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.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE RIGHT-WING CONSERVATIVE

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging lefty fought for minimum water quality standards.

With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie bastard fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $7.50 of his medications are paid for by the PBS because some lazy union workers fought for universal public medical insurance, Medicare – now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man fought for laws to regulate the meat industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby do-gooder fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the train station for his government-subsidized trip to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants socialist fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, sick leave, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy union bludgers fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment benefits because some stupid bleeding heart didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the Reserve Bank because some godless ALP hack wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is safe because some fun-hating technocrat fought for car safety standards.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by single desk trading boards that allowed farmers to bargain collectively. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government ALP stooge stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on a pension and a union superannuation fund because some Chardonnay swilling lefty made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home and turns on a radio talk show. The talkback host keeps saying that leftys are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Liberal Party and big media have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.

Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government socialists ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

With apologies to PunkVoter.com

The Quiet American

The quadrennial popularity contests that are the US Presidential Primaries are being inflicted upon us again for the right to see who will take the reins of empire from Nero as Rome slowly burns. It should be a doddle for the Democrats after eight years of malfeasance under the most corrupt and incompetent Republican administration since, well, the last one. But the Democrats have an uncanny way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and this years fun could go the way of so many others in recent memory. Who'd a thunk that a wealthy trial lawyer could re-invent himself as a champion of the little guy? But that's exactly what the former junior senator from North Carolina, John Edwards, is doing. Edwards, but a blip on international consciousness, is probably best remembered as John Kerry's southern insurance policy in his ill-fated tilt in 2004. But Edwards has sniffed the wind and learnt fastest and best from the mid-term shellacking the GOP received in 2006 when voters turned out in droves and threw out them there Republican bums. Why? Because organised labor - the dreaded unions - outreligious-righted the religious right, by rocking (literally, if John Cougar Mellencamp is to be believed) out the vote on the first Tuesday in November and snatching control of Congress by turning those elections into a referendum on the minimum wage. Most of the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers international media didn't get it, particularly our own wine soaked brand, reading it as a referendum on Iraq. Sure, Iraq was floating around in the background, but every credible exit poll had conflated Clinton's dictum, "it's the economy, stupid", into "it's the economy, you goddam corrupt sons'o'bitches!" Edwards got that message and has hopped into bed with organised labor faster than a sailor on shore leave into Madame Fifi's House Of Relaxation. It was telling that in Iowa he gave his final stump speech at a Steelworkers Union function in Ottumwa (which Australians probably know best as Radar O'Rielly's home town). The result is that he has come from nowhere to take second spot in Iowa and is holding up in New Hampshire. This pushed Clinton II into third spot, made the excellently named Barak Obama frontrunner and the whole Democrats nomination process a wide open free for all. Despite being all but ignored by the Mainstream Media he is saying things middle America wants to hear. He has a credible single payer health care plan and is running the most populist presidential campaign since Truman. It's not every day you hear a Presidential candidate saying stuff like "Unions made manufacturing jobs the foundation of our middle class, and they can do the same for our service economy." or "Union membership can be the difference between a poverty-wage job and middle-class security." but it's all there over on his website. But does he mean it? He's probably no Joe Hill, but his plan is to make it easier for service industry unions to organise, so obviously manufacturing would go the way of Betacam in a John Edwards America, which NAFTA is ensuring anyway. But it's the best deal working stiffs have been offered in Septicland since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. It is also dawning on Yanks like Euclidean geometry on a 14-year-old that the good ole land o' the free mightn't be quite ready to share that freedom with either a woman or what is politely referred to in progressive circles in this week's most powerful nation on earth as "a man of colour". And sitting next to that elephant in the room is another elephant - Iraq - as this excellent piece by Scott Ritter explains. Remember Scott Ritter? He was the UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq who suggested to the Bush Administration that they might wanna just hold on a cotton pickin' minute here, before Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and all those other Loonies pushed him out the door. He seeked Weapons Of Mass Destruction here, he seeked Weapons Of Mass Destruction there, the length and breadth of Iraq, before coming up with nada; which was not what his betters in the Pentagon wanted to hear. And, as he points out, there isn't a single candidate in the whole goddam shooting match who has the vaguest clue about what to do with that stinking fish. Especially the Republicans - for whom the "surge" in Iraq is working. Thank the Lord and pass the sauce that the Nutjob Huckabee won Iowa - the man's unelectable. Scarier though is Rudy Giuliani, who is electable, and who will run a tarred and feathered Ms Hillary or Obama out of town on an iron rail - and take US foreign policy to the solarium for a few years. It shall be an interesting election, but it will be fought on domestic issues. This 'sub-prime mortgage' BS is just code for easy credit - too easy credit - but they can't call it a credit card crisis (which is what it is) or US consumerism will gridlock into a depression that will make the Thirties look like the Fifties, all on the back of what economists call 'sentiment' and what the rest of us call blind crazed mass hysteria. The US economy is going to hell in a handbasket and there isn't really much the Yanks can do except drown in cholesterol and exhaust fumes - and learn Mandarin. Someone who knows Rudy Giuliani all too well put it nicely a few years back:

Its like what my painter friend Donald said to me Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done

Have a nice day!

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.

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: Costa The Crazy Trot

Tool Of The Week and economic whiz kid, Michael Costa, culminated a long career of nutjob politics with a masterpiece this week - a privatisation proposal that reads like a suicide note.

The Privatisation of power in NSW is obviously Michael Costa’s cry for help.

Here is an incredibly disturbed man, wandering freely through corridors of power, bent only on self-destruction - and this time he’s taking us all with him.

The Privatisation of NSW Power assets - going by the guide of, say, every other jurisdiction in Australia or the known world - will be an unmitigated pain-in-the-sit-down-apparatus, if not regional scale disaster, for most, if not all, sentient beings. It will torpedo any chance of New South Wales maintaining a first world electricity system.

This act of public policy self-immolation crowns the public life of a man who has been obviously mad since he was sprouting Socialist Workers Party gibberish back in High School.

Of course, the Privatisation is just a ruse, a kind of brandishing of the weapon in the public space - it throws many into fear, if not panic, but he hasn’t started shooting yet.

The problem with Michael Costa is that he needs a hug.

But this hard-arsed Cypriot ever had time for hugs; he was too busy being a ‘tough bloke’.

He was a tough bloke when he dropped out of his scary-bourgeoisie university life and entered his homo-erotic fantasy world at Garden Island, working as a rigger and helping the logs over at the Federated Ironworkers Association talk themselves into irrelevance or the Australian Workers Union (which is pretty much the same thing).

He carried that tough bloke persona right through his days in the eighties as a trainee Train Driver - when he never did quite get to understand how to drive a train, or living in Emu Plains - but managed to nobble the militant leadership of the train drivers union in his ‘spare time’.

From the train driver’s union to his rise to be secretary of the Worker’s Parliament, the Labor Council, his record is an outstanding one. One of qualification, fixing, nobbling, deal making, haranguing of rank-and-file, and sausage fingered diplomacy.

If his job was to marginalise and prostitute organised labour in NSW he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

He appointed such star performers as Michael Gadiel (who marries for a living) and contracting out ‘communications’ to that unctuous, wannabe lad carpetbagger, Peter Lewis.

John Robertson changed more about the union movement in NSW than the name when he picked up the pieces afterwards.

While Unions NSW goes from strength to strength, our Tool of the Week prides himself on posturing his small minded, dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers, try-hard red-neckery as a type of anti-politician. Unfortunately it delivers the sort of policy outcomes that leave the very people purports to speak for bent over the bonnet with their pants around their ankles.

His ‘elevation’ to the NSW Ministry is a fine example of the Peter Principle in full flight.

This incompetent log enjoyed election day baiting a female greens booth worker with former NRL Player Mark Sargent as muscle.

Real brave, pal.

But the man who put ‘maniac’ into ‘megalomaniac’ left no doubt where his political sympathies lay come the recent Federal Election, bragging that:

“I struck up a reasonable relationship with people from [Liberal MP] Bob Baldwin's office; we got on very well. We were offering each other water and other benefits but I will not tell members what they were.”

Here is a trot who has gone on a political trajectory in life that started in the hard left, moved through the labour movement and is now off having a pipe with right-wing nutters like the Liberal MHR for Paterson, Bob Baldwin. The only problem being that Curly got stuck in the NSW Cabinet on his way through, and decided he liked the Living Away From Home Allowance. You’ll need a crowbar to shift this log now.

The thing about Costa is that he’s stuck in an eighties tribal siege mindset of those members of the NSW Right that were never too bright to begin with anyway.

While he likes to spin the smart spiv smartarse persona, the reality is he’s an insecure little joker, way out of his depth, that thinks that he has to keep being a bastard to have any sense of meaning in his life.

After all, he’s a big fan of cars, and we all know about men who like fast cars.

The outshot is that, unless he gets a size nine in the sit-down apparatus from some more decently minded people around the labour movement - and soon, then our creaking power infrastructure is going to unravel remarkable quickly and inconveniently in the midterm. The good news is it's not too late.

The bad news is that all Fatty O’Barrell has to do to be the next Premier of NSW is put his pants on right way round each morning for the next two and a half years

And as for our Tool Of The Week, well, I hear they’re still looking for train drivers in NSW.

Good News

The best news since 8.12pm Saturday night comes hot off the wires with sacked construction worker Barry Hemsworth getting his gig back at Botany Cranes after a 441 day picket! Read about it here This is the most promising development since the election and hopefully a positive sign of things to come. I particularly like the manager claiming it had nothing to do with the election result, just that the timing was a "coincidence". Yeah mate, sure.

What Have The Unions Ever Done For Us?

From the people that brought you the weekend comes...