Larvatus Prodeo

Euskadi Ta Atasuna, the Basque terrorist group responsible for hundreds of deaths, political assassinations and major bombings in Spain and France over the last half of the twentieth century, has been forced into declaring a permanent ceasefire with the Spanish Government.

Continue reading ‘War On Terror Won?’

The Australian Federal Police have started a book club. It’s not like other book clubs, though, with Margaret Atwood, red wine, cheese and other bourgeois comforts: the Feds seem to have a more interesting view of fun. The ABC reports:

A Melbourne university student says the Australian Federal Police (AFP) forced him to answer questions because he borrowed library books about terrorism and suicide bombings.

The Muslim convert, known as Abraham, says he was targeted by investigators while borrowing the books for PhD research at Monash University into the role of Islam in martyrdom.

One of two things has happened. Either the AFP has access to library borrowing records at the Monash Uni library (and, implicitly, other libraries), or someone working at the Monash Uni library rang the anti-terrorism hotline and dobbed this student in for borrowing books. Neither option is particularly palatable.

Just what will industrial relations look like when, as Justice Wright commented this week, the independent Government arbiter is gone, and the idea of fairness is missing? Is ‘labour market deregulation’—the usual code for removing workers’ rights—an inevitable and uncontestable requirement to progress, as some bloggers have posted?

Some workers might argue with such a statement. Car detailers at Hertz at Perth Airport have been threatened by management, with tactics including anonymous threatening notes, simply for trying to negotiate their agreement.

“We signed an agreement we didn’t agree with,’” says Transport Workers Union delegate Nicki Shea. “We were forced to sign, there was no negotiation.”

Consider the way industrial relations has worked in countries without a history of an independent arbiter at all. Stephen H. Norwood’s cracking history of anti-unionism in the US, Strikebreaking & Intimidation, for instance, provides ample historical evidence of the way, without a State or Federal Government willing to stop them, employers organised throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century to systematically prevent unionism, and to crush it where it had become established.

The United States during the early twentieth century was the only advanced industrial country where corporations wielded coercive military power. In Europe, employers did not hire armed mercenaries. When force was applied during labor disputes, it was invariably by well-disciplined army troops or national police, neither of which was subject to private or local direction. As a result, spontaneous violence was far less common in European strikes. Paradoxically, the nation that never experienced feudalism and that pioneered in introducing civil liberties allowed corporations to develop powerful private armies that often operated outside the law, denying workers basic constitutional rights.¹

In the coalfields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia during and after the First World War, mining companies organised paramilitary forces to police the towns in which the miners and their families lived, with the connivance or support of the local authorities. In Colorado in April 1914 the Baldwin-Felts agency, one of the more notorious companies specialising in anti-unionism, was involved in an attack, using an fortified train armed with machine-guns, on a tent-colony of striking miners at Ludlow, in which seventeen people died.

While thankfully Australian industrial history has not been so bloody or violent as that of the United States, employers down under have followed their example, and organised their strikebreakers along military lines. During the 1917 strike on the waterfront, scabs in Sydney were housed at the Sydney Cricket Ground and at Taronga Park, supervised by a Major Read from the Army Medical Corps, and, as the Sydney Morning Herald noted, the ‘volunteers’ and ‘loyalists’ were:

…rationed and looked after on the same scale as recruits in the AIF.²

Many students from the University of Sydney, I am sad to say, took a prominent role volunteering as strikebreakers, as the Daily Telegraph reported—’almost in a body’.³ Apparently loyalty could be exercised on the wharves and in the railway sheds in Redfern as well as in France.

Contemporary industrial relations in the United States is not without similar systematic militancy on the part of employers. While trade unionism in the States has been declining over the twentieth century, employers have not slacked:

During the 1980s, management was increasingly willing to break strikes with “permanent replacement workers”, using them in nearly one-fifth of strikes between 1985 and 1989. A House of Representatives Committee in 1989 estimated that around 21,000 strikers had lost their jobs to permanent replacements that year. …
Corporations began relying more heavily on professional security services specializing in combating unions to protect their “replacement workers”. Vance International, for example, directed by former US Secret Service agent Charles Vance, which was hired to protect strikebreakers in the Pittson coal strike in 1989 and the Caterpillar tractor strike in 1992, provides armed guards “dressed in combat gear”, who employ film cameras to identify pickets. Vance guards have “become fixtures wherever a major strike occurs”. Vance International advertises for what unions call “mercenaries” in Soldier of Fortune magazine. During strikes, these security firms sometimes also erect elaborate barbed wire fences around plants to inhibit picket line activity.⁴

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of recent IR history knows that the potential is there for this behaviour to be replicated in Australia. It can happen here. Let’s be clear about what the deregulation of the labour market means in practice. It’s about real bosses and real workers. By the deregulationists’ own language, IR reform is about taking the Government and independent arbitration out of the system and letting everyone work things out for themselves.

Arbitration in Australia has led to a peaceful, harmonious system of industrial relations, and more than that, a fair one. Do the economic rationalists really want more control for employers?