 |
Jul-Aug 2008
|
|
Tribute to Vic
MUA Assistant National Secretary Vic Slater retires
after over three decades on the waterfront
Vic Slater, professor, philosopher, wharfie, unionist, election punter, negotiator, internationalist, communist, campaigner and man of compassion retired from the union and the labour movement in February, 1999. A casualty of the waterfront war, Vic suffered a severe stroke in August last year in the midst of leading the push against a new conspiracy case unfolding on our western front. He formally retired on February 22, after the doctors diagnosed his illness as at least partially attributable to stress and strain of the years' events.
In some of his more lucid moments in the days following his hospitalisation, while still hovering between life and death, Vic would half joke that the stroke was yet another Reith conspiracy. For the hard hearted Minister for Workplace Relations and his office had months previously circulated rumours that Vic Slater (and John Coombs) suffered ill health and would be gone by the end of 1998. That's how low they were prepared to stoop.
Vic was at the front line during the great docks dispute. It was Vic Slater who drove to Port Botany on the evening of April 7 after the latest tip off that the invasion of the wharves would be brought forward that night. He stood beside the wharfies outside the gate - no sign of what was to come but for the new barbed wire strung onto the fence top some days back. Vic shared a sausage sizzle and returned home. But at 11.15 that night the phone rang. It was the administrators of the labour hire firms informing Vic that Patrick Stevedores was insolvent. MUA waterside workers were, effectively sacked nationwide. With military precision squadrons of security guards and dogs with key special forces operatives, battle hardened soldiers from the jungles of Vietnam, industrial mercenaries led the charge under cover of dark.
As MUA Assistant National Secretary, Vic Slater's first call was to his National Secretary John Coombs who was out of town. Vic was holding fort. The mass sackings were not expected until Easter. Vic had joked on the aptness of Reith, Corrigan and Co choosing Crucifixion Day to martyr the wharfies. But the union's preemptive action in the Federal Court, which would have outlawed any termination of labour, meant the plot was rushed forward to the night before the court ruling.
It was Vic Slater who first heard of the complicated corporate scam that enabled Patrick to lock all MUA labour out the gates, effectively sacking an entire workforce of nearly 2000 nationwide in one fell swoop. He contacted John Coombs before heading back to the Botany wharves. I was in the passenger seat beside him. The car headlights caught the luminous glow in the eyes of the Alsatians as the guards paraded inside the locked gates.
The mobile kept ringing. Emotions were high. Angry wharfies spoke of defending their jobs with their lives - of blood on the wharves. News came that workers at Darling Harbour, Sydney, were refusing to leave. We jumped in the car and sped back to Hickson Road and waited, unionists outside the gates taunting the grinning 'two legged dogs' and their furry friends on the inside.
The mobiles kept ringing... a call to London, ITF, to report on what was happening. John Coombs would not arrive back until the morning. ACTU Secretary Jennie George was flying up that day. It would be a long night for Vic. One of many.
Inside the gates the midnight shift had refused to leave when the anonymous security guards, dogs on leash ordered them out. They had no authority documentation. No ID. The workers were pulled off the cranes and forklifts and from the ship's deck. Stunned, but resolute they stood their ground in the amenities room until police arrived. Then the gates were opened and they drove out, the shock and horror of the night's events engraved on their faces. Many trembled with indignation and anger as the media encircled them and their voices began to reach out through the airwaves. But Patrick boss Chris Corrigan, reportedly, slept soundly.
Some of us went to walk through the gates for a closer look. Some way back a man shouldering a Betacam TV camera filmed our advance. If media were allowed in, so was I. But it was not a TV crew inside the gates recording our every move. It was a hired spy camera. A hefty islander stood in our way and quietly ordered us back. My eyes barely reached past his massive chest, but Vic Slater and the guard were eyeball to eyeball. In the scrum that followed as the guards attempted to ram the wire gates shut in our face, big Vic led the push, the weight of his bulk temporarily blocking the gate from shutting. The incident was caught by television crew... one of the moments of the great wharf war - and Vic Slater - immortalised.
Vic emerged apparently unscathed, but his mobile phone was crumpled. He took mine.
During the 30 day lockout, Vic played a key support role for National Secretary John Coombs at Sussex Street during his many absences due to court hearings, media demands and the need to visit all ports, nationwide. While other officials enjoyed the more glorious task of leading the pickets and community assemblies, Vic took the less glamorous but vital job of fund raising to assist the families of the Patrick workers locked out the gates with no pay. He also became a familiar face and union spokeperson in the media. But he still spent time on the Port Botany picket and he was there on the night they were to triumphantly reclaim their jobs and the wharves, Vic was at Port Botany by the workers' sides to see them back in the gate.
For Vic Slater life had come full circle. One of his earliest recollections that shaped his destiny was being baby sat' at a rally in support of striking railway workers in Brisbane. "It was St Patricks Day, 1948. I was four years old," said Vic. "A small group of perhaps 250 workers were confronted by a massive show of police force. Several marchers were injured by police batons. The victims included communist parliamentarian, Fred Paterson. He was struck from behind by a brutal and heavy blow to the head. I watched the ambulance leaving the bloody scene to rush the injured to hospital."
It young Vic never forgot. That night set the stage for what was to follow. There would be many struggles bridging the invasion of the wharves by industrial mercenaries and his childhood experience of police brutality - not least a spell behind bars during the heady days of the Vietnam Moratorium. In 1969 Vic refused to pay a fine for marching on the streets. He was imprisoned for three days in the notorious hangman's block with murderers and serious criminal offenders.
Victor Charles Slater was born in Queensland in March 1944 the only child of Jim and Joyce Slater, card carrying members of the Communist Party of Australia. Jim, worked on the Brisbane dredges. He was a member of the Seamen's Union, serving as the Queensland Presiding Officer from 1951 to the early 1970s.
Jim Slater was renowned for his public speaking, a talent that the young Vic soon inherited. Jim, like so many Australians, joined the Party during the hardships of the Great Depression and served on its central committee (1938-1948).
Vic's mother, Joyce, joined up in Great Britain. As well as sharing her husband's oratory skills, Joyce was a talented writer working as a journalist for the Queensland Guardian and, later, as the WA correspondent for Tribune (1976-1990).
Vic too joined the party in 1962 after a stint as president of the Eureka Youth League. He stayed with the more broad left CPA when it split from the hardline Stalinists after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1991, when the Communist Party of Australia closed shop, Vic did not join any of the surviving factions. Nor did he join the Labor Party, but he kept a close eye on politics and polling, becoming renowned for correctly predicting every election outcome, federal and state from the year 1958 to 1996.
His politics, his heroes and his role models were all of the left - among them Nelson Mandela 'who despite being incarcerated for 26 years, emerged as president of a multi racial south Africa', and Jennie George, first woman president of the ACTU, 'for bringing the union movement back to the grass roots after the Accord era'.
Vic joined the Waterside Workers' Federation before his 21st birthday in January 1965, one of 300 casual workers recruited to the Port of Brisbane that year. He went on to work in Sydney and Melbourne prior to transferring to Fremantle in January 1970.
On the wharves he soon earned the nickname 'the Professor' arriving on the job each day bespectacled and carrying a briefcase heavy with reading matter on world politics and economics - a walking encyclopaedia of information. Indeed National Secretary John Coombs was to remark at Vic's farewell, on how after many hours wasted in futile attempts to draft a weeks resolutions, councillors would delegate Vic to write them up in his lunch break, a feat he accomplished with startling ease. Vic was not one of the more productive stevedoring workers, but his keen intellect and political upbringing quickly took him up the ranks of the union from secretary of the job delegates committee (1972-1980), to Fremantle WWF branch treasurer (1981), WA Trades and Labor Council delegate and executive member (1982) and WWF branch secretary and federal councillor (1985), then, nationally, on to WWF assistant general secretary (1992), first MUA deputy national secretary (1993) and assistant national secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia (1995-99).
While heading the union in WA, Vic reformed the job delegates' association; led the public relations campaign into rural WA, co-ordinated a history project to celebrate 100 years of unionism on the Fremantle waterfront and helped compile the book Wharfies with Bryn Griffiths.
It was during his time in the WA branch that Vic, horrified by the growing death toll on the wharves developed a passion for occupational health. The big issue was asbestos disease. Wharfies were being struck down with terminal cancer and lingering asbestosis by the dozen - all from handling the deadly blue asbestos shipped down from Wittanoom.
Vic would always remind people that as far back as the first century AD, the Romans had provided respirators made from animal bladders to protect their slaves weaving asbestos cloth: "We have been treated worse than slaves," he would say.
Vic won asbestos victims and their families millions of dollars in ex gratia compensation payments, served on the Dust Disease Board in WA, helped forge new legislation on asbestos disease and improved standard company agreements allowing widows to claim for compensation.
While in National Office Vic continued his passion for a safe working environment, serving as a member of the ACTU Occupational Health and Safety Committee (1990-1998), the Asbestos Disease Society of NSW inc, the Environment Protection Agency Hazardous Waste Policy Reference Group and the ACTU trade union aid group, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad Inc.
Vic also served as a director of the Stevedoring Employees Retirement Fund which Business Review Weekly listed as the top industry fund in 1998 and as a member of the International Cargo Handling Coordination Association Australian Executive Committee.
His achievements during his nearly four decades in the union will one day no doubt fill a hefty book. Vic was a tireless and productive official spending many of his weekends in the office. In the lead up to the union amalgamation, Vic worked on the rule changes and the formation of the Maritime Union of Australia. He played a key role in national award and enterprise agreements, in the commission and on job committees. Vic also worked closely with National Training Officer Graham Young, serving as an alternate director on the Transport Industry Training Board.
Vic championed greater involvement of women in the union, helping establish the first MUA Women's Committee and inaugural women's national rank and file conference in 1995.
In many ways Vic also served as the union's foreign minister. Over the years he penned many thousands of letters, resolutions and petitions on behalf of imprisoned unionists in despotic lands or communities languishing under foreign aggression. He played a role in the International Transport Workers' Federation standing in when the Australia co-ordinator was on leave. He worked hard to make the numerically small Maritime Union the biggest fund raiser for the ACTU's overseas aid agency, Apheda; flew out to negotiate with German maritime companies on behalf of the fledgling Fijian maritime union and accompanied NZ seafarers General Secretary Dave Morgan on trips to Tuvalua and Kiribati to assist local seafarers negotiate better wage rates and start up a credit union. Vic was also an ongoing union representative to the India Ocean Network, participating in Calcutta Conference in February 1997.
Vic's lifelong love affair with Asia was consummated in 1997 with his second marriage. In December, Vic wed Thai national Orathai in the mountains of Chiang Mai. For Vic the beautiful divorcee and her daughter Belle personified the East, their marriage symbolising his long-held philosophy that Australia and Asia should live together in harmony.
Vic had lived the tough and lonely life of a bachelor since parting with his first wife Joy when daughter Juanita was still a child. But as far back as October, 1966, long before APEC, and Asia's economic attractions first aroused Australian interest in it near neighbours, Vic Slater stood as the communist candidate for Griffith with the motto 'Living with Asia'.
In those days the Yellow Peril and the White Australia policy still caste their shadow over close ties with the region. We were at war with Vietnam. Indeed it was the Vietnam moratorium and the campaign against Australian military involvement in this most immoral war that compelled Vic to first become involved with the region. Little did he know then that he would be in direct combat with the cold war warriors, three decades later, when the Government and Patrick were to recruit them to lead a platoon of industrial mercenaries on the wharves.
On March 14 Vic's many friends and colleagues all took turns to farewell and honour the union's long serving official for his lifelong achievements to the labour movement and the left.
One by one they took the mike, often just to recall his assistance, advice or anecdotes over the years - old communists including Pat Healy, the grand daughter of renowned waterfront union leader Jim Healy, film maker Martha Ansara, former Fremantle wharfie, long term friend and CTAL committee member Terry McCabe, fellow unionists Julies Rowe (AMWU), Lyn Ridges (Nurses Union), Peter Murphy (PTU), Gerard Langes (National Training Industry Advisory Board), Don Sutherland (TUTA), representatives from Apheda Phil Hazelton and former WWF General Secretary Tas Bull, branch and national officials of the MUA, family and friends.
But Vic Slater's long association with the union does not end with his retirement. He plans to return to do some work in the union library and research section while writing a book Conspiracy on the Waterfront, exposing the government and NFF role in the Patrick Dispute. "It was the worst dispute I've ever seen and there's no guarantee they won't repeat it - they won't be happy until the MUA and the whole trade union movement is dead. It's like fighting the communist party dissolution bill back in the fifties, but now it's a union dissolution bill. If you're in a union, they want you to lose your job."
Indeed the one thing Vic would like to see now is the end of Peter Reith and the Howard Government: "They were nearly the death of me," said Vic. "In many ways they forced my retirement, but I'm predicting that I will see them out."
Given that Vic was also well known for his accurate forecasts of the fate of politicians in the past, this may well be the case.
War on the Waterfront articles
|
