Daniel Rashid and Tommy Lawson, 2024 || The media outlets owned by Nine/Fairfax have released the results of an investigation into “corruption in the construction industry”. The articles talk about contractors, the government, business figures and criminals, but the primary target is clear – the construction division of the CFMEU, and its Victorian branch in particular.
The reports have triggered a wave of hysteria; some of it plainly insincere, the rest of it naive. Every day the reaction grows more severe. The Federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Burke, attacked the CFMEU openly and declared it was “on notice”. He made it clear that the deregistering of the construction division was a possibility.
In Victoria, the Premier Jacinta Allan has moved to ban donations to the Victorian branch of the ALP and expel the union from the party altogether. Furthermore, she has stated that she would “request the Federal Government to… if necessary, terminate CFMEU enterprise bargaining agreements of Victorian construction sites, to prevent criminal activity”. Chris Minns has made the same steps in New South Wales, as have Labor leaders in other states.
Despite the union’s National Branch attempting to get a head start on damage control, the Federal Government declared it will appoint Murray Furlong as an administrator to the union. Furlong previously worked for the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the Liberal Party’s main weapon in its war on the CFMEU. Disgracefully, the ACTU itself has decided to suspend the CFMEU, and has passed a motion demanding that the union support and work with the administrators that will be forced on them.
The politicians, media hacks and business leaders naturally hate militant unions. We shouldn’t be surprised when they attack them; it’s pointless to try and convince them to do otherwise. The point of this article is not to “speak truth to power”, but to try and convince our fellow workers that standing with the CFMEU in this period is essential if we actually want our unions to mean something. This attack will have flow-on effects and mean bad things for anyone committed to workplace militancy, regardless of their union.
Taming the concrete jungle
To anyone who works in the construction industry, many of the Fairfax “revelations” are not revelations in the slightest. The accusations are a mixture of serious charges, liberal hand-wringing over criminal records, and tit-for-tat bullshit stemming from factional divisions within the union movement. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy in some of the charges: one of the key interviewees talking at length about integrity was an investigator with the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption – a trumped-up witch-hunt led by the prolific sex pest Dyson Heydon.
To be clear: corruption in the trade union movement is real and a blemish upon it. John Setka should have been moved on years ago. Any official that uses their union for their own personal benefit should have a black mark put against their name, permanently. The old tradition of having all union staffers be paid the average industry wage should be revived to prevent exactly this from happening. Having officials be directly elected by the branches they serve would introduce a powerful degree of accountability.1
But all this needs to be put into perspective. The forces of law and order – the media, the government, the capitalist class – are now aiming their guns together at the CFMEU under the guise of anti-corruption. Of course, it’s not beyond the bosses to engage in corrupt practices either, and plenty engage with organised crime too. How naive can someone be about the construction industry to suggest otherwise? Have they ever met a property developer?
As the Queensland/Northern Territory branch of the CFMEU have said in their strong statement,
“The real crooks in this industry are the civil contractors and their cronies… the sad reality is that it’s the major civil companies that have brought the unsavoury elements on government-funded projects, and yet Albanese knows that a thorough investigation will put Labor Governments in a world of pain.”
In 2020, two officials from the Victorian branch were set upon and attacked by seven unknown men, after raising safety complaints on a Melbourne construction site. Where was the inquiry into this? Even beyond construction, bosses get in bed with thugs to get what they want, all the time. Does anyone remember the employers hiring goons to intimidate unionised workers during the Patricks dispute on the waterfront? History is filled with examples of employers hiring gangsters to do their dirty work – at least, when they can’t get the cops to do it for them.
Other unions have rolled over in the face of half-baked journalism and are playing into the ruling class’s latest assault on workers organisations. Progressives who cannot see this have their heads buried in the sand. These people do not care about corruption. It is a transparent sham. They’re not just attacking corrupt officials, but the union altogether – including the rank and file members that are best placed to clear out bad officials.
Fairweather Comrades, and Australia’s Worst Union
A number of the charges put forward by McKenzie, Schneiders et. al relate to behaviour by the CFMEU that is aimed at shutting the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) out of the industry. A CFMEU official is alleged to have threatened the owner of a Indigenous labour hire firm for looking at signing an EBA with the AWU. The CFMEU has been blamed for the death of the young man Ben Nash, and are alleged to have been motivated by anti-AWU mania.
There are flaws in this story, to say the least. Perhaps people should stop to ask why the business owner was so determined to sign up with the AWU, and what this says about his concern and care for the wellbeing of his employees.
In construction, the AWU functions to undercut the achievements of other unions. That is its primary purpose. It cuts sweetheart deals with employers that function to lock out the CFMEU, leaving workers represented by a far more toothless union. In the past, they have accepted direct funding from employers in exchange for keeping the CFMEU away. On the Cross River Rail project in Brisbane, the AWU’s negligence is risking life and limb. Industrial action on the project regarding health and safety is ongoing, after the death of a worker last December from heat stroke.
A major motivating force in the attacks on the CFMEU is the fact that the union has managed to secure a de-facto closed shop on many major building sites. This, naturally, infuriates the building industry bosses – and it infuriates politicians too, since many of the projects the CFMEU has locked up are state infrastructure projects. The AWU is the tool that is used to attack the CFMEU’s iron-tight organisation.
This is not a story of irrational prejudice on the part of the CFMEU. Their members expect them to keep the AWU out, and for good reason. They deserve to be locked out of the industry. The safety, conditions and wages of construction workers depend on it. To be frank, if they didn’t try and intimidate employers for signing on with the AWU, the CFMEU organisers wouldn’t be doing their jobs.
The hostility of right-wing unions to the CFMEU is occasionally used as evidence that the CFMEU is in the wrong. If the majority of unions support the CFMEU’s suspension from the ACTU, then surely it means the CFMEU is in the wrong? This is a sham. The moment accusations were made, the representatives of unions like the SDA were out for blood, knowing that this would be an opportunity to rid them of a rival.
The ANMF proposed the motion about accepting a state appointed administrator to the ACTU, with the SDA seconding it. There wasn’t even an attempt to keep the problem in house, or in supporting the CFMEU to clean up its own problems. The right wing of the bureaucracy went on the attack, and most of the left wing of the bureaucracy simply capitulated. The ACTU executive signing off on Labor’s appointment of an administrator for the union reflects the weakness of the Australian union movement, and exactly the kinds of problems that emerge when the unions are in the thrall of politicians.
Naturally, the ACTU leadership haven’t spoken a word to defend the shop stewards and rank and file who have been besmirched by Fairfax’s accusations. There are ex-criminals as shop stewards – so what? With the way laws are set up to punish workers who make mistakes, it’s not as if they are going to become primary school teachers. We know many people who have criminal pasts, yet have turned their lives around and now make a fair living. To restrict these people from taking roles as delegates is nothing but moralistic bullshit, and the CFMEU is right to reject such nonsense.
The elephant in the room
As we said, John Setka should have resigned a long time ago. His politics are a mess, he maintains friendships with low-lifes and middlemen like Mick Gatto, his sexism is undeniable, and his monumental ego has helped lead to the explosion of the CFMEU itself, with the manufacturing and mining divisions splitting away. He has alienated many of the people who formerly supported him, and in their place he has constructed a base of loyalists whose only allegiance is to himself. His legacy has been the de-politicisation of the construction division of the CFMEU; he is a pale shadow of his mentor John Cummins.
Take a step back, though, and look at the rest of the union movement.
Some of the largest unions in the country, like the SDA and AWU, are controlled by factional party hacks who sell out workers in a million different ways. They are not led by people recruited from the industry, who have proved their stripes as militants. They’re led by former student ALP politicians who plan to use their position in the union to springboard into parliament.
Does the AWU get thousands of its members to rally in person for EBA meetings? The CFMEU does. How many fines does the HSU rack up when doing business? Not a lot. How much industrial action does the SDA take? Quite literally, none. In fact, it actively pursues agreements with employers that send wages and conditions backwards. The people within the Labor Party leading the charge against the CFMEU are the kinds of suits that run these unions. Tony Burke himself followed the typical factional hack career path, spending a few years as an SDA organiser before eventually getting himself elected via preselection to a safe seat.
The CFMEU commands mass loyalty from its members precisely because they don’t give a fuck about playing nice, and are willing to push the boundaries of the law to get what they want. Any attempt at turning the CFMEU into a respectable union is going to fail, because respectable unions in general fail: the most successful ones are the ones that place their members’ interests first, and the interests of polite society last. In our eyes, unions have the right – if not the obligation – to defy the law.
The relatively high pay of construction workers is well known. There are few industries remaining where workers without a degree or even a trade can earn the kind of wage that might allow them to buy a house. This is the direct result of the work of the CFMEU, which sets the standard for the entire industry. It is, by all objective standards, a union that is very successful at what it does. All the stereotypes about construction workers stopping work when it gets too hot are there because even anti-union people know that the CFMEU has a lot of power.
Setka is a problem, no doubt – but he is the working-class’ problem. That can’t be forgotten.
The way forward
There’s an old slogan that has never been more true than ever: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class themselves.
The responsibility for opposing union corruption rests with unionists, and unionists alone. Any attempt to use the mainstream press or the law to accomplish this will only result in setbacks for workers. It’s a good thing that Setka has resigned, but now what will happen? Perhaps some of his factional friends will stay in senior positions, playing by the rules because they know their skin is on the line.
The union is now about to be neutered by the state and controlled by a government appointee. In the name of preventing corruption, CFMEU EBAs might be ripped up – a direct blow to the wages and conditions of the members who fought hard for these agreements.
The only way forward comes through bringing to the front the people that both union bureaucrats and government figures push to the back: the rank-and-file.
Like the good anarchists we are, we’ll refer back to the experiences of the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (NSW BLF). The NSW BLF is best known for the Green Bans that saved much of Sydney’s cultural and environmental heritage, but their story actually began a few decades earlier. Prior to the take-over by the left, the NSW BLF was run by a corrupt mob around Joe Thomas, a right-wing reactionary who maligned his own members in the union’s bulletin.
In response to this, Communist Party members joined with members of the Labor Party Left and unaligned militants to create a powerful rank-and-file movement. This movement did not root out the corrupt Thomas leadership by begging the government for an intervention, or by trying to put pressure on opponents through selective leaking to friendly journalists.
No: they out-organised the leadership. They bore the threats of violence by having the collective strength to move forward undeterred. They mobilised enough rank-and-file members to knock out the bureaucrats, and in doing so invigorated a militant base with a strong tradition of bottom-up leadership. This base then became the bedrock of the Green Bans movement, and the entire late 60s/early 70s “hot period” among labourers in NSW.
The CFMEU is one of the few unions in this country that have a genuine disdain for the law. That hostility to the government should be protected and kept alive by the rank and file members who are the ones getting smashed as a result of this sordid affair. Clearing out bad officials is their job, and no-one else’s. It’s only through the rank and file coming to the fore that corruption can be ended without subordinating the union to the state – an act of class treason far more profound than anything discussed by Fairfax.
Right now, as the government decides how best to cut down the union, it’s essential that workers stand with the CFMEU and defend it against government intervention. Any proposed administrators should be rejected, and the rank and file organised to take control of what’s theirs.
It’s unlikely that Burke would deregister the union, only because he knows that it would provoke a rebellion from allied unions like the PPTEU and ETU. This solidarity needs to be defended, and extended – because if the CFMEU gets smashed, then militant workers in every industry will be more alone than ever.
ACTU secretary Sally McManus stated that she could count the unions opposing the CFMEU’s suspension on one hand. It’s up to the rank and file of every union to make sure that number grows.
Correction, 18/7: to the union’s credit, most organisers in the Vic/Tas CFMEU are elected by the membership.
Discover more from SE Queensland IWW
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
