision for one month’s pay for each year of service for redundant employees. This new minimum deters employers from making employees redundant and assists redundant employees in this recessionary period.

2.7 A specific process provision for precarious workers with non-standard work arrangements to have the legal right to union representation and to be able to organise in unions.

I support the ACTU campaign for Secure Jobs.

As the many issues of insecure work in Australia has overseas the same issues this Inquiry will investigate other countries attempts to deal for greater protection for their employees. I recommend China’s attempt (see this blog).

I urge support for the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia

Review by Howard Guille

This is the second book of Humphrey McQueen’s research into builders’ labourers and their unions.

Read it, as the author says, with the earlier volume ‘Framework of Flesh: Builders’ labourers battle for health and safety.

This book is a history of builders’ labourers and their work from colonialisation onwards. More especially, it is an account of the formation and operation of the Australian Building Labourers’ Federation from 1910 to the amalgamation of its residual bits into the CFMEU in 1991.

The book cannot be summarised in a review that is two words for each of the years McQueen covers.

One impressive aspect is the weight given to the outlying states as well as to Victoria and New South Wales. Another is the section on the ‘money flow’ within unions; put plainly, a union will fold if it fails to collect and bank members’ dues. McQueen also looks past ‘a cult of individuals in the Jack and Norm show’ (p12). Even so, his account of the genesis of green bans and his analysis of the conflicts between Norm Gallagher and Jack Mundey will raise controversy.

McQueen tells how workers tried to control what was happening to them – in practice, what bosses were trying to do to them – in the face of economic and social forces and changing technology.

There are fascinating insights – for example, other things being equal, concrete gave labourers’ opportunities and increased their relative power and work value but scissors lifts reduced them. He makes subtle use of Marxist political economy weaving ideas of surplus value, socially necessary labour and the like into understanding the actual economic forces pressing on workers.

Unionised labourers fought with trades, with judges, arbitration commissioners and other unions as well as with bosses.

The Arbitration system was a site for almost constant contest about which union covered which jobs and how these fitted into award coverage – for example was a plasterers’ labourer a trades’ assistant or a labourer; is a bridge or a communications tower a ‘building’. There was, especially in Queensland, an incessant coverage battle with the AWU. This went beyond the Builders’ Labourers and was a general fight from 1915 to 1996 between the AWU as Labor Government ally and the unions affiliated with the Trades and Labour Council. This was reprised after 1989 with Goss ALP Government.

I finished reading the book just as Alan Joyce gave Qantas shareholders ‘certainty’ by grounding the entire fleet of planes. The Qantas dispute and media shrieking about unions came after a period of ‘official quiet’ about industrial disputation that McQueen’s book helps to put into perspective. Disputes fell off in 1990s and 2000s apart from a few unions including the CFMEU, CEPU (ETU) and NTEU that adopted disciplined pattern bargaining. This has a clear lineage from the Victorian Building Industry Agreement of the 1950s onwards led, as McQueen documents, by the Builders’ Labourers. This was ‘collective bargaining’ on an industry basis designed by unions. It is far cry from today’s ‘enterprise bargaining’ designed by the Business Council of Australia and their legal and academic advisers as a second best if individual contracts could not be achieved.

McQueen says his book is about ‘defeats as well as victories, drunks and thieves as well as militants and revolutionaries’.

More importantly, as he says, it shows ‘why a union should be a school for the working class’ (p11).

The book should be compulsory reading for new and old union officers and organisers: it will certainly challenge them to decide whether they are workers representatives or ‘workplace relations practioneers’.

This review appears in the magazine Australian Options no 67

from Dave Noonan CFMEU

Despite our best efforts, the ABCC has received a stay of execution. The legislation introduced by the Labor Government to scrap it was not debated this year, and won’t be back in Parliament until February at the earliest. So the fight continues in 2012.

Some members of the crossbenches have said they need some more time to consider the Bill and we will continue to talk with them and explain the importance of abolishing this throwback to the days of WorkChoices.

Others, such as Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie support the abolition of the ABCC.

The Greens have indicated that they believe that the legislation should go further by abolishing coercive powers completely.

In the meantime, the conservatives and their attack dogs have been out in force seeking to defend this organisation’s outrageous attacks on working people.

Only last week former ABCC Commissioner, John Lloyd, demanded that new Minister for Workplace Relations Bill Shorten abandon the Government’s commitment to abolish the ABCC.

Lloyd was recently presented with the Charles Copeland Medal by the extreme right wing H.R.Nicolls Society and has been employed by the Institute of Public Affairs, another union basing think tank.

Remember, this is the person who claimed to be an apolitical, unbiased public servant!

This is the same person who held the right to use coercive powers against construction workers, and did so illegally on 203 occasions.

Also in the last week the Parliamentary Library has made this significant observation comparing the fines that may be levied against Qantas to the fines that have been levied against building workers and their unions:

“To put the general and building regulatory systems in perspective, should the Qantas’ actions to ground its airlines be held as illegal industrial action under the Fair Work Act31, the maximum fines it may face (per offence), would be one third the maximum fines (per offence) faced by the CFMEU taking illegal industrial action on building sites. Should public support continue to swing toward the role of tribunals with greater conciliation aims as opposed to having, on balance, greater inquisitional or litigious functions, there may be grounds for the ABCC’s proposed replacement to progress.”

Over 1000 emails were sent to MPs calling for the scrapping of coercive powers within 48 hours of our last message to supporters. This shows the anger the ABCC and its illegal interrogations have provoked among construction workers, their friends and families.

We will be seeking your support for the final campaign to achieve equality for construction workers in early 2012.

www.rightsonsite.org.au

To see earlier posts put in ABCC in search.

by GRAEME ORR

We are told industrial action is flaring across the nation.

In truth, what is flaring is that elements of the media are reheating well-worn claims by opportunists in big business, who want a rewrite of the 2009 Fair Work Act.

Industrial action in Australia is rare, by both historical and developed world standards.

Take the last financial year. 166,000 working days were lost to industrial action, whether strikes by employees or lockouts by employers.

Is that a lot or a little? Let’s picture it in absolute terms.

Imagine sitting outside a factory gate for a whole year.

In an employed workforce of over 9.5 million, last year’s level of action equates to seeing just one employee in every 57 emerge, for just one day of the year, to miss work.

Industrial action in Australia remains near record lows.
…
Stopping employees striking against an employer who refuses to meet with a union bargaining agent is pure WorkChoices, a la the Boeing dispute. The implication is that unions should have to fight, US style, to win a majority recognition ballot, firm by firm. But there’s nothing liberal about that system: it is a free kick to employer consultants to bust unions and scare employees against joining.

Protecting employers from agreeing to unenforceable terms about how businesses are staffed assumes an overbearing union.

And there lies the real thrust of big business’s complaint.

Despite the overall weakness of the union movement, business resents the surviving pockets of viable unionism, notably in transport and parts of mining, construction and manufacturing.

Wipe out unions and industrial action, and productivity may or may not rise.

What we do know is that over time, the ratio of wages to profits – the sharing of wealth in society – is likely to blow out further.

Unimpeded managerial fiat, and the drive for profitability above all, become the singular logic of not just our economy but society.

The truth is that industrial action, like unions, is in a twilight rather than a renaissance.

Paradoxically, we have grown so used to minimal levels of industrial action, that instances of it appear to be aberrations, rather than legitimate exercises of industrial democracy.

Graeme Orr is an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, teaching labour law and the author of The Law of Politics (2010).

Read the whole article here
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3720658.html

joe hill

22/11/2011
Unions have today resolved to vigorously defend workers’ rights against a new wave of employer militancy that is threatening the livelihoods of working Australians.

A meeting of unions in Melbourne today has condemned the antagonistic and counter-productive behaviour of Australian employers emboldened by the Qantas dispute, and pledged to strengthen protections for workers’ rights against being railroaded by aggressive tactics by business.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said the peak body’s Executive had today resolved to seek improvements to the Fair Work Act, including allowing workers better rights to bargain for job security and strengthening access to arbitration in an even-handed manner.

“A new pattern of industrial militancy by employers has emerged following the reckless and disproportionate action of Qantas management to ground its entire fleet and threaten to lock out its workforce last month,” Ms Kearney said.

“This deliberate escalation needlessly disrupted the plans of tens of thousands of passengers and caused enormous damage to the national economy and to Qantas’ reputation. It is of serious concern that Alan Joyce and Qantas management claim to have had other major employers endorse this action.

“It is clear employers have been emboldened by Qantas’ action, in particular Liberal State Governments, including the Baillieu Government in Victoria, which prepared a secret strategy to provoke an escalation of the dispute with the state’s nurses. None of this is in the spirit of bargaining in good faith, as envisaged by the Fair Work Act.

“Productive and co-operative industrial relations are not achieved by declaring war on a company’s workforce and customers. Workers should be able to seek secure jobs and better pay and conditions without threats of lock-outs, big fines or punitive legal action, the use of strike-breakers or thugs to physically disrupt peaceful picket lines, or by other similar tactics.

“Harmonious and productive industrial relations are achieved through genuine negotiation and engagement with workers and their unions, not by making them the enemy. Responsible business and political leaders should disown such tactics as counterproductive in the workplace and contrary to the national interest.”

The ACTU Executive today resolved to pursue explicit reforms in the ALP platform at next month’s national conference to improve the ability of workers to negotiate for secure jobs, and to strengthen the rights of workers to have access to arbitration to settle disputes.

“Secure jobs matter to all workers. With 40% of the workforce in casual, contract or labour hire employment, unions are determined to campaign in workplaces and communities for a better future for these workers.

“We will take this campaign to next week’s ALP Conference and beyond,” Ms Kearney said.

I wrote this three years ago. The politics is still relevant in 2011 as PM Gillard is not repealing the coercive powers against construction and building workers and their unions, just changing the name.

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2008/11/1984-remains-dpm-firm/

The rights on site struggle goes into 2012
for this Parliament.

Rights on site campaigns to abolish the ABCC

CFMEU campaigns…

http://cfmeu.asn.au/campaigns/national/bad-laws-cost-lives

The Gillard Government should follow through on its mandate to abolish the ABCC by ensuring its coercive powers are not moved to another organisation, the CFMEU said today.

CFMEU Construction National Secretary Dave Noonan said the legislation introduced to the House of Representatives today was a good start but did not go far enough in ending the ABCC’s attack on workers’ rights.

“The Parliament will soon have the chance to end the ABCC and restore rights to workers,” Mr Noonan said.

“It is crucial the final legislation not only scraps the ABCC but does not transfer its coercive powers to another organisation.

“Coercive powers – which give the ABCC the right to secretly interrogate workers – have no place in a free society.

The ABCC’s recent admission that it had stepped outside its powers and illegally interrogated 203 people up to November last year should be the final proof it has become a rogue organisation.

http://www.cfmeu.asn.au/news/abcc-abolition-bill-should-go-further-and-abolish-coercive-powers

“Construction workers want to be treated the same as all other workers, not subject to the stress of arbitrary interrogations which can hang over their heads for months.

“Any replacement to the ABCC must focus on the issue of sham contracting in the construction industry, which costs the Federal Government billions each year in lost tax, and on working with unions and employers to improve safety in construction.”

Mr Noonan said the impending end of the ABCC had provoked a flurry of misinformation and baseless allegations from the anti-union zealots who had been behind its formation.

“We have seen claims that the ABCC is needed to combat alleged thuggery and illegal behaviour on building sites,” Mr Noonan said.

“The fact is that the ABCC has only ever had the power to deal with breaches of industrial law; any criminal activity can and should be investigated by police.

“No industry has been as thoroughly investigated as the construction industry, and for so little result.

“No other workers have had important civil rights, including the right to silence removed by legislation.

“The ABCC is a failed ideological excess of the Howard Government, and this Parliament should scrap it.”

Rights on site campaigns to abolish the ABCC

I urge debate on reviving the strike.

Joe Burns has a stimulating analysis and conclusion in his book ‘Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.’

Australia’s labour relations system differs historically and institutionally from the US, but working people experience the same repression of strikes and the decline of the strike.

Our corporate and state rulers dominate the labour law system, and as in the US, deny workers and their unions any effective right to strike.

PM Gillard’s regime the ‘Fair Work Act’ retains the ‘Work Choices’ excessive legalistic penalising of strikes and the Building Industry Act (2005) with the ABCC severely threatens and penalises building and construction workers organising. (See my arguments on this blog put in search the right to strike.)

After reading this book, the same the arguments apply – that unions have to revive the strike weapon.

As in the US, with our near disappearance of strike struggle, the task is how this revival is to be done – a serious challenge for Australian unionists in this era of capitalist instability, corporate attack, a likely Abbott government and the Occupy Wall Street movements.

Burns argues that the US working class became more powerful by winning strikes.

“By wielding the threat of a powerful, production halting strike, trade unionists forged a better way of life for millions of working class Americans during the roughly fifty year period from 1930 though 1980. …The strike is by far the most important source of union power…Collective bargaining made little sense unless it was backed by the threat of a strike that halted production.”

Citing US labour relations scholars, union strike struggles improved workers’ lives.

Burns relates the history of union leader militancy, solidarity and secondary boycott strikes, industry-wide and pattern bargaining strikes, mass pickets to stop ‘replacement workers’, sit-down strikes and occupations – all crippling economically the corporations and forcing management to negotiate until union demands are met.

Union militancy in the 1930s organised strikes in response to the serious class war from management. Unions defeated employer solidarity and the law. Radical actions ensured wage increases and standardisation and with some worker control against management authoritarianism.

From the 1980’s, again with capital’s fierce attack on unionism, the retreat from these strike tactics means unions are weaker. The employers’ counter offensive cut wages and conditions.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in the early 1990s, unions need

“their only true weapon—the right to strike. Without that weapon, organized labour in America will soon cease to exist.” (p20)

The US system, like Australia, allows only a limited lawful strike, orders return to work and enforces legal penalties against industrial action deemed “unlawful.”

In the US arbitrators and judges interpret labour laws within the acceptably narrow ‘free market’ enterprise bargaining to ensure that withdrawing your labour is risky and largely ineffective. Corporate lawyers for the employers with the state’s legal forces attack the strikers and their unions.

Burns gives a key illustration with the legal restrictions on the picket line.

This is ineffective with strikers walking around with placards, while watching scabs walk through taking their jobs.

Pickets are supposed to block all access for the strike to win. Judges deem the effective picket line ‘unlawful’. Legal decisions enforce for the employer the right to use ‘replacement labour’, scabs.

In past strikes, winning meant defying anti-strike laws and judicial injunctions.

Despite the strengths of today’s union leaders, Burns argues they do not use the strike to seriously challenge employer power – stopping production and work is a fringe idea.

Young radical union organizers today organize social campaigns and get community support, but are not allowed to win a strike.

Earlier, industry or pattern bargaining with mass strike pressure to make labour costs uniform was achieved. But this is union bargaining is also ‘unlawful’ and not attempted today (same as in Australia).

The extreme T-party Republican and corporate agenda in 2011 passed legislation where the public service unions are denied the right for collective bargaining. (Put Wisconsin in this blog search to see the mass resistance).

The union song “Solidarity Forever” is indeed just a song.

“Solidarity is the heart and soul of unionism—the only force capable of confronting power and privilege in society. To revive unionism, we must recover labour’s long-lost tools of workplace-based solidarity.

Today, union activists join each other’s picket lines and hold fundraisers for striking workers. While important, these acts of solidarity are largely conducted away from the workplace.

In contrast, labour’s traditional forms of workplace-based solidarity allowed workers to join across employers and even industries to confront bosses. Such tactics included secondary strikes and industry-wide strikes.

What’s a secondary strike? Say workers at a small auto parts plant in Indiana walked out. If they enlisted the support of the Teamsters to refuse to transport the parts, the United Auto Workers to refuse to assemble a car with the parts, and employees of car dealerships to refuse to sell the cars, their power would be multiplied. The original strike would be a primary strike and the others would all be secondary strikes.

In the past, solidarity tactics allowed workers to hit employers at multiple points in the production and distribution chain. By impeding the flow of supplies into a plant, unions pressured the employer to settle a strike or recognize the union. Similarly, secondary boycotts pressured retailers to stop selling struck goods.

Solidarity tactics expanded the site of the conflict, allowing workers to confront employers as a class.” Burns in Labor Notes -http://www.labornotes.org/2010/10/secondary-strikes-are-primary-labor-revival

Burns documents how the US judicial system outlawed the secondary and solidarity strike.

“At a deeper level, modern labour law forces unions to bargain with individual employers rather than establish standards on an industry basis.”

Australia’s outlawing of secondary boycotts began in the 1970′s through trade practices law and ending in WorkChoices and FWA and has weakened union solidarity actions.

As I have a law degree, I learnt from Burns’ recounting of the history of the US labour legislation, the judicial cases against basic union principles and judicial injunctions against unions’ industrial action.

The US restrictive labour law legal control over labour shows how difficult it has been and is for unionists unionizing – let alone organizing a successful strike. Years of courts penalizing strikers are the history.

But Burns makes this telling point.

“To be clear, the downfall of solidarity cannot be attributed solely to legal factors. Unions willingly agreed to no-strike clauses.

Over the years, many focused on just the needs of their own members, failing to embrace a social unionism that looked out for the interests of all workers. In the 1980s and afterwards, unions often failed to defend their pattern agreements, allowing special deals for particular “troubled” employers until the pattern was no more. And union officials all too often squashed rank-and-file attempts to join together across bargaining units, even at the same employer.”

What has occurred with current union leaders is an abandonment of the practice of the strike and class politics, although e.g. the AFL-CIO is strong rhetorically. The labour movement is trapped in business unionism and social unionism.

Burns looks at inadequate union alternatives to the strike in chapter 4.

“With the production-halting strike becoming a relic of the past, union activists of the last 20 years have had to turn to other mechanisms to try to pressure employers during collective bargaining. Thus, we have seen the rise of strike “alternatives” such as the one-day publicity strike, the corporate campaign and the inside strategy.

Each strategy, while supposedly an attempt to revive trade unionism, instead adheres to a system that has been established over the past 75 years to guarantee labour’s failure.

Without the traditional tactics of solidarity and stopping production behind them, none of these strategies had proven powerful enough to make an employer suffer economically.

In many ways, these strategies are a reflection of the current state of the labour movement.

Rather than putting forth bold ideas calculated to challenge the current system of labour relations in this country, contemporary trade unionists have instead adopted a philosophy of pragmatism, of making do with what the existing system offers, instead of trying to break free of that system, as traditional trade unionists once did. (p71)”

“Nonetheless, in recognizing the limitations of these tactics, we must still acknowledge how creative and refreshing they have been in an era of union busting and decline. They have kept alive the fighting spirit in the labour movement, particularly in situations where a traditional strike would have meant crushing defeat.”

One-day publicity strikes.

“In a one-day publicity strike, the union informs management that its workers will be going on strike, but will return to work in 24 hours. Due to the short duration of the ‘strike’ and the advance notification of the return to work, there is no opportunity for the employer to permanently replace the strikers.

However, due to their limited timeframe, one-day strikes have little impact on the operations of a company. Since the union announces its intention to strike in advance, the employer is typically able to make alternate arrangements to cover the work for the day that the workers are on strike.

The main goal of the one-day publicity strike is, as the name implies, publicity, as the union tries to bring public and media attention to the grievances of its workers. Consequently, one-day publicity strikes have generally been used against employers who are susceptible to public pressure. Frequent targets have included hospitals, universities and public employers.(p72)”

The one-day protest strike strong in the public sector became the only strike action for many US unions, with some gains, but where anti-union employers survive, as the economic pressure is not enough.

“…The one-day strike supplies the illusion of struggle, distracting from the real problems facing the labour movement, which is the lack of an effective traditional strike. (p73)”

Working to rule keeps within employer boundaries and has limited success. On the job go-slows or the ceaseless rolling intermittent strikes, in and then out and return and effective bans – again made illegal -. has greater force.

Union strategists for decades use anti-corporate campaigns, with a range of community and public lobbying tactics to pressure the employers and governments. Despite some wins, they are not as effective as the strike weapon.

Burns while accepting the organising strength of social unionism with union/community coalitions, union media and public pressure with successes, argues such a strategy, without the strike, has not seen the union renewal promised.

“Social unionism is not a replacement for direct struggle against employers. In social unionism, the strike is abandoned, and in the process, the central role of workers at the point of production is lost.

Although appearing progressive, social unionism in fact represents a shift in power from workers to union officials and non-profit staff…social unionists also sidestep the key economic concerns that must be at the centre of labour’s revival, namely that any trade union strategy must be capable of redistributing wealth and power. Organization and community ties alone do not lead to power. (p81)”

Burns’ criticism is levelled not only at the conservative and right wing ‘business unionism’ leaders but the left unionists and progressive labour academics.

The debate for strengthening unions relies on union democracy where union members control the union and engage in the militant strike struggle. Burns takes us through key examples of past successful strikes with members’ democratic control.

Chapter 5 “Why organizing cannot solve the Labor crisis” is important for the debate on new strategies.

Despite union leaders successfully shifting resources to organizing the un–unionized sectors from the 1990s until now, Burns argues overall this strategy has failed to revive unions.

“In fact, the idea that the labour movement can resolve its crisis simply by adding new members – without a powerful strike in place – actually constitutes one of the greatest theoretical impediments to union revival (p95).”

Burns does not reject the practice of increasing union density and organizing in the industry of competitors. He argues it is not sufficient without the effective industry or pattern-bargaining strike and the ability to have sufficient power at work to force the collective agreement.

Unions may succeed at times with skilled or professional workers able to control the supply of labour. But with the low levels of unionization continuing, union leaders – and I was one of them – just advocating organizing the unorganized is not good enough.

Even when union density increases, the power to beat the employer does not necessarily follow. In the US, the labour laws allow aggressive employers to wage successful anti-unionizing drives and to defeat union elections. In Australia employers similarly have many legal weapons to defeat unionism.

Burns argues that even with the proposed labour law reform in ‘The Employee Free Choice Act’ making it easier for workers to unionise and bargain, such a reform is not sufficient for revival.

In any event, President Obama – despite promising unionists – failed to even look like delivering.

Burns gives historical examples of militant strikes that had surges in workers joining unions. In 2011 during the Wisconsin struggles many workers joined unions.

Burns criticizes the organizing model goal of union reformers as “abandoning the goal of creating the type of labour movement capable of transforming society (p113).”

I will not here go through the details in Chapter 6 of the US system of labour control.

The corporate lawyers and judges have indeed worked remorselessly to limit unions’ ability to have workers organize and win.

I add that Australia’s former arbitration system and now Fair Work Australia has pro-management ideology designed to make unlawful the strike and impose penalties (see this blog).

Today union leaders do not risk defying judicial injunctions against strike activity because of the penalties.

But union leaders did so before – with some wins and some serious defeats depending on the contested conflict.

The details are instructive but the conclusion critical – rejecting the whole labour control system is necessary.

“Trade unionists need to envision a world where labour’s conception of striking prevails over that of management. Otherwise, labour can construct a solidarity grounded in weakness.”

Today with the power of giant US multi-national corporations unions not only have to develop the ability to take strike action locally and nationally but internationally.

International strike action is done but is limited to day protest stoppages or across some regions cross-border industrial action collective agreements. In response international labour solidarity has to challenge corporate power, and with the strike organized across countries.

Chapter 7 has a valuable articulation of the principles of labour rights.

“Labour must develop a working class perspective that establishes a set of principles that clearly justify the refusal to follow unjust and illegitimate restrictions on the right to strike. (p137) …it was labour’s agitation and the open and principled defiance of judicial orders, that won workers the right to strike and stop production.”

Unionists use other key principles to argue the case – such as
“labour is not a commodity”,
“labour creates wealth”,
“the right to strike is a basic freedom that distinguishes us from the slave or bonded labour” and
the progressive principles from socialists and those activists with a class analysis. These principles not only are returning, but have to predominate over management ideology labour relations.

The US constantly ignores international rights’ standards and so international labour rights from the ILO, but is not taken up by Burns. In Australia we agreed to the ILO workers’ rights on the right to strike, but where in reality our FWA breaches such accepted ILO international standards.

Burns argues a labour movement in the US is possible in chapter 8 if we learn lessons.

Chapter 9 is “Where do we go from here?”

“After watching the labour movement—and the strike—wither over the past 30 years, trade unionists today need to answer several big questions if they wish to revitalize unions in this country. How should the labour movement deal with the current system of labour control? How should human labour be treated in relationship to capital? How can workers act as a class to advance their common interests?

What are the best forms of organization to carry on the fight for workers’ rights? And finally, what is the role of the strike?

The answers—or non-answers—to these fundamental questions will shape labour’s future in America.”(171)

“To point the labour movement in a new direction will require a large group of people willing to challenge the status quo, people who have the ideas, organizational skills and self-confidence to give voice to a workers’ movement capable of transforming America.

This will have to start with the activists in the movement—shop floor militants, progressive union staffers and officers, worker centres’ activists, and friendly academics.

However, the debate over the future of trade unionism must grow beyond this committed, but small group if the there is to be a true labour revival in this country.

So how does one build such a trend? Again, we can learn from labour history.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the labour movement was stuck in a narrow form of craft unionism that was unable to win gains from employers. Craft unionists viewed only skilled workers as deserving of union representation, and they rejected attempts to organize all workers into one union.

However, a counter current developed that argued that industrial unionism was the road forward for the labour movement. This trend toward industrial unionism was driven by the political left of the era (socialists, anarchists and communists), who had a program that, although varying in its approaches, shared one guiding principle: the strength of the overall trade union movement.

Eventually, the years of agitation paid off as the idea of industrial unionism gained popularity, first at a grassroots level, and then broadly within the entire working class. Thus, when the economic crisis of the 1930s hit, workers were ready to embrace a new form of unionism…

The task today is to build such a broad-based understanding within the labour movement of the need to change the present system.

How can this be done? During the decades-long push to establish industrial unionism in the first half of the twentieth century, industrial union activists repeatedly raised their issues at union conventions.

Following their historical lead, trade unionists today could adopt the position that the system of labour control is illegitimate, and support efforts to break free from it. Just as it was once official AFL policy to disobey injunctions, trade unionists today could debate whether or not to comply with the different facets of the system of labour control.

No matter the issues, reviving the strike — and by extension, the labour movement — will require a single-minded focus by trade unionists.

Right now, the left wing of the labour movement lacks a common agenda, as it advances a hodge-podge of ideas of what it will take to save unionism in this country. If one agrees with the analysis in this book, then the one unifying factor that can achieve the myriad goals of the labour movement is the revival of the effective, production-halting strike. This must become labour’s primary focus.

Additionally, if trade unionists ever decide to embrace a new militancy in order to smash the system of labour control, they will need the support of their union brothers and sisters.

Historian Nelson Lichtenstein, in the conclusion of his influential history of the labour movement, ‘State of the Union’, lists the failure to support militancy as one of the major weaknesses of the modern labour movement. Discussing what the movement needs to succeed, Lichtenstein writes,

‘The first is militancy. The union movement needs more of it, but even more important, American labour, as a whole needs to stand behind those exemplary instances of class combat when and if they occur. The 1980s were a tragic decade for unions, not because workers did not fight, but where labour did take a stand…their struggles were both physically isolated and ideologically devalued.
Instead of being engulfed in the solidarity of their fellow trade unionists, workers today who choose to fight back often do so on lonely picket lines, with little support from the official labour movement. Without a broad trend that promotes effective tactics, striking workers are not exposed to ideas that can help them win strikes, nor are they supported when they engage in militancy.”

While the strike might seem like a relic of the past too much of the contemporary labour movement, as labour historian Peter Rachleff writes,

“it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that strikes are on their way to the dustbin of history. As long as the capitalist economy rests on the employment and exploitation of labour, the organized withdrawal of labour is bound to remain a central expression of working class protest and power.”

If working people are to regain power and transform the US and Australia, the strike has to be revived.

I see more clearly past faults in my union practice.

In this era of strikes in Europe and countries against austerity cutbacks on workers and strikes against dictators, reviving the strike debate is critical.

Here is more

http://prospect.org/article/struck-out