Friday 25th July 2008 saw 100 Union Solidarity activists from the Western suburbs shut down the CSR Construction site, Lyell St Yarraville.

Workers and their unions on this site have a range of longstanding issues.

However Union Solidarity, as friends know, is less concerned with the issues than we are with the use of undemocratic laws against workers and their unions in the righteous pursuit of their interests.

It is this central point around which Union Solidarity was formed and continues to protest: union activities are not criminal as current industrial law paints them, but are simply designed to insure that workers have the same rights as employer organisations in the pursuit of their interests.

CSR have employed a man named John Kint who has an extremely bad history of eliminating workers' and unions' democratic rights through the Howard years, notably at Port Campbell. Kint has now told workers on the CSR site that if they talk to a union organiser they will be docked four (4) hours. Clearly the same penalties do not apply to employers seeking to meet with their unions/associations!

Australians voted overwhelmingly in 2007 to put an end to this sort of unequal injustice, to the point where for the second time only in our nation's history a Prime Minister lost his seat. Clearly, however, the new government does not feel confident enough, under massive corporate pressure, to change the laws in a thoroughly democratic direction.

It is up to the people to provide enough weight and pressure back the other way, a powerful enough action and voice against the totalitarian temptation which the Howard years unleashed. For our part Union Solidarity will step in whenever workers tell us of bullying and intimidation sanctioned by bad law.

With all of the problems facing our nation economically and interconnected to that environmentally, the totalitarian temptation will seem to many employers even more alluring. We must resist that tendency.

Only an entitled people, in a rights-based economy, can act in the responsible ways which our uncertain future will demand from us. Rights are needed which empower Australian workers to be able to respond in a fully engaged manner, to deal with crises around manufacture, water, transport, power/energy, the health problems which will arise, the rapid re-localisation we will need of jobs and tasks which three decades of globalisation have moved from the shores of our nation.

Without rights enabling workers and their organisations to act, does anyone truly believe that central government alone will provide for our needs, even if they had the confidence to do so in the face of corporate threats?

Governments are too focussed on short-term electoral outcomes and the more so the less of our resources the nation owns.

Building workers without rights under the Building Construction Industry Improvement (sic) Act are not only disempowered in the pursuit of their immediate interests to a degree not experienced by other workers, and certainly not experienced at all by employers, but importantly for the us in the community, they are unable to play the historic role they have always played in defence of communities and the general good.

It is crucial that we are even more outspoken in our opposition to laws that would silence the working class voice in this country, at this time of impending crisis. If CSR escalates the problems of building workers in Yarraville the community stands ready to build resistance to those moves.

more info: John Kint at Port Campbell | Kint pressuring OH&S rep

Labels: CSR, Kint, Port Campbell