PARTISAN!

In April of 1998, Patrick Stevedores threw out its unionised workforce, and the docks turned into a battleground between cops, private security, and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). In the lead up to May Day, Mila Volkova reflects on the waterfront dispute and what lessons communists can draw from that struggle.

It has now been 136 years since the foundation of the Second International for the Labour, Socialist, and Marxist parties. Every year, at this time, workers across the globe come out into the streets to celebrate and commemorate our long struggle against capital. May 1^st is an opportunity to reflect on our long history and plan for the future. In the 1880s, they demanded an eight-hour workday and world peace. What do we demand today?

It is also the 27^th anniversary of the most recent important part of our long history – the Patrick Waterfront Dispute. In April 1998, workers in the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) went on strike after the 1,400 “wharfies” were laid off by Patrick Stevedores, a shipping and dock corporation. It is important because it was the last major industrial action with solidarity strikes from other sectors, big national news attention, and picket lines and police crashing into one another – with the pickets winning.

We yearn for those days. We wish for our times to contain such heroic victories against the enemy. How can we resurrect our contemporary workers movement? If we want to find the answers to that question, we must understand the dispute. What were the strike’s failures and successes? What can we emulate from now on, what can we avoid?

The Dispute

This was the situation in 1998: the Accords-era Labor party had speared the trade union movement with the pike of neoliberalism. The dispute was the first major strike since the post-Accord “bargaining model” was introduced. It had become an offence to boycott international trade, and workers could only fight isolated battles against their own employers rather than against multiple employers in an entire industry all at once. A “right-to-strike” was formally introduced alongside increasingly severe penalties for “unlawful” (anything the courts decide is too demanding) strike action. The Howard government’s reforms had only made this worse.

This was part of a deliberate international effort to smash workers’ power and free capital’s hands to escape the borders of the nation-state. Globalisation was the big new word, and it meant unemployment, casualisation, and the end of the welfare state. Rather than keeping workers and parents fed, benefits now only really served to keep them in a state of constant paranoia. The Soviet Union had fallen. With it went most of the organised socialist movement (including the Communist Party of Australia) and the hope of any sort of alternative system, no matter what anyone thought about it.

On the docks, the workforce had been gradually whittled down to about half of what it had been in the 1960s. Mechanisation had aimed to reduce the workforce and improve productivity, yet Australian docks were still about half as productive as the desirable international benchmark decided on by capital. As an export-economy, Australian profits rely just as much on the literal speed that docks can get goods loaded onto ships and sent off to satisfy international demand, as much as they rely on efficiently producing those goods. It is no mystery why the National Farmers Federation collaborated with Patrick Stevedores by providing much of the scab labour.

Howard was keen to smash the MUA because it would send a message to all that opposed him. 1998 was also the year of the Jabiluka blockade, which successfully stopped the plan to build a uranium mine on indigenous land. Universities regularly seized up as students protesting cuts and privatisation paralysed campuses with occupations. Australian protestors had a taste for blockade tactics, and the federal government sought a confrontation where they could dramatically crush a blockade to prove a point.

In the dead of an early April night, security hired by Patrick Stevedores assaulted docks in speedboats and armed with dogs. They forcefully removed the entire night shift, claimed they were trespassing, and waited for scabs to arrive by police-escorted armoured trucks at dawn. The MUA went on strike and formed pickets alongside members of the CFMEU, AWU, NUW, and various other sympathetic workers, students, and wives. Over the next month, pickets in Fremantle, Sydney, and Melbourne successfully held off attempts to break their line and get the docks up and running again. In Brisbane, to the frustration of many members, Labor and the ACTU demobilised the unions and the picket was broken.

Unexpectedly, the MUA took the boss to court on the charge of a conspiracy between the government and Patrick Stevedores to illegally fire the workforce. They won an injunction against the company and the court forced the parties to negotiate. This was something the boss usually did. According to the reports, the warfies sang union songs non-stop until the end of their first shift back on the docks.

The results: half of the 1,400 sacked workers kept their jobs (with the 700 redundancies paid for by the federal government rather than the company), the MUA lost the right to enforce a union shop on the docks, the dock workers lost overtime rights, and the MUA was forced to withdraw the conspiracy case. Is this what success looks like?

The union claimed a victory and those that kept their jobs celebrated. The MUA keeps a documentary of the dispute prominently displayed on their website, with glowing praise for the last successful major strike in Australia. But the fight had been tough. Many workers had lost their marriages to the stress, lost their livelihoods when they were sacked, or simply lost their lives out of grief-stricken suicide.

Assessing the Strike

There would be no purpose to self-congratulation here. We must be frank when we declare that the dispute was a failure and not a small one. There was a world where the MUA could have won a total victory over the bosses. To accept the dismal results of the dispute would mean accepting that total victory of the bosses is natural – that it is inherently more likely than the victory of the workers. But there is nothing natural about capital’s control over us.

Looking back, it is obvious that solidarity from other unions was key to getting the MUA what little victory they achieved. There were points where it was impossible to maintain the pickets otherwise. But it is a common conclusion that cross-sectoral solidarity from other unions is key to winning big industrial actions. We must recognise that even these acts of solidarity were limited and uneven. While some unions formally stopped work to join the pickets, many solidarity strikers did not have the support of their union leaders, and much of the support came from members of the community. Only thirty years prior, unions were organising general strikes across the entire country in solidarity with one another. It is the legislative framework of “bargaining” that bans such strike action.

The union attempted to wield this legislative framework against the bosses – with the results only confirming that the purpose of this system is to crush workers under its sheer weight. Prior to the raid by Patrick Stevedores security in early April, the company had gone through a restructuring that created a “labour-hire company” which held all the contracts of the workers. This allowed Patrick Stevedores to terminate all its employment contracts without formally sacking anyone. Because this bogus labour-hire company (really an arm of Patrick Stevedores) then went bankrupt, the courts were literally unable to order Patrick Stevedores to take back all 1,400 staff. It was impossible for the MUA to win a total victory through the courts.

Reports released after the dispute have revealed that this was a deliberate strategy of the company and the federal government. They were aware that firing all 1,400 workers was illegal, but that isn’t what they wanted. Their plan was to draw the MUA into a legally enforced bargaining process where they could get what they really wanted: a modest reduction in the workforce and an end to MUA control over the labour hire process. This allowed them to introduce cheap non-union labour and impose productivity requirements on the workforce, reducing the cost to Australian capital of importing and exporting commodities.

If workers want to get serious about winning, winning big, and winning totally over the bosses – we need to get straight with the fact that the legal bargaining framework is in our way. Legality is not our friend – it is a series of carrots and sticks structured to punish serious union militancy. Its use for capital is that our union leadership has become completely implicated in this process of incentives. Our leadership act more as cops for the bosses than as delegates for our interests, they never imagine taking serious (illegal) strike action. If we want to win, we must imagine it. One day soon we will have to face the unavoidable truth that real success will only happen if we defeat police in a serious picket line, deal with frozen or fined union budgets, and cope with our organisers getting thrown in jail.

We must remind ourselves who created the bargaining framework: the Labor Party. While the Coalition has refined the system over decades, they were unable to implement it when called on to do so in the 1980s. It was Labor, with its control over the union movement via the ACTU, that did capital’s grubby work. Even in opposition, as they were during the dispute, they flip-flopped between vaguely sympathetic inaction (the federal party), deliberately undermining the pickets (Queensland party), and support alongside mediation (Melbourne and Sydney). But when they are in power, it is always they that do the important work that the Coalition cannot do from outside the house. When the factory wheels need greasing from hands that know its rhythms personally, it is Labor that picks up the phone. Rank-and-file party members, union members, and voters are betrayed constantly – the be-suited backs of party politicians, careerists, and union bureaucrats always turned on them. We must keep the Accords in mind. We must keep the recent annihilation of the CFMEU in mind. Labor are agents of the enemy in our camp.

Going Forward

But let’s be clear, the structural forces that led to the MUA strike are not just fictions made up by capital to trick us into accepting its will. Inflation in Australia was rampant, profits were too low, and productivity was not internationally competitive. A general strike of many Australian workers may have won a total victory in the dispute, but capital’s voracious need to expand asserts itself ruthlessly on everyone. It would only have been a matter of time before this iron law of accumulation reared its head again and clawed and gnashed its way out of high wages in Australia to low wages elsewhere.

On May Day, it’s important to remind ourselves that we are just one national section of an international class connected to one another through our socialised labour. This is not a philosophical point, but an objective reality that our labour is more connected than ever before. The structural forces of globalisation are international in scale and, if we want to win, we must organise ourselves on an international basis. Even then, we cannot overcome these forces through sheer determination and never-ending strikes. We must take political power and seize control of these forces directly – slay them rather than tire them out in a boxing match we don’t have enough rounds left to win.

But leaping from our current conditions to an imagined international proletarian revolution isn’t any good. We must face our concrete contemporary conditions. Reflecting on the dispute, and the 27 years after it, we find two important tasks that we need to achieve today:

• Abolishing the legal mechanisms of union bargaining and arbitration. We need to free our hands to strike on the largest scale possible. We need full control of our strike budgets without the risk of government confiscation.
• Split from the Labor party. We need a socialist workers party, not a capitalist one. We need independent trade unions controlled by rank-and-file members and led by socialist agitators rather than Labor bureaucrats.

How do we get from where we are now to where we need to be to achieve these? We are in a paradox – to achieve these tasks we need a militant union movement, but to resurrect a militant union movement we need to achieve these tasks.

We need something resembling a party. Not an actual party, because that can’t exist in a meaningful way until after the workers movement’s heart is beating again. But nonetheless, it is basically impossible to go about defibrillating the trade unions without a socialist movement that is united, rather than divided into squabbling sects. In the dispute, socialists were a marginal force, and it showed in the misplaced faith of the rank-and-file in the Labor-aligned union leadership. Union delegates were often the primary force pushing for a general strike, but they were unable to shift the views of their members. Without the organisation and discipline of a vanguard party, they could not unseat their complacent leaders.

Our strategy needs to shift too. The past thirty years of a-political “rank-and-file” so-called “base building” organising by socialists has failed – the union movement has only continued to decline. In the era of de-industrialisation, financialisation, and complete capital mobility it is increasingly impossible to properly win union demands without calling for state intervention. Economic demands are no longer enough when achieving even that requires a political vision. The trade unions must be politicised, transformed from ailing economic apparatuses to genuine organs of struggle. Only an organised vanguard, which unites the sects, and which agitates in favour of economic demands for openly political reasons, can do this.

If we do all that, we might just have a revolution in our lifetimes.