Australian Construction Workers Are Fighting Back

Jade Ingham || When Australia’s Labor government overrode union rights — and justice — to place the construction union under administration, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thought he’d played a trump card. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Tens of thousands of union members and supporters of the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) rallied in opposition to the government-imposed administration of their union.

Three months ago, Australia’s Labor government rushed extraordinary legislation through Parliament to force one of the nation’s largest trade unions, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), into administration. The state seized our union’s finances, sacked our democratically elected leadership, and disenfranchised tens of thousands of unionized workers across the country.

As the national president of the construction division of the CFMEU, I was one of 268 union officials to be fired from an elected position. We are now classified as “removed persons.” The legislation explicitly denies my comrades and I the right to appeal. None of us have been convicted of a crime, and the allegations leveled against a few officials have yet to be tested in a court of law.

The administrator has also been granted broad powers to change the CFMEU’s rules without the endorsement of members, to sell union assets, and to hire and fire staff. If the administrator decides to sack one of the union’s membership assistants, receptionists, or industrial officers — for whatever reason — those employees also have no right to appeal.

It is, by some measure, the most draconian anti-union legislation imposed in decades. It is more insidious than the attacks on workers and unions launched by the conservative governments of John Howard, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull.

Labor Attacks Union Rights

The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties (NSWCCL), one of Australia’s leading civil liberties groups, immediately raised “serious concerns” with the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024. The Council argued that the laws set “a dangerous precedent for the trade union movement, membership-based organizations, and the rights of individuals to natural justice and procedural fairness.”

Even the appointed administrator, Mark Irving KC, reportedly acknowledged to a room of CFMEU officials that “union democracy has been dismantled.”

Unlike previous assaults on workers’ rights, these anti-union laws have been implemented by a Labor government with the support of the leadership of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Giddy with sensational, unproven allegations that the CFMEU has been infiltrated by organized crime, mainstream media outlets have celebrated the move and refused to examine the legislation and its consequences.

It is telling that in the Albanese government’s own submissions to the High Court, its lawyers have argued that while the laws were made in the context of criminal allegations, it “does not depend on the correctness of these allegations.” This is an extraordinary acknowledgment of their disregard for natural justice when it gets in the way of political problems. This kind of cynicism is exactly why voters are leaving mainstream parties in droves, tired of career politicians and party spin.

The coordinated legal attack on the CFMEU is aimed at strangling our collective voice and striking fear into the hearts of our members. With the political establishment, the media and the employer class firmly against us — not to mention the threat of fines and imprisonment hanging over our heads — the Labor Party and the ACTU calculated that we would back down and consent to the administration.

Unlike previous assaults on workers’ rights, these anti-union laws have been implemented by a Labor government with the support of the leadership of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

They made a bad bet. Since administration commenced, more than 200,000 workers have hit the streets in protest, and rank-and-file working groups have formed across the country to resist the administrator. Other blue-collar construction unions have joined them. The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) has disaffiliated from the ACTU and withheld donations to the Labor Party. Several militant unions representing a quarter of a million workers are considering the establishment of a new, independent trade union confederation.

Two deposed CFMEU officials and one current official have launched a High Court challenge to overturn legislation that we believe is unconstitutional and undemocratic. The “Your Union Your Choice” campaign underpinning this legal fightback is gaining support among migrant associations, student groups, and rank-and-file unionists employed in the public service and education sector.

At a recent anti-administration rally in Brisbane, Bec Barrigos, a Queensland public-school teacher and union activist, summed it up. “The only response to a historic attack on unions,” she said, “is a historic battle of resistance.”

A Tradition of Solidarity

To understand the attack on the CFMEU, it is important to first understand the role our union plays within the trade union movement and Australian society.

The CFMEU was formed in 1992, as part of a union-led push to create “super unions” to represent entire industries rather than individual trades. Until recently, the CFMEU was made up of four autonomous divisions: construction, forestry and manufacturing, maritime, and mining and energy. The construction division was always one of the most militant, in part due to the adversarial nature of the industry and in part due to the radical history it upholds from its predecessor unions, particularly the Builders Labourers Federation and the Building Workers Industrial Union

Some of the unions that amalgamated to form the construction division have a history that dates back to the nineteenth century and the Second Industrial Revolution. Our forebears — the stonemasons — were the first Australian workers to win the right to an eight-hour day. Today stonemasons are still an important and valued part of the CFMEU.

In the twentieth century, construction unions waged hard-fought and effective campaigns to lift workers’ pay and win workplace rights and decent safety standards in a dangerous, itinerant industry. They were willing to strike and were unafraid to employ guerrilla tactics to achieve their aims.

The CFMEU’s predecessor unions were also not afraid to wage campaigns that went beyond immediate workplace issues. They fought conscription during World War I, took action in solidarity with the movement against  South African apartheid, and opposed nuclear proliferation. In 1973, unionized construction workers in Sydney voted to stop work at a Macquarie University construction site after a gay student was expelled from one of the university’s residential colleges.The “pink ban” was enforced until the student was reinstated. Construction unionists also supported land rights for indigenous people and pioneered “green bans” to protect working-class housing, the environment, and heritage buildings.

Today most members of the CFMEU construction division work in the construction industry. But the construction division also represents members in the forestry, manufacturing, mining, and local government sectors. For example, in my home state of Queensland, the construction division has long organized members in bedding factories, timber mills, joinery shops, mine sites, and local councils.

This speaks to the fact that our union is known for getting results. CFMEU members are loyal and battle-hardened. It’s common to see CFMEU members with hard hats, hoodies, and shirts bearing slogans such as “If Provoked Will Strike,” “If You Don’t Fight, You Lose” and “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.” And these slogans aren’t hollow. Thanks in part to strong, active union delegates, the union is prepared to engage in industrial action when necessary. As a result, construction workers in Australia enjoy world-leading wages and conditions. Fraternal unions in other countries are often in awe of the power and influence CFMEU members have on-site.

We are rightly proud of this, and it’s our success that has made us a target for the ruling class. Over the past three decades, the CFMEU has been subject to royal commissions and various building codes and legislative instruments designed to restrict our activity. In 2016, Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government went as far as forcing a double dissolution election to restore the authoritarian Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

Putting Construction Workers Back in Our Box

John Howard’s Liberal government first established the ABCC in 2005, to target the CFMEU. As a pretext, he claimed that the union was lawless, and over its lifespan, the ABCC fined the CFMEU tens of millions of dollars for taking industrial action. In fact, most of the penalties issued by the ABCC were because our officials were found to have broken restrictive workplace laws that endangered workers. Some of the ABCC cases were downright farcical. In 2021,it was revealed the ABCC spent nearly half a million dollars in legal fees trying to fine the CFMEU for forcing a construction company to install a women’s toilet on a Melbourne worksite.

Regardless of which party holds government, a toxic stereotype of “overpaid” construction workers has taken root. For business groups and media commentators, as well as some privileged white-collar professionals, the idea of working-class men and women earning good money inspires ridicule and contempt. Most of the criticism of the CFMEU and construction workers drips with class prejudice. For example, the Australian Financial Review last year published an article by ex-ABCC bureaucrat and neoliberal warrior John Lloyd, lamenting the fact that some CFMEU traffic controllers earn more than a teacher or a nurse. Paying a “lollipop person” a six-figure salary, Lloyd wrote, sends the “wrong signals . . . to labour market entrants and participants.” In other words, Lloyd suggests that working in construction is nothing to be proud of, and only tertiary-educated workers deserve a decent wage. But in a country where the median house price is almost AUD $1 million, working-class people need six-figure salaries just to keep up.

It is almost never acknowledged that most CFMEU members don’t come from privilege. Most were raised in country towns or the outer suburbs of Australian cities, and a lot of them  left school early to enter the workforce. Many are immigrants looking for a start in a new country. Some are seeking a second chance and a pathway out of intergenerational poverty and the criminal justice system. Our union is full of stories of redemption. We are proud of the fact that the CFMEU is a union where a five-foot tall single mother, a heavily tattooed man, or a recovered drug addict can find purpose in our industry. Anyone can rise to become a workplace delegate or an organizer, so long as they hold union values and win the trust of their workmates.

Some unions advertise for organizers on job websites and LinkedIn. The CFMEU is different — it trains them on the shop floor. Our union employs an industrial lawyer who spent most of his working life as a steel fixer and workplace health and safety coordinators who come from the various trades on-site. The CFMEU is a union of opportunity. We believe you can’t properly represent blue-collar workers unless you’ve  got the kind of perspective that only comes from working a tough job. And we believe in the radical potential for working-class people to govern their own affairs.

CFMEU members know that it is militant industrial unionism that wins above-average pay rises, not politicians or the workplace regulator.

CFMEU members know that it is militant industrial unionism that wins above-average pay raises, not politicians or the workplace regulator. They know the living standards of construction workers in most other countries pale in comparison with the standards they have won. And they know that other essential workers, like teachers and nurses, deserve better standards and pay raises. We see their contribution firsthand, through our kids’ schooling or when we need patching up after being injured at work. That’s why, when workers in other industries strike, the CFMEU is always one of the first to stand in solidarity.

Over the past couple of years, as real wages stagnated and the cost of living skyrocketed, the CFMEU has broadened its political focus. In July 2023, we launched our “End the Housing Crisis” campaign, which proposed a corporate profits tax to fund a massive expansion of public housing. It was a progressive proposal that provided a genuine left alternative to the ruling Labor government’s timid housing policies.

More recently, our members have mobilized for pro-Palestine rallies across the country. Alongside several other CFMEU leaders, I’m proud to have spoken at these rallies, calling on the Labor government to stop supplying weapons and associated materials to Israel. In July, when the Labor Party expelled Senator Fatima Payman for speaking out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the CFMEU was one of the only unions to publicly support the young senator.

Revealingly, Labor’s anti-CFMEU bill aims to block these kinds of initiatives, by banning our union from making political donations or engaging in political communication of any sort.

And it’s no secret which class’s interests the bill serves. Incredibly, a senior Labor minister sold the bill by saying that it does “what the employers are asking for.”

Simply put, the administration scheme has nothing to do with ridding the construction industry of organized crime or bullying. It is about pulling up the handbrake on our union’s runaway success and putting us construction workers back in our box.

Battle Lines

The High Court challenge to the government’s union-busting legislation will commence next month, on December 10. The stakes could not be higher.

The Labor Party and the ACTU leadership have teamed up with our class enemies and doubled down on their support for the administration. The conservative opposition is threatening to go a step further should they win the 2025 federal election and directly deregister the construction division of the CFMEU.

The big four construction bosses’ groups are seeking to capitalize on the period of administration to roll back workers’ wages and conditions. The chief executive of one of those employer associations, Master Builders Australia, said the quiet part out loud when she praised administration as an “effective way to control” the union.

Meanwhile, the media is framing the High Court challenge as an attempt by “ousted leaders” to “wrest back control of the union.” The opposite is true. The applicants — former Queensland and Northern Territory branch secretaries Michael Ravbar and Kane Lowth, and current ACT acting secretary Michael Hiscox — are fighting on behalf of every CFMEU member. It’s not about individual leaders; it’s to make sure the CFMEU is returned to the democratic control of its members.

The big four construction bosses’ groups are seeking to capitalize on the period of administration to roll back workers’ wages and conditions.

Beyond the urgent need to restore union democracy, it’s also about preventing the administrator running the CFMEU into the ground. The wages of the administrator and his hand-picked staff run into the millions, and members forced to pay every cent. Mark Irving’s reported annual salary alone is $643,640 — significantly higher than any current Australian union leader, and more than the prime minister. Worse, Irving and his staff are indemnified for any mistakes they make during the three-year period of administration. In other words, they can bankrupt our union without consequence.

As it stands, more than 150 years of union achievement and history hang in the balance. One of Australia’s oldest and proudest working-class institutions is under the dictatorial control of a lawyer who, by his own admission, has no understanding of the industries that CFMEU members are employed in.

If You Don’t Fight, You Lose

The Labor government has backed the CFMEU into this corner — but not everything is going its way. Already rank-and-file union and Labor Party members are organizing within their branches to pass motions condemning the anti-CFMEU laws and the administration. One motion passed by a Labor Party sub-branch declared the legislation sets a “dangerous precedent” and that “all bar the most ‘tame cat’ unions will be at risk.”

WhatsApp group chats are pinging with conversations between principled unionists, including from sectors beyond construction. They recognize the grave threat this legislation poses to the wider union movement.

These rank-and-file true believers show us the way forward. As uncomfortable as this moment is for CFMEU members, we are also forging stronger bonds with our allies and discovering friends we never knew we had.

That’s why this moment is also a historic opportunity for Australian trade unionists to return to first principles. We must bring on a blue with those smiling assassins who call themselves union leaders, but who are comfortably divorced from the day-to-day lives and struggles of their members. We must break away from the notion that the only way to advance the living standards of working-class people is to hang off the Labor Party’s back pocket. And we must build a new, broad-based movement that is unapologetic about industrial militancy.

WhatsApp group chats are pinging with conversations between principled unionists, including from sectors beyond construction.

From the building sites where I now work, this project doesn’t feel as outlandish as it may sound. Throughout the media and political storm that has engulfed the CFMEU, journalists, politicians, and ACTU hacks have made a crucial mistake. They forgot to talk to our members. Instead, they spoke at us, lectured us, and presumed to know what’s best for us and our union. As much as anything else, that born-to-rule approach has made us wild with rage.

One thing is for certain. The political and media establishment have underestimated the intelligence of the men and women of the CFMEU. We have always been skeptical of the boss, and we long ago lost faith in politicians and journalists. We may not all have university degrees — but we know a stitch-up when we see it. They’ve picked a fight with the wrong crowd.