Joe Hockey’s is the most savage budget attack on the working class for two decades. It demands a vigorous response from our unions.

It’s not the first time that Liberal governments have gone on the offensive like this – and there’s always been opposition to previous onslaughts. History shows both the strengths of these fights but also some of their limits, which together can inform us how we can win this time around.

Fighting Fraser

Malcolm Fraser was installed as Prime Minister in 1975 with clear instructions from his Melbourne Club backers: attack the working class, wind back Whitlam era reforms and smash union power. But within six years, the Fraser government’s offensive had been parried and his government paralysed following a long war with the unions.

Fraser’s first step was his plan to gut Medibank (Whitlam’s predecessor to Medicare) early in 1976. Looking for a chance to get one back on Fraser after Whitlam’s defeat, many workers were more than ready to do battle. On 7 June, 40,000 NSW South Coast workers struck – mainly militant wharfies, coal miners and power workers. Thousands marched and voted for further action.

Later in the month, public transport, manufacturing and power generation workers in Victoria struck for a day. The ACTU moved for a 24-hour stoppage on 12 July. The resulting strike was the single biggest stoppage in Australian history, involving 1.6 million workers. Fraser was saved from defeat only by a lack of nerve on the part of the ACTU, which allowed the campaign to fizzle out.

The following months and years saw bitter disputes; several lasted for many weeks if not months. In October 1976, 1,400 Fairfax print workers went on strike for 8 weeks against job losses. In the following year 2,300 maintenance workers struck at the State Electricity Commission in Victoria for 11 weeks in opposition to the government’s wage indexation system, which pegged wages to inflation.

Although both these campaigns went down to defeat, they showed that workers continued to organise on the job even in trying circumstances. If workers were not scoring goals against Fraser, this didn’t lessen the hatred for him among the more class conscious. His attempt to bring in a new anti-union Industrial Relation Bureau in 1977 and to toughen laws against solidarity strikes failed dismally.

The union fightback began in earnest in the winter of 1978 when 1,750 coal miners at US multinational Utah in central Queensland struck for six weeks for higher pay. They won significant concessions. Telecom technicians also struck in defence of job security in the face of computerisation, forcing management to retreat.

In August 1978, rank and file unionists in all the major cities – including waterside workers in Port Adelaide and Melbourne and hundreds of Melbourne construction workers – spontaneously walked off the job in protest at a horror Liberal budget.

On 17 August the unions called marches in the capital cities, which drew in 5,000–10,000 workers from the wharves, the metal industry, the shipyards, the print industry, the metal trades and meat works. A meeting of 1,000 shop stewards in Melbourne called on the ACTU to organise weekly half-day stoppages. The ACTU leadership failed them.

Over the next three years strikes climbed rapidly to the highest level in decades in response to the government’s attempts to cut wages through partial indexation (lifting wages by less than inflation). In 1979 wharfies broke through with a big wages win.

In the winter of 1981 striking truck drivers won a big pay rise and busted indexation wide open. Warehouse workers, the metal trades, Telecom workers, Melbourne wharfies, hotel workers, public servants and car workers raced through the gap.

In just three years, four million workers racked up 7,400 strikes, accounting for more than 11 million strike days. Wages shot up and union membership jumped by 130,000. Fraser’s reputation as a union-busting leader was in tatters. His credibility in the eyes of the ruling class was further diminished when the economy slumped in 1982.

Workers had shown time and again that they were prepared to fight for their rights during a right wing Liberal regime. The problem in the end was that they lacked the kind of organisation necessary to push back against the new Prices and Incomes Accord cooked up by a bevy of union leaders and Labor politicians late in 1982.

The Liberals were thrown out in 1983, only for workers to cop wage cuts in the coming years, this time endorsed by the union leaders under a government led by former ACTU President Bob Hawke.

Taking the fight to Howard in 1996

On his election in March 1996, John Howard had promised a “relaxed and comfortable” Australia. In office, however, the Liberals quickly revealed their true agenda when they tabled their Workplace Relations Bill in parliament.

The bill attacked the award system, introduced non-union individual contracts, toughened anti-union laws, stripped back enterprise agreements and weakened unfair dismissal protections.

The ACTU described it as “the most malicious and vindictive piece of legislation that the country has ever seen”. Adding impetus to growing hostility to the government was opposition to other Howard government proposals slated for its first budget, including privatisation and big cuts to public services and higher education.

Workers took every opportunity to protest. On 17 May, 2,000 members of the CFMEU and MUA marched in Sydney. The university staff union held two national strikes on 30 May and 7 August. Nearly 30,000 took part in demonstrations. Also on 30 May, 150,000 construction workers struck. A union march in Canberra on 6 June drew 4,000 public service unionists.

On 11 July the construction unions were out again, with 5,000 marching in Melbourne. In the last week of July, 11,000 Telstra workers rallied against privatisation, and tens of thousands of public servants marched in Melbourne. Thousands of students and Aboriginal people also protested against cuts to education and attacks on Indigenous rights.

Even though Howard had won a big majority in the election, workers were prepared to take a stand when their union leaders called them out.

The ACTU campaign climaxed with a “Cavalcade to Canberra”. Unionists converged on Parliament House for a big demonstration on 19 August, the day before the budget was handed down.

Several left unions pulled out all stops to get members to the rally; the AMWU alone organised 47 buses and the CFMEU brought large contingents of members. Aboriginal groups and student unions also joined in.

By 12 noon some 20,000 protesters had assembled. They listened to speeches by Labor leader Kim Beazley and various other worthies. The ACTU then told workers to get on the waiting buses and go home.

But many workers weren’t prepared simply to leave without having their say.

Contingents of CFMEU members, students and Aboriginal people started to gather at the forecourt of Parliament House. Others quickly joined in. Two thousand or more then marched up to the doors of the building, where they laid siege to it. Canberra Times journalist Ian Warden captured the carnival atmosphere as the demonstrators asserted their claim to the “people’s house”:

“Impertinent but agile protestors climbed up and across the holy marble parapet of the Great Verandah in front of the building and hung their banners there. Eureka and Aboriginal flags even hung across the holy marble parapet of the nation’s sacred stainless steel coat of arms.

“Nothing was sacred, and the hitherto aloof, superior and polished parliament, however inexcusable the damage done to its yesterday, seemed for a few exciting hours to be a popular amenity.”

Cheered on by the crowd, between 500 and 1,000 of the protestors then pushed open the first set of doors, forcing the police to retreat. Unable to get any further, some of the demonstrators then sought a different route via the gift shop where they pushed out a window. After police reinforcements rushed to the scene the protesters were driven back and 49 were arrested.

What was quickly described by the media as a “riot” demonstrated workers’ anger and their preparedness to fight back against Howard’s class war.

The ACTU ran scared, disowning the protest and refusing to call any more. From now on, the campaign would be restricted to raising “community awareness”, lobbying Democrats and the formation of a “network of respected persons”. This course was incapable of defanging the laws and budget cuts. A slightly amended version of the bill sailed smoothly through the Senate later in the year.

Defending the wharfies

Having secured its anti-union legislation, the Howard government now began to hunt down individual unions. Early targets included unions in construction, coal mining and meat industries. But it was the waterfront that was the focus of its union busting efforts.

In 1997, ministers Peter Reith and John Sharp, Patrick Stevedores’ CEO Chris Corrigan, and Don McGauchie and Wendy Craik from the National Farmers’ Federation hatched a plan to destroy the MUA.

In the dead of night on 8 April 1998, Patrick sacked 1,400 unionised wharfies and replaced them with scabs. Security guards with dogs chased workers off the job.

But tens of thousands of workers were not going to sit back and watch the Liberals destroy one of the country’s iconic unions.

The MUA and its supporters immediately organised protest camps in response to the sackings. In Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle, these quickly became serious pickets. In Melbourne, picketers laid railway tracks across the road and welded them together in what they cheekily called a “community arts project”.

They arranged concrete blocks across the entrance road to East Swanson Dock and they overturned a trailer to block traffic. Before long, more than $500 million worth of cargo was stranded on docks across the country.

Thousands of unionists rushed to back the wharfies. Over the course of April, warehouse employees from the big supermarket chains, building and construction workers, truck drivers, metalworkers, vehicle workers, coal miners and university students all turned up in large contingents to lend support to the wharfies.

When it was reported on 20 April that WA Premier Richard Court’s brother was set to break the picket line in Fremantle with a convoy of farmers’ trucks, P&O workers struck in protest. Other workers swamped their union offices with calls demanding to know when they would be called out. A mass meeting of 3,000 Victorian union delegates voted to hold a rally in support of the wharfies on 6 May.

The most dramatic mass action took place in Melbourne on the night of 17–18 April. Following a tip-off that 1,000 police would be arriving to break up the picket line and cart people off to detention centres, 4,000 picketers stood their ground. At 8am they were joined by 2,000 construction workers. The police were encircled and then forced to retreat. No cargo moved into or out of the entire port that day. It was the biggest victory won by the trade union movement for many years.

In Fremantle there were similar scenes. Up to 2,000 wharfies and their supporters made the movement of trucks difficult, if not impossible. In Sydney hundreds showed up to protest outside Patrick’s operations at Darling Harbour and Port Botany. From Japan to South Africa to the US, unionists took action around the world in solidarity, tying up scab ships.

What had begun as an attempt to break the unions quickly developed into a situation where the unions could have broken the government, or at the very least inflicted serious damage on it and its industrial laws. Had the call gone out for national solidarity strikes, the response would have been enormous, but that call never came. Instead, the MUA and ACTU put the emphasis on a legal case for the reinstatement of the sacked workers.

Facing the shut-down at Patrick operations, and the evidence that workers were not going to abandon the wharfies, the Federal Court could do little but order their reinstatement. On 7 May, MUA wharfies marched back through the gates of Patrick’s operations around the nation.

The Howard government had been punched on the nose and the MUA was back in place. But the wharfies paid a heavy price in the deal subsequently negotiated between the company and union. Six hundred permanent wharfies lost their jobs, the bulk of the workforce was casualised, key functions were contracted out and penalty rates scrapped. The union also lost control over allocation of work. P&O then followed suit.

These were totally unnecessary concessions. The MUA could have saved the workers’ jobs and kept their conditions. The focus on the legal challenge, however, and the disavowal of strikes, meant that the union and the ACTU sacrificed the best opportunity in many years to turn the tide against such attacks. But the example of the massive solidarity campaign lives on as a glimpse of the kind of action we need if we are to push the Liberals back this time around.

Your rights at work campaign

Six years after being pushed back in the Patrick’s dispute, the Howard government won a double majority in parliament at the 2004 federal election. It took the opportunity to ram through WorkChoices – the most anti-union legislation seen since the 1930s.

WorkChoices pushed individual contracts, weakened the ability of unions to negotiate collective agreements, abolished the “no disadvantage test” which had put a floor under conditions of employment, and trashed the award system. It also significantly limited the right to strike. Additional legislation directly targeted the construction unions, which had managed to hang onto many of their strongholds in the CBD sites.

Employers went on the rampage. Within a year of WorkChoices coming into force, employers had pushed more than 300,000 workers onto individual contracts, stripping away penalty rates, shift loadings, overtime loadings, public holiday payment and annual leave loadings. Rest breaks, public holidays and annual wage increments disappeared and real wages fell. Union membership fell by more than 200,000 within two years.

Unions had to fight or face annihilation. Following a big mass meeting, Victorian Trades Hall Council delegates put out a call in April 2005 for a national day of action on 30 June. Other labour councils fell into line, with NSW opting for 1 July.

The rallies were an enormous success. More than a quarter of a million unionists and supporters marched across the country – from the 120,000 in Melbourne to the smallest events of a couple of hundred in regional and country towns. It was the largest union-led mobilisation in Australian history.

The ACTU now stepped in. Three more national days of action followed, in November 2005, June 2006 and November 2006. The largest attendance at a single rally was 250,000 in Melbourne on 15 November 2005, with a further 300,000 protesting in other towns and cities.

The ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign cohered and sustained mass opposition to WorkChoices. Government polling plummeted and no amount of government advertising could turn this around.

The problem for workers was that this strategy went hand in hand with intensive lobbying of conservative senators and a High Court challenge which, predictably, wasted union time and resources.

But more damaging than these diversions was the electoral orientation of the ACTU campaign. A Victorian delegates’ meeting voted for a general strike. Disgracefully, it was simply ignored by the union leadership. There were lengthy intervals between the national days of action and an emphasis at the big rallies on workers as victims rather than fighters. All of this sucked the life out of the campaign. Militants became cynical or demoralised. The rallies diminished in size.

The electoralism became dominant in the year leading to the November 2007 election when the efforts and resources of the ACTU and most of its affiliates were devoted to marginal seats campaigning. No more national days of action were called and the official slogan of the campaign, “Your rights at work, worth fighting for”, was transformed into “Your rights at work, worth voting for”.

A serious campaign of strikes in the maritime, transport, energy and construction industries could have broken WorkChoices by rendering it inoperative. The massive turnout at the rallies and the widespread opposition to WorkChoices revealed in every opinion poll showed that support for more serious direct action could have been mobilised. The problem was that the ACTU refused to countenance such a strategy.

As the campaign became increasingly geared towards the electoral contest, so it became hostage to the Labor Party. Under new leaders Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the ALP offered unions less and less in return for their unstinting support. By the time that the election came around in November 2007, Labor’s industrial relations platform differed little from WorkChoices in relation to union rights, earning it the nickname “WorkChoices Lite”.

Again, like the MUA dispute, workers had shown a willingness to fight the Liberals, but this was thrown away by the union leaders who promoted a strategy that helped throw Howard out of office but allowed the ALP to maintain the most vicious attacks on unionism.

Winning this time around

We can see from these four examples that the Liberals can be fought; we don’t have to sit back and allow them to kick workers in the guts. The fightback against Fraser in particular shows how a ruling class offensive can be pushed back successfully by sustained industrial action.

But to go forward we need to challenge the kinds of strategies that came to dominate the union movement in the Howard years and which still prevail.

Our alternative starts from the logic of the class struggle: if the capitalists and the Liberals are waging a no holds barred campaign, we need to respond in kind. That means unleashing a determined strike campaign. A revived union movement needs to confront the bosses and the Liberals with aggressive strikes, defiance of legal injunctions, even if this risks jail for unionists, and appealing for broader working class support.

Such a strategy could not fail to put the union movement back at the centre of Australian politics. It would draw support from all those who are getting slugged by the Abbott government – not least, pensioners, students and the unemployed.

Unions have done this in the past. In 1969, a general strike in Victoria, with solidarity action widespread interstate, freed jailed tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea and brought down the Penal Powers that had been choking trade unions for two decades.

But for such a campaign to happen, we need to build a serious fighting left in the unions. A layer of socialist union militants in the core unions could capitalise on the opposition to Liberal attacks by providing a practical lead. Such a layer of militants could also debunk the barrage of ruling class lies which always accompanies their assaults – whether these be about “budget crises” or scaremongering about refugees in order to divide us.

This may not seem like the easiest option, but it’s what we desperately need if we’re to do justice to the gut hatred of Liberal attacks that we’ve seen come to the surface time and again over the past four decades.

[Tom Bramble is the author of Trade Unions in Australia: A history from flood to ebb tide (2008), available from Socialist Alternative.]