Friday’s climate strike was a brief but exhilarating dash of hope amid the dispiriting intransigence of Australian environmental politics. Standing among the 100,000-plus crowd in Melbourne, with hippies, suits and tradies embracing in raucous chants, one could briefly fantasise that we were winning; that the political climate, if not the physical one, might be changing for the better.
Significantly, the third global climate strike was the first in Australia to include mass participation of workers alongside students. Indeed, the protest rivalled the largest worker-dominated rallies in Australian history, despite the teenage organisers lacking the resources and networks of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
The youth-led movement did face difficulties in encouraging workers into the fold, though not for lack of adult enthusiasm. The problem is that workers are subject to myriad restrictions on their right to peaceful civic engagement.
You can’t sack students
When organising students, Greta Thunberg’s disciples had a clear theory of change — young activists could pressure powerful adults to act on climate change by making inaction costly. They did what workers once could, absent legislative barriers — disrupt the daily operations of important institutions and cause headaches for those in power. Conservatives whinged but were powerless to stop it, as disciplining students remains the purview of teachers who often encourage their students to be civically engaged.
The power of workers to similarly disrupt “business as usual” has been systemically stymied by draconian legislation that severely limits their right to strike. The Fair Work Act affords no legal protection for striking except in limited circumstances, such as during EBA negotiations. Striking for non EBA-related matters, particularly political issues, can see your pay docked or your contract terminated.
On Thursday, the Fair Work Commission reminded workers that if they wanted to attend the climate strike, they would require permission from their employer and/or may need to use their annual leave (if they had any). Unions agreed these were the only options for many workers. The only workers known to have taken industrial action to attend the climate strike were some Sydney wharfies whose EBA negotiations fell at a coincidental time.
So for most workers it wasn’t really a “strike” at all. It was a protest, lacking the central element of industrial action: the collective withdrawal of labour to coerce institutions to alter their actions. Many workers missed out on attending the protest, unable to forego the income or defy the boss for fear of retaliation.
Solidarity forever™
Some employers granted their workers time off and a select few actually paid their staff to attend. Such supportive corporate interventions rightly place the burden back on institutions to make the necessary sacrifices. However, they still disempower workers and reinforce that these are decisions for boardrooms, not breakrooms.
Hostile companies were answerable principally to consumers and competitors, coerced only by the threat of a socially irresponsible image. Yet many employers simply don’t care, opportunistically “greenwashing” for brand exposure while doing little else to affect change.
While institutions are far more responsible than individuals for the environmental crisis we face, corporations still largely insulate themselves from adverse consequences and outsource the moral burden to resist.
The workers united need legislative support
The protected right to strike, enshrined in global standards, must surely be extended beyond its current limited remit.
Firstly, workers should be afforded legal protection for strike action on any matter that directly relates to their workplace pay and conditions, whether during a negotiating period or not. Secondly, legal protection should be afforded to a specified number of non-workplace-specific strikes per year for workers in large companies (the use of which must be negotiated in good faith between unions and employers). This would allow workers and their representatives to prioritise and pursue pressing political goals, including issues that affect all workers, such as a just transition to a low-carbon economy.
I doubt Scott Morrison has any intention of facilitating the positive freedoms required to foster a vibrant civic culture. After all, a truly liberal framework would allow even more protesters to highlight his government’s callous disregard for our planet’s future.
But the union movement, currently mulling its next move after the “Change the Rules” campaign, should take heed of society’s growing appetite for civil demonstration and imagine the possibilities that could arise if workers’ passion was less shackled.
The draconian Ensuring Integrity Bill will further remove worker’s rights. 2 May 1933 Hitler made a speech “We must close their offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike.”
1933 over 100,000 unionists were imprisoned in the gulags
This Liberal Govt is goose-stepping down the path well worn by the right wing fascist Nazis.
It is time for the labour movement to assert the right to strike more generally, but they won’t. Established unions are now just another piece of state machinery clogged up by political class leeches. Why make things uncomfortable for MPs when you want a safe seat or senate spot?
Quite so Draco. Workers need to (re) fight for the right to strike for many other reasons than attending protests.
This issue keeps coming up in various contexts particularly wage stagnation. Our forebears fought and often died for the right to strike and our current generation have rolled over with barely a whimper. There was endless union bashing and media propaganda when I was young so nothing new there.
A little less workforce casualisation and its attendant underemployment wouldn’t go astray, either. I’d have loved to attend the climate strike here in Newwy last Friday, but I’m a casual on-call disability support worker and I had a shift. I literally cannot afford to say no to shifts – I simply don’t get enough hours as it is and knocking back shifts or making myself unavailable results in less hours being offered. It’s not the fault of the service I work for- the entire NDIS was based on a casual workforce on call 24/7. My employer can’t offer me any employment stability.
It’s ironic really. I’m basically paid by the NDIS – the same NDIS that is largely responsible for the only growth we’re seeing in the economy and pretty much solely responsible for Morrison’s bogus Surplus, but there was no way I could afford to take time off.
On “legal protection for strike action” –
Climate revolutionaries need legal protection for revolutionary actions. Elders who might encourage or restrain hotheads need to know the legal boundary between revolutionary and terrorist actions. Those boundaries might need to be shifted lest they damage the lives of young people taking action for the greater good.
As with industrial action to get a pay rise or fairer treatment for individual workers, the reality is that protest that causes no inconvenience will have no effect. As is obvious with the passing of the publicity relating to Greta Thunberg’s address to the U.N. Climate Change Summit, those not inconvenienced by the pressure exerted by a group on some issue just wave it away.
Nothing better demonstrates class in Australia than the ability of Australia’s small group of powerful decisionmakers to make far-reaching decisions through small meetings of which no-one else will usually ever know. Controlling political and financial resources as they do, public protest is unknown to them, would be embarrassing, and is completely unnecessary since to achieve even the most viciously anti-social aim all they need to do is either promise or withhold the resources that they control.
Violence by protesters is usually accidental and spontaneous. Violence by the State is usually massive and institutionalised – and easily promoted as “maintaining the Rule of Law”. Just remember what a small group it is that writes those laws. As well as the certainty we will be neither consulted nor included.