Only a fool would believe that the construction industry could be rid of crime by eliminating unions.
But that is exactly what the ALP government is doing: with the support of the Liberals, it is introducing draconian laws to disempower the entire unionised workforce.
This is like using a cannon to kill a sparrow. It is an election ploy that gives Anthony Albanese the added advantage of depriving his internal “leftists” in the party of parliamentary support.
The construction companies and the building association are licking their lips.
Yes, there are serious problems in the CFMEU’s construction division – problems that the Prime Minister has known about for at least a decade but claims to have only recently learned about. But these problems cannot be solved by the current legislation being rushed through Parliament.
A former senior CFMEU organiser told me:
The Prime Minister is attempting to blame the Greens for his own failure to handle the matter, the political equivalent of a blip after failing to address the corruption he was informed about ten years ago.
Under the current legal situation, any future liberal government will be able to more or less deregister trade unions. This would guarantee that organised crime does not become a disease but a pandemic.
In the early 1990s, at the time of the Gyles Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry in NSW, newspaper columnist Paddy McGuinness cited a maxim that had long held true in the construction industry: it was dominated either by organised crime or by communists.
At that time, the predecessor organisations of the CFMEU – the BWIU and the BLF – had militant, communist leaderships.
The construction industry is a godsend for organized crime (whether small or large), for money laundering or for the transfer of large amounts of money to the city’s wealthy circles.
While some of the criminals are pumped up and covered in tattoos, the people who make the big money wear suits, drive Teslas and live in leafy suburbs.
Only a militant, independent union can tame the concrete jungle. Unfortunately, since the communist leadership is gone, the jungle is trying to tame the union.
Since the 1990s, construction unions have increasingly relied on organizing strategic production points—such as crane crews and concrete pourers—to control the price of labor.
While this brought decent pay increases to the major construction sites and helped maintain safety standards, delegate structures atrophied and political education disappeared.
In many parts of the industry, unions have virtually disappeared from small construction sites.
In the absence of the broad-based working-class consciousness that characterized the strong trade unions of the Keynesian post-war period, the NSW branch in particular was weakened by the management practices of its leadership and created a vacuum that criminal elements sought to exploit.
The organizational culture remained stronger in the Victorian branch, but the collapse of the political culture left a vacuum of its own.
The fact is: as long as capitalism exists, organized crime will try to launder its black money in the construction industry and secure regular profits.
The influence of this layer has found its way into parts of the union over the last twenty years. A once proud, independent and militant organization has let itself get this far.
Lions are led by donkeys
Construction workers deserve better than to be led to this massacre. The CFMEU leadership bears some responsibility for opening the door to this frontal attack.
If the CFMEU is really as militant and savage as it claims, why has the current leadership not taken the men and women off work in protest against these laws? Why have there been no mass meetings?
There are three reasons for this: first, the union leadership has a completely legalistic and bureaucratic framework in which to take up the struggle; second, the delegate structures are atrophied; and third, there is a risk that difficult questions will be asked of the leadership at a mass meeting. It is better to leave the members atomized than to risk resistance.
The truth is: if you use the number of days lost to industrial action as a measure of militancy, the construction industry is tamer than many other industries.
(According to ABS data, over the five years to the March quarter of 2024, the average days lost per quarter to industrial action across the economy was 2.1 days per thousand workers. In construction, the figure is 2.6 days per 1,000 workers, while in transport and warehousing, 9.1 days per 1,000 workers were lost to industrial action. Construction is thus barely above the background average for all industries.)
Nonsense
Albanese has known about organised crime, particularly in the building departments of New South Wales and Victoria, since at least 2014, when a whistleblower gave a first-hand account of it in a face-to-face meeting at his constituency office. Albanese deflected responsibility.
The ALP leadership’s claim that they only learned of this through recent articles in Nine newspapers is, frankly, nonsense.
Many of the union’s “old hands” in the industry believe that an administrative period is necessary to weed out the black sheep at the top of the union.
But relying on the capitalist state to do this is a recipe for disaster. It would have been far better for the ACTU to push the issue within the labour movement. But no union secretary wants to set a precedent of the ACTU interfering in the “internal affairs” of its affiliates.
However, intervention by the courts and the state would have a far worse outcome and precedent.
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties stated:
The rushed implementation of this Bill, which seeks to override proceedings brought by the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Court, threatens the principles of natural justice and procedural fairness. We note that the Bill would set a precedent where membership-based organisations can be stripped of outside democratic control based on unsubstantiated allegations. This is of concern to all unions, incorporated clubs and Australian membership-based organisations.
The bill breaches Australia’s obligations under the International Labour Organisation, in particular Articles 3 and 4 of the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948.
The NSWCCL has long held that everyone has the right to natural justice and procedural fairness, regardless of the allegations they face. If passed next week, this bill threatens that fundamental right. The right to freedom of association and the nature of membership-based organisations across Australia must be protected.
And they are not wrong.
But employees must expect higher standards from their managers than just bourgeois “procedural fairness.”
More than a decade ago, Martin Smith, the leader of the Trotskyist sect SWP in Britain, was accused of rape. He was forced out of office after initially trying to cover up the case internally. No police were involved, no charges were brought. But the SWP was forced to act.
There have been senior executives in the CFMEU who have been guilty of violating domestic violence orders, drug offences or bribery – and all of them kept their jobs at the time.
What is missing is an organized force at the grassroots level that can challenge the union leadership. This is a symptom of the general decline in class consciousness among workers.
Under the “clean” Zach Smith, the CFMEU national office is taking a clueless legal approach to challenging the government’s bill. It will fail.
Without militant action by the workforce to bring the construction sites to a standstill, it will be ignored.
Most of the socialist “far left” have behaved as mindless cheerleaders for the incumbent union leadership. Having no working-class base whatsoever, they are using this dispute as a kind of proxy proletarian role-play.
They show less independent thinking than Karl Malden’s character of father Pete Barry in the classic film The water (1954).
This film is about a local dockworkers’ union that has been infiltrated by organized crime. Its members are intimidated and forced into silence.
Malden’s Father Barry plays the role of independent conscience. He delivers a eulogy for dock workers at the body of a slain whistleblower and says:
What does Christ think about the guys who make easy money, do no work and still always pocket everything?
What does he think of the guys who wear hundred-dollar suits and diamond rings and pay your union dues and bribes?
And how does He, who fearlessly spoke out against all evil, feel about your silence?
You want to know what’s wrong with our waterfront? It’s love for a lousy goat. It’s love for a goat…more important than love for a human.
At the end of the film, the workers refuse to unload the ships until Terry Malloy, a reformed Marlon Brando character, leads them back after taking a beating from the gangsters.
These thugs are eventually pushed aside and the workers return to their work. One says to Brando’s Malloy:
“We’re going in with you so the shippers can see… we’re not going to take any more orders from Johnny Friendly (the corrupt union leader).”
“This will give us our union back and allow us to get it back on track.”
Only construction workers can save their own union by organizing for a militant, independent class politics that is not imposed on them from above by the state or the union bureaucracy.
