The bad old days are waiting in the wings

He’s backed by the bully-boys of big business, by the industrial and financial clout of organised capital, by the mighty corporate unionism flexing its muscles at the big end of town.

Now that Howard, their hard-hatted, hard-hearted, heavy-hitting henchman, has achieved a closed shop in the Reps and the Senate, black-banning anyone and anything his comrades among the CEOs don’t like, it’s time to strike. Against what’s left of the trade unions; against those millions of Australians enjoying some degree of protection through organisations born from the savage mills of the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Unions, according to the bruvvers of the board rooms, have no place in the 21st century.

Thus are the battle lines drawn on the eve of the biggest political conflict this country has seen since those blokes in black masks brought their Rottweilers on to the waterfront, while Peter Reith was having troops trained as strike-breakers in Dubai.

But what makes this different is that every working man and woman is under threat, no matter what job. And you don?t have to go back very far to remember how bad things can be.

Take the building industry in the 1950s, when Jack Mundey arrived in Sydney from the bush to play rugby league. Having spent the Depression years helping with his father on a struggling dairy farm, working and then walking to school in bare feet, Jack had to buy boots for his sport and another pair for his job as a builder’s labourer. The conditions were brutal. To save themselves paying workers in wet weather, the employers evolved the ’one-hour-hire-and-fire rule’.

Not only was there no annual leave, but Jack also got used to being sacked the day before a public holiday, and rehired the day after.

Only one communist has ever been elected to an Australian parliament, but many were voted into the leadership of trade unions by workers who trusted the coms to be incorruptible. Thus, ten years after becoming a builder’s labourer, Jack was elected Secretary of the NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation. Because corrupt industries tend to create corrupt unions, the scene was rotten to the core. But the Mundey team cleaned it up and within a few years Jack would become one of the world’s most famous union leaders, up there with Poland’s Lech Walesa, and as responsible as Bob Brown for creating the green political movement. Petra Kelly of the German Greens says it all started in Australia, between the Franklin campaign in Tasmania and the fight to preserve heritage sites in Sydney.

The improbable story began in blue-chip Liberal territory, with housewives in Sydney’s Hunters Hill opposing an attempt by A.V. Jennings to knock down 5ha of bushland. Having lost every round, these middle-class women turned to Jack and the BLF backed by the building construction employees to join the fight.

The unions threatened to stop works on Jennings high-rise projects from Sydney to Canberra. They won.

Heritage buildings were being skittled everywhere. With no legislation to prevent it, with governments in the pockets of developers, the builders labourers invented the green ban? and between 1971 and 1975 43 projects were stopped in their tracks. Then the Wran government established the Land and Environment Court and introduced planning and conservation acts. It had been a rough time, as the murder of Juanita Nielsen attests, but they’d won.

I retell this story because society’s memory is so short. Much of what we take for granted in terms of rights, entitlements, conditions and social justice comes from the heroism of the trade union movement from generations of Jacks around the world. I’ve been talking to Jack lately, he’s now in his seventies and he fears for the future of workers in this country if Howard wins his IR fight. The bad old days are waiting in the wings, and they’ll be back with a vengeance.

The Mundey story reminds us that unions have always fought for more than self-interest. Menzies was christened ’Pig Iron Bob’ during a stoush to prevent metal being shipped to Japan and returned to Australia as World War II weaponry. The wharfies helped the Indonesians win their struggle against the Dutch. City unions helped Aboriginal workers get a fair deal from Territory pastoralists. As Jack says, ’Democracy consists of more than casting a vote once every three or four years. Genuine democracy is everyday democracy, fighting for social justice.’

Amen to that, not amen to trade unions. We’ll all know grief if corporate Australia gets to bury them. Even if you’re a BMW driver in leafy Toorak or lustrous Vaucluse, you might need a union one day. Ask the women of Hunters Hill.