A long-running tug of war over work practices on Australia's waterfront comes to a head with the dismissal of 1,400 members of a maritime union

By TIM BLAIR

t was a move so smooth, so secretive and so successful it had clearly been long in the planning. Last Tuesday, less than an hour before midnight, hundreds of private security personnel--some arriving by sea, some accompanied by growling Dobermans--swooped on 17 docks around Australia's coast. Workers were hustled out of crane cabins. Forklifts were intercepted, ignitions cut, drivers ordered to step down. Swiftly, the workers--all of them members of the Maritime Union of Australia--were driven from the docks, the gates locked behind them. As dawn broke, news spread that all 1,400 MUA members employed by Patrick, one of Australia's largest stevedoring companies, were employed no more.

For many Australians, it was as though a Berlin Wall of the waterfront had fallen. Since World War II, a succession of federal governments has tried to nullify, co-opt or break the MUA. But the MUA remained strong, winning wages and conditions for its members that were the envy of other unions, and maintaining a near monopoly on waterfront labor. In the end, it took a trio of anti-MUA forces to strike last week's historic blow: Patrick, which under chairman Chris Corrigan had waged a bitter campaign against the union; the National Farmers Federation, which undertook to supply non-union labor to replace MUA members at Patrick sites; and the conservative coalition government of John Howard, which provided moral and legislative support as well as arranging redundancy payments for dismissed workers. Says MUA national president Jim Donovan: "All previous disputes have been driven by the employers. This one is driven by both employers and the government, which makes it unique."

The government's gamble that the public would support its action seemed to pay off; the first polls after the sackings found a majority of respondents in favor of the move. When the Australian Labor Party was in government, it too tried to rein in the MUA. In 1989, after years in which waterfront inefficiencies had cost Australian industry about $A1 billion annually, the ALP's then Transport Minister, Ralph Willis, declared that the waterfront was rife with "ineffective management and poor workforce motivation, introspective industrial attitudes, high costs, endemic unreliability, poor response to user needs, abuse of monopoly power and a pervasive lack of competition." Three years of reform followed, during which the waterfront workforce was halved, ship turnaround times were cut and labor productivity doubled. But that momentum was soon lost. Since the Waterfront Industry Reform Authority program started by Labor ended in late 1992, productivity gains have slowed. Says Mark Paterson, chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry: "The Labor governments tried to achieve reform by negotiation, spent millions of dollars, didn't get success."

Some perceive that Labor, with its traditional links to the union movement, lacked the political will to follow through against the MUA. The coalition government has no such reservations. The MUA members "have not done a day's work in their lives," Liberal Communications Minister Richard Alston told the Senate last week. National Party leader Ron Boswell said the wharf workers had "got what they deserved fair in the neck." Victorian Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett said the workers had been "very badly led by people who are antiquated, who are leading them, lemming-like, to the pool of the unemployed."

For unionists, the sight of the nation's wiliest trade union being outmaneuvered is a chilling one. "Once the government have broken the strongest union, they just go for the rest," said builder Tony Gill, who abandoned his construction site to support protesting wharf workers at Sydney's Darling Harbour docks. Building caretaker Colin Evans, who has been a union member for 45 years, said: "Attacks on industrial relations will spread if they get away with this one." Federal Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith sought to calm wider union concerns. "This is uniquely about the waterfront," he said. "They are different, the wharfies, and I think most people will understand that." In the view of Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Bill Kelty, "To weaken the MUA is to weaken the union movement as a whole. The day we give away that support is the day we rip out our own heart."

The MUA, which grew out of the former Waterside Workers Federation, is a cornerstone of Australian unionism. In recent years other unions have brought in management from white-collar or tertiary-educated backgrounds, but the MUA has always stuck with its own: national president Donovan has worked on the wharves for 36 years, and national secretary John Coombs for 31 years. Their rhetoric is rooted in the traditional terms of worker vs. boss. Says Donovan: "Time, energy and money is now being spent against the workers. We're not the only ones. Workers have been suffering all over the world." The MUA leaders enjoy the unqualified support of their members, who have vowed not to accept any of the redundancy packages, some worth $A270,000.

The government's confidence in public support for the sackings is based on the widespread view that MUA workers are not suffering at all; that, in fact, they earn far too much for far too little work, and that their constant strikes and obstructive work practices are penalizing Australian business. National Farmers Federation executive director Don McGauchie declared that only 500 NFF-trained non-union workers would be needed to replace the 1,400 MUA members. According to Reith, some wharf workers were earning extraordinary salaries: "Under the umbrella protection of this union, some employees have been able to earn $A90,000 a year for 14 hours a week sitting on a crane." Says the ACCI's Paterson: "There's been a culture of overmanning and of manipulation of shifts." According to Donovan, the salary and overmanning claims are wrong: "If you keep telling lies, if you've got a government who'll back up those lies, then some of those lies will start to be believed." But according to Corrigan, "Most Australians believe that these people have not been doing the right thing by their countrymen."

Late on the first day of the lockout, even as the union successfully sought a stay of the mass dismissals in the Federal Court (technically the workers weren't sacked; Patrick simply withdrew the capital from its stevedore business, leaving the workers without a viable company to employ them) the work on the docks shifted to new hands. In Fremantle, non-union workers unloaded ships for the first time in Australia since World War II while 100 furious MUA members screamed abuse from behind locked gates. Said Corrigan: "They're already doing better crane rates than we were getting out of [Sydney's port of] Botany, on the first day. It looks very, very promising indeed."

More protests met non-union labor at Sydney and Brisbane ports the next day. And the cries have reached unionists around the world. Says David Cockroft, general secretary of the London-based International Transport Workers' Federation: "Our affiliates will be taking action against ships that use Patrick. Every union in the ports industry can see that if the MUA goes down they are next in the firing line." John Fay, executive vice president of the U.S. branch of the Seafarers International Union, announced: "We stand with our brothers in the MUA one thousand per cent."

The question is whether the support of fellow unions can save the politically isolated MUA. In mid-1890, maritime workers struck for three months; the dispute drew in the coal and shearing unions and eventually felled the governments of New South Wales and Victoria. One hundred and eight years on, John Howard's government is confident that by undermining the maritime workers, it has boosted its chance of remaining in power after the next election.

--With Reporting by Lisa Clausen /Melbourne and Susan Horsburgh /Sydney