Maritime Diary

By Paddy Crumlin, National Secretary

At the International Mining and Maritime Conference held in Los Angeles in May, I relayed a story that may help identify the problems and dangers our key strategic role in national and international trade holds for us and our determination to see fair trade, not free trade.

Flashback

A familiar story which loses little in the retelling. On April 7 1998, at the midnight shift change in Patrick terminals around Australia, an extraordinary event occurred.

Battalions of private security forces, some masked and restraining leashed attack dogs, marched into our workplaces and dragged, pushed and intimidated nearly 2000 waterside workers from their place of work, their jobs, their future and their families' livelihoods.

These mercenaries then escorted in a replacement scab workforce, many with military backgrounds, who had been secretly trained offshore and at home in clandestine camps - with the active complicity of the Australian Government On that night our lives and our union changed forever.

For the next eight weeks we stood at the gates of our own workplaces watching scab labour do our jobs. For the next eight weeks we stood shoulder to shoulder at the gates and pickets with our full membership, with other union members, with other Australian citizens, retirees, the unemployed, our families and neighbours, their families and neighbours; fighting for natural justice and the restoration of our rights.

We all know of many big disputes; from the longshoreman dead on the streets of San Francisco, fighting for job security that ILWU member's now take as their due, to Thatcher's brutal smashing of the UK miners' union. We know of the systematic murder and torture of trade union activists in Columbia, Guatemala and Burma, to protect sweatshops, child labour and institutionalised corruption. But this was Australia; a wealthy country with social and political values based on a fair go. A country with a long matured tradition of balancing labour and commercial rights.

What had changed this country?

Our national economic interests had changed.

We were now a relatively minor link in a global market increasingly driven by a desire for profit. And that transcended any consideration of the needs or importance of that same humanity the market existed to serve.

It is a market ruthless in its purpose, relentless; so corrupted by greed and elitism that it has in turn corrupted a government theoretically elected to nurture and further the economic, cultural and moral needs of the electorate.

As part of that corrupting mutation of values, the same self interest had come to dominate the major media. Those with the democratic responsibility to inform and enlighten, were now spewing distortion and corporate propaganda driven by carefully crafted falsehoods.

What had changed was that this arrogance of power, surety of strength, distortion and rubbishing of values, had allowed a government and a company to criminally conspire, according to our courts, to deny Australians their constitutional rights and freedoms.

Now they're at it again.

Bad laws

On May 26, the Australian Government announced the details of their long touted industrial relations 1 June 2005.

The changes in the law are predictable from a Government so clearly bought off by international capital and its political and intellectual pressure groups.

The new laws are disgraceful from a Government theoretically elected to represent the interests of the electorate and their families. They are laws prejudicial to freedom. They are laws prejudicial to independence. They are laws prejudicial to justice. They are bad laws, un-Australian laws. They are laws worth fighting against, laws requiring a fight if you care for or believe in the nature of our Australian society - the right to a fair go, looking after your mate, looking after the disadvantaged or those down on their luck. They are laws against the spirit of our Australia from a Government of arrogance, elitism and naked ownership by corporate Australia.

From a Government that talks human rights, but denies them in every action they take, from free trade agreements with China that neglect to mention protection of the workers of both countries and their labour standards, to the criminal persecution of women and children in our outback concentration camps.

Now you can be sacked for no reason with no come back. Your wage can have every element of its support for you and your family removed - from overtime to leave, to hours of work. Existing agreements can be dumped by an employer, an individual contract offered and if you don't like it, then there's the door.

Read what they are doing to you. Get angry, get active then let's get together to fight it. It will be a 15 rounder not a king hit, and we have to sustain our outrage and determination.

At the recent Mining & Maritime Globalising Solidarity Conference we had the support of some of the most powerful and militant unions in our region and trade area. That's important.

But the fight is our fight. The fight of all Australian working women and men. We looked the devil in the eye in '98 and he blinked, Maritime workers have been on the heavy end of this Governments bastardry, lies and bludgeoning offensive and were still standing proud. Now we're in for some more of it. We're up for it, if we're not, no one is. It's really about what sort of Australia we want to live in - their's or ours!