Logging on
By National Secretary Paddy Crumlin
The MUA and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union are widely seen as two of the most progressive and militant maritime unions in the world. We share a special friendship and a long history of joint struggle as well as a strong joint commitment to workers' rights in the new global circumstances. The Convention resolved to fully support the MUA and the Australian trade union movement's campaign to remove the Howard Government and its anti-union legislation.
It was therefore a great honour to represent the Maritime Union of Australia at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's 33rd International Convention, Vancouver, British Columbia, May 18, 2006, alongside special guests like Paul Robson Jnr, son of the legendary political activist and singer and Richard Trumka, secretary of the AFL-CIO (the US equivalent of the ACTU).
As well as giving a keynote address, below, I joined a rally of over 600 ILWU, teamsters and other members in support of exploited Blue Diamond workers. The march followed immediately after convention delegates were given a presentaiton on the solidarity action of MUA members outside the company's major importer in Melbourne and Sydney. Australia's role in this international demonstration of worker solidarity earned the union a standing ovation. In turn the Convention resolved to fully support the MUA and the Australian trade union movement's campaign to remove the Howard Government and its anti-union legislation.
This was the ILWU's last convention before their next contract negotiations, which are expected to be difficult. Members may recall that last time around the employers locked longshore workers outside the gate and we sent a n Australian NZ solidarity delegation to stand and fight beside them fighting for their right to work.
The convention also marked a changing of the guard with president Jim Spinosa not seek renomination and (Big) Bob McEllrath nominating for the position unopposed. Willie Adams, well known to many Australian maritime workers was also elected unopposed, along with other ILWU International officials. The following is an abridged version of my speech to the convention.
Shared Aspirations
It's a wonderful thing about our movement. We are individuals, but we share the same aspirations for a better life, a healthy life, a safe life. We share the same aspirations for a loving family environment and a home we can call our own. We share the same need for a safe and secure job regardless of where we are, and a safe and decent workplace, decent working conditions and pay, and, most importantly, the basic human right to negotiate the terms of the long days, months and years of our working life. This is an aspiration lasting generations of courageous struggle by our unions, particularly the ILWU and MUA. It has made us what we are and what we have achieved. If we don't understand our history, we are unable to deal with our future.
If they were trying to break our necks and our backs in the twenties and the thirties and the forties and the fifties, how much more so today, with global trade and the wealth and power and influence that comes underneath our cranes and underneath our straddles and on to our trucks and on to our trains every day of our working lives. As we saw the other day, not 50, 60, 70,000 longshoremen with hooks and bags, moving a tiny amount of cargo, but a fraction of that workforce, now moving 1,000 times or 10,000 or 30,000 times more cargo through San Francisco or Los Angeles or Sydney or Melbourne or any other port in the world. We are more essential than we have been ever been. And because we are so important, we are potentially dangerous to their interests.
When we see the injustice, greed and terrible excess in our world, it is a struggle that brings great satisfaction, a struggle that brings great peace of mind. How can we sleep when the world is burning from fires lit by powerful and corrupted political and corporate elites armed with the weapons of untrammeled wealth, armed with the weapons of gross selfishness and greed and ignorance. They use their workforces and their militias to do what we saw done to Chilean dockers' leader Brother Jorge with his brains leaking out on to the ground for opposing port privatisation.
The neoconservative coalition of the willing in the US and Australia and in many other countries shares a willingness to destroy the very fabric of labour and its principles and goals. Why? Because we do genuinely stand for democracy and freedom and liberty and equality. We do genuinely stand for values that they have left behind. We are despised and hunted down by these rats and villains because of it. Hunted out of our workplaces on the docks in Australia by scabs and their thugs in balaclavas with their dogs, with the full support of the Australian government.
Hunted out of the ports here on the West Coast, with the gates locked behind us by that rag tail group of international ship owners, stevedores and the treacherous and thieving retailers like Wal-Mart.
Hunted out by a corrupt administration in Washington who wanted to fight two wars at once, one against their own citizens -- you, hard working, honest, tax-paying, working men and women of the United States of America.
We're their prospective kill. We know it. Workers died. We heard of them today. We have to enshrine their names or otherwise we forget what they died for. Workers died on the streets of San Francisco in '34 because of it.
Skinned and Gutted
If you think it's tough here in the U.S., I'm about to make your day. I'll tell you a little bit about Australia. The right to strike has now by legislation been effectively removed for all workers, including in contract negotiations. The labour tribunal has been skinned and gutted and the carcass is now hanging on the wall of the shed. A collective contract may be terminated at any time it is in force and workers put on individual contracts at the whim of the employer. If a collective agreement is in place, any new worker can be offered a separate individual contract on much lower conditions of employment.
If I or any one of my members on the Negotiation Committee or officials seeks the right for the union to be involved in dispute resolution, do you know what happens? A $30,000 fine for the union and a $6,000 fine for myself for asking.
If we ask for a union picnic day, a $33,000 fine and a $6,000 fine for asking. If we ask for a remedy against unfair dismissal, a $33,000 fine for the union, a $6,000 fine for the individual. If we ask for trade union involvement in training, safety training, skills development, a $33,000, $ 6,000 fine.
If you are a recidivist like me and we keep doing it, then, of course, they stop fining you and eventually send you to gaol.
Union officials will not be allowed to access the workplace. It is easy to make it an illegal act.
Anyone with a criminal conviction, including for serious breaches of the labour laws, like I said before, cannot hold office as an elected union official.
War on Workers
Why and how can this happen in a country like Australia? It happens because working men and women and their unions actually do stand for freedom. We do stand for democracy. It happens because we can and do achieve justice. We stand for and can achieve equality. These neoconservative political and corporate elites despise us for the things that we stand for and that they should stand for. The people elected to protect our interests should stand for these things and they despise us because we actually do. And they don't or, more correctly, won't. Their political corruption has reached a point where forces that genuinely stand for truth, courage and humanity's best interests, like the union movement, are their enemy and the object at times of their conspiracy.
Labour Alliance
So I say on behalf of my union and the working men and women that rely on it, we are inspired and remain committed to the great friendship between our two unions and the proud history and struggle of the ILWU. We have stood together on many battlegrounds over many generations to deliver dignity and decency for all workers facing oppression and exploitation, and we will continue to, wherever there is a campaign or wherever there is a picket line. Because we are who we are and what we stand for. We stand amongst these struggles and trials, and we are absolutely determined to find the strength and courage to fight for better lives for workers, to fight for better workplaces, and to fight for a better and more peaceful world.
A full transcript of the National Secretary's speech can be downloaded from
http://www.mua.org.au/events/392_20060509.html
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