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

Poem/1090
[1]16/2011

We are the 99%

a materialist concept
of class struggle endures
recurrently high & low

“rise like lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number-
shake your chains to earth like dew
which in sleep had fallen on you-
ye are many- they are few”
by Percy Shelley

The War of Wealth McQueen on the capitalist crisis

Workers have an extra month to tell their story to Inquiry into Insecure Work

15 December, 2011 | Media Release
Workers, unions, community and other representative groups have an extra month to contribute their experiences to the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia, with the deadline for submissions now extended until late-January.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said 317 workers, community organisations, unions and academics had already lodged submissions by Tuesday.

“Submissions were due to close this Friday, but the inquiry panel, chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, has extended the deadline until 20 January 2012, in recognition of the amount of preparation needed, particularly for organisations, and the pressures to complete other work before the Christmas-New Year break,” Ms Kearney said.

“The submissions received have already provided valuable evidence for the Inquiry to consider the impact insecure work has on people’s ability to plan for their future, to make ends meet and to spend time with family and friends.

“We know that insecure work – casual, fixed or short-term contracts, labour hire, and contracting – has almost doubled in the last two decades to make up about 40% of the workforce now.

“We know from research we have conducted, that for workers, insecure work often means lower pay and fewer rights and entitlements at work. It makes it harder for them to manage their household finances, to spend time with their family and friends, and to plan for the future.

“This inquiry intends to examine the impacts of insecure work and propose policy actions.”

Ms Kearney said once submissions closed, the Inquiry would then conduct hearings around the country in February and March next year, before preparing a report for the ACTU.

The ACTU recently prepared for the Inquiry an options paper, The future of work in Australia: dealing with insecurity and risk, which found half of all casual workers would prefer to have a standard, secure job.

“The paper acknowledges that solutions to the growth of job and income insecurity in Australia will be complex and diverse, but should aim at improving the rights and conditions of all work for all workers,” Ms Kearney said.

“Approaches to insecure work should also ensure that non-standard forms of employment are used for their legitimate purpose and not as a cheap substitute to ongoing employment.”

Ms Kearney said there was a range of views on job security, and the inquiry wanted to hear from as diverse a representation of the Australian community and economy as possible.

Submissions can be lodged on the campaign website, securejobs.org.au, by email to inquiry@securejobs.org.au, or by phoning a special hotline on 1300 362 223 (toll free).

Contact Details
Rebecca Tucker
Ph: 0408 031 269

Workers have just one week left to tell their stories to the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work

12 December, 2011 | Media Release
Workers across the country have less than one week left to contribute their experiences to the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia, with submissions set to close this Friday.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said an overwhelming number of workers had already lodged their submissions, with 265 received at the end of last week.

“The submissions from workers will provide valuable evidence for the Inquiry to consider the impact insecure work has on people’s ability to plan for their future, to make ends meet and to spend time with family and friends,” she said.

“We know that insecure work – casual, fixed or short-term contracts, labour hire, and contracting – has almost doubled in the last two decades to make up about 40% of the workforce now.

“We know from research we have conducted, that for workers, insecure work often means lower pay and fewer rights and entitlements at work. It makes it harder for them to manage their household finances, to spend time with their family and friends, and to plan for the future.

“These submissions from Australian workers will provide further valuable insights directly from those who are impacted the most.”

Ms Kearney said the Inquiry would also be collecting submissions from unions, employers and other workplace representatives.

It will then conduct hearings around the country in February and March next year, to prepare a report on solutions to insecure work for the ACTU.

The ACTU recently prepared for the Inquiry an options paper, The future of work in Australia: dealing with insecurity and risk, which found half of all casual workers would prefer to have a standard, secure job.

“The paper acknowledges that solutions to the growth of job and income insecurity in Australia will be complex and diverse, but should aim at improving the rights and conditions of all work for all workers,” Ms Kearney said.

“Approaches to insecure work should also ensure that non-standard forms of employment are used for their legitimate purpose and not as a cheap substitute to ongoing employment.”

Ms Kearney said there was a range of views on job security, and the inquiry wanted to hear from as diverse a representation of the Australian community and economy as possible.

The Inquiry, chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, will hold a series of regional hearings across the country in February, before preparing a final report, expected by May.

Submissions can be lodged on the campaign website, securejobs.org.au

by email to inquiry@securejobs.org.au, or by phoning a special hotline on 1300 362 223 (toll free).

Contact Details
Rebecca Tucker
Ph: 0408 031 269

by David Peetz and Georgina Murray
Griffith University

“We sociologically investigate how deeply embedded finance capital is within very large global corporations, by asking the following questions:

Is ownership of very large global corporations dispersed amongst a wide variety of individuals, families and shareholder types?

Or are there common patterns of ownership across the largest corporations?

Are the largest corporations dominated by industrial capital, finance capital, or something else?

Does the state still have any role to play in ownership of large corporations?

What does this mean for our understanding of the debate about a transnational class?

We use a database of shareholdings in the 299 largest global corporations.

Our data speaks to the existence of a true transnational class comprising finance capital: a group that, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, controls the exercise of economic power across and within national boundaries.

Financial capitalists appear to vary in the basic strategies they employ, with some financiers seeming more aggressive than others in seeking to exercise greater influence over individual companies.

In turn, collective ownership by finance capital is concentrated in the relatively small portion of finance capitalists that comprises the top share controllers.

We also find that the state is still a major player in ownership.

And we find power in the BlackRock corporation…

The second noteworthy aspect is that a remarkable 6.06 per cent of the assets of the 299 VLCs in our database (around USD 3 trillion) are held or controlled by one company that is relatively unknown: BlackRock Inc, a financial company with offices in 24 countries and approximately 8,400 employees.

BlackRock exercises control of shares principally through the funds it controls rather than through direct ownership: over 85 per cent are via funds it controls rather than through direct ownership.

http://www.tasa.org.au/uploads/2011/01/Peetz-David-and-Murray-Georgina.pdf

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and Board Chairman Leigh Clifford from Rio Tinto militantly employed the mining sectors’ rightwing anti-union practices with the corporate union busting legal firm of Freehills.

Qantas aggressive lock-out power was to defeat legitimate workers’ industrial action.

They were most incensed by pilots wearing red ties –unionism! Baggage handlers were stopping for short periods and on TV marching with placards through the airport. Engineers had responsible limited bans. None were in force on the day of the lock-out during so-called ‘good faith bargaining’.

The lock-out was in response to legitimate job security claims that are well known (ref) and with much community support.

The very powerful corporation secretly planned after the AGM to ground the airline without notice to anyone, disadvantaging the flying public and politically challenging the Gillard government.

One conclusion is that employers ought not to have the right to lock-out.

An amendment to the Fair Work Act FWA that removes the lock-out must be introduced. The more powerful corporations instead are to be required to negotiate a collective bargaining settlement with their workers.

Qantas management tactics shows the lock-out – the employers’ weapon in our collective bargaining – ought not to be available in any reasonable collective bargaining system. The lock-out should be banned.

The three unions had to go through technical process requirements, applications to FWA for protected action, ballots with members voting in favour and notice and constant negotiations. Any technical defect, Freehills applies that the industrial action is “unprotected” and huge fines threatened.

Qantas management simply plans that after the AGM we will immediately ground and lockout.

Now the Fair Work Act FWA (the same as WorkChoices) allows this management tactic. The FWA has no legal requirement for the employer to give notice to lock-out, nor balloting of shareholders the AGM and certainly not the many processes forced on unions for strikes. This serious process deficiency is yet another rule for 1%.

For our collective bargaining system to work for employees against the more powerful corporations, lock-outs ought not to be allowed at all.

Some nations prohibit offensive lockouts on the basis that they tilt bargaining power too far towards employers.

The International Labour Organization ILO principles and most labour relations systems start from the widely accepted reality that employers already have the greater power over their workforce.

The lawful right to strike is necessary to afford some ability of workers and their unions to counter that employer power. The lock-out as shown with Qantas denies such balance, the effectiveness needed for workers to bargain in their interests. Gillard claims balance -wrongly and Qantas is another example.

In any case, most employers legally reserve lockouts as a genuine option of ‘last
resort’, rather than the Qantas ambush of ‘first resort’.

Some labour relations systems require notice and some balloting their shareholders. The principle is some notion of ‘proportionality’ to govern the usage of lockouts.

But not in Australia.

Our right-wing corporates with their law firms are gearing up to emulate the Qantas tactic against any industrial action.

Unions’ experience is that disputes are not resolved by the lock-out but by sitting around the table negotiating an outcome, a real agreement.

At the end of the dispute and the industrial action management and their workforce have to continue to work with each other. Unionists remember. There are long-term consequences.

Workers are in a difficult position facing the lock-out. Here is a film of a US workers’ struggle against Rio Tinto’s lock-out – www.lockedout2010.org

Most Qantas dispute news is constantly on social media.

http://www.twu.com.au/write-to-joyce/

As well, the Qantas tactic triggers the FWA section where the unions’ protected action is terminated not suspended and the lock-out as well.

This rarely used power is when the economy is significantly damaged.



I do not believe this dispute is causing significant damage to the economy, but we shall see what the Full Bench of Fair Work does today and what happens on monday.

I note that the clause adds ‘or an important part of the economy’.

One union concern is the Minister’s application for an order to cease protected industrial action where termination prevails rather than suspension.

On another point. The Fair Work Act has numerous alternative devices as well as the lock-out for Qantas to halt the limited lawful industrial action of the three unions in their collective bargaining. 



For the employees’ right to strike to be effective, their reasonable protected action ought to be allowed for the balancing of the power of the corporations and ensure a settlement between the parties.



In our collective bargaining system the repression of strikes is severe.



Any reasonable collective bargaining has to have employees and their unions the ability to effectively organise however we want to without government interference.

The ability of employers or the Minister to halt reasonable protected action ought not be available. 

We shall see what happens, but the Minister’s application to terminate industrial action is being heard this Sunday afternoon.

Interesting reading on how Joyce can backfire – Larvatus Prodeo

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2011/10/30/qantas-dispute-how-joyces-actions-could-backfire/

On executive salary increases, the Gillard governments responses are minor reforms and inadequate and the Parliament can act.

Overall what Qantas does is how corporations work in this capitalist crisis and why workers and their unions quite reasonably resist.

Most of the news on this dispute is on social media, except for some TV coverage.

I look forward to ABC balance that gives the three unions equal time to present their arguments.

“If there’s one thing Occupy Wall Street demonstrates about most of us, it’s how desperately our minds seek order in civic affairs.

That’s natural, since politics is the science of government.

We demand clarity, and a movement as inclusive and haphazard as OWS throws us off balance.

But Bertolt Brecht understood, more than eighty years ago, that disorientation is a valuable tool in its own right.

So the timing of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s remounting of The Threepenny Opera earlier this month, performed by the Berliner Ensemble (the company he founded), was serendipitous.

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
Are daily tortured, stifled, punished,silenced and oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
For once you must try not to shirk the facts.
Mankind is kept alive
by bestial acts!

read here
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3201/stacey_mickelbart_brechts_impe/

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

The 92-year-old Seeger, accompanied by musician-grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger, composer David Amram, and bluesman Guy Davis, shouted out the verses of protest anthems as the crowd of about 1,000 people sang and chanted.

They marched peacefully over more than 30 blocks from Symphony Space, where the Seegers and other musicians performed, to Columbus Circle. Police watched from the sidelines.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/22-2

http://www.crikey.com.au/column/video-of-the-day/