Trevor Cook

Old mates squabble, unions get nervous and academics hedge against an Abbott landslide

As the ship heads towards the rocks, it's payback time.

Here the long-term battle between two former AMWU officials (George Campbell and Doug Cameron) gets an airing, along with some more public airing of the ALP's unsavoury party pre-selection processes. The AMWU has a lock on one of the ALP's NSW Senate spots, what branch members might think doesn't enter into it.

Meanwhile, union support for the ALP is apparently wavering as the scale of the looming electoral disaster becomes more apparent:

- The ACTU seems to be wavering in its support for Julia Gillard following the union body's polling which suggests massive swings against the ALP in the September election.

The union movement has a problem. It prefers Gillard because she is close to the union movement (largely because she needs a support base in the ALP) and Rudd really doesn't like unions very much. On the other hand, an Abbott Government with control of the Senate (a distinct possibility on present public and priivate polling) would be seen as an existential threat for the union movement by the ACTU.

Do they stick with Gillard, or try and save themselves by switching to Rudd and saving a few seats and a few precious Senate positions?

- The NTEU (academics) have donated a million dollars to the Greens in response to cutbacks on universities by the Gillard Government as part of its plan to fund the Gonski reforms.

This emphasises again that for non-affiliated unions there is a viable alternative to the ALP on the left. 

Presumably, the NTEU hopes that the money will help the Greens retain a strong position in the Senate and be able to block some of the bolder deregulation of higher education that Abbott and Pyne appear likely to pursue.

The prospect of a government run by a bunch of right-wing former student politicians is very bad news for the NTEU.

- In the Australian, Troy Bramston has a piece pointing out that the union affiliation to the ALP has been a 50 year problem that Whitlam himself tried to do something about back in the 1960s.

Bramston makes some good points but falls for the sleight of hand that suggests that union affiliation is somehow consistent with the vision of the ALP as a genuine 21st century centre-left party.

In my view, the ALP can remain close to unions (and other community-based organisations) without being owned by them.  

Privileging unions through affiliation can only happen at the expense of non-affiliated unions, other community organisations, and individual branch members.

That is the point of affiliation. 

There's a rubicon here that needs to be crossed.

My thesis on unions and the ALP has attracted about 1800 reads on Scribd, and becomes more relevant by the week as the ALP continues to unravel.

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Ged Kearney, the Accord and Batman

More media coverage of the ALP's dysfunctional structure

Note: My thesis on the changing relationship between unions and the ALP has passed 1750 reads on Scribd.

From Alan Stokes at Fairfax:

It was telling on Tuesday when she(Gillard) said: ''I am the best person to lead the Labor Party.''

That is a party run by factions, apparatchiks and unions irrelevant to most people.

Notwithstanding her talents, Gillard capitalised on those party insiders to oust Rudd from the top job. Most voters have not forgiven her. They don't trust her.

Yet she still believes she is the best person to lead the party.

So, too, do the faceless men who helped get her there, as do those within Labor who have disproportionate power thanks to the party's rigged structure.

But voters do not like the party. And they do not think Gillard is the best person to lead their country.

Never has the gap been so wide between what Labor is and what the nation wants it to be. How does Australia reconcile this?

Rudd as Labor leader would be competitive with Tony Abbott; he may even save Gonski.

Crucially, Rudd would also have a popular mandate to fight the unions, apparatchiks and factions.

That's why they do not want him back.

The sad truth is Rudd is the best chance to fix Labor for democracy's sake.

If Gillard does not step down, the party will not change for yonks.

And a Third Way will have to emerge. Can't wait.

Mark Kenny describes the nightmare scenario confronting Shorten and the other faceless men who put Gillard in the Lodge:

Right now the dominant males (they are always male) are busy preparing for a severe electoral winter - in this case, a winter substantially of their own making.

And none more so than the ''faceless men'' from the 2010 palace coup: Bill Shorten, the Workplace Relations Minister; Don Farrell, a South Australian senator largely unseen despite his public capacities as Science and Research Minister; and David Feeney, a Victorian Right figure of limited profile.

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Unions and the ALP leadership

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Rudd and unions: a world apart

Rudd and unions: a world apart

 The interviews for my doctoral thesis on the changing relationship between unions and the ALP were conducted during the days when Rudd was riding high as PM, even then there was evidence of a schism that goes to the heart of the ALP - as well as to Rudd's sense of himself as a political leader.

Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Rudd has always been a big problem for the ALP because he has very little feel and sympathy for the old blue-collar union machine.

Here are some key quotes:

I don’t think Rudd likes us (unions). With the exception of a couple of state unions in NSW, just about every single union was opposed to him becoming leader. When he was shadow foreign affairs minister he was all over us. It was a bit sickly to be honest. He turned up everywhere. Everywhere you went oh there’s Kevin Rudd. Every function, Kevin Rudd would be there. But he’s not from us, clearly not of our culture. - Senior current affiliated union official.

In a perfect world Kevin would like to be leader of a party that doesn’t have unions. Kevin’s primary motivation is Kevin and we work for Kevin. It’s in Kevin’s interest to have us and it’s in Kevin’s interest to have a close relationship with us. But I think philosophically, if he does have some ideology, and I’m not sure that he does, but if he actually does believe in things I don’t think his belief would be with us. - Senior current affiliated union official.

The other thing that was notable was that there were two parallel campaigns run in the last federal election (2007), the unions ran the negative campaign on IR but Rudd did not buy into that campaign at all. Rudd tried to set himself above and beyond that and spent a lot of time hitting union leaders over the head to show that he wasn’t a captive of the union movement. - Current peak union official.

Rudd’s been nervous about being seen to be too close to unions.  I know that there are some people (from the union movement) who have said to Kevin at various times it’s OK to use the U-word sometimes, it’s not a bad thing.  And I think he has been advised that way, I don’t think it is something that he arrived at naturally or deliberately.  More recently, people have said to him it’s OK to publicly say that it is good to be in a union.  That’s not going to lead to the re-establishment of the Berlin wall. – Current affiliated union official.

Some of the key players don’t have a lot of union history … the prime minister (Rudd) doesn’t understand the union culture and doesn’t understand the labor culture and the union culture within the labor movement.  That’s part of the issue.  You could argue that that has been the case from time to time over the last 100 years. – Current peak union official. 

I get a sense that the prime minister (Rudd) would see the ACTU no differently to say the AIG or the BCA as another group that he has to interface with and listen to and respond to but they’re not central to the project as they were a decade or two ago. – Current federal MP.

 

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Unions and the ALP leadership

Labor's longer-term leadership problem

The last federal ALP leader capable of winning an election AND governing a country was Paul Keating.

Even Keating was a poor second to Bob Hawke who was (IMO) the best PM since the second world war.

Hawke was a genuine policy innovator and a brilliant campaigner - it's a rare combination in politics.

After 1996, Beazley and Crean basically wasted the ALP's time for a decade.

Beazley and Crean rejected the Hawke and Keating legacy because they didn't understand it.

They were two of the least impressive Cabinet ministers during the Hawke-Keating era.

They turned away from the Hawke-Keating direction for a modern ALP without coming up with anything to replace it.

To get out of the Beazley-Crean deadend, the ALP opted for Latham.

Latham was supposedly the new man, the new direction.

From Sydney's western suburbs with an alleged connection to the region's 'aspirational' voters, he was in-touch with the party's evolving base.

So it was hoped.

Latham took the ALP backwards at the 2004 election.

Howard blew him out of the water with the line 'who do you trust on interest rates' - goodbye aspirationals.

(BTW some people in the ALP still think Latham was actually in with a chance of winning that election).

The ALP's massive defeat in 2004 (it delivered control of the Senate to the LNP for the first time since the 1970s) showed that Howard's Liberals understood the ALP heartland better than Labor's isolated leadership elite.

After Latham underwent his post-election meltdown, the federal ALP caucus went back to the safe hands of Beazley.

Beazley offered a version of old-style labourism.

But two years later, with the election looming the party lost confidence in Beazley's ability to actually win an election.

Despite a decade of frantic self-promotion, Rudd had only single-digit support, or a little more, in caucus.

Rudd is a major league narcisisst in an occupation that attracts a lot of them.

His efforts to appeal to the public over the heads of his colleagues did not endear him to them.

Gillard, a left-winger despite her views, didn't have quite enough support to win the leadership.

GIllard did have substantial union support (anachronistically important in the ALP) and Rudd had virtually none.

So an inherently unstable 'team' of Rudd and Gillard was formed. 

Adding to this instability, Rudd locked himself into keeping Swan on as Treasurer, following a few media questions in the run-up to the 2007 election.

This is probably one of the worst political decisions Rudd ever made.

Swan's performance as Treasurer  has dragged down both the Rudd and Gillard governments.

Swan has little to show in the sense of reform achievements and his political incompetence and inability to shape agendas and win public debates has been a real (and continuing) drag on the ALP.

Things seemed OK in the heady atmosphere of a big election win and a long-desired return to the Treasury benches.

 But the hatreds were still there.

Swan and  Rudd have loathed each other for many years.

Gillard's ambitions only grew.

Rudd proved to be hopeless at running a government.

The PM's office and the Cabinet were badly dysfunctional.

Rudd was still not liked in the caucus, in fact his disdain for many of his colleagues (and their union patrons) only heightened their sense of being excluded from 'their' government.

Perhaps inevitably, the hatred, the instability and the incompetence proved explosive - to the detriment of Rudd and the ALP.

Despite her ambition, Gillard has been a lacklustre PM.

She has had some policy wins, but many disasters as well.

She has not 'solved' the asylum seeker issue.

Her carbon tax betrayal has blighted her prime ministership, as has the (backroom) way she became PM.

The next leader after Rudd and Gillard depart will probably be Bill Shorten.

Shorten's performance has so far been modest at best.

The bigger issue is why there aren't more potential leaders in the federal caucus.

After the election, the ALP will have to think about getting a much better talent pool in the federal caucus.

Otherwise the long term leadership problem will just go on.

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Unions and the ALP leadership

Unions and the ALP leadership

Ultimately, as Mark Kenny said on ABC Insiders yesterday, unions will determine whether Gillard stays or goes.

Well, partly right, because it is union bosses, not union members, that make these decisions.

Many members of the ALP federal caucus owe their pre-selections to the support of individual unions, particularly the right-wing unions - the AWU and the SDA. Other significant unions include the CFMEU, AMWU, TWU and NUW.

So far Shorten and the AWU seem to be holding firm, and there is little or no media coverage of what the SDA or other unions are doing. Union leaders, who helped bring down Mr Rudd and have supported Ms Gillard's leadership, are also conceding her hold on the top job is over. But the Prime Minister is denying claims from within Labor that cabinet minister Bill Shorten - the former Australian Workers Union national secretary and key member of the Victorian Right - has withdrawn his pivotal support. - The Australian

"We support the Prime Minister," said Mr Howes, the AWU national secretary who in February told Ms Gillard that the union "has got ya back". - news.com.au

Paul Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, to which Mr Shorten and Treasurer Wayne Swan are allied, is also backing Ms Gillard. - AFR

Rudd loyalists believe that if Mr Shorten switched allegiances, along with his Australian Workers Union faction, it would be enough to force Ms Gillard to step down. He influences five or six votes in the 71-strong caucus, which is roughly split on the leadership issue. - West Australian 

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Australian unions TV ad and comments on ALP links

The Australian Unions (ACTU) TV ad campaign has apparently driven an upsurge in membership, it has also caused some discussion on facebook of the approrpiateness of the links between unions and the ALP:

Melissa Ohaeawai Wednesday That's great, however people will also continue to leave unions in droves as long as unions continue to support the ALPs clearly anti-worker agenda both financially and by a lack of public criticism of bad policy.  If we really want a return of union power, we, as union members (for what else are unions if not their members?) need to fight for better laws and not support bad policy that hurts workers. I'm no fan of the Liberals, (disgust might be closer) but make no mistake: they and the ALP serve the same masters.

Shane Burke Good to see a positive..the unions collectively need to get stuck into the ALP,after all thats where they started.

Keryn Anderson Don't confuse the ALP with the ACTU. The ACTU haven't lost their values and will always remember who they are fighting for - workers and their families. Unfortunately most of the ALP have forgotten why they are there. Time to get rid of the dead wood I say. Bring on this election.

The pro-ALP links are mostly around the idea that Abbott would be a lot worse.

Interestingly, some internal union critics of the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign argued that it did a good job of getting the ALP elected but not much to help re-build membership.

One senior national official of an affiliated union told me (thesis p258):

Well, the first failure of YR@W was that in all the conversations I had with Robbo[1] and with Greg Combet, Robbo was about him and Greg was just about the next election.  I kept saying what happens if we lose and what happens if we win.  It’s not just about getting Labor elected its about getting a stronger movement which actually entrenches Labor for the future.  Their focus was definitely just the next election.

---

[1] John Robertson, Secretary of UnionsNSW during YR@W campaign and later ALP Opposition leader in NSW Parliament.

 

 

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Ged Kearney, the Accord and Batman

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Ged Kearney, the Accord and Batman

I think it is a shame that the ACTU president, Ged Kearney, has ruled herself out of the pre-selection race for the ALP's safest federal seat of Batman.

It is not surprising.

Women still find it much harder than men to win ALP pre-selection for safe seats.

Officials from non-affiliated unions find it even more difficult.

The parliamentary representatives of the ALP are mostly drawn from that half of the union movement that has a formal affiliation with the party.

Affiliation matters because it shapes the composition of the federal caucus, it is about backroom power not on stage talent (so David Feeney)

The ALP doesn't represent unions it represents affiliated unions.

Affiliated unions are mostly blue collar (plus a right wing catholic cabal clled the SDA).

If they weren't so powerful inside the party, they would be a sort of harmless local labour movement version of Brigadoon.

Kearney, a nurse, is much more representive of the modern union movement than many of the apparatchiks in the federal caucus who used the union movement as a stepping stone to parliament.

The typical Australian unionist today is female, university-educated, working in the community services sector.

Kearney also shows some strength and vision.

Last Friday at a bit of a love-in to celebrate the Accord - 30 years after the Hawke Government was elected (see my previous post on this event) she bravely touched on the reality of the Accord (its failings as well as strengths) and the way in which nostalgia for the old corporatist adventure has become weight in the saddle bags of modern unions.

After praising the Accord, and criticising the business community, Kearney moved on to some important reflections.

Here are some key sentences:

But there is today, some mythologising of the Accord. For those of us in the leadership of today’s union movement, it sometimes feels like a heavy cross to bear. 

The comparisons that are made with the ACTU of the Accord era are often plainly wrong, and they fail to acknowledge the vastly different economic and political environment of today.  

Radical changes which have taken place over the last 30 years in the way governments operate and in the structure of the union movement mean the way the two relate to each other – particularly when Labor is in power – is much more complex than it was 30 years ago.

Unions today have deep reservations about entering into a formal agreement on policy, but it still makes sense for us to manage differences and find common ground where we can. 

Neither was there a great appetite from either the government or the union movement for a new Accord when Labor came to power for the first time in a decade in 2007.

From the perspective of the union movement, there was a wariness about what had over time become known as the “failures” of the Accord, as I outlined earlier.

Since the Accord, the way unions achieve reform has changed. We have mobilised into an independent campaigning force, capable of multiple campaigns at the same time.

Times and circumstances have changed, necessitating new demands, new campaigns and new methods. 

My thesis strongly reflects these sentiments which I picked up in many interviews.

The key problem is that line about "an independent campaigning force".

How politically independent is the union movement when half of it, the affiliated half, seems to be treated as a career path for ambitious young men (and some women)?

Photo is by Mark Phillips and was originally published on the ACTU website.

Where's the evidence, Joe (de Bruyn, SDA)?

The SDA leadership continues resist reality, damaging the PM and the ALP brand in the process. This was in business insider a few days ago: 

"Some apparent dissidents in Australia’s largest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (or SDA), are today calling on the organisation’s boss to reveal the research which he claims shows most of the country’s retail sectors workers are opposed to same-sex marriage.

That boss is Joe de Bruyn, a member of the national ALP executive and hugely influential figure in Labor party circles. The union, known as the SDA, has over 200,000 members.

A conservative Catholic, de Bruyn is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and says the majority of SDA members agree with his position.

Now a group called SDA Members for Equality want him to reveal the research that de Bruyn says was conducted a couple of years ago. The Canberra Times reports:

Mr de Bruyn said the union had “some years ago” discussed with a representative sampling of members the view that marriage was between a man and woman and received overwhelming support.

“We believe that this continues to be the view of the overwhelming majority of the members of the union,” he said.

The request by SDA Members for Equality is a reasonable one. It’s hard to square de Bruyn’s comments with the published polling which for some years has been showing around 60% or more of Australians support same-sex marriage.

(And that’s before asking why an organisation that represents people working on shop floors needs a trenchant position on same-sex marriage in the first place.)"

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The Accord 30 years on

At the end of next week a 'special symposium' will be hosted by Macquarie University to mark the three decades since the ALP-ACTU deal helped to elect the Hawke Government in 1983. The good and the great of the Accord era will be there (Hawke, Crean, Kelty etc) as will many enthusiasts from the academic community.

The Accord was Australia's odd experiment in corporatism at the national level. Odd because the labour movement (or at least its leaders) seemed to embrace corporatism at the same time and, at least on the political side, with the same enthusiasm as it embraced the neo-liberal agenda then sweeping the anglophone world.

Whatever its merits, I found in my thesis that today's union leadership are split over the Accord. Split in intresting and important ways. Here is an excerpt:

The ACTU’s adoption of independence and external lobbying involves a direct rejection of the dependence and internal lobbying approach involved in the social democratic style Accord arrangement. The adoption of union revitalisation strategies is based in critiques of the impact of these social democratic arrangements on union vitality and membership engagement.

In fact, for the critics inside today’s union movement, the Accord is viewed through the lens of a contemporary focus on re-building membership. The Accord was good for working people, but it was, they say, bad for unions.

While a few interviewees found merit in both the Accord and the organising model, seeing them as appropriate responses to the circumstances of their times, most leaned one way or the other.

ALP reform links for 23 April - campaigns, union challenges, power-sharing and the ALP's choices

Anatomy of a modern campaign - Pollytics (Crikey)

Essentially we’re just applying the best of the resources of the early 21st century, to early 20th century community organising. But what that actually requires under the bonnet is a level of political information and analytics that’s never really been needed by a campaign before, so that it can be transformed into the knowledge required to enable the people with the real skills – our union campaign folks and our organisers – to achieve magnitudes of order more than they ordinarily could do without it.

(UK) Trade unions face difficult times, but challenges shouldn't be exaggerated - LSE

These are depressing times for trades unions, because we are facing a period of loss. However, its important not to get carried away with the sense of liquid fear that pervades unions in decline. The decline is not happening to the same degree at the same time everywhere, rather there are still opportunities for unions to secure real gains for working people. This might well mean moving from Marx to Freud, swapping one bearded bloke for another, and mourning the loss of a utopian dream of internationalism and decent work. However, such mourning would allow us to move beyond a position of denial and drop the stalled attempts at ‘renewal’, so as to work towards a more realistic goal of securing real gains for working people. This is a painful process for those of us who have invested so much in our unions, but it does then free us up to aim for a more achievable future. At a time when the magic solutions are running out unions need to play on their strengths, which include a pragmatic insistence that something is better than nothing and a realistic assessment of which unions can still deliver it.

More on the power broking in WA ALP - Sunday Times

It had been rumoured for months that union heavyweights Dave Kelly and Joe Bullock the respective bosses of the powerful Left and Right factions of the WA Labor Party had done a deal that would see both of them end up with cushy jobs in politics.

This week the deal was consummated when Bullock got the top spot on the Labor ticket for a Senate position guaranteeing him a job in Canberra at the expense of his supposed mate, WA Senator Mark Bishop, and Senator Louise Pratt, who has the No.2 spot.

Kelly's Left faction (United Voice) this week delivered the numbers for Bullock's ascendancy, at the expense of one of their own, Pratt, who is also part of the Left.

Bishop was stranded and will now retire from politics.

Informed sources say the Left's support for Bullock stemmed from the fact that the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Union secretary delivered Kelly the numbers to stand for the seat of Bassendean, which he won.

Sources say Bullock also gave his blessing for Simone McGurk another of Kelly's union mates to be pre-selected for the seat of Fremantle.

"Bullock wanted the No.1 spot for the Senate so badly that he was willing to give Kelly control of the Labor caucus by having more Left-aligned MPs," a source said. "This has members of Bullock's own faction scratching their heads."

Ged Kearney on the ALP-unions relationship - ACTU

Labor has always seen itself as a community-based party engaged with people where they live and work.

The relationship between the ALP and our affiliated unions is at the heart of our vision for a Labor Party that speaks for, and seeks government on behalf of, working people.

The industrial and political wings of our movement can come together, campaign around this issue and deliver real dignity to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. 

In doing so, we can once again reconnect with working people at home and at work, and speak to their lives.

This is a challenge the union movement is united around – regardless of the election result on September 14.

But for the ALP, it is ultimately a choice. 

Labor can choose to join us in that battle, and as Daniel Andrews indicated yesterday, Victorian Labor is clear in its resolve to do so.

But there is an alternative. That alternative is to turn inward, and play a divisive, futile blame game. 

Make no mistake – that’s what our opponents want. They would love nothing more than to see the energies of the labour movement diverted away from organising and representing working people by a messy fight about the relationship between organised labour and political Labor.

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