Melbourne’s Webb Dock has become the site where labour’s right to organise in the 1990s is being fought out. After nearly two years of preparation, Australia’s right-wing Coalition government has found employer allies prepared to take on one of the country’s best-organised and most militant unions, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).
The Coalition’s Workplace Relations Act, passed last year, now gives legal protection for employers to attack the rights of unions to organise and defend their members’ rights. Picketing is almost illegal and any form of secondary boycott, even by members of the same union against the same employer in different ports, is punishable by punitive damages in the civil courts. The real targets of the laws are the militant coal miners’ union and the waterside workers. In both industries there are employers — Rio Tinto in the mines and Patricks and the National Farmers’ Federation on the wharves — willing to take on the unions in serious, protracted industrial battle.
In a sting remarkably similar to that faced by the Liverpool dockers, wharfies came to work one afternoon at Melbourne’s Webb dock to find that their employer, Patricks, had sub-leased the dock to the National Farmers’ Federation, who intended to employ an all new non-union workforce. The NFF is the arm of agricultural capital, and has built a reputation for financing employers to break unions.
The MUA is strong, though much smaller than it was, after containerisation, new technology and previous governments’ efforts to reduce the workforce. It takes its stand on “reforms by cooperation with industry players, not by conflict”. But the employers want more, and believe they can wind back many of the gains won by the MUA over nearly half a century.
The workers at Webb Dock exercised tremendous discipline as the scabs moved on to the leased portion of the dock. They had to be restrained by the officials from taking their own direct action. They are conscious of the risk of repeating the experience of the Liverpool dockers, whose case is well known to them. The MUA is scrupulously avoiding breaking the new law, and trying all manner of legal manoeuvres to maintain its position. But in so doing it runs the risk of relying too heavily on lawyers and on trying to placate the very hostile media.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions has said it will support the wharfies to the end. Secretary Bill Kelty, speaking at the 1997 ACTU Congress, promised the biggest picket line the country has ever seen if the laws were used against the MUA. ACTU president Jennie George has spoken to the workers on the picket line and reinforced the ACTU’s support.
Tony Brown
