Ryan Stanton writes on why the old BLF slogan “Dare to struggle – dare to win! And if you don’t fight – you lose” needs to be taken up again if the workers' movement is to be rebuilt. This article should be read alongside Jerome Small's "Inside a Melbourne warehouse strike".

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Unprotected strikes are rare these days; a four-day unprotected wildcat strike of hundreds of workers employed by a major corporation is almost unprecedented. 

When management at the Woolworths Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre (MLDC) declared that they would introduce agency casuals for the first time in the warehouse’s history – creating an underclass of new employees with no rights – workers defended their conditions and job security the only way they could. They walked out. When the Fair Work Commission ordered them back to work, they voted to stay out indefinitely.

All of this was unlawful under Australia’s restrictive anti-strike legal regime, there’s no doubt about that. But these workers shattered the illusion that their struggle must be limited by the very laws designed to strangle them. In so doing, they pointed the way forward for the Australian labour movement.

Being harassed by the boss? Fill in this official complaint form. Been sacked? Make an appropriate application to Fair Work and patiently await a response. Are your conditions being gutted? Too bad, we’re not in an enterprise bargaining period.

For more than three decades, the bosses, the judges and our own union officials have fallen over each other to highlight all of the laws that prevent us from taking industrial action. The Prices and Incomes Accord in the 1980s drew the labour movement into a system constructed on the denial of our right to strike. Since then, strike days have plummeted, conditions have gone backwards and job security has been weakened. Profits, though, have skyrocketed.

In the 1990s, the shift to enterprise bargaining became a new way to impose the same restrictions. Under this regime, protected strike action is limited to individual workplaces and available only in narrow periods around the expiration of enterprise agreements. Even then, workers have to jump through a circus of hoops to take industrial action and can be ordered to stop if it causes the bosses too much pain.

There is nothing impartial about these processes. They are designed to limit our struggle to parameters that are acceptable to the bosses. The union movement’s preoccupation with “proper legal channels” has done nothing but handcuff the working class in the fight against capital.

It’s time to remember what workers are capable of. There was not a single person on the MLDC picket line who didn’t know that what they were doing was against the law. Every one of them knew that they could face repercussions, including fines and sacking. But they walked out anyway.

When Woolworths’ threats didn’t get the workers back through the gates, the company pleaded with the authorities to help. The commission obliged by ruling in the company’s favour, but the workers still refused to go back. All the while the bottle shops grew empty, stores closed and the company’s stocks fell.

When the workers stared down the commission’s directive, one of the largest and most powerful corporate empires in Australia became utterly helpless.

This says something about what is necessary to pull the union movement out of the morass it has wallowed in over recent decades. There are no two ways about it – if striking is illegal, then we have to break the law.

There are important examples we can look to. Just this week, the Maritime Union of Australia won a partial victory after taking unprotected action. When 97 workers were sacked by late night sms, the union struck and picketed Hutchison Ports in Sydney and Brisbane.

For a week they stayed, even after Fair Work declared the action illegal. The potential for a major confrontation on the docks pressured the Federal Court eventually to order that the workers be temporarily reinstated. The Hutchison Ports workers’ fight is not over. But if the union had obeyed Fair Work and gone back, those jobs would already be gone.

Throughout our history, workers and unions have repeatedly been forced to challenge the legal system to win. The Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) in the ’70s, the nurses in the ’80s and the MUA in the ’90s stand tall in the pantheon of the Australian labour movement, and it wasn’t because they rolled over and accepted what the courts gave them.

The BLF had a popular saying in two parts: “Dare to struggle – dare to win! And if you don’t fight – you lose”. The history of defeat and retreat in our unions over the past 30 years is ample proof of the second half of this saying. So many unions have failed to fight, and workers have lost as a consequence.

In contrast, MLDC and Hutchison Ports workers dared to struggle. They dared to win. And in doing that, they’ve pointed a way forward for the rest of us.