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 16th 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