BY LINDA HARRIS AND RON POULSEN
SYDNEY, Australia - "Wharf war sweeps nation," blared Brisbane's Courier-Mail April 9. Across the country major newspaper headlines chorused the same theme, directed against the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). This is the Australian capitalist rulers' response to the government- backed mass sacking of 1,400 wharfies (dockworkers) on April 7 and the use of scab labor.

This showdown is the latest round of a long-running union-busting campaign orchestrated by the conservative Liberal-National coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard. The assault has been spearheaded by Christopher Corrigan, chief executive officer of Patrick, one of the two big stevedoring companies on the waterfront. Corrigan took over its parent company, Lang Corp., in 1991.

Late in the afternoon of April 7, Patrick's subsidiaries were put into voluntary receivership by Corrigan to legally justify the sacking of the entire wharf workforce at all 14 terminals. That evening, a special meeting of the federal cabinet was held in Canberra to back Patrick's moves.

At 11:00 p.m. that night, in a nationally coordinated surprise move, hundreds of private security thugs entered the terminals with dogs, ordering workers off the docks. In some cases drivers were ejected from cranes with heavy containers still swinging in midair, recklessly disregarding safety. The next morning, Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith announced government backing in the form of a A$250 million (US$165 million) scheme to fund redundancies (layoffs) being offered to divide the sacked workers.

In Melbourne, 27 workers locked themselves into a compound on the East Swanson Dock for 20 hours before leaving under police escort. They came out chanting "MUA! Here to stay!"

The sacked wharfies rapidly set up round-the-clock picket lines at all Patrick docks. As news of the midnight "ambush" broke on the morning of April 8, thousands of unionists around Australia walked off the job and marched to join the MUA picket lines. Some 5,000 marched in Sydney alone.

Workers and others have joined the pickets in ones and twos. Colin Marshall, a Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) member from Port Hedland, Western Australia, who was in Sydney on vacation, came straight to the picket line. "I disagree with what's happened to these guys. If the MUA goes down, it will affect all the unions like dominoes," he said.

Tony Papaconstuntinos, the national deputy secretary of the MUA, said, "While we are obliged to pursue our fight using the legal system, I don't believe this dispute will be won in the courts.... Unless there is national unity and a show of strength the government will get the upper hand."

On April 9 the Victorian Trades Hall Council called a statewide strike for May 6, along with protest rallies. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has called for member unions to take up collections for the MUA strike fund.

More than 200 Filipino unionists picketed the Australian embassy in Manila April 8 to protest the sackings. In another solidarity protest, seven unionists were arrested in San Francisco April 9, after blocking the Australian consulate entrance.

David Cockcroft, general secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), to which the MUA is affiliated, said, "The waterside unions around the world are going to back 100 percent the efforts of the MUA." He explained they know "that the future of unionization on the docks around the world is at stake."

Ignoring a federal court injunction for a week's freeze on the sackings, Patrick rapidly moved to bring scabs in. At Port Botany in Sydney, Patrick was forced to fly in nonunion labor by helicopter on April 9, following an unsuccessful attempt to land them by boat.

For the first time in half a century docks in Sydney are being worked with nonunion labor. Ships have also been worked in Fremantle and Brisbane, but have been short loaded and delayed.

In Sydney on April 12 the first ship with an MUA- organized crew to try to dock at Port Botany, the Australian Endeavour, was delayed for eight hours. At the Port Botany picket line the next day, Kevin Clifford and John MacKay, who were on the MUA-crewed tugs that brought the ship in, said they resisted berthing for safety reasons, "because of the dogs and guards on the wharves."

The crews received notice from their employer that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) had threatened to charge them with "preventing international trade," which they said carries a fine of A$10 million against the union and up to A$500,000 against each individual. Under advice from the union they reluctantly brought the ship in. MacKay described this as "the blackest day in Sydney Harbour. Our hearts said no don't do it, but in the end we had no choice." They explained that the MUA- organized crew on the Australian Endeavour also faced mutiny charges if they refused orders.

As the vessel began unloading with scab labor, Reith called it "an historic moment." Standing reality on its head, Corrigan proclaimed it the "final nail in the coffin of the MUA's campaign to destroy my company."

The national secretary of the MUA, John Coombs, noted that Patrick still had to get cargo in and out of the terminals through MUA picket lines. He pointed out that in Melbourne pickets had prevented cargo movements at East Swanson.

As Peter Francis, an MUA delegate (shop steward) at Port Botany, explained to Militant reporters April 10, Patrick is a long way from full operations and this is "just part of the propaganda war." Echoing the common view on the picket lines that the wharfies are in for a long and bitter struggle, he said that he "[didn't] care how long it takes," that he and the other sacked unionists would be "here to the end."

Yoon Young Moo, international secretary of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, visited the Port Botany picket April 8, saying, "We need a new global solidarity." A solidarity message from sacked Liverpool dockworkers was read at the Darling Harbour picket line in Sydney, April 10.

Contrary to the heavy propaganda portraying the picketers as "MUA thugs," the source of violence on the picket lines is Patrick's security guards. At Darling Harbour, in the early morning of April 10, wharfies and others on the picket line were sprayed with mace by security guards. Earlier that night a van was driven out through the picket line, hitting two workers. Police on the scene made no arrests. Welcoming the mass sacking, Prime Minister Howard claimed that it was "a defining moment in Australia's industrial relations history."

Months of campaigning to break the MUA's closed shop followed, including a media propaganda blitz painting wharfies as "overpaid and underworked," and decrying the union's monopoly of labor supply as preventing "waterfront reform." During a TV interview on A Current Affair, Howard was asked why even the workers on the Adelaide docks, operating with the highest container loading rate, should be sacked. He explained, "Well, they're all part of the one union."

In preparing for the April 7 sackings, Patrick leased a wharf at its Webb Dock in Melbourne to Producers and Consumers Stevedoring (PCS), a company set up by the National Farmers Federation (NFF) on January 28. Strikebreakers, working under nonunion short-term individual contracts, began training at the PCS dock February 23.

The NFF is dominated by capitalist farmers and has a history of union-busting operations backed by a multimillion dollar war chest. Ashley Clarke, a Queensland small farmer, joined the MUA picket line in Brisbane on April 10 and criticized the NFF's actions. He said, "At no time has any of these issues of the NFF been downloaded to the farmers and put to the vote."

Attacks on the MUA and the coal miners in the CFMEU, another key industrial union, have been central to a broader offensive on union rights carried out by the Howard government since it came to office in March 1996. This antiunion drive has been fueled by the deepening global economic crisis of capitalism with depressed and glutted markets worldwide, and especially in Asia, causing intensified competition from rivals of Australian-based big business. In response, capitalists like Corrigan have taken the lead in trying to prop up their declining profits at the expense of workers' pay and conditions.

Coinciding with the escalation of this antiunion assault and worsening economic prospects, the Howard government is preparing to call elections before its full term in office expires. Several pieces of government legislation have been blocked in the Senate, most notably Howard's bill to gut Aboriginal land rights. These are being described as possible triggers for early full elections to both houses of Parliament.

The political polarization reflected in the waterfront confrontation, the debate on Aboriginal land rights, and government attacks on the social wage are creating a volatile atmosphere for a national election.

Referring to the upcoming vote, one seaman and MUA member who joined the Darling Harbour picket told the Militant April 9, "Now's the chance for people who believe in social justice, who support unions, who support Aboriginal rights, to get together to bring this government down."

Linda Harris is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union. Ron Poulsen is a member of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia in Sydney. Joanne Kuniansky contributed to this article.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home