The war on unions is on – it's time to fight back

Tim Lyons
theguardian.com, 10 April 2014

The rants of trade unions' enemies don’t bear any resemblance to my experience as a unionist. My memories of nearly 20 years as a union official are about people ...

What we do as union officials, and delegates do as volunteers in workplaces, is the sometimes slow and often not very sexy work of helping workers get heard and get some power over their work, and therefore over their lives. It’s about supporting workers like these who are paid award minimum wages and have been told that they are stuck there because their employer has explicitly adopted a low-wage business model.

Our work is about people’s individual and collective right to dignity and fair treatment at work. It’s about decent wages and conditions, employment security and safety. And it’s about issues like patient care, and quality public services, and public safety, and rights at work for every Australian, union member or not.

This is important work. It’s good for working people, and it’s good for our community. Not that you hear much about it. Instead, we’re depicted as some sort of racket.

I’ve spoken regularly about my contempt for any crooks in the union movement, and am happy to put my personal record as an advocate for governance and accountability up against anybody’s. But the Royal Commission into unions needs to be called for what it is: the legal machinery to go with a general campaign to delegitimise unionism.

Nobody believes that the Abbott government wants to see bigger, stronger, more effective, better run unions as the outcome of that campaign. The government clearly wants the royal commission to function as a general trial of the fundamental validity of trade unionism, to both dirty us up and distract us along the way. Soon the government will start a productivity commission review of the industrial relations system, as a prelude to policy change. What better way to start a long-run campaign to reduce rights at work than to silence or discredit your only likely source of serious opposition?

The royal commissioner seems acutely aware he is operating in a hyper-partisan political context. Yesterday, in his opening remarks, he felt it necessary to make the extraordinary disclaimer that “the terms of reference do not assume it is desirable to abolish trade unions”. The Commissioner in the HIH Royal Commission, for example, did not feel the need to announce that his brief did not assume that insurance companies should be abolished. Such a comment would have seemed absurd in that context, but was deemed necessary here.

That he did feel it was necessary says a lot.

Of course if we did abolish trade unions, Australia would be a different place. A more unfair and a more unequal place, and one where most people would enjoy a lower standard of living. Because of what unions wouldn’t be doing anymore.