Pearls and Irritations

Only a fool would think that removing the union from the equation will rid the building industry of criminality.

But that is just what the ALP government is doing: introducing draconian laws with the backing of the Liberals to neuter the entire unionised workforce.

It is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is a pre-election ploy that has the added bonus for Anthony Albanese to remove factional support for his internal “left: opponents in the party.

The building companies and the Master Builders Association are licking their lips.

Yes, there are serious problems in the CFMEU construction division – problems the prime minister has known about for at least a decade, but is pretending to only have learnt about recently. But these problems cannot be solved by the current laws being rammed through parliament.

A former senior CFMEU organiser told me:

The Prime Minister is trying to blame the Greens for his own mishandling of the issue with a policy equivalent of a brain fart after not having dealt with the corruption that he was informed about 10 years ago.

As it stands the current legislation will enable any incoming Liberal government more or less to deregister the union, thereby guaranteeing that the presence of organised crime becomes a pandemic and not an illness.

In the early 1990s, at the time of the Gyles Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry in NSW, newspaper columnist Paddy McGuinness recounted a maxim long held in the building industry: it was either dominated by organised crime or communists.

That was when the forerunners of the CFMEU – the BWIU and BLF – had militant, communist leaderships.

The building industry is manna for organised crime (petty or serious), for money laundering or for shuffling large amounts of money at the big end of town.

While some of the criminals are jacked up on ’roids and covered in tatts, the people creaming off the serious bucks wear suits, drive Teslas and live in the leafy suburbs.

Only a militant, independent union can tame the concrete jungle. Unfortunately, with its communist leadership gone, the jungle has been trying to tame the union.

Since the 1990s, building unions increasingly relied on organising the strategic production points – like crane crews and concrete pours – to control the price of labour power.

While this has delivered decent pay rises to the big sites and helped maintain safety standards, delegate structures withered, and political education disappeared.

For much of the industry on small sites, the union effectively vanished.

In the absence of any broad-based working-class consciousness that characterised the strong unions of the post-war Keynesian era, the NSW branch in particular was weakened by the managerial practices of its leadership, which created a vacuum that criminal elements have sought to exploit.

The organisational culture remained stronger in the Victorian branch, but the collapse of political culture created its own vacuum.

The fact is, while capitalism exists, organised crime will look to the building game to clean its dodgy money and get regular sinecures.

Over the past 20 years, the influence of this strata has found its way into sections of the union. A once proud, independent and militant organisation has let itself come to this.

Lions led by donkeys

Building workers deserve better than to be led to this slaughter. The leadership of the CFMEU must bear some responsibility for opening the door to this full-frontal attack.

If the CFMEU is as militant and wild as they say, why hasn’t the current leadership called the men and women off the job to protest these laws? Why haven’t there been mass meetings?

The reason is threefold: one, the union brass has a completely legalistic and bureaucratic framework to take on the fight; two, the delegate structures have withered; and three, there is a chance that any mass meeting could ask difficult questions of the leadership. Best to leave the members atomised than risk push-back.

Truth is, if days lost to industrial action is your measure of militancy, construction is tamer than some other industries.

(According to ABS data, in the five years to the March quarter 2024, average days lost to industrial dispute per quarter across the economy has been 2.1 days per thousand employees. For construction it is 2.6 days per 1000 employees, while in transport and warehousing, 9.1 days per 1000 employees lost to industrial disputes. Construction is barely above the background average of all industries.)

Bullshit

Albanese has known about organised crime specifically in the NSW and Victorian construction divisions since at least 2014 when a whistleblower presented first-hand accounts of this in a personal meeting in his electorate office. Albanese passed the buck.

For the ALP leadership to claim it has only now found out about this since the recent articles in Nine papers is, frankly, bullshit.

Many union “old hands” in the industry are saying a period of administration is needed to clear out the bad apples at the top of the union.

Relying on the capitalist state to do this is a recipe for disaster, however. It would have been far better for the ACTU to force the issue inside the labour movement. But no union secretary wants to create the precedent of the ACTU intervening in the “internal affairs” of affiliated organisations.

But to have the courts and state intervene is a far, far worse outcome and precedent.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties has said:

The rushed nature of this legislation which is designed to override a process begun by the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Court threatens the principles of natural justice and procedural fairness. We note that the proposed legislation would set a precedent where membership-based organisations can have democratic control externally removed on the basis of untested allegations. This is of concern to all Unions, registered Clubs, and Australian membership-based organisations.

The Bill violates Australia’s obligations under the International Labour Organisation, namely Articles 3 and 4 of the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948.

The NSWCCL has long held that everyone has the right to natural justice and procedural fairness, regardless of the allegations they face. If this legislation is passed next week, it threatens this fundamental right. The right to freedom of association and the nature of membership-based organisations across Australia must be protected.

They aren’t wrong.

But workers must hold their leaders up to a higher standard than bourgeois “procedural fairness”.

More than a decade ago, Martin Smith, the leader of the SWP Trotskyite sect in the UK, was accused of rape. He was forced out of his position after an initial attempt to whitewash the case internally. No police were involved, no charges laid. But the SWP was forced to act.

In the CFMEU, we have had leaders guilty of breaching domestic violence orders, or guilty of drugs charges, or charged with bribery, all who kept their jobs at the time.

What is missing is an organised force in the rank and file that can challenge the union leadership, a symptom of an overall decline in working class consciousness.

Under “clean skin” Zach Smith, the CFMEU national office is pursuing a clueless legalistic approach to challenge the administration bill. It will fail.

Without militant action from the workforce that brings building sites to a stop, he will be ignored.

Most of the socialist “far left” has acted as mindless cheerleaders to the incumbent leadership of the union. Completely without any base in the working class, they are using this dispute as a bit of vicarious proletarian role-playing.

They are showing less independent thought than Karl Malden’s Father Pete Barry character in the classic film On The Waterfront (1954).

That movie depicts a local longshoreman union that has been infiltrated by organised crime. The members are intimidated into silence.

Malden’s Father Barry plays the role of an independent conscience. He delivers a eulogy to waterfront workers over the body of a killed whistleblower, where he says:

What does Christ think of the easy-money boys who do none of the work and take all the gravy?

How does he feel about the fellows who wear hundred dollar suits and diamond rings on your union dues and your kickback money?

And how does He, who spoke up without fear against every evil feel about your silence?

You want to know what’s wrong with our waterfront? It’s the love of a lousy buck. It’s making love of a buck … more important than the love of man.

At the end of the movie, the workers refuse to unload the ships until the redeemed Marlon Brando figure, Terry Malloy, leads them back after he cops a beating from the gangsters.

Those thugs are finally pushed aside and the workers return to the job, with one saying to Brando’s Malloy:

“We’ll walk in with you, so the shippers can see … we’ll take no more orders from Johnny Friendly [the corrupt union leader].

“That’ll give us back our union, so we can run it on the up and up.”

Only building workers can redeem their own union by organising for militant independent class politics. It won’t be delivered by the state or the labour bureaucracy from on high.