Yesterday, the story going round the traps was that Greg Combet and Sally McManus had come up with the JobKeeper rescue package and sold it to a reluctant Scott Morrison, who then sold it to the even more reluctant hardliners in his cabinet.
This morning in the Oz there’s a breathless story about how Morrison dodged it up with four business leaders, and Greg Combet was then roped in to sell it to Sally McManus. I don’t believe that Paul “Elevator to Nowhere” Kelly or other journos would knowingly report porkies, so I don’t doubt the business roundtable happened.
But I wouldn’t trust them as fast as I could spit them out on spin and slant. Quite possibly it was the CEOs who persuaded happy-clappy ScoMo that capitalism was just a series of deals, not a divinely ordained master-servant relationship. The group included Solomon Lew, who has just dudded the landlords of 1250 of his outlets with a retail rent strike.
But I’d be surprised if a lot of the pressure didn’t come from McManus, and the actual content of the package from Combet, the brains of the outfit. In terms of stuff other than making money, most CEOs are as dumb as Gerry Harvey sounds.
Whatever, the case, now that immediate crisis for many (not all) has been averted, it’s time for the ACTU, the unions and Labor to pivot sharply to the defence of workers as a class, and to provide more democratic, left and creative responses to the crisis.
There may have been a need for immediate national coordination to a degree. But it also plays to the fatal script buried deep in Australian unionism that it should play the role as state’s subaltern in disciplining the workforce, and managing its expectations.
It’s time for the unions to radically pivot around and assert the immediate needs of workplace workers, healthcare and other “contact” workers in the first instance.
The heartwarming sentiments about us all being in this together are the fiction that makes these lockdowns possible. Some of us are at home, doing work — essential, useful, bullshit work as it may be — and minimising our risk, while others are being crowded into high-contact situations for food production and distribution, transport, knick-knack delivery, etc.
Suddenly, work that was seen as low-status — the proverbial “shelf-stacker” replaced the “ditch-digger” as an image of drudgery a while back — has now been given hero status and thanks of a grateful nation, etc. The question of the work’s safety has never been adequately raised, as we rushed towards a lockdown society.
This is the pure logic of capital at its most visible: the human worker remains essential because of their essentially human capacities as self-directing labour power. But because they are essential, their humanness cannot be acknowledged. They are dead and alive, machine and person. In this case, their negation/alienation is as potential disease sufferer.
The possibility that food distribution and general delivery was too high-risk to be conducted on a business-as-usual basis was simply never acknowledged.
It was a dirty secret, as we hunkered down, and the union movement as a whole was willing to participate in that acquiescence. Since workers and members were also dependent on things keeping going, one can acknowledge the contradiction that had to be faced.
But now is the time to come down on the other side of it. Across the US, workplaces are staging wildcat strikes — they’re not even calling them strikes, in many cases, many having no connection to that tradition — over working conditions related specifically to safety.
That’s especially over the obvious contradiction that general guidelines on social distancing are specifically not being followed in workplaces whose output makes social distancing possible. What I have suggested be organised as, in the Australian tradition (of industrial “blackbans” or environmental/social “greenbans”) “yellowbans” on unsafe workplaces, are being called “sick-ins” in the US.
They’ve started here but on a smaller scale. Is that because conditions are better, or because the Australian union apparatus is playing a disciplining role that is absent in the US? Are workers at WholeFoods starting to come out on sick-ins in multiple branches, not despite the absence of something like the SDA, but because they don’t have a reactionary, repressive, miserable company union like the shoppies sitting on their necks?
The relevant unions not only have a duty to start agitating in these workplaces for a full floor-to-ceiling audit of work practices and safety, they have the opportunity to change the basic presumption of safety authorisation in the workplace.
This needs to be moved out of management and proprietor hands absolutely and finally. The safety of a workplace, within nationally-achieved safety guidelines, should rest with a workplace committee, in which management/ownership is only one voice.
But they not only have the opportunity, they have the threat that if this don’t respond to these concerns, workplace committees will form autonomously.
This is the paradox of Australian unionism. Having gained a larger role than most in the affairs of the nation, rebellion against such must ceaselessly be staged within it — otherwise conditions become worse than elsewhere, because contradictory interests are buried.
The national direction is settled for the moment; it’s now time to stand up for the stackers and packers, and other essentials, working for the JobKeepers allowance amid multiple disease vectors, so the rest of us don’t have to.
As we have found out, there’s nothing like a few empty shelves to make people aware of how things really work.
Interesting Guy that a piece about the health and welfare of those we depend on the most draws so little comment from Crikey’s barflies. They remain an assumption of being there, the phantoms to our very existence as a functioning society.
“draws so little comment from Crikey’s barflies.”
Ha, well said, cruel but fair.
In many ways this crisis is exposing Neoliberal Capitalism’s many flaws. As Guy points out, we are being presented a sort of experiment perhaps Marx may have relished.
The opportunities for change are in interpreting those exposed weaknesses and determining how they can be best exploited. That is the task of Labor, the unions and The Greens because only collective action exploiting the exposed vulnerabilities will achieve necessary radical change. It cannot be left to hope that the masses will be awakened (although I think that must be a factor).
Only labour can produce surplus value (Marx, Ricardo). That’s why capital depends on it.
I’d go further and say they should have go-slows to all the suburbs where the CEOs and so-forth live until they get real protections. And maybe not charge people for food as they go through the checkouts in poorer areas. Workers who’ve had coronavirus (and therefore aren’t at risk of getting it or passing it on) could lead blockades and other actions needing more direct physical contact with others.
“ The heartwarming sentiments about us all being in this together are the fiction that makes these lockdowns possible. Some of us are at home, doing work — essential, useful, bullshit work as it may be — and minimising our risk, while others are being crowded into high-contact situations for food production and distribution, transport, knick-knack delivery, etc.“
And residential support workers supporting people with disability. We’re out here, too, shaking our heads at the lucky third of the work force doing jokey memes and cartoons about the burden of boredom those poor, put upon work from homers are enduring, while we run the gauntlet and hope we don’t take COVID19 into our homes or workplaces. Fun, fun, fun! Oh well. At least we can take our residents shopping in the 07:00 -08:00 time slot. Shame the hoarders bought all the hand and laundry sanitisers and antibacterial wipes before it was brought in and we were never allocated any by the Government. I suppose killing us all off is one way for the NDIS to cut costs.
Thanks for remembering those of us who have to leave the house and work, GR. Residential disability support workers won’t stage sick-ins, though, because our residents have nobody else. Many don’t have families at all or their families walked away long ago because they couldn’t cope with their relative’s mental illness. Many of our residents were rough sleepers before they came to us. Many more spent their entire lives in state psychiatric institutions until all those unnecessary prime waterfront properties sorry institutions were closed down. Not that the public seems aware of what we do. We’re only noticed when the Government needs to stage a public flogging (aka a Royal Commission) and then we’re the enemy. Untrained. Uneducated. Vicious abusers of “our” most vulnerable. Only in the job because we’re basically unemployable and Disabilities will take anyone, just like Aged Care. Nobody has a nice thing to say about us.
I keep harping on this – second time this week in Crikey – in the forlorn hope somebody will finally sit up and take notice and fight for our safety, too, because we can’t keep ”your” most vulnerable safe if we’re not safe ourselves.
Hi CC, just want you to know that I read your comments and agree wholeheartedly.
I’m on the medical “frontline”, and it’s not fun. But we get lots of recognition, lots of gear, lots of support, free coffees, etc. Whereas you and your colleagues get — well, you’ve explained very well what you get.
I may have missed it, but I haven’t noticed any human interest stories about carers doing what they simply have to do to provide the care for people we mainly try to forget about – no social distancing in your work CC!
Thanks – for what you do and for finding the time to prick our consciences.
Yes, very little mention of child care workers and teachers who are expected to go to work, but haven’t had any advice to wear, at very least, a n95 level face mask. They have no protection whatsoever and couldn’t purchase any if they wanted to anyway.
My next door neighbour is a RN at the local base hospital. She told me the other day they ready’d an entire wing for coronavirus patients, but all the staff is ‘shit scared’ (her words) because they have nowhere near enough PPE or masks.