Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Jobs and the environment
Sunday 31st July 2005

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Dave Kerin

Earthworker, Union Solidarity

I think that we, as a movement, have a pretty good track record on working out the way forward. Usually after the fact, we’ve been found to be right about many things that over the last decades, and no-body comes back to you later and says, “about that Vietnam war…” Nobody comes to our communities and says, “all the things you were warning us about, where correct.” All the things we are talking about relating to global warming have been proved as right and no-one is coming back to you and saying that you have been right all along.

So it’s important that we come together in forums like this to develop and expand our ideas, debrief and console each other, and generally nurture each other into the future. So thanks for today.

Earthworker strategy is still going. Not so much as an organised group with a badge, because while we wanted to bring these groups together we ended up threatening all camps. We wanted to say that the notion of jobs versus the environment is not only wrong, but it’s dangerous. And what we’ve just heard is the proof of that. Really it’s got to be jobs and the environment otherwise we don’t have a future.

Rather than going into the history of the toes we have trodden on and the mistakes we made, I’d like to look at what’s happening now, some ideas for the current situation as a working class and where we’re going in the future.

The Earthworker strategy was looking at the fact that our problems are global. We wont resolve them within the confines of a one nation state. And that indeed globalisation offered us the chance to talk about that far more openly, given that globalisation was the process whereby capitalism was indicating that it couldn’t afford the nation state any longer. It couldn’t afford it financially or environmentally. This new environmental imperative is acting upon capitalism and their only answer is to deepen the consumer spiral, which is the very thing they’re saying via globalisation that they cannot afford any longer. This week they’re finally fessing up and saying that it’s an imperative and if you read between the lines you’ll see that they don’t have an answer.

The system is in a very, very deep crisis. We made that clear at the time we set Earthworker up in 1997. The military is now the largest industry in the world. In the early part of this century the UN said that the second largest industry internationally is the illegal drug trade. And that is by anyone’s analysis a devolutionary growth spiral. The more we grow, the bigger the chance of devolving off the planet.

War and the illegal drug trade. A trade that they can never make legal because there is too much investment in it. The prices would drop and we would literally go into a depression. Think about a world that has that kind of logic attached to it. Think about the war in Iraq. It’s not only oil that they’re seeking dominance and hegemony over, it’s the need to feed this very large industry. After the Vietnam war there was a deep recession for that very same reason. The military industry was massive. The deserts in America were full of machines they wouldn’t use at the end of the war and it dragged their economy down. We’re stuck in the quagmire of Iraq with all its devastating human and environmental costs and if they get out of Iraq we go into economic crisis and if they stay in Iraq we go into economic crisis.

The aim of Australia’s government in taking us on the coattails of America into Iraq is about jobs. It’s a push by the government to stabilise the Australian economy. When you think of an Australian economy that is 90% services, it is effectively built on sand. Who can afford the services once all the substantive jobs go? The building industry is already beginning to wind down. After the games next year it will begin its bust. When I came into the building industry at the end of 1970 we had a four-year boom-bust cycle. Now you can meet young building workers in their 30s and 40s who have never seen a bust. It’s the longest boom that Australia has ever seen in construction. Every depression has been ushered in by a building industry bust. This building industry bust is going to be big. The substantive jobs that go from glass, in steel, in clerical, shipping etc will see the service sector that’s built on the sand beginning to collapse around us.

The government was looking at new jobs in new industries and they looked at the largest industry – the military industry. We have begun to see the scramble for military contracts. In some of regional Victoria we are seeing those jobs grow already. An alternative has to be put forward because at the end of the day they need us and we don’t need them. That fact hasn’t changed from the beginning of capitalism until now. The old Wobblies had a saying that when the workers fold their arms nothing moves. That is as true now as it was then. But Marx had a notion of not just folding our arms in protest but of creating a new world within the shell of the old.

The Earthworker strategy from my point of view as a labour activist was to look at the ways in which we could begin to create that new world. The massive superannuation funds give us a chance. But we need to campaign very hard about democratising access to super and the way it is used and invested so that it is not invested in wood-chips, uranium mining, or overseas in all sorts of skullduggery by capital. But is instead invested in the new jobs in the new green industries here.

When superannuation first came in there were two interesting things to note about it. One, the commission effectively ruled that it was the unused component of the workers wage. We have never used it like that but we have allowed capital to invest it as it saw fit with the only rule being that you maximise the return. The second thing was, and I know this because many of us in the labour movement opposed the notion of superannuation, I believe now wrongly, that it would eventually be used by us to service our own retirement – and we certainly weren’t wrong. We were wrong in opposing the idea that a part of our labour would be used for good social outcomes. That debate was had but then we dropped the ball and we let it go. One of the things that came up in the early days of the debate around workers’ superannuation was the notion of workers’ housing and whether we would invest in it with a view to supporting the construction of houses for working people.

I believe we need to reinvigorate that debate. So that we have got good housing for workers, good housing for aged care, so we begin to use the surplus we’ve created to eliminate the waiting list for hospitals, optical, dental, we take back our own homeless youth, they don’t belong to capital. And we provide the training, apprenticeships and new jobs for our children who may be homeless. That we being to look at that new world within the shell of the old.

Earthworker maintained that we could begin the process of building solar, wind and water industry in this country. To that extent we pulled together stakeholders to initiate a solar industry plan. I believe that plan still stands. We as a labour movement, as a working class are the only ones with the social weight to bring it about. That was one of Earthworker’s main aims – to say that all of the things that the green movement was correct about, it could make happen. The environment movement could succeed at times as a protest movement to stop certain things but it didn’t have the social weight to bring about another world that offers the alternatives to the things we don’t want.

I believe we as a labour movement got very good at saying what it is we don’t want but ask us what it is we do want and you’ll find us lacking. That is something that a lot of our social movements share and we need to move beyond that. We need to move beyond protest. The current IR legislation, Union Solidarity, the organisation that I’ve helped get off the ground, is very clear on that. We are not going to protest our way through this. No amount of street marches will stop this. If we can’t win it on the ground then we wont win it in the courts and we certainly wont win it via election campaigns. When did any labour government ever withdraw secondary boycott legislation? It didn’t. This legislation, as the secondary boycott legislation was, is aimed at the heart of the labour movement. That pulsating heart is about two key functions – organisation and solidarity. If we cant organise, if you can stop organisers going into a workplace, if you make it illegal for activists and delegates to carry out their function then you have no union. Likewise, if you can stop the ability of unions to show solidarity, within their own ranks and between unions, then you have no movement.

I’ve experienced that. That hairdresser over the road here used to be the union headquarters of the builders and labourers federation. I was the Education Officer of that union, only after we were deregistered - as a part of the left we never got on with the official leadership that well - and it took a deregistration to get us all singing to the same tune.

One of those things that I learnt from the 1970s and 80s was that the green bans created far more jobs than they ever stopped. So when we look at dredging, and forestry or timber, at all of those debates, the green options give us far more jobs than they ever stop or destroy. Not only that, but they give us the sustainable jobs. Look at the Rocks in Sydney, the Victoria Markets just up the road here, they were the alternative plans that we put forward in the 70s. When they wanted to knock it all down and put up office blocks we said, “no, we’re not going to do that, but we will do this.” Wherever you look you will find thousands and thousands of jobs that emanated from those bans. I am not a researcher and have not done the research on it, but anecdotally I know it to be true.

At the end of the day, we’ve got to be more confidently putting forward environmentalism, to be ecologically mindful. It’s something that is crucial for the labour movement, especially now that we are under attack. As I said we are not going to protest our way out of this. No amount of waving our fist at capitalism, which is becoming fully global, will get us out of this. Given that, we’ve got to have a vision that wins people to the banner, something positive, something we are saying ‘yes’ to.

One of the things that’s being discussed by some leaders in the labour movement is that we look at using C-bus, the ETU’s fund, and other industry funds where unions have some control, to set up a manufacturing cooperative. That manufacturing cooperative would look at things like building a solar water heater, which we don’t build in Victoria. This is something that Earthworker proposed back in 1997 and it’s no accident that we are getting a bit of a hearing on things like this now that the labour movement is facing the biggest crisis since the 1890s. The crisis has given us that opportunity. It has forced us to think about how we communicate to the broader public that we are a movement that is worth supporting.

The vast majority of our kids work in that 76% service sector and they’re not even in a union. They’re saying, “they’re going to take sickies off us? So what, we don’t have any” or “they’re going to take our holidays off us? I’ve never had a holiday.” So how do we show our relevancy to them? We have to go back to our socialist roots. The socialists always saw organised labour as a means towards a better end, a different sort of society, not the consumer capitalism that we have today.

We’re putting forward this notion of a manufacturing industry that would build a solar hot water unit, which would be owned and democratically controlled by the workers in the cooperative. We then have part of the manufacturing cooperative that looks at installing it across Melbourne’s roofs. 10-15% of the surplus would be used for things like the elimination of hospital and dental waiting lists, especially for those aged 65 and above, initially. It could be used for our homeless young people in a meaningful way that incorporates them into our own work, into the jobs that we create. We then would move into grey water, brown water, constructing our own water tanks. Even if we only mobilised that 20% of currently unionised people, that is a large purchasing group.

Effectively we’re beginning a process of setting up a social economy. There’s a private, a public (what’s left of it), and a social sector of the economy. In the Marxian sense we could not be any more prepared to run this society than we are now. What’s missing is the understanding that we can and that we ought to.

In this period of crisis you need to be giving something that’s tactile, hands-on, that you can touch, that has the politics built in to the action itself. For us, it’s going back to our roots, and looking at how we apply those same principals in the 21st Century. Slowly but surely there’s a process of saying that work can be done differently, what we use our work to do can be different and we can surround that with a democratic process. That’s the sort of labour movement we want, that’s the sort of Australia we want to build, on jobs that are safe and sustainable and that they never move off-shore. That’s the promise that the environmental jobs offer. If we have a vision that touches the lives of ordinary working people, then that provides us with a future.

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