We Have Reached A Tipping Point - Let's Tip Out John Howard

The following speech was delivered by AWU National Secretary Bill Shorten at the ACTU National Congress on October 24, 2006.

The Howard IR revolution doesn't seem so certain, or inevitable, or long-lasting any more. The politics are turning against him.

Interest rates are volatile again, global warming suddenly changing votes everywhere, the war in Iraq a catastrophe that now military experts are nervously disowning, George Bush is in political meltdown - the Montgomery Burns - and his principal grovelling Smithers, John Howard feeling the heat, and maybe, just maybe, the IR laws, and the AWA individual contracts, have only a year to do the damage they will, and it will be considerable damage, before they are torn up and flung to the four winds by an incoming Beazley government, a thing of the past and a stark amazement to future generations that anyone ever had the cheek to try them on.

But till that glad day a year from now - 365 days - or a year and two weeks from now, or a year and three weeks, we have to martial and focus our arguments, and shape our local campaigns, and our leaflets and emails and commercials and letter-drops, and the things we say in the supermarket, in order to bring back the civilisation we had, and the disposable income we need to lead a reasonable life.

Do not imagine we can coast to victory, whatever the polls are currently suggesting, however loudly the bewildered commentators are saying Labor is in with a chance. Every seat will be hard-fought, every campaigning day vulnerable to error, every media outlet predisposed their way, and hundreds of millions in public monies will be spent on libelling and vilifying our cause, in the lead-up to next October or November, and we have to have our answers ready and rehearsed, our policies thought out and our hopes high.

So let's go through it. What is happening here? What is happening to Australia?

Nothing less than the systematic shrinkage down to desperate minimums of the one life we are going to get.

We can lose our job at any time for any reason, including attitude.

We can be forced for any reason at any time onto AWA individual contracts and lose penalty rates, overtime, leave loading, public holiday pay, RDOs, and ever four weeks' leave.

We can be fined a week's pay for a fifteen minute stopwork meeting over a safety issue. Like the CFMEU experience.

We can be fined, or the union can, thirty thousand dollars for undertaking unapproved safety training of the sort that Todd Russell and Brant Webb took in Beaconsfield, the training that saved their lives.

And we have almost no right any more to go to the Industrial Relations Commission for a better deal, for a better life at work.

Now some of the arithmetic, some of the figures we've been seeing lately, seems to help the government's cause. 95.5 percent of those on the job-seeking register have work, they're saying, and so they do. But if you divided the total number of hours worked per week by forty, the figure I'm sure would look much less, because so many of us are now working less hours than we want for less pay than we need. But the figures on the surface look okay for the government, 95.5 percent in work, 4.5 percent unemployed, until you realise how lousy they are for the economy.

· Most new jobs at ( 85% <27K ) low paid
· Too many that live in poverty
· Many Australians < $600 per week
· Most people work at businesses < 100 people

Because, and it's pretty straightforward, because no-one on one hundred dollars less a week buys more than they used to, they buy less than they used to - shoes and school books and dental fillings and family holidays at Christmas time. Less days at the cricket, less nights at a Chinese restaurant. And so the whole economy shrinks, corner grocery stores and small-town newsagents lay off teenage workers, petty crime increases, substance abuse, divorce and traumatized children. One hundred dollars less a week can buy you a whole lot of trouble. One hundred dollars less a week can buy you a whole lot of trouble. Fifty dollars less a week can buy you a whole lot of trouble, and unhinge the civility our towns and suburbs and communities and factories and economies used to run on. One hundred dollars less a week, and that's what we're looking at, can turn us into something very unAustralian, once you realise what these figures are leading to, once you realise the cops in Baghdad get three dollars a day for risking their lives among suicide bombers, and in a global economy, an ever-expanding global economy, an ever more colonial reality, our wages can go down too.

It's important we don't let the Howard Government hide under the figures what the figures ultimately mean - lower wages, greater risk, longer hours, less happiness, a life less glad than the life we used to have, and a future struggle for our children.

Now they will say, of course, in response to this: the unions are running a scare campaign, the union campaign is misleading, the sky isn't falling, it's all hyperbole, it's all spin, don't believe it. And this will sound pretty plausible, until we come back with our response, and it probably should be this.

Supply us, Mr Howard, with the videotaped testimonies of 1000 - just 1000 - workers, male and female, who've gone off regular salaries with negotiated benefits, and onto AWA individual contracts, and are leading better lives now. Just 1000. Out of the million you've signed up, there's bound to be 1000.
Well, isn't there?

And of course there isn't. Like the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Children Overboard, and the 290 million dollars that mysteriously went to Saddam Hussein without Alexander Downer knowing about it, this is a big lie that is not going to stick. Because there's no-one out there who's ever had a job before who's pleased with this IR legislation, because the arithmetic, of less money to buy things, and more danger in the workplace, means a smaller, meaner, nastier Australia and everybody at every level knows it.

And they will say, forget it, this is not about workers, it's only about union power, it's only the Labor Party in disguise, trying to sneak back into power on the back of a scare, don't be taken in.

And you have to say, I have a family, I live in a community, and these important things in my life, my neighbourhood, my town, are being smashed by this needless impoverishment, and this needless imperilling of the way we live now. We made the fortunes you now enjoy, and instead of reward we are getting lifelong punishment for having so enriched you. When I can get one hundred dollars less a week, and take home maybe five hundred, maybe four hundred dollars a week, and Sol Trujillo gets three thousand six hundred dollars an hour, and he won't work for any less, because that is what he deserves, there is disproportion in our society that will not stand up in any argument, any argument based on decency, mercy, productivity, global priorities or even arithmetic. Average increases in wages are now at a seven year low and Peter Costello has a fourteen billion dollar surplus to splash around on Howard's feel-good advertisements and his corporate friends, and it isn't fair. Or if it's fair, can you tell me how it's fair? Can you debate me in any town hall?

It's hard of course to keep a cool head, and they know this, and they hope to madden us with the kind of disproportion they see as their right, their us and them right to impose on us, the underlings, the also-rans, the losers.

But the difficulty John Howard is having with IR is that it's real, it's local, it's known. It's not just a tragic story of a ship going down in the Arafura Sea or a war that has to be won in Mesopotamia. It's in every street and on every kitchen table. It's the numbers that inform the choices that shape our lives. Everybody knows somebody who's been dudded by an AWA workplace agreement, who's been humiliated by the fear, panic, hope and anti-climax of losing a good job one morning and being offered a worse job doing the same thing for less money on worse conditions the next morning. IR is not just a faraway country of which we know little. IR is where we live. It's the bad old days we're heading into, that our children will remember as our parents remembered the Great Depression, when everything was too hard, and the human spirit was crushed by the weight, the injustice of the times.

Recent statistics from the Office of Employment Advocate show, and it's horrible to reveal this, that of all the AWA individual contracts registered since March

• every one removed at least one award condition

• two-thirds removed or cut leave loading, penalty rates and overtime

• more than half - 52 percent - cut shift loadings

• 40 percent stripped away public holidays

• around a quarter of new AWA individual contracts - 22 percent - contain no pay increases over the life of the agreement.

• One in six - 16 percent -- removed all protected Award conditions.

John Howard has only one answer to the challenges of global competition and it's this. In order to compete with low paid, we must become low paid ourselves, and so if our rival slaves beat down their wages even further, we must follow. And Sol Trujillo's wages must simultaneously go up, to keep the profit levels down, and justify more wage cuts, and this is the Howard vision.

The congress is a different one. It's called a fair go. It's called a fair Australia, one in which our children do better, not worse, than we used to. In which prosperity expands and embraces us all, and neighbourhoods are friendly, and our children don't go to sleep, as children do in America where the majority is doing it tough and finds it difficult to make ends meet.

John Howard's vision will impoverish and undermine Australia. That why we have to fight him, and why we have to defeat him, and why we have to, every hour between now and next October, keep our focus clear and our minds keen, and prepared for the battle that will save our country from the imminent decline that is now in train, that would debase our lives and depress our instincts, make us like some desperate Third World country, fighting like rats for the crumbs that fall from a rich man's table.

The AWU is proud to support the vision of the congress. Because all Australians, everywhere, receive the benefits of trade unionism. I as an Australian I am proud to say I'm a unionist.