CFMEU: Unions Here To Stay

Rita Mallia, NSW president of the CFMEU construction and general division [extract]

While the HSU saga has been front page news, the same treatment is not given to corporate malpractice.

Around the time Fair Work Australia's report into the HSU was making headlines, an Australian construction icon, Lend Lease, was fined $US54 million for "audacious fraud" in its overbilling for more than a decade of US clients - many government agencies on major projects.

One day's worth of bad press in the back news pages and a pledge from the Lend Lease chief, Steve McCann, that the company would behave better, and that was it - matter closed.

Compare this with recent coverage of a Supreme Court civil case involving Multiplex, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, its former state secretary Andrew Ferguson and the disgruntled owner of a bankrupt demolition company who claimed the three had conspired to drive him out of business.

The coverage was sensational. Columns spilled forth claiming "corrupt" practice and "collusion".
Yet when Justice McDougall comprehensively dismissed the case this month, finding no evidence of corrupt activities and, in fact, it was the demolition company owner and his witnesses who were not "credible", the same detractors were silent.

The obsession conservatives have with the CFMEU belies a major point - the construction union today is one of the most vigorously monitored unions in Australia. Two royal commissions and a national watchdog - the Australian Building and Construction Commission - have mined every aspect of its performance and yet we have had not one conviction for corruption-related activities. The best it has come up with is swearing and infractions related to industrial disputes. Little is said about the genesis of those disputes such as poor safety, exploitation of migrant workers or workers being ripped off.

It is time conservative commentators and the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, who has vowed to return the ABCC to its former glory, recognise the essential role unions play and cease the union-bashing and political point scoring. They should concentrate on issues of substance that adversely affect construction workers and workers alike, such as poor workplace safety, the low number of apprentices and the slowing in investment in the construction sector in states like NSW.

As for the union movement, we are here to stay.