Internationalist Standpoint spoke with Tom Griffin, a train driver and unionist from the Independent Transport Union (ITU) in Australia about the attempt of the state government in Victoria to push forward a bill that attacked union rights. According to the new bill, the unions that use the legal structure of “Incorporated Association” were “fake” unions and could not continue to exist as such.
While this interview was being prepared, the state government was forced to withdraw the bill, marking a very important victory for independent unionism.
- Tom, can you talk to us about your union, how it was created and why it is being attacked by the Victoria government?
Our union, the “Independent Transport Union” (ITU) that covers railway workers, bus drivers and tram workers has broken from the traditional public transport union, the RTBU. This is the result of many years of bad deals made for the workers by a very bad leadership that is linked to the ruling Labour Party (state and federal government). This link with the Labour Party (to which the RTBU pays huge amounts of money) as well as financial scandals accumulating through the years, have made the workers very unhappy with their leaders. This led to the formation of a new union (ITU) under the legal structure of an ”Association”.
- Why an Association? Why not another Union formally?
In Australia we have some of the most restrictive trade union laws in the world. Around the time of the fall of Stalinism and the really big neoliberal attacks, we had a Labour Party government. They had already been in since 1983 and at that period they pushed the idea of a “social partnership”. In order to do this they made a lot of legal changes. They pushed the trade union leaders to combine all the smaller unions together into so called “super unions”. They also created a special category for the existing trade unions and introduced a law that made it practically impossible to create a new union in this category.
The form we currently use, i.e. of an association (like a football club or social club), is something that allows us certain rights.
At this point in time, after the global financial crisis, the pandemic, the wars, etc, the political and economic situation has changed and people are becoming increasingly unhappy with the existing trade unions and their leaders after many corruption scandals. So, every now and then we have a sudden crack. In our case we were inspired to use this new form in order to create new, more combative structures.
- How are the traditional unions affected by these developments?
This represents a big threat to the leaders of trade unions that are dominated by the Labour Party. These careerist bureaucrats have no other way to fight back because they are mostly unable to serve their members’ interests. So their only option is to change the laws that give us the right to create associations and use them as Unions. The trade unions are very important for the Labour Party, because they give a lot of money to its politicians for their election campaigns, they provide staff for the election campaigns, people to knock on doors, to make phone calls etc.
Let’s take the example of the SDA. It covers the shop and retail workers, and its leadership is dominated by what is actually a multi-generational caste of political reactionary Catholics. Their tradition is fighting the left and the communists in the trade unions from the 1950s onwards, and it is the biggest union in the country (it claims it has 200,000 members but probably it actually has about 120,000). It is basically a “yellow”, bosses – driven union that makes deals with the major supermarkets and other big retail businesses, restaurants, etc, to give lower wages even than the legal minimum wage. In return, the bosses make all the teenagers who work in their businesses join the union. It is a rotten situation.
- When did the attempts to build these new fighting structures begin?
The first attempt to build this kind of association-union was launched in 2006. It was called UNITE. This new union in the form of an association managed to win significantly better wages for the workers, especially immigrant workers who until then had been getting half, or even a quarter pay. But this union never managed to become a mass membership based union, it was more of a worker-activist group network – a campaign kind of thing. Still, it helped in part to inspire a new union created on the basis of this association model, called RAFFWU (Retail and Fast Food Workers Union). This union is ten years old now and it has done amazing things, it won back billions of dollars in wages for working class people, from major supermarkets and restaurants, like Domino’s pizza, McDonald’s, Hungry Jack’s, etc.
Αt the same time they took the membership of the biggest union, the SDA (that is linked to the Labor Party and the bosses) from 200,000 to about 120,000. That amounts to a 40% decline in membership in a decade.
This is a lot of money and a lot of political power. And of course there is no way for the SDA leadership, these catholic reactionaries to fight back. Their only other option is to try to make a law that will cancel independent unions.
The RTBU (the transport traditional union) is also affected by this situation. It is an important, medium size union nationally. The formation of ITU that started with railway workers, has become even more threatening after we welcomed recruited bus drivers in our union. They came from another major road transport union, the TWU, where the careerist leaders are big players in the Labor party.
What exactly is the new bill about? How will it affect ITU, RAFFWU and others like these?
The bill that is in the Victorian state parliament at the moment, and is supposed to address the “problem” that some groups of people use the form of association (commonly used by sports clubs, social clubs, cultural clubs, etc) in order to form “fake unions” or even terrorist or nazi groups. They are trying to pass a bill that compares workers unions with terrorists and nazis! It is even more bizarre, since the minister that promotes this bill is the minister of consumer affairs. The government’s argument is that this is about consumer protection, because workers may be tricked by a fake union, and give their money to it. So, this equals to misleading consumers into buying fake products – it is completely ridiculous.
It is not hard to answer these arguments. Our association, our trade union, is honest about what we are, what we do and what our legal abilities are. What makes a union is not what the government or the bosses say. The most important factor that determines the strength and the power that a union has, what it can do, is the size of its membership and its political ideas. We have a strong membership, we have experienced unionists leading this organization and we can do nearly anything that a traditional union can do. Only small legal things are out of our jurisdiction, but they are not of decisive importance to our work.
The Labour Party also tries to lie about our unions, saying that they are not as democratic, as transparent as they should be, there is not much financial accountability, etc. This is such an obvious lie, since there have been so many unions during the last two decades that had so many “official” financial scandals, corruption, etc. It is in the press all the time, and the Labor Party leadership is always involved (usually its right wing faction – the one that is currently trying to pass this bill against us).
If this bill passes, it will mean that we cannot use the legal structure that we currently use (an association for trade union work). We would have to change again, which would require a lot of effort and money, it would probably worry some of our members. It could be a serious problem, but it would not kill us. This move exposes a desperate government, which is suffering internal battles before an election.
- How does the ITU operate in your workplace? What are the working conditions, the wages and your demands?
Relatively speaking our wages and conditions are better than most. One reason is that they can’t take our work and send it overseas like they did to the factory workers. But there are some problems. For example, there is one contract that covers all the workers of the railway (the station staff, the signallers, the drivers, the conductors, everybody) and then there are different “chapters” in the contract. The chapter that specialises on drivers rights is a very good one – one that, of course, we won with struggles during the last decades. The drivers are about one third of the staff covered by the contract.
When the leaders of RTBU negotiate for a new contract every 3-4 years, they take back some of the driver’s rights (increasing the time or the distance we have to drive) and in return the bosses give all the workers of the agreement a pay rise. So, the union leaders take this proposal to the members of the union, and try to convince the other two thirds that it is a good deal and they should vote for it, despite the fact that it is bad for the drivers. This is how they try to maintain their power and good relations with the bosses and the Labour Party. These union leaders even took control of the bank accounts that belonged to the drivers-members of the union (which were separate).
So, this is why many of the drivers were prepared to break with this scandalous leadership, and join a new union-association. This has proven to be a correct decision, because if it hadn’t happened, today the number of the people who are unionised overall in the railways would be smaller and, possibly, we would have seen further attacks on working conditions and rights. Because of the RTBU leaders there were too many people becoming depressed, demoralised, angry, and leaving the union.
But now we have a union that can work as an alternative, as a positive example that shows what can be done. We represent and defend the workers who get in trouble at work, when the pay is wrong we intervene and fix it, either for individuals or for whole groups, we make sure that health and safety standards are being met, etc. We have both the right and the ability to negotiate for the new contracts.
As a result, some bus drivers who are also not happy with their union have found us and asked to become members. Of course we accepted, and created a special section within the union for bus drivers, who are associate members (not full members yet). The bosses have been trying for a long time to come to an agreement that was bad for the bus drivers (arguably a worse deal than the supposed minimum for their sector) but the bus drivers refused.
They turned to ITU, despite their old TWU leaders’ lies about us. If we can help them win an improvement it will be a huge success that will seriously embarrass their old union leaders.
- What are your expectations regarding the battle against the new bill? Have there been any acts of solidarity towards ITU and RAFFWU?
We expect to win on that. The state parliament (Victoria) will soon dissolve before the November elections. The Labour Party controls the lower house, but they don’t have enough votes in the upper house (the parliamentary system is very similar to the British one) so they will probably not be able to pass the bill, although we didn’t have much time to develop a mass campaign. The main opposition parties saw an opportunity to this attack on our union, because they can use it to attack the Labour Party in relation to their union policy (they can criticise them about corruption, state monopoly on workers’ rights, etc.).
The Greens are supporting especially the RAFFWU union against SDA, not only because RAFFWU is very popular (organizing the exploited youth, especially teenagers) but also because the SDA is a reactionary force that also attack abortion rights, same sex marriage, and other social rights.
Our union (Independent Transport Union – ITU) doesn’t get the same amount of solidarity, because people still don’t know us well. We are three years old and do our work more quietly. We haven’t had any big campaigns, or huge victories yet. The traditional railway union (RTBU) has all the links to the Labour Party and they go around lying about us. They say it is just an undemocratic split because some people are upset they lost the union election. Of course none of this is true.
In reality, other union leaders are afraid of us, because they fear that their members can follow our example. We don’t advocate for this, we are not saying that workers from other sectors should also form associations splitting from their traditional unions We don’t know the detailed situation well in every union, we don’t know what is best for anyone else right now. But there is certainly a new example that puts pressure on other union leaderships to do a better job, while in the past there seemed to be no alternative.
- What is the importance of the attack against ITU and RAFFWU for the workers in general?
The bill that the state government tries to pass is only a state/local bill (in Victoria State). But the federal government is also a Labour Party government and they say they plan a similar attack nationwide. The workplace and employment minister comes from the SDA union. She already talks about “fake unions” that are “not legitimate”, “not transparent”, etc.
We know that we have another big battle coming up, we just don’t know exactly when and how it will go, but we have to rapidly unfold our political campaign on these issues, become known, etc. At the moment we are in a situation where we try to build the airplane while flying it. But in the next period we will accelerate our efforts.
