Lousy value for money

Dean Mighell was in the news. The Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union upstaged no lesser personage than Kevin Rudd, on talkback radio in Melbourne.

Those that care about such things will no doubt know the story. For those that came in late, a woman caller to (I think) the Neil Mitchell show was in tears with fear about what could happen to her.

She had insulation installed in her roof and was worried the whole place could go up in flames.

Rudd proffered an emergency response number. She said she’d tried that and it was unhelpful (fancy that, an unhelpful call centre. Who could have thought there’d be such a thing). In fact, they were more concerned about whether she owed them money.

Rudd is promising everything except going around there himself, when it emerges that the good Mister Mighell, a licensed electrician, had arranged to check to see if her insulation was safe. Militant unionist 1. Technocrat hack 0.

Mighell popped up in the Fairfax papers around the same time with an op-ed piece about whether the union movement should keep its links to the ALP. It’s an interesting point, but first some clarification.

One; the ALP was founded by the union movement around 120 years ago after a period of rapid growth in unionism hit a brick wall in the early 1890s when the Victorian land price bubble burst and the floor price of labour collapsed.

Two, not all unions thought tying themselves to a political party was a good idea, and even today most unions aren’t affiliated to the ALP.

Three, from the get-go the parliamentary ALP has tended to pretty much ignore the agenda of the organised labour movement. The primary relationship has been one of personnel. The union movement has employed most ALP politicians at some stage.

This is not to say that those politicians have ever been particularly attached to the principles of the union movement, it’s just that there is a strong history of partiality around unions when it comes to their employment selection practices.

That said, the links between the ALP and trade unions are pretty strong, in a networking rather than policy sense.

Which is why most of the leadership of the ACTU have been largely silent while Julia Gillard is, in reality, cutting wages for hospitality and care workers (amongst others) under the banner of Award Simplification.

Gillard, as she is good at, plays the clever lawyer and argues that it is possible for employees to negotiate their way out of a pay cut. But wasn’t that the whole point about why WorkChoices was bad? That people were expected to have to negotiate a solution rather than having the protection of an Industrial Award?

But the ACTU wants to be seen as a ‘team player’ in the eyes of their ‘friends’ in Canberra. The wooden Jeff Lawrence had a minor whine about it, Sharon Burrow doesn’t want to criticise her buddy Julia. So the whole situation has been largely ignored.

The problem is probably a lot bigger than the few news articles that have covered it would suggest. After all, these are people at the bottom of the labour market, so who really gives a shit?

I am meeting people caught up in it. Anecdotally, the vast majority are un-unionised casuals, so they just suck it up and wonder why Kevin Rudd is doing what John Howard did.

Unions that aren’t affected by it seem to be rather indifferent to the plight of these workers. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ principle is ascendant in the modern labour movement.

But most union officials must be, at the very least, slightly uneasy about how things have panned out. Wasn’t the Your Rights At Work campaign supposed to do away with the assault on working conditions at the perennially soft bottom end of the labour market?

A few things have improved, but there are also a large number of people who are still missing out. This is especially true of the unskilled, the casual and young people – the people who were at the pointy end of WorkChoices. The same people who got screwed under the Keating/Hawke reforms.

After the disaster of the Latham campaign, the Union movement knew it needed to get rid of Howard. So they brought in a PR firm, Essential Media Communications, to advise on creating a grass roots campaign. It’s called astroturfing, and it worked a treat.

Your Rights At Work got rid of John Howard, so after November 2007 it was allowed to fizzle, splutter and die.

Sure, there were a few half-arsed campaigns with little or no follow through at the local level and the odd mass email just to keep up appearances, but the union movement was never really serious about creating an ongoing community campaign.

The reality is that the union movement couldn’t organise its way to the shops, which is why they brought in the consultants.

How do I know this? I worked on the Your Rights At Work campaign.

This pattern is continuing with some unions now getting a contractor to do core union work – signing up new members.

In terms of creating a solid protection for working conditions the Your Rights At Work campaign failed. All it did was elect Rudd. Forget all the dribble about Kevin 07 and climate change, the only game in town in November 2007 was Your Rights At Work – it shifted tens of thousands of votes to the ALP where it mattered.

But it didn’t protect Award conditions – Julia Gillard’s Award ‘simplification’ is taking working conditions away. People that were screwed under WorkChoices will be screwed under Fair Work Australia.

Mighell is right; the union movement would be better off if it wasn’t just a work-experience factory for ALP staffers and would-be politicians.

The Liberal Party likes to foam at the mouth about the amount of money the union movement gives to the ALP, but they miss the point.

Most of this money is simply club membership to keep the union movement inside the tent pissing out. The politicians always end up playing the ACTU and their affiliates like a violin.

Club-busters like Mighell will go nowhere in the union movement, which is built on a scared rabbit inward, defensive, almost paranoid, consensus that totally misunderstands the nature of modern society.

In the meantime the money the union movement gives to the ALP, so that the Rudd government can keep kicking working stiffs like you and I, is pretty obviously lousy value. That is if the union movement’s core mission is to protect working rights, as opposed to getting on in politics.

Don’t get me wrong; this is far from an endorsement of the Liberals – especially under Abbott. It is merely pointing out that neither of the major parties are seriously interested in the lot of working stiffs as anything more than ballot fodder, and as consuming machines to keep the big mortgage holding banks and retailers happy.

Outside of that the government, whoever is in power, is hell bent on crunching down the price of labour. In a service-based economy where you don’t need anyone with too many brains or skills it spells bad news for future living standards for the majority of us.

Now, if we had a union movement that was prepared to oppose this economic ‘consensus’ - as Mighell suggests - the prospects for my friends working bar, waiting table and wiping old folks arses would be brighter.

As it stands, they are screwed whoever wins this election.

Ho Bloody Ho

A vision of things to come was provided for us in New Zealand this week, with the Singaporean Government using security guards to belt a few union organisers in Palmerston North. The union folk were trying to get a better redundancy deal for some call centre workers whose jobs are flying off to Manila for the duration. When the ACTU described call centres as the "sweat shops of the 21st Century" they weren't kidding. In a time honoured fashion plod has decided to charge the union organiser for repeatedly headbutting a security guard's fist. A fan of this sort of harmonious social interaction between labour and capital, Mr Peter Hendy, has packed his comb-over and left the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry - where he did such a sterling job defending WorkChoices with such success at the recent elections - and has gone onto the staff of the obviously doomed Dr Brendan Nelson. The good Doctor appears intent on surrounding himself with intellectual and social winners in much the same way that General George Custer surrounded himself with the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. Why Nelson would plumb for such a Capital L Loser as his chief of staff is anyone's guess - perhaps no one else wanted such a poisoned chalice. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we slouch towards Bethlehem and K Mart as the annual festival of consumption rattles apace. I am avoiding Sydney until this whole thing blows over as I have reports of how that whited sepulchre is descending into a hell hole of third world proportions. It appears, from reports, to be suffering from an epidemic of 'Freedman's Disease' - a condition named after the frontman for the band The Whitlams - symptoms include a vastly exaggerated sense of self importance, a propensity for impotent violence, and a vacuous worshipping of of middle class banality. A town where creativity is competition and the nearest thing to a soul is on the bottom of your shoe is best avoided. After all, the next big thing planned is the post Christmas sales, where mild mannered people claw and scratch at each other to get hold of 'stuff'. It makes cargo cult riots in Papua New Guinea seem mild by comparison. We live in dark days indeed. The one redeeming feature was confirmation this week of something I had hitherto suspected for some time - this report from the delectable Annalee Newitz reveals that humans are not much smarter than dogs or monkeys. I believe that monkeys are probably, and dogs certainly, a lot smarter; as any witnessing of a post Christmas sale will evidence. The blog that never sleeps will be continuing to spew forth right through the festering season. These are the last days, and someone needs to keep these clowns accountable.

Tool Of The Week - Gerard Henderson

The increasingly erratic Gerard Henderson took time out from being paddled by his chums down at the Sydney Institute this week to fulminate against people being paid a living wage.

This will not do, thundered Henderson, who continues to believe that only good looking chaps from decent schools should be allowed to speak in public.

Henderson was railing against the Harvester Judgement, the one piece of social policy that stopped Australia from becoming another Argentina.

This deranged sociopath was foaming at the mouth in the Sydney Morning Herald this week because someone dared celebrate the foresight in a bloke called Higgins deciding a hundred years ago that people were born to live, not just to make rich men richer.

Not that we’d expect Henderson to grasp this, the bastard has never done a day’s work in his life. Preferring to fellate any nutjob roaming the land with a baseball bat looking for working people of an independent bent to belt.

He sucked up to Howard as if that grubby little rodent was capable of doing anything more than fixing his own breakfast.

He cheered for WorkChoices so that bottom feeders could pay teenagers $3 an hour legally under Howard’s laws.

He doesn’t like Harvester because he believes that Government’s should pick up the tab if people aren’t being paid enough to live. Yet this is the same pea brained onanist who believes in that miserable piece of government-sanctioned thuggery, welfare to work, which is doing exactly the opposite.

It is also curious that this dalek-like acolyte of the market sees the state as picking up the bill that his tight a#se huddle of degenerate losers down at the club aren’t prepared to pay. He is obviously a frustrated socialist.

This creep likes to paint himself as an academic, but in reality he has all the intellect and social utility of a broken sewer main, but is not nearly as pleasant. He is an intellectual coward - the sort of insecure martinet that likes to think he can bully people into believing his rather bizarre worldview.

This soaring Tool Of The Week, like his toilet trading pal Tony Abbott, believes it is better if you and I get treated like a shovel than be treated with dignity. He believes it is better that we get paid three-fifths of naff all rather than the poor employer be forced to pull their son out of Riverview.

Henderson is one of those useless loops that think employers should only have to pay what they can afford to pay. Let’s take this logic to its conclusion. I, as a consumer, have only $58 for groceries this week. So how about I load up my trolley with over $200 worth of goodies and when I get to the checkout say, “Well, I only have the capacity to pay $58 so, taking the advice of Gerard Henderson, I am only going to pay that”.

Quite rightly I’d be marched out of the store by a security guard, as Hendo should be marched out of Australia's consciousness.

Jerks like Henderson need to wake up to the fact that we live in a society made up of people, not businesses, and that if democracy is to mean anything it needs to serve the interests of human beings first and that narrow section of society called the business community second.

And he needs to stop it, or he will go blind.

WorkChoices Is Dead; Long Live WorkChoices

In what is looming to be a tactical victory for the Rudd Government, with accidental benefits for working Australians, Kevin Rudd has made dismantling WorkChoices a "priority". The announcement came out of Yesterday's (December 18) Cabinet meeting, where the reality of the Your Rights At Work campaign must have been laid bare for even the technocrats to understand. The Liberals are, of course, all over the place on the issue. Wets like Chris Pyne are glad to see the back of it, while Joe Hockey has declared it "dead" -meanwhile The Dead Rev, Kevin Andrews, has sprung out of his coffin to declare that it's all the way with WorkChoices still. "[Is] what we believed was for the good of Australia is no longer the case," was The Dead Kevs rhetorical question, to which this blogger poses the rhetorical answer "was WorkChoices good for any country?". The answer, of course, being no. The wrong Kevin will discover that the people have spoken if he only refers to a copy of any newspaper dated on or after November 25. It's a brilliant bit of work by Rudd & Coy. The Libs will either be wedged and forever known as the party that backs paying 16 year olds $3 an hour, or they roll over and let his, admittedly limited, roll-back go through the senate. The Libs best bet is to refer it to a senate committee in the hope that some sections of the union movement use that as an opportunity to embarrass Rudd and Coy. and expose just how many problems for working people they are leaving on the statute books. The crux of the issue is that there is a great deal of WorkChoices that will remain - the prohibition on union right of entry being the most glaring one - while many other areas; such as unfair dismissal laws, prohibited award content and the Gestapo-like Building and Construction Commission; will receive a partial, limited and delayed roll-back, if at all. We won't be going back to the lifestyle our parents enjoyed. So the inexorable trudge towards a third world lifestyle continues apace. In twenty five years of employment I've had one paid vacation, and this will become the norm for my generation and those that come after. It's pretty obvious we're going backwards. While the Liberal Party wanted to kill organised labour it appears the modern ALP is happy to watch us die by the death of a thousand prohibitive sub-clauses. Wouldn't it be great if the unions got together and formed a party to act in the interests of working people? Oh, I see we've already tried that. Well, plan B anyone?

Tool Of The Week: The Nutty Professor

Paul Gollan is one of those bottom feeding caricatures of a human being spewed out by the classical school of economics.

He has an opinion piece in the Canberra Times this week pleading for his beloved WorkChoices to be saved in all but name in the spirit of 'compromise'.

Well, if economics is the dismal science then Gollan is downright murky.

This bottom feeder tearfully asks that employers keep the right to pay kids three dollars an hour.

Now Gollan might think child abuse is OK - and given his many contributions on the subject he has probably already sold his own kids for medical experiments on the basis of maximising rent on labour.

Gollan agrees that WorkChoices was the single biggest issue that led to Howard's defeat (no argument there) but that this only "arguably" gives Rudd a mandate to do anything about it.

Instead the Gollan warns that Rudd risks anger from the business community (read his kiddy fiddling mates), as if they live on a separate planet from the community we live, breathe, work, sleep and play in.

His solution is WorkChoices Lite - WorkChoices in all but name. Expect to hear more bottom feeders like our Nutty Professor start to sell this "solution". All backed up with the garbage economics that equates human life with all the hope, sense of purpose and dignity of a shovel.

Gollan and his shirt-tucked-in-the-underpants mates simply don't "get it".

The underpinning of the Australian way of life has been - until the greed driven layabouts from the corporate sector got their way - that wages and conditions are determined collectively. We either all go forward together or society fragments as it has under Howard, with some people getting ahead at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us that have watched our standard of living head south for the last ten years.

Until eggheads like the Gollan get it into their heads that markets reduce human life to something nasty, brutish and short we will still have this voodoo economics shoved in our faces.

Of course you're going to create jobs if you destroy collective agreements that regulate things like shift rosters and apprenticeships and allow people to be paid three dollars an hour - that's just great for everyone except for the person with the job, their landlord, the small businesses they're supposed to buy from, the welfare agencies that have to support them, the utilities that expect them to pay bills and the kids that have to grow up in these households made up of Gollan's working poor.

If lunatic theorists like Gollan were forced to, say, clean toilets for a living they might just get a perspective on life that would stop them dribbling this inane garbage.

The Full Nelson

If ever you wanted confirmation that the ALP is prepared to play both sides of the fence over the Your Rights At Work v WorkChoices battle then check out nelsonfacts.com It's an attack website put together by the national secretariat of the ALP. The site pretty much spends its entire energy ripping into new Liberal Leader and current Tool Of The Week Brendan Nelson for his support of the WorkChoices laws. The site is Authorised by ALP National Secretary Tim Gartrell, who was fellated in a nauseating piece in the SMH over the weekend as if he personally was responsible for getting rid of the Howard Government, rather than the thousands of ordinary Australians in the Your Rights At Work campaign who actually DID make a difference. I mean, after all, all Tim had to do was turn up on election night - the heavy lifting had been done out in the marginals for him. Left to his own devices he would have given us a repeat of his brilliant performance in the 2004 campaign, where he succeeded in making the Liberal Party look attractive enough for them to get control of the senate. If the laws are as bad as Mr Gartrell and the Federal secretariat of the ALP say they are, then why is the ALP government sitting on their hands whistling Dixie as if WorkChoices isn't a very real problem faced by working people STILL. And the very modest changes they are proposing (that won't take effect for half a year at the earliest) do nothing to help people who:

• Are forced to sign an AWA to get a job in the next six months
• Want the union to visit their workplace to help organise co-workers
• Work in the building industry and wish to keep union matters confidential (gaolable offence if they refuse)
• Work in the building industry and want to promote their union at work
• Want to include content now prohibited in collective agreements, such as union training.
• Have the conditions Tim Gartrell is so keen to promote ripped out of their work agreements

In the meantime don't speak up - you can still be sacked under Howard's laws for at least another six months, probably longer if we take the word of Julia Gillard. What we are seeing here is a grade one, first class exercise in hypocrisy. The ALP was quite happy to hide behind the Your Rights At Work campaign to get into office - now they are there they are not exactly exerting themselves to protect Australians who are under the gun with these new laws. It's a cynical, gutless exercise that will blow up in their face if they're not careful.

"When we said we'd rip up WorkChoices, what we really meant was..."

On the Monday prior to the recent election John Howard said he was happy for the 2007 poll to be a referendum on WorkChoices. It was good that he was happy, because that is exactly what it had become by then anyway. The Your Rights At Work campaign showed that community campaigns do work; if the community is engaged. Just over 12,500 people across NSW got involved in the campaign. These were people, separate from the ALP, who came from all walks of life - many who had never been involved in a political campaign in their lives - who took the fight for rights at work to the streets, shopping centres, train stations, festivals and community events of our nation. If you weren't engaged at some stage by the Your Rights At Work campaign you simply weren't living in Australia for the last 18 months. It was a brand that was everywhere. And what carried that brand? Ordinary people. And many of these people had borne the brunt of WorkChoices - they'd had their incomes slashed, been sacked unfairly, had their rosters go all over the place and been bullied and intimidated by employers that took Howard's laws as a green light for bastadry. If you want examples I have heaps and am happy to share them. Which is what makes Julia Gillard's statements about not being in a rush and being "careful and measured" so sickening. Those same employers will read this gutlessness as a further green light to continue to treat human beings like shovels to be picked up and put down when needed. We are seeing this already, most notably with Telstra. What part of the phrase 'rip up WorkChoices' doesn't the Rudd-Gillard government understand?

• A credible survey has shown that WorkChoices was the reason why 5.6 percent of voters shifted their vote to the ALP
• It is highly unlikely that Kevin Rudd would be Prime Minister now if it wasn't for the Your Rights At Work campaign.
• Neither Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or any other ALP politician has mentioned the Your Rights At Work campaign in any report since the election, let alone thank and acknowledge both the people and the community campaign that worked incredibly hard put them where they are today.

This is, of course, being aided and abetted by the ignorant ostriches in our pathetic media, who must live in some parallel universe where the Your Rights At Work campaign never happened. The Your Rights At Work campaign WILL continue. We are not going away just so that Krudd and Gillard can schmooze the Australian business community - the community we live in comes first.