PARTISAN!

Cassie Barnes assesses the attitude of CFMEU members towards their ousted leadership.

The CFMEU membership turned out in force on Tuesday 17th September at Emma Miller Place in the Brisbane CBD. Crowds of workers in hi-vis could be seen filing in from kilometres away and a densely packed crowd numbering in the thousands filled the park. The attendees were not only furious about their union’s treatment at the hands of the Albanese Government, but also organised, engaged, and responsive to speakers to a degree that is rarely seen at political events like these.

The crowd was an active participant in the event, and the dialogue between speeches given and the responses they received revealed a lot about the internal tensions of the union. To me, it told a story of mounting frustration and patience wearing thin with a leadership that had little to offer beyond excuses and buck-passing.

The Leadership Whines

The speeches given by members of the CFMEU leadership and those cosy with them revealed a confused, desperate mindset. They lurched, seemingly at random, between reactionary appeals, denial of basic facts, and at one point outright declaring that the union was helpless without their leadership with the repeated line “we need them!”. It all seemed to centre on a desire to return to the idyllic days of 10 weeks ago (without any notion of how that beloved past led to this hated present). If the wheels of history wouldn’t turn back, they seemed happy to settle for vengeance on all they hold responsible.

Michael Ravbar, the recently ousted head of the Queensland and NT section of the union gave the last speech of the day, opening with a promise to speak carefully due to his involvement in the case being brought to the High Court. He had barely finished the sentence before he broke this commitment, giving a speech that can only be described as a bewildering, self-pitying, stream-of- consciousness rant about how unfairly he had been treated. Any wrongdoing involving corruption, treatment of women and connections to fascist groups was dismissed with nothing more than a mocking tone and a cheap applause line. His critique of Albanese contradicted itself from moment to moment, that he was gutless and unable to act, but also a tyrannical bully who was trying to break the RBA to his will (!).

Ravbar celebrated the landslide victory of the Country Liberal Party in the recent Northern Territory elections, regarding Labor’s loss as
somehow being a vindication of the CFMEU. He urged the attendees to vote out the Labor government in Queensland without any suggestion of who to vote in or what this would achieve. Given that the only objection that he has to the Queensland Labor Party seems to be that they stopped taking contributions from the CFMEU, it is hard to read this as anything other than an attempt at a narcissistic Samson Option to bring down the house around him.

While it is easy for Marxists to hear a union condemning and declaring independence from the ALP and ACTU and read a class-conscious agenda into it, these speeches were not the monumental declarations of class independence we might wish them to be. They were just a bunch of complacent union bureaucrats and their allies whining because they thought the party would never end.

The crowd gave only muted cheers or polite claps to these declarations of the necessity of the leadership and their mistreatment. Where at other events a quiet or unresponsive crowd is indicative of low morale, inexperience or passivity, the majority in attendance on Tuesday consciously exercised silence and tepid responses to make their dissatisfaction known. Their commitment, discipline and readiness for conflict was evident, but their patience for time- wasting, disorganised politics and bureaucratic excuses was clearly wearing thin.

The Rank-and-File Roars

The crowd’s approval was most loudly expressed in response to two speeches which broke from the leader-worship. One was from Ashley Lynch, a worker who talked about her passion for the CFMEU earned through the union’s support through difficult times and how it safeguards the lives and health of her and her family. This clearly resonated with the crowd and hit to the heart of worker’s fears: how many might be forced to work in inhumane conditions
under contracts negotiated by a neutered CFMEU? How many might be permanently injured by relaxed safety procedures? How many might die?

The other was from the unexpected star of the show: Bec Barrigos, a Queensland Teachers’ Union rank-and-file member and a member of Socialist Alternative. She spoke as a representative of “QTU Fightback”, a militant informal subgrouping of the QTU membership which has challenged the leadership for its cosy relationship with the ALP and Education Queensland

She gave a speech which emphasised the power of the rank-and-file union members and the unity of workers’ struggle across industries and sectors, linking the struggles of blue-collar and white-collar workers. Her criticism of the CFMEU leadership was not explicit, but hard to miss as she connected this situation to teachers’ experiences struggling against leadership to create substantive democracy. Her message was clear: the union doesn’t belong to the deposed leaders or the state administrators, it exists only to serve the workers and anything which impedes that can and must be crushed.

This speech was delivered eloquently and with passion, and met with thunderous applause throughout and for a full minute afterwards. It was so clear that she stole the show that both the MC and Ravbar tried to get some reflected glory by referring back to her when they talked. It is clear that Bec tapped into a feeling in that crowd: “We have a lot to lose, but together we are strong.” Unfortunately, no one had a good answer to the question which necessarily follows that thought…

How to break free

The only criticism that can be made of Bec’s speech is that it failed to take the opportunity to break from the labourist consensus that all this was within. Surrounding all of this talk on the day was the foreshortened horizon of negotiating better prices and conditions of provision of the labour-power commodity, which gave a claustrophobic feeling to the proceedings. If that is all that can be achieved, it is hard to fault those who simply want it back the way it was.

Under the likes of Setka and Ravbar, the CFMEU has done a lot to improve the pay and working conditions of most of its membership, and this kind of economism has an obvious appeal. The CFMEU as it stood in early 2024 was a textbook example of what success looks like for this model of unionism. It has nothing serious to say about exerting power over what is done with that labour in the style of the Green Bans, nothing to say about shaping a better society, nothing to say about anything beyond haggling, because it is nothing but labour’s pimp, and so everything comes down to price.

The desire for something more was clearly present in that crowd, they rewarded those who reflected that passion and that experience back to them, but nothing provided a channel to direct this towards a liberatory vision. And so we come to the big open question: are there leaders in that crowd who will provide that vision? Have younger generations of representatives and organisers and delegates been properly trained for leadership with an understanding that the union belongs to the members?

The most important lesson that I have learned in my years on the left is that the worst thing an organiser can be is indispensable. Being indispensable means you have failed to educate others in your duties and skills, and it holds the cause hostage to your capacities. At best this can be due to negligence, at worst it is about putting your personal power above the goals you were supposedly striving for. The insistence on how much the union needs Setka and Ravbar and the rest of this ruling clique is more than a narcissistic tantrum: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim, this is an unforgivable act of betrayal against all the working class.