Which Side Are You On

Here is a rank and file newsletter that aims to increase the coordination and militancy in the construction industry in Brisbane. It is being handed out to interested comrades and union members in the construction industry.

Editorial:

The current threats facing the CFMEU and the building unions in general are significant. Without concerted action by rank-and-file workers we risk being left behind as the builders, the government and the broader capitalist class in Australia move to crush unionism in the building industry. We must realise that only through solidarity and rank-and-file action can our unions meet this attack and come out the other side intact. We need to build militancy on the jobs to meet the challenges of the administration.

The current state of the industry suggests the likelihood of a mild slowdown in activity. The effect of inflation, higher interest rates, higher materials costs, a reduction in household spending and a shortage of skilled workers is beginning to have an effect. However, despite the change to a Coalition government in Queensland, there is still a large and dominant pipeline of work to be done in government projects. The commercial sector is likely to continue to grow in coming years despite this slowdown. The labour shortage gives construction unionists a further bargaining chip to resist the Liberals’ attacks on health and safety during the latter half of 2024. The main focus of the LNP after taking over the state government has been repeating the previous government’s focus on increasing productivity with a more authoritarian vigour. The number of residential approvals and completed projects for housing has decreased in Queensland, meaning the housing crisis is likely to get worse.

In late 2024 economic growth in Australia fell to the lowest since 2020 and wage growth across the economy has slowed. Inflation has fallen in goods prices but has continued to remain high in rents and insurance. The unemployment rate nationally remains lower with the labour shortage continuing. Despite this, household spending remains weak due to inflation and interest rate rises. The government is propping up economic growth by public investment and expenditure. This state directed spending is key to the current economic model of a declining capitalism. 

The prospect of trade wars internationally from the authoritarian regime of Donald Trump will have a destabilising effect on the economy in general in the coming years. As the world economy continues to stagnate and decline since the 2008 financial crisis, the need for radical action increases. Years of low productivity, growth and profitability have taken their toll on the ability of private capitalism to maintain itself in this crisis. The threat of this crisis will make the twin crises of climate change and war a more dangerous combination. Without significant change, these problems will continue to give ammunition to fascists across the world who seek to capitalise on the crisis.

The extraordinary attacks on the CFMEU from the employing class since the middle of this year have shown how these problems require a scapegoat by the employing class. The viciousness of the attacks through the media, cheered on by the employers, have demonstrated how easy it is to make the government backflip on its commitments to construction workers. They serve the bosses and now make no business of hiding that fact. The fact that these attacks sabotaged our strike against CPB and have targeted our civil organisers shows that the only group truly served by the ALP is business executives and shareholders. These capitalists are after all the primary funders of their election campaigns and have been doing so for many decades.

What should workers do in the current crisis? The ALP have betrayed us, as well as most of the leadership of the white-collar unions. The only path forward in the present crisis is that of militancy and rank-and-file democracy. We must organise together on the jobs into independent workers committees to meet the many challenges that face us. The existing HSR committees are the best way to do this, like the job committees of the 1970s. We must meet independently of management and formulate together in our own meetings a common plan of action. We must also report back our activities to union members on the jobs in regular mass meetings to maintain accountability to the rank-and-file. 

The future is uncertain without this concerted action. We risk being crushed by the bosses and the government in a period where our members should have more leverage, not less. Therefore, we need to consider new ideas and strategies to meet the coming crisis. The main article is about the factory councils in Italian history in 1919 and 1969 and should help provide an example of such ideas and strategies. Also, a workers inquiry questionnaire will be pursued by this publication to gather information to help understand the industries technical and social composition to help us understand its political composition and the possibilities open to us as organised and militant workers.

Factory Councils in Italy:

The factory councils in northern Italy during 1919-1921 and again from 1969 to the early 1970s are prime examples of where job committees can lead. The early examples of factory councils came from the union-controlled body, the internal commissions, which were elected to directly bargain with employers in the early 1900s. These commissions were important to the daily struggle of workers on the shopfloor and grew in militancy during World War I. The socialist movement, tied to the second international, involved future communists. Antonio Gramsci was one such figure, who became a crucial leader of the council movement and an early leader of the Communist Party of Italy.

In his L’Ordine Nuovo journal, Gramsci popularised the internal commissions as a potential source of revolutionary working-class power. He familiarised the workers in Turin with the WWI British shop steward’s movement and argued for the revolutionary potential of the internal commissions. Over the course of 1917 unrest grew over the war in Italy. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the victory of the soviets (workers councils) gave hope to Italian workers. Germany also overthrew the Kaiser at the end of WWI and formed workers councils from November to January 1918-1919.

From October 1919, factory councils sprouted all over Turin from the press of socialist party council communists like Gramsci. These factory councils elected workshop commissars in each department and work group. These were elected by all manual and intellectual workers in the factory and could be removed by the work group or factory assembly at any time if they did not have their confidence. They were to be chosen from unionists only, but were required to speak for all workers, regardless of union membership.

The commissars would work with the unions and keep employers under constant surveillance to employ workers’ control. The factory assembly would elect an executive based on short terms that would run the day-to-day operations of the council. Activities such as spreading regular factory bulletins and socialist newspapers were to take place in break-times. These revolutionary bodies were involved in numerous strikes and general strikes. There were massive general strikes and factory occupations in April 1920 and in September 1920 which during the September struggle spread this movement to factories all over Italy.

The council movement ran into fierce criticism from CGL union officials and socialist party leaders who said it undermined their authority and was far too radical. They undermined and weakened this movement through 1920. A final mass strike and occupation movement took place in April 1921. However, by this time the government and employers were using armed groups of nationalists to kill and attack socialists and their socialist party centres and offices. These groups would come under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who would become Prime Minister in 1922 after his March on Rome. The fascists would by 1927-1928 outlaw the Communist Party of Italy, created in 1921, the Socialist Party and all affiliated and independent trade unions. This would last until 1943 with the dictatorship of Mussolini and the fascists. A good book on this subject is Gwyn A. Williams’ Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Communism in Italy 1911-1921.  

Factories manned by the Red Guards in 1920.

Another important example of factory councils is that of northern Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s. During this period of Italian workers history, workers engaged in militant class struggle against the social democratic and Keynesian status quo. The Italian Communist Party retreated from the factories in the 1950s and moved to court middle-class voters in this period. This left a political space open for a more militant and radical politics. The journal starting to engage with these ideas was called Quaderni Rossi in 1961 which, with key figures like Raniero Panzieri, Romano Alquati, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, started engaging in militant workers inquiry into Italian industries like Fiat the major car manufacturer. These inquiries led to a split in the journal in 1963, with Panzieri remaining with the others creating a newspaper called Classe Operaio from 1964-1967.

These important inquiries into the class composition of Italian industry led to the realisation that a new class subject was emerging out of the younger Southern Italian migrants to the north, the mass worker. This mass worker would engage in mass strikes in the period of 1969-1970 known as Hot Autumn, following the rise of the militant student movement in 1968. These struggles involved rank and file workers committees, coming again from the older internal commissions in Italian industry. The movement used mass assemblies of workers and students to coordinate their struggles. In 1965 there were thousands of workplace committees, somewhat archaic, bureaucratic and controlled from above representing 500, 000 members. Whereas in 1972, there were factory councils in over 4300 factories in northern Italy. These councils represented a million members, and these were controlled from below.

These factory councils and the mass worker assemblies associated with them were leaders of struggle in this period. The factory delegates elected were often from new political groups like Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua who fought for the equalisation of work categories, more wages and less work. These political groups, of which there were many more, fought for improved conditions in the factories and sought to make workers struggles in the factories political. The delegates from these political groups struggled with the leadership in the factory assemblies to gain more shopfloor power for these workers. The movement briefly went into decline in the early 1970s, as the Italian Communist Party did its best to regain control of the factories through its trade unions and decided to channel these struggles into more politically acceptable forms of struggle. This led to the decline of the factory councils as more militant bodies for struggle.

Despite this impasse, new autonomous workers committees were created and led struggles in the early to mid-1970s. The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee in Milan and the Porto Maghera Workers Committee in Venice by the mid-1970s were a good example of these committees. These committees led the beginning of the autonomia political movement. Some of these committees formed an organisation called Senza Tregua which was the journal of this movement. They led struggles regarding the increasing global inflation and the cost of consumer goods, utilities and housing. This in turn fuelled neighbourhood organisations to engage in self-reduction struggles, where working class people on mass refused to pay their consumer, utility and housing bills.

These struggles culminated in the movement of 1977 which questioned the basis of Italian capitalism regarding the unquestioned right of bosses to productivity. The movement was heavily repressed through mass arrests in 1979 after the rise of the terrorist group the Red Brigades undermined and fragmented the movement. This ended in mass layoffs for the factory workers at Fiat and many other companies in 1980. Robert Lumley has a good book on this period called States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. Another good book is by Steve Wright called Storming Heaven: Class Composition And Struggle In Italian Autonomist Marxism.

Turin, May 1974. Mirafiori demonstrations. Photograph by Mauro Raffini.

The building trade unions can learn from these forms of struggle developed in Italian union politics, which are directly relevant to our own struggles. We have a similar system of legalised bargaining over working conditions as represented by the internal commissions. Our system is the Health and Safety Representative system inspired by the UK system after the Robens Report in 1972 and the passing of UK legislation. This was then taken up by Australia in the 1970s by separate states and federally in 1985. Our HSRs have this framework that we operate in and that gives us the power to maintain conditions. The use of the HSR committee system gives the building trades the power to maintain conditions in a difficult industry. However, this legal protection is not enough to make the kinds of changes and forms of struggle that we need to meet the challenges ahead. 

We need to adopt the practice of rank-and-file workers committees that was adopted by Italian militants in the 1960s. These forms of organisation are quite possible under the current system. Indeed, they are, in some ways, easier to put into practice than in the period before the late 1970s, where shop stewards had no legal standing and could be easily dismissed or moved on by anti-union employers to break up shop and job committees. We need to redevelop the old system of independent job committees, under the current model of HSR committees. We must develop a culture of independent meetings of loyal unionist HSRs to go into the safety committee meetings with a united front against the bosses. We must also report these activities at regular site meetings to the members to keep them informed. This is the way forward for construction workers today.

In times where these committees have developed and struggle is at a high mark, we should fight for the formation of these job committees into factory councils as demonstrated in Italy in 1919-1920 and 1969-1972. These are the organisations that have a potential to go beyond the current class struggle into a higher plane and a more advanced form of struggle. It is only through forming factory councils that we can begin to claw back the rights that have been taken away from us by the Australian capitalist class. When enough of these organisations have been formed in a city or town, we can form workers councils representing all industries. The coordination of these kinds of organisations through state and federal councils is the only method we have in the current crisis of capitalism to offer another alternative beyond capitalism. We must fight the current degeneration and authoritarianism of capitalism with our own power, workers power.

The Administration and HSR Councils:

The administration has shown the need for continued militancy on building jobs to maintain our conditions. Without militancy our union would have been crushed by the assault of the builders, the government, the media and the ACTU. The administration seeks to use the Fairwork Commission and the modern trade union registration system to undermine and destroy trade union militancy in our industry. The coercive conditions that our organisers now face, having to argue constantly with a Fairwork appointed administrator, is nothing short of appalling. It is now clear that the ACTU will not defend us and is doing everything it can to destroy us.   

This past year has shown the strength of militant unionism, but it has also shown the challenges we face in maintaining that strength. We are now largely isolated from significant sections of the trade union movement We have many key blue collar unions in our corner. However, the important white collar union leaderships are largely against us. With the possibility of a change of government under Dutton and the Coalition, this is not a good situation for us. We must reconnect and reinvigorate the rank and file of the union movement to remove this threat from workers in this country and the growing global assault on unionism. Therefore, we need new ideas on how to organise the fight back against the union leaderships that turned on our union. 

The path of rank-and-file democracy will have the most positive long-term effect on our union and will strengthen the building trades unions going forward. The most effective form of this democracy is forming strong, independent workers committees like the shop/job committee movement of the 1970s in Australia. These workers committees will need to increase their strength and determination to win better conditions both economically and politically for construction workers. These committees should have the goal of greater independence for the rank-and-file. They should also fight for the creation of the previously mentioned factory councils, which would gradually replace the workers committees based on existing HSR structures.

These factory councils would then develop into a social movement which would then need to form city-wide workers councils to coordinate and grow the movement. These workers councils would grow this movement beyond the building trades, representing all workers in unionised industries. The growth of both factory and workers councils is essential to deal with the growing authoritarianism since 2008-2016 of this increasingly stagnant and declining capitalism.

Without the CFMEU, ETU, Plumbers and the AMWU, the current industry will become increasingly dangerous and predatory. The need for unity and democracy in the coming struggles is essential and our unions are particularly suited to deal with the growth of authoritarianism in Australia and globally. We need new ideas in this period, and the growth of democracy in the rank-and-file is the surest way to maintain and develop strong and militant unions in the building industry. Without this democratic approach our unions face a dire future of declining conditions and membership in the face of either Albanese or Dutton.     

Local Struggles:

Cross River Rail:

Steve Amies, 11/11/24

I’m a CFMEU delegate and safety representative for the Cross River Rail project at Albert Street. I’ve been here for about a year now and I’ve witnessed first-hand this builder, CPB, taking advantage of the current administration that our union is under. We have been on protected action for about 3 months. Our EBA expired over a year ago and we’ve done everything as per the anti-worker rules the Fair Work Commission. These rules are used to dictate how we can bargain for a new deal annually that covers heat policy and fairness for all workers on the project. We have been on strike and back to work a few times to try to win our EBA.

As soon as the administration was announced this builder has used the administration to its advantage. For example, leading up to this time we have been to many bargaining meetings with CPB to negotiate a new agreement. We were starting to get somewhere and a draft proposal of an EBA was given to Jade, the assistant state secretary. This proposal of an EBA was 90% done. There were a few things to tweak but we could certainly work with it. As soon as administration had started, the company, CPB, backflipped on this and went right back to nothing new except a tiny pay rise. They put this vote out to their workers twice and both times it was voted down by the CPB workers. They also reported our civil organisers to the Fair Work Commission for nothing more than being effective. The administration then sidelined these organisers for a period, even though there were no allegations against them.

Our site suffered as these organisers were very involved in this project and not having them come to site when we needed them gave the bosses confidence as we watched conditions around site worsen. Eventually these organisers returned, as there was no charges or allegations. The most recent time, one of our organisers was blocked from entering site, leading up to one of our EBA votes. The organiser wanted to catch up with members and explain the reason a strong no vote was needed. CPB blocked his access to site even though he had all the right permits. This was very upsetting for a lot of our CPB members as we witnessed the whole incident at the gate to the job. With only an administrator leading our union, decisions are being made that leave our members worse off. Deciding that organisers cannot enter on to a job to protect workers when the workers need them, will disadvantage members. We have witnessed this first-hand here on this inner-city project.

International Struggles:

South Korea:

The repressive regime of the President of South Korea, Yoon Suk-yeol has fallen since December 3^rd, 2024, after the President declared martial law and tried to initiate a coup in South Korea. This comes after many attempts to repress trade unions in South Korea. In 2021 the Korean government attacked construction workers by creating a taskforce to crackdown on the construction unions. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions declared an indefinite general strike and the intense popular pressure has led to the impeachment of the President.

Greece: 

On November 20^th, 2024, a general strike was waged in Greece. The major public and private sector unions were involved as construction workers, doctors, teachers and transport workers went on strike. Ships remained docked and rail and bus services were affected in the mass show of solidarity. A mass demonstration took place in Athens with many thousands taking to the streets. The strike was over the high inflation in prices outstripping wages and pensions. The constant increase in prices has reduced purchasing power by up to 50 percent. This comes as Greece is still recovering from the 2008-2018 debt crisis. The high cost of living in Greece is compounding these problems.

What should we do now?

How do we change our current situation? We must revive the tradition of rank-and-file organisation from the 1920s to the 1970s. We must form job/shop committees. These committees can be formed involving every union, HSR and delegate on our job sites.

They are elected annually, subject to recall and are responsible to regular site mass meetings. These should be formed within existing union HSRs and meet independently of management.

How do we do this?

• Form a core group of five trusted workers at your site
• Create a bulletin to push for a job or shop committee
• Call and fight for a lunch hour meeting to discuss this with your fellow workers
• Form a job or shop committee based on existing HSRs
• Take direct action to improve the job or shop committees bargaining power

FORM THOSE JOB COMMITTEES!

Contact:

Email: wkpr1969@proton.me

Website: https://whichsideareyouon.link

Thank you to the editors of https://classandcapital.substack.com/ for allowing me to adapt their renewable industry questionnaire for the Brisbane construction industry. Make sure to check out their project and substack for more on workers inquiry.

Here is a questionnaire for the Brisbane construction industry. It is the first step in understanding the technical and social class composition of our industry. This process will help us come to the political composition of our industry and the broader working class. This is essential to understanding what the best course of action is and the political and social possibilities of the current moment.

Here is a link to the questionnaire file:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sjePadkR3K02Wii1Gn1_AC1bJYeb3ZW9

https://whichsideareyouon.link

Please answer as many questions as you can and send the answers to the following email: wkpr1969@proton.me

1.   What sector of construction do you work in? (ie commercial, civil, residential)
2.   What is your job? (tradesman, labourer etc)
3.   How long have you worked in the industry?
4.   How old are you? Where are you from?
5.   What did you do before your current job?
6.   Have you worked for other companies in the industry?
7.   Are you directly employed? Or do you work through an agency or subcontractor?
8.   How many people do you work with?
9.   What are the ratios of labourer-apprentice-qualified tradie at your company?
10.    What does your normal work day look like?
11.     How do you feel about your work? Is it rewarding, fun, stressful, long, repetitive or interesting?
12.   Do you find your job meaningful? What do you like/dislike about it?
13.   Does your job provide a good quality of life? Why or why not?
14.   Do you think your pay and conditions are fair?
15.   Does your company provide all the tools and materials you need to do the job?
16.   Are there other things your company should provide but doesn’t? Do you cover them yourself? For example do you use your own car, pay for fuel out of pocket, use your own mobile phones etc.
17.   How much does your job require digital administration? Do you do this on your own devices or company provided ones? Such as a laptop, ipad, or phone. Do you find yourself doing this work ‘out of hours’?
18.  Do you think your company makes much profit? Is that reflected in your pay and conditions?
19.   Do conflicts ever come up at work? Do you and your colleagues talk about them? How are they resolved?
20.   What does the management chain at your work look like?
21.   Who deals with health and safety in your workplace?
22.   Are you a union member?
23.   Do you worry about your trade being protected? Does automation or the use of unskilled labour mean less hours or a lower quality of work?
24.   Does your company provide education and training?
25.   Have you gained any qualifications from working in Construction?
26.   Do you think you’ve gained skills that will translate into other industries?
27.   Do you see yourself continuing in your role for a long time?
28.   Have you worked interstate since working in the construction sector? Did you notice anything significantly different?
29.   How does working in construction compare to say, logistics, or at the Port of Brisbane?
30.   Do you think there are ways your job could be done more efficiently?
31.   Do you think the way the industry is organised makes sense? What needs to be invested in? What needs to change?
32. How does the current cost of living crisis impact on your financial situation?
33. Do you rent or own your home? How does your rent or mortgage repayments impact on your financial situation?
34.   OPTIONAL: If you’re comfortable with us using your name or any other personal details about where you work feel free to enter them here.
35.   OPTIONAL: Please leave any other feedback or thoughts!

 

Here is a rank and file newsletter that aims to increase the coordination and militancy in the construction industry in Brisbane. It is being handed out to interested comrades and union members in the construction industry. Through such publications, we can conduct workers inquiries into the state of the industry and workers perspectives of their own situation. This will help increase workers power and self-organisation towards class struggle.

Editorial:
The current state of the Brisbane construction industry is one of crisis due to the decision of the failing Albanese government to attack the CFMEU. This attack is the culmination of economic and political changes in Australia as the stagnation of the Australian economy, inflation, interest rate rises, the housing crisis and ineffective moves to address these problems continue to eat into workers’ incomes.

The Albanese government has failed to address its housing and infrastructure policies and has decided that it will attack the CFMEU to gain political capital leading into the next election and assure procurement for government construction projects. This latest betrayal comes after 40 years of neoliberal government, starting under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments during the Accord process.

Since 2008 this system went into crisis with the return of the mixed economy, limited protectionism and expanded global competition. The modification of the system because of the growing conflict with China by 2016 has created a more authoritarian form of government. We are seeing what this may look like in Australia with this ALP government and ACTU attack on the militant side of the labour movement.

The outlook for the economy shows stagnant, limited and uneven wage growth, declining profits and growing unemployment. There is a growing risk of a recession in Australia, partly due to inflation and rate rises with a working class that is struggling to makes ends meet already. A recession would hit the construction industry along with the rest of the economy and further squeeze an already increasingly impoverished working class. The response of the political class to these problems is to blame the militant side of the labour movement for these structural problems which have resulted in a media feeding frenzy from the bourgeois press.

What is to be done in this situation from a working-class point of view? We must understand the current conditions of our economic and political decline through a process called workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry is the study of the technical, social and political composition of the working class and its economic conditions under capitalism. It is through studying these conditions that we can more effectively struggle.

We must do this through the use of research, questionaries and interviews with rank-and-file delegates, HSRs and members in our industry on the conditions of struggle within it. To achieve this, this publication calls on the workers of the Brisbane construction industry to answer a questionnaire regarding their working, living and organising conditions and to send responses to the email address at the end of this bulletin when this becomes available on our website. This process focuses on workers and radical rank-and-file intellectuals to work together to create new forms of knowledge that will assist in the emancipation of the working class. By engaging in co-research as Romano Alquati would have put it, a more accurate picture of the political composition of the working class in the Brisbane construction industry becomes clear. Given the relentless attacks on the CFMEU and militant workers in general by the political class of Australia, we must find new ways of understanding our industry and the conditions which we face.

This publication is a tool to start this process of class recomposition in Brisbane and we hope that it can contribute to a new cycle of struggles in Brisbane and eventually to other parts of the country. We are pushing in this process for a new form of organisation in Brisbane’s workplaces. In Italy in the 1970s workers formed workers political organisations like ‘Sengua Tregua’ and the radical Porto Marghera workers committee and assembly. These organisations pushed for a more radical approach to workplace safety, wages, hours and other employment conditions. By practising more effective class struggle on the shopfloor, these workers committees were able to achieve political interventions in the territories in which they lived. They did this through a campaign of direct action in the community through self-reduction struggles, where workers collectively refused to pay inflated prices for services like utilities, petrol, rents or groceries.

We need this kind of organisation and to coordinate our activities through rank-and-file industry networks. If we can do this successfully, then we can engage in community organising in working class neighbourhoods and student organising at Tafes and Universities. By building a new and more grounded workers movement, we can better achieve the conditions that we want and fight to achieve the necessary goal of all working-class people. We must fight for the emancipation of the working class by the workers themselves. This is the only way to gain our freedom to live decent lives.

Workers Inquiry Overview Article part 1:

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the positions of capital, the state and the union movement in regards to our industry. This is in preparation for conducting workers inquiry through interviews and an anonymous questionnaire on the state of construction in the Brisbane area. By engaging in this inquiry, we can come to a better understanding of what to do in the present moment. There are 17,447 construction businesses in Brisbane, with these businesses being 12.8 % of the companies operating in the city of Brisbane.^[1]

Construction workers in Brisbane are concentrated in the inner-city suburbs, the southwest industrial corridor, the Port of Brisbane industrial corridor and the Brisbane Airport industrial corridor with local concentrations of thousands of workers in these areas.^[2] There are 68, 000 construction workers in this city, making up 7.1 % of all the workers in Brisbane; however, this is down from 8 % in 2017.^[3]

The construction industry made $8.847.3 billion in profit and was 7 % of the total industries in Brisbane in the year 2022, but this was down from 9.3 % and $10.465.7 billion in 2017.^[4] These changes were in large part a result of the pandemic and its after-effects on production in general. The position of capital is one of rising costs as a result of the pandemic’s economic effects on inflation and the general economic environment. According to the Master Builders Queensland, the industry in 2023 faced interest rate hikes, increasing costs and a change in regulations such as the National Construction Code by the federal government.

The increasing costs of materials was going to slow, but instead continued to rise. Small density housing was the most effected, with medium to high density housing to see steady growth along with transport and recreational projects in preparation for the 2032 Olympic Games. Only industrial construction would see an easing off in activity after strong growth.^[5]

The training organisation Construction Skills Queensland maintains in its 2022/2023 Outlook that the pandemic’s effect on the industry had begun to lessen but its effects continued, and the industry saw an increase in state government expenditure of $15.5 billion in the state budget for 2022/2023 in infrastructure projects. However, with the shortage of workers faced by capital, this has led to delays and bottlenecks in production even as the number of apprentices being trained also has grown.^[6] The effects of the pandemic in recent years have created new problems for capital as it struggles to maintain its position. Capital is struggling to maintain the flow of surplus value/profit and to maintain productivity with a smaller number of workers ready to replace those employed in the industry.

The position of the state at present is to maintain this flow of surplus value through government spending on infrastructure to increase the profitability of Queensland industry. The Brisbane City Council is constructing the Brisbane Metro and several other major infrastructure developments with industry and often in partnership with the Queensland State Government.^[7] The Queensland government’s State Infrastructure Strategy of 2022 states that it intends to manage the supply problems of the pandemic through investment in renewable energy projects: the 2032 Olympic Games projects in Brisbane, transport projects to the regions to connect these regions to capital and investment in public services and transport in South-East Queensland to ensure the social reproduction (workers engaged in unproductive forms of labour) of workers who produce surplus value.^[8]

The federal government under Anthony Albanese and the ALP has pledged to maintain this initiative on the federal level, while cutting some projects it saw as unsustainable. It has announced that in November 2023 the government would provide key funding for road and rail corridors across the country.^[9] This strategy relies on the boosting of fixed capital – such as machines and infrastructure – that circulates for longer than a year, as opposed to circulating capital, which regularly circulates in a much quicker production cycle.^[10]

The federal government is maintaining the current strategy to boost falling productivity, which fell by 3.7 % over 2022-23, along with declining investment in the Australian economy. This strategy is designed to maintain the system by making construction workers in particular more productive of surplus value. By working us harder and faster, capital and the state can increase its profits and the state its share of these profits through taxation.^[11]  

The Queensland Council of Unions maintains that the current economic problems that have led to rate rises by the Reserve Bank of Australia are unfair, put workers at a disadvantage and increase inequality. This is all true. However, by maintaining the old line of ‘a fair days work for a fair day’s pay’, they miss the point.^[12] The rate rises that have directly affected our industry are a means for capital to move costs onto workers, to increase surplus value and profit and to further erode the small degree of power workers have gained through the labour shortage.

This is not about big business being unfair to workers. This system is based on the exploitation of the working class through workers producing more value than they in turn receive back from their employer. This is because the organic composition of capital includes the machines, tools and materials or the constant capital as opposed to the variable capital, the workers themselves, with everything extra being surplus value, measured through surplus labour-time, as shown by Karl Marx in ‘Capital’ Volume 1-3. When the commodity is sold on the market, however, it is transformed into profit which is only the total capital advanced, and the extra money made by the capitalist.^[13]

This system cannot be made to be fair for workers. It is corrupt and must be smashed by the organised power of the working class through its own rank and file organisations. A more effective strategy would be to mobilise the power of HSRs in citywide councils every six months. These HSR councils would then engage in struggle, win back and, eventually, through dual power with the state, abolish the wage system entirely. However, the QCU and most trade union officials would never allow this because it would threaten many of their positions of power.

These HSR councils must be independent organisations of the rank and file to push for workers’ power on the shopfloor and in society in general. The CFMEU is holding HSR meetings every two months, and this is excellent. However, we should broaden these to the other unions in the industry and push for broader HSR organisation in Brisbane outside the QCU’s control. The CFMEU’s current civil construction campaign and recent Cross River Rail strike show the way forward in dealing with the Queensland Master Builders and the government’s strategy of building up infrastructure and fixed capital. We must fight them.

Through a process of workers’ inquiry, we can assess the technical composition of capital in our industry. This is the way capitalists organise production and our role within this process. Also, through this process we can assess the social composition of capital, or how our lives outside of work affect this organisation. By engaging in interviews and anonymous questionnaires, we can come to the political composition of the working class and better understand the best ways to self-organise our struggle in our own interests. This is the task we set ourselves in the coming period.

Economic Nationalism and the Authoritarian State:

Neoliberalism has been dying since the 2008 crisis. The crisis and breakdown of neoliberalism and the rise of austerity led to competition with China in the mid-2010s. This further led to changes in the opinion of the US political class away from neoliberalism, because the US was losing control of the global economy.^[14]

This was further pushed by the undermining by Trump of the WTO and IMF as adjudicators of the international trade system. These events and the trade wars with China have created a breakdown of neoliberalism with the rise of authoritarian leaders around the world. This has contributed to a return to economic nationalism and the use of key tariffs, subsidies and incentives to extend and expand the capitalist system internationally for each nation and to compete with other countries.^[15]

At the same time each nation has used this power to grow the influence of the national bourgeoisie and to simultaneously repress the working class through the growth of the authority of the state. The state is also more ready to intervene in the economy to enhance each country’s competitiveness. This had led to harsher and more authoritarian measures to control the working class through surveillance, policing and direct repression. The growth in war production and proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza is an example of the increase in militarism, imperialism and tension in the international system as many nations prepare for war.^[16]

Though neoliberalism is dead, a more authoritarian form of politics is replacing it using fascist culture wars to divide and repress oppressed minorities and the broader working class. Labor in Australia is copying Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (2022) with the Future Made in Australia plan in the 2024 federal budget. This aims to improve the competitiveness of private industry to move towards more green technologies and manufacturing in Australia.^[17]

This strategy, however, means that the traditional role of boosting social reproduction spending in health and education and the often private contractors who profit off this spending is reduced. This is while inflation remains higher and cost of living is a constant issue for workers who are being squeezed by historically low wages and this high inflation.^[18]

This leads to the question of what to do politically if the economic system known as neoliberalism has changed. The end of neoliberalism means the communist movement must reframe its analysis to meet the new conditions of capital accumulation with our power, worker’s power. To do this we must engage is general and then specific forms of workers inquiry to determine what capital is doing and what we must do to fight capital politically.

For A Rank and File Industrial Unionism:

In response to the attacks from the ALP bureaucracy and the ACTU under Sally McManus, we must embrace a new strategy. We need to take the lead in refocussing the union movement on rank-and-file unionism. As rank-and-file unionists we have more power than our leadership, who are legally and judicially hamstrung by the laws introduced under neoliberalism and the ALP and Liberal governments of the 1980s onwards.

We are not as controlled by these laws. There are risks, but as the old saying goes, ‘if you don’t fight you lose’. Our leadership simply does not have the leverage they once had in the 1970s. It is up to the rank-and-file workers in our industry to rebuild this power in the interests of our class. To do this, we need to fight for recreation of job committees in the construction and wharf labouring industries.

We must also fight for the recreation of shop committees in other industries where these committees used to exist in the 1970s. These committees should be formed of all unionists on the job as HSRs. These job representatives would meet an hour or two before the existing Health and Safety Representatives Committee meets to go into such meetings with a plan of action against the bosses. These job/shop committees would then report back to a mass meeting on the job every month or two to have its decisions ratified by the members.

In support of these committees, we must create independent workers councils based on every city and town with union members. These workers councils would be made up of HSRs from each HSRs committee in the city. The goal of these committees and councils is to push for direct action, industrial unionism and job/shop committees across Australia. The current state of the union movement is dire as the ACTU actively collaborates with the ALP in breaking up the CFMEU by further pushing for legislation to push the manufacturing division out of the union.

With such moves only benefiting the capitalist class and not our class, the working class, a new strategy is needed under an increasingly authoritarian and economically nationalist paradigm. The response to the attempts by the ALP and the ACTU to once again crush militant unionism in Australia must be to rebuild the labour movement from below. Construction workers are in the forefront of this struggle and we must take the lead and give our leadership the increased leverage needed to properly improve wages, hours and conditions.

However, it must be us, the rank and file, who do this to create the space for a more militant unionism. Without the rank and file taking the lead, we risk becoming isolated and exposed, just like the BLF in the 1980s, to attack from both the capitalist class and our own trade union bureaucracy in the form of the ACTU. We must face this latest attack with something that has been building for decades.

The growing poverty and resentment of workers in Australia and across the world against being so utterly under the capitalist thumb is reaching a crisis point. The capitalist class should be careful of repeating the mistakes of the Ancient Regime of Louis the 16^th of France or those of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. This society is a powder keg ready to explode.

Struggles Abroad:

Construction and metal workers join national strike in Italy after five killed in horrific workplace accident

22 February 2024

Workers throughout the construction and metal sectors in Italy joined a national strike on Wednesday, outraged by the death of five workers killed in a collapse at a construction site in Florence. The CGIL and UIL unions called for a strike in response, a two-hour stoppage.

According to ANSA, more than 60 percent of construction workers in many regions joined the stoppage. There was clearly widespread outrage that fatal workplace accidents are extremely common in Italy, which had the second-highest number of workplace deaths in the EU in 2021, according to Reuters. Highlighting the ongoing massacre, a worker was killed at a Stellantis factory in Campania only the day after the strike.

Construction workers in Panama conduct protest strike

25 March 2024

In response to the burning of its union building, the freezing of its bank account and spurious court actions against the union of constructions workers, SUNTRACS, Panamanian construction workers carried out a 24-hour protest strike on Tuesday, March 19.

Strikers carried out protest marches in Panama City and rallied at the Labor ministry. A SUNTRACS spokesperson declared that the union plans to continue the fight through every mean at its disposal to win this struggle and called for the support of all Panamanian workers.

---

Workers Inquiry Overview Article part 1:

[1] .id informed decisions, City of Brisbane: Businesses by industry, https://economy.id.com.au/brisbane/number-of-businesses-by-industry

[2] .id informed decisions, City of Brisbane: Employment locations – Construction, https://economy.id.com.au/brisbane/employment-locations?Indkey=23005

[3] .id informed decisions, City of Brisbane: Employment by industry (Total), https://economy.id.com.au/brisbane/employment-by-industry

[4] .id informed decisions, City of Brisbane: Value added, https://economy.id.com.au/brisbane/value-add-by-industry

[5] Master Builders Queensland, Building Industry Outlook, https://www.mbqld.com.au/news-and-publications/reports-and-statistics/outlook-and-forecasts

[6] Construction Skills Queensland, Industry Outlook: For Queensland’s Construction Industry, https://www.csq.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/CSQ_Industry_Outlook_2022-23.pdf

[7] Brisbane City Council, Brisbane Metro major infrastructure, https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/traffic-and-transport/public-transport/brisbane-metro/brisbane-metro-major-infrastructure; Brisbane City Council, Local government infrastructure plan (LGIP) 2016-2026, https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-and-building/planning-guidelines-and-tools/local-government-infrastructure-plan

[8] Queensland Government, State Infrastructure Strategy 2022, https://www.statedevelopment.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/72103/state-infrastructure-strategy-2022.pdf

[9] Hon Catherine King MP: Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, 

Nation-building infrastructure for a better Australia, 16 November 2023,  https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/c-king/media-release/nation-building-infrastructure-better-australia

[10] Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume II, London: Penguin Books, 1990: 268-305.

[11] Peter Hannam, Australian workers’ productivity drops 3.7% as employment surges and investment slows, 1 March 2024, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/01/australian-workers-productivity-drops-37-as-employment-surges-and-investment-slows

[12] Queensland Unions, RBA shake up is welcome news, 20 April 2023, https://blog.qldunions.com/media/rba-shake-up-is-welcome-news; Queensland Unions, RBA slammed for pushing rates ‘too far’, 27 July 2023, https://blog.qldunions.com/media/rba-slammed-for-pushing-rates-too-far

[13] Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volumes I,II,III, London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Economic Nationalism and the Authoritarian State:

[14] Alfredo Saad-Filho, https://www.ppesydney.net/the-rise-of-nationalist-authoritarianism-and-the-crisis-of-neoliberalism/, November 2, 2018.

[15] Adam Tooze, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/02/covid-and-the-crisis-of-neoliberalism, September 2, 2021; James Meadway, https://novaramedia.com/2021/06/29/neoliberalism-is-dead-and-something-even-worse-is-taking-its-place/, June 29 2021.

[16]  James Meadway, https://novaramedia.com/2024/03/27/labour-will-end-neoliberalism-just-not-in-a-good-way/, March 27 2024; Initiative group Socialism or Barbarism / April 2024 – Angry Workers Collective translation, https://www.angryworkers.org/2024/05/03/socialism-or-barbarism-fifteen-theses-for-a-new-anti-imperialism/, May 3 2024; Boulogne-sur-mer, 14/04/2024 – Angry Workers Collective translation, https://www.angryworkers.org/2024/05/13/macrons-war-economy-or-producing-to-the-sound-of-cannons-%ef%bf%bc/, May 13 2024. 

[17] Australian Government, The Budget 2024-2025, https://budget.gov.au/content/03-future-made.htm.

[18] Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/federal-budget-2024-25-huge-disappointment-for-gps, May 14 2024; Australian Education Union – Federal, https://www.aeufederal.org.au/news-media/media-releases/2024/may/budget-fails-deliver-public-schools, May 14 2024.

What should we do now?

How do we change our current situation? We must revive the tradition of rank-and-file organisation from the 1920s to the 1970s. We must form job/shop committees. These committees can be formed involving every union, HSR and delegate on our job sites.

They are elected annually, subject to recall and are responsible to regular site mass meetings. These should be formed within existing union HSRs and meet independently of management.

How do we do this?

• Form a core group of five trusted workers at your site
• Create a bulletin to push for a job or shop committee
• Call and fight for a lunch hour meeting to discuss this with your fellow workers
• Form a job or shop committee based on existing HSRs
• Take direct action to improve the job or shop committees bargaining power

FORM THOSE JOB COMMITTEES!

Contact:

Email: wkpr1969@proton.me

Website: https://whichsideareyouon.link

Here is a rank and file newsletter that aims to increase the coordination and militancy in the construction industry in Brisbane. It is being handed out to interested comrades and union members in the construction industry. Through such publications, we can conduct workers inquiries into the state of the industry and workers perspectives of their own situation. This will help increase workers power and self-organisation towards class struggle.

Editorial:

The current moment in our industry in Queensland looks good. We are making significant gains in unionisation, many new EBAs have been signed and we look forward to the buoyant market in construction in the coming years. With the current rate of success, we are facing good times ahead.

The present moment outside our industry and its more unionised sections looks less bright. The working class of Australia in most industries is still in retreat, highly precarious and under constant surveillance at work. Even in our industry, labourers and traffic controllers face both the builders and our mostly labour hire employers.

With the limitations of the current environment and the heavy toll that work takes on all of us, what can we do more broadly, and, particularly in our industry, to change this?

We can engage in resistance to the rule of capital on our lives through understanding our current conditions and, in doing this, we can find a way forward through workers inquiry and the study of class composition.

What is workers inquiry? It is the use of what Romano Alquati called co-research, where rank and file workers and socialist/communist militants work together to understand the conditions we face through surveys and interviews with ordinary workers to come to conclusions about what to do in the current moment.

Class composition studies, as used by Notes From Below and Angry Workers, use this information to look at the technical composition of work, how work is organised, the social composition of workers lives, how we are housed, relate to each other in terms of race, gender, sexuality and immigration status and, through looking into this, we come to understand the political composition of the class or how we can fight against the grinding world of work.

This relates to our industry in the sense that we are an advanced section of our class. We have a greater power to use our strength to cause an increased rupture in Australian society among the working class in Australia and, hopefully, this will spread to neighbouring countries. We can begin to ask questions that have relevance for our industry and, more broadly, to other less organised sections of the Australian working class.

The time for such work is now. We must use this moment of strength to raise up the weaker sections of our class. In doing this, we can increase the power of workers on the shopfloor not just in our industry but across the board. This can lead us to a new cycle of struggles like those of the 1960s and 1970s.

The current moment is one of precariousness for our class, as inflation related to the two wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the supply chain disruptions of Covid 19 and the general stalling of productivity now and over the last 40 years in Australia and globally is biting working class budgets.

This economic decline and the threat of ecological collapse from climate change and nuclear war are heavy burdens to bear for our collective future. The time is rapidly approaching when the costs of this crisis will have to continue to be borne by workers or by the capitalist class instead. In the coming decades this will be an immense struggle which, most unions and social democratic parties are not prepared for. They are a part of this system and are governed on the other hand by industrial relations laws and the control of concentrated capital on the other.

This is especially true of the ALP. Without capital from wealthy donors, the ALP cannot win re-election. The power of international capital has always controlled the destiny of Australia from the British Empire, to the American Empire and to the Empire of global capital as described by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. With these challenges, we must take our lives into our own hands and fight back against the violence of capitalism and the rule of the factory over every aspect of our lives.

The current moment also requires us to engage in rank-and-file organisation based on our industries and our local areas. By creating industrial rank-and-file net-works in a localised way, we can engage in this important work and come to solutions to the problems in our industry and more broadly. We could call this rank and file network of all the unions and militants in our industry Construction Workers Unit-ed, and this network would start to work towards conducting workers inquiries, the study of class composition and to the increased effectiveness of union coordination in our industry on a rank and file level.

We must seize this opportunity to recompose all that has been lost since the 1970s and the Accord of the 1980s and to make workers struggles relevant and to defeat the current onslaught of capital against workers. Our goals could be that Construction Workers Unit-ed aims to create more coordination, greater democracy and a more radical approach to unionism with this present opportunity.

The Need for Job Committees Today:

The current system of joint safety committees has been useful in defending conditions so far in the construction industry. However, to develop further job control, we need a different form if organisation. From the 1930s to the 1970s, job committees existed in the construction industry along with, eventually after 1962, safety committees.

We need job committees today. We need job compittees based on every trade, union and section to be elected and to sit on the committee as existing HSRs from each trade on union jobs. With a structure such as this, we can more effectively push for better wages, hours and conditions on job sites.

This idea comes from the shop committee movement in Australia from the 1920s to the 1970s and the construction industry equivalent, the job committees. The shop committee movement was a creation of the highly unionised and complex workplaces like the railway workshops in NSW in the 1920s with many different shops, departments and unions being involved. These shop committees spread to the metal working industry, the electricity industry, the Naval Dockyards, the Meatworks and the construction industries. They existed until the 1950s and went into a temporary decline.

In the 1960s, these industries were exceeded in economic importance by the metal engineering, construction, car manufacturing, electricity generation, oil refining and chemical production industries. In many places area committees existed from the 1940s to the 1970s which coordinated the shop committees in a given local area.

The construction industry was no different to these other industries and had its own equivalent, the job committees. These committees were formed in the 1930s and became active, along with many other industries, in the Second World War. The defence projects were a key part of this struggle for the job committees in this period.

The post war period and the rise of the Building Workers Industrial Union, led to struggles to improve conditions from 1945-1950 with the builders through job committees and the holding of lunch hour job meetings at job after job in the industry to win better conditions and to win union campaigns.

This was challenged by the ALP groups from the right wing of the Labor Party. However, the BWIU and the industry withheld their assault on militant unionism, though they began to become more defensive. The mid to late 1950s was concentrated on the struggle against the penal provisions of the Arbitration Act which gave huge fines to unionists who conducted direct action.

The growing radical-ism of union opposition to the Vietnam War, conscription and the growing opposition of young people to the alienation of capitalist society led to a new wave of radicalism through the workers control movement. The BWIU, having been threatened with deregistration in the late 1950s began to become more conservative. However, since the 1950s in Victoria the BLF had been growing in militancy and by the late 1950s in NSW the leadership was won by Communist Party of Australia militants.

The Builders Labourers Federation was becoming increasingly radical and dedicated to the struggle to improve conditions on the new and dangerous high rise construction projects. The NSW BLF in particular had cast off the corrupt leadership of the branch which was highly undemocratic.

Over the 1960s, these new leaders rebuilt the branch so that in the late 1960s and early 1970s the radical rank-and-file and leadership of the BLF would engage in militant strikes and radical environmental action as a part of the broader workers control movement. The militant strikes, direct democracy in the union and term limits on officials and organisers challenged the existing trade union officials and threatened the old communist union leaders.

The Green Bans of the early 1970s were an example of bans on environmentally and socially irresponsible building projects, backed by mass meetings from local resident action groups. The leadership in NSW was then sacked in 1974 and black-listed by the rival Victorian BLF branch leader, Norm Gallagher.

Throughout this radical period of rank and file action, the job committees and safety committees were a key part of this structure on the job in the industry. These job committees were backed up by regular site meetings where workers would increase the degree of workers’ control on construction jobs by forcing the election of leading hands and foremen on the builders.

The safety committees were formed after 1962 and worked closely with the job committees to achieve shopfloor control. Without job control being established and continued by the job committees, safety committees and site meetings, the militancy of this period would not have been possible.

We need to re-organise job committees in the industry to increase coordination between the different unions and to reinvigorate the rank and file militancy from this period. This current moment of opportunity requires that we increase our organisation on the shop-floor and create job committees on every construction project with a union presence. This is essential to increase our power on the job to push for dominance over the builders and 100 percent unionism in the industry.

We must also build these job committees as independent struggle and political committees. These committees must begin to make workers decrees like the Magneti Marelli Workers Committee and the Senza Tregua movement in Italy in the 1970s. They will build workers’ power through independent struggle and political action with the broader working class movement. Without doing this, we risk missing this opportunity to increase our ability to win better conditions for construction workers and building a mass movement for workers’ power among the broader working class.

WE MUST SEIZE THIS MOMENT! FORM JOB COMMITTEES!

Recent Local Actions:

Rally Against the Fairwork Ombudsman 5th April 2023:

The rally was well attended with 20, 000 members present. The subject of the rally was that the ABCC commissioners had mostly been given new jobs at the Fair-work Ombudsman. Three quarters of the commissioners got jobs at the new organisation two levels up in the same building. The Building Trades Group were all present and sent representatives or their state secretaries.

These unions were mostly from the CFMEU and with lesser numbers the ETU, Plumbers Union and the AMWU. The AMWU was more moderate than the other unions but was still supportive of the rally and its objective. Most of the members from the EBA jobs walked off the job from all over Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Ipswich, attending the rally by walking from their jobs’ smaller rallies or by bus. The rally was held in every state in the country.

The workers walked with police escort from Queen’s Park to Felix Street with chants and plenty of spirit. The workers got to the building with the Senators from the Federal Albanese ALP government.

When the workers got to the glass facade and doors, they began to bang on the glass in high spirits. The glass on the door shattered probably by accident. Not long after this, the organisers helped move the workers away from the doors and the police moved in to the front of the doors. Apart from this minor damage, the rally was spirited and fun.

The ABC and other media outlets framed the protest about the glass door being broken and mostly ignored the message of the rally which was then picked up by various other news outlets. The rally was a positive experience for the workers present and allowed many comrades who haven’t seen each other for some time to catch up in the park, during and after the rally.

Despite the negative media attention, the rally was a fun and positive experience for the vast majority of those who attended. The fact that the media immediately went into attack mode shows the fear that mass industrial action and worker protest has on the middle classes and the intelligentsia in particular who framed the rally as in Brisbane being down to union thugs and not an important protest from the workers movement.

The rally showed the pent up anger and resentment that the Coalition governments have spent 10 years trying to destroy. The fear of media and political reprisal of the construction unions as a result of the minor damage reduced the effectiveness of the rally. If struggle was at a higher level, then this event could not have been so easily forgotten by the middle classes and ignored by the political class. Nevertheless, the protest sent a message to the bourgeois and the political class that, along with the NSW strike wave, workers protests and mass strikes are back.

Struggles Abroad:

South Korean construction workers protest heat-related deaths

4 August 2023

The following are sourced from wsws.org

A group of Korean Construction Workers Union members protested outside the Yongsan Presidential Office in Seoul on Wednesday demanding safety measures for construction workers during the ongoing heatwave. The protest was in response to the high number of heat-related deaths in the construction industry.

Government data collected between 2016 and 2021 shows that 20 out of 29 heat-related deaths occurred in the construction industry. There were five deaths in July last year alone.

A recent union survey of 3,200 construction workers resulted in 81 percent saying they were working without breaks during the recent heat wave and more than half replied they had seen a co-worker faint or have had symptoms of heat-related illness.

On Tuesday, the government raised the heat wave warning level to “severe,” the highest in its four-tier system. According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, at least 17 people across the nation died in connection with the heat wave over the weekend.

The union has allowed this crisis to continue for years. The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which requires employers to implement safety measures for people who work at high temperature sites, does not include construction workers.

India: Tamil Nadu construction workers hold state-wide protest for improved benefits

23 June 2023

CWFI is demanding an increased role for the trade union within the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board. It wants a system where trade union representatives approve all petitions for welfare benefits and for the union to be given the right to sanction membership certificates of construction workers to the Board. Two million workers are registered in the welfare board which has an accumulated fund of 41.5 billion rupees.

What should we do now?

How do we change our current situation? We must revive the tradition of rank and file organisation that was common in highly unionised industries from the 1920s to the 1970s. We must form job committees. What are job committees? These committees can be formed involving every union, section or trade in our industry.

They are elected annually, subject to recall and are responsible to regular site mass meetings. These should be formed within existing union HSRs and meet independently of management. They must undertake direct action on the shopfloor to achieve better union conditions for the whole job. This can be done through lunch hour meetings, stoppages or go slow actions to improve our committees’ bargaining power.

How do we do this?

• Form a core group of five trusted workers at your site
• Create a bulletin to push for a job committee
• Call and fight for a lunch hour meeting to discuss this with your fellow workers
• Elect a job committee based on every section, shift and trade
• Take direct action to improve the job committees bargaining power

FORM THOSE JOB COMMITTEES!

Contact:

Email: wkpr1969@proton.me

Website: https://whichsideareyouon.link

The rally was well attended with 10, 000 members present. The subject of the rally was that the ABCC commissioners had mostly been given new jobs at the Fair Work Ombudsman. Three quarters of the commissioners got jobs at the new organisation two levels up in the same building. The Building Trades Group were all present and sent representatives or their state secretaries. These unions were mostly from the CFMEU and with lesser numbers the ETU, Plumbers Union and the AMWU. The AMWU was more moderate than the other unions but was still supportive of the rally and its objective. Most of the members from the EBA jobs walked off the job from all over Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Ipswich attended the rally by walking from their jobs in smaller rallies or by bus. The rally was held in every state in the country.

The workers walked down the street with the police being forced to shut down the streets due to the numbers marching from Queen’s Park to Felix Street. There were many chants and plenty of spirit. The workers got to the building with the Senators from the Federal Albanese ALP government. When the workers got to the glass facade and doors they began to bang on the glass in high spirits, the glass on the door shattered by accident. Not long after this the organisers helped move the workers away from the doors and the police moved into the front of the doors. Apart from this minor damage the rally was spirited and fun. The ABC and other media outlets framed the protest about the glass door being broken and mostly ignored the message of the rally which was then picked up by various other news outlets. The rally was a positive experience for the workers present and allowed many comrades who haven’t seen each other for some time to catch up in the park, during and after the rally.

Despite the negative media attention, the rally was a fun and positive experience for the vast majority of those who attended. The fact that the media immediately went into attack mode shows the fear that mass industrial action and worker protest has on the middle class and the intelligentsia in particular who framed the rally in Brisbane being down to the old trope of union thugs and not an important protest from the workers movement. The rally showed the pent-up anger and resentment that the Coalition governments have spent 10 years trying to destroy. If the conditions of the Construction unions regarding the fear of media and political reprisal as a result of the minor damage been less feared then they are at present and workers felt empowered to go further, perhaps more pressure could have been applied. If struggle was at a higher level, then this event could not have been so easily forgotten by the middle classes and ignored by the political class. Nevertheless, the protest sent a message to the bourgeois and the political class that, along with the NSW strike wave, workers protests and mass strikes are back.

Joseph S.

The economic, political and revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg is essential to understanding modern capitalism. Her life as a Polish/German left-wing Social Democrat gives key insights in the struggle for freedom against capital. She was born in Poland in 1871 and was murdered by the the far right Friekorps militias in 1919 along with fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. Her life and works are essential to understanding the development of Left Communism as a movement and tradition.  The Council Communists after World War I were heavily influenced by her ideas. This tradition lead to the Autonomist Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s and has great relevance for today’s revolutionaries.

Without Rosa Luxemburg’s inspiration these movements would have looked quite different in comparison. Her piercing insights into the theory and method of revolutionary thought, her critique of Lenin’s Democratic Centralism and the bureaucracy created by the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution of 1917 are key to an understanding of the way forward today. Also, her inspirational writings, for example ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions,’ help provide insights into both the problems and potential of revolutionary struggle under capitalism today.

Reading List:

Rosa Luxemburg – Social Reform Or Revolution?

Rosa Luxemburg – Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

Rosa Luxemburg – The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions

Rosa Luxemburg – The Russian Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg – The Accumulation of Capital

Rosa Luxemburg – Socialism or Barbarism?: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg   

Here are the writings of Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, the first person in modern history to proclaim themselves an anarchist. He was a firm advocate of the traditions of revolutionary France. Being born into poverty in rural France, he achieved a scholarship and became a brilliant student of philosophy and a socialist theorist. He was deeply involved in the movements of the revolution in 1848, writing for radical newspapers. Proudhon was at one point elected to the National Assembly, using these experiences of parliament and its failure, to practically theorise his anarchist ideas. He suffered repression and exile after the coup of Napoleon III in 1851.

His early anarchist ideas and experiences, provide the foundation stone, on which the anarchist movement is built, influencing deeply the development of Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as Marx and Engels early on. His mutualist theories were superseded in development by Bakunin’s collectivism and Kropotkin’s libertarian communism. Proudhon became opposed to the developing strategy of political parties by communists like Marx and Engels, which is one reason why he came out so strongly against communism.

His writings on the critique of social institutions – capitalism, church and state – are crucial to the pursuit and understanding of freedom. His discussion of the revolution, organisation and federation are also essential. His main political work was ‘General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century’ and also important for organisational theory, ‘The Principle of Federation.’ All are worth reading. ‘The Philosophy of Misery’ and ‘The Principle of Federation’ are in the second parts only partially translated. Also important are ‘Confessions of a Revolutionary’, about his experience of 1848 and ‘The Political Capacity of the Working Classes’, both of which can be found in the Ak Press edition of ‘Property is Theft’, (https://libcom.org/library/property-theft-pierre-joseph-proudhon-anthology).

Reading List:

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – The  Principle of Federation

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – What is Property?

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon – The Philosophy of Misery