Maritime Diary

By Maritime Union of Australia

By National Secretary Paddy Crumlin

Politics & Communication

This is your first Maritime Workers' Journal to arrive by post. It follows our union's determination to have a more involved and better-informed membership. This is essential to our collective health.

The union is also finalising our new website which will offer up-to-date news and other member services and advice. Start-up should be in October.

The union is facing extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The Howard Government and the ACCC continue to attack us. The shipping industry has demonstrated its resilience, but has suffered greatly under the political ordeal of Howard's policies. The stevedoring industry similarly has found great reserves of determination among the membership to fend off the bitter attacks from government and employers.

We are a small and proud union targeted by entrenched and hateful enemies because of our history and activism. Global capital demands the world market and governments continue to surrender national sovereignty and social policy to its needs. Unions are projected in the media as regressive, anti-growth and undemocratic. Collective values are dismissed or subjugated to obsessions about individual rights.

Under this scenario, divisions, internal factionalism and anti-union rhetoric can weaken our collective resolve to face up to and combat these monolithic external attacks.

We need to understand the nature of the world we work and live in, the dramatic change under the new global conditions and the great dangers this change presents to our movement and its ideals of social justice, fair distribution of wealth and decent jobs.

If we do not understand it, or are unwilling to come to terms with the current difficult and complex problems facing us, then we will not be able to engage with this environment to our collective advantage.

Patrick EBA

The Patrick EBA has been endorsed by MUA members employed at company enterprises. The meetings were long and promoted strong debates, mainly around the company and its track record. Chris Corrigan did not get much of a character reference from his workforce. MUA members remain bitter about the 1998 lockout and distrustful of management's motives. However, the negotiations had an unprecedented involvement of the rank and file in the process beginning at the conference of delegates, right through to the final settlement. Up to 40 delegates were involved in the negotiations alone - their costs met by the union.

It was tough going on the way through. The economic downturn, some loss of contracts and the impending election provided a pressure cooker environment. The negotiation forum unanimously endorsed the agreement as fulfiling the key objectives of the Patrick conference, particularly the formula for permanency, permanent part-time and the ongoing review of casuals to maximise their access to more job security. We have also laid the foundations for negotiating improvements to super that will take stevedoring employees to 100 per cent of salary at 55. This outcome is essential to clear away further dislocation in the industry. Workers have a right to decent entitlements at 55 based on their salary. All employers will have to come to the party.

Gaining an agreement under the current conditions was an exceptional achievement and the Patrick delegates and negotiators deserve a wrap. Change will continue to be forced onto the workplace under the prevailing economic and political world circumstances. Meeting that change positively and with unity is the best bet to get a result for MUA members.

Shipment of Shame

The Tampa was another example of the Howard Government's tampering with the lot of us. We took a strong up front position. Maritime workers are faced with persons and vessels in distress at sea as part of our working life. Every seafarer knows their life may be placed at risk if called on to save another. It is one of the enduring protocols of the sea. Nevertheless, increasingly sub-standard shipping and shipowners have instructed crews to turn a blind eye on occasions due to the time and cost this support may take up. Howard's position can only encourage this attitude into the future. People smuggling is abhorrent and must be combated. This can be dealt with by supporting many of the neighbouring states and the nations pumping out refugees. It is also a political issue. The New World order has resulted in more war, poverty and human dysfunction than we've seen since the WWII. It is not all Big Macs, Zegna suits and home cinema systems. Capitalism would market the murder, mayhem and child abuse of the third world if it was about honesty.

Howard is preying on the traditional fear Australians have about Asia. The new yellow peril looms in the minds of the uninformed. It is all right to trade with the world to develop the quality of our lives. But to have them over? That's another matter.

It's pretty ordinary stuff for a Prime Minister, even considering this bloke's track record. The amount of refugees ending up in Australia is more like a leaking faucet than the busted main pouring into European, US and Asian countries. Refugees are everyone's problem. But then how else is the Howard Government going to gain government? Certainly not on their track record. So they'll promote fear and prejudice because they don't have much else to run with.

Harry's Century

A delegation of rank and file members, with some officials, attended the celebrations of Australian seafarer longshoreman and long time national president of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union, Harry Bridges. Harry's working class activism and leadership continues to shine through the ILWU, a progressive, militant and outward looking trade union that continues to promote and nurture international solidarity and working class friendship. The Australian delegation was treated with respect and overwhelming hospitality. Consolidation of our relations with the ILWU can only strengthen the interests of international dockworkers and wharfies and other transport workers, including seafarers and the working class generally.