Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons. This article mentions suicide and domestic violence.
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
— sigh, yes, Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History.
Look, in retrospect, my idea for a fundraising CFMEU “Not WorkSafe!” glamour calendar was a misfire, and it’s probably good it didn’t happen. The concept came from noticing how, on sites, there were so many young people, male and female, of a certain… elegance, and suggesting that sultry shots of them in situ, plus two of fat, grumpy old geezers for December and January, for giggles, might raise funds for charity. Through contacts, I sent it up the line, have no idea what happened to it. Would not have helped I guess.
But, amid all the storm and fury about the CFMEU, and everyone running around saying they are shocked, shocked to hear that bikies have been involved in construction union politics and big builds, it’s worth asking why my calendar idea was even possible. It’s because there were so many people on building sites, so many young people, more women, more non-Anglos and non-Europeans, more Indigenous people, and, yes, more LGBTQIA+.
All on stonking wages and great conditions. As the developers made huge profits, the CFMEU has ensured that those on their sites got a decent share. The Betoota Advocate, voice of sanity as always, had got it right with a headline about a woman worker wishing her union would get into bed with bikies so she could buy a house, as many, many thousands of CFMEU members have been able to do. (Half right: Betoota had a nurse saying that. The nurses union has done pretty well for its members, in a less beneficent sector than CFMEU is in. Shoulda been a Coles shelf-stacker.)
So, what’s interesting about the current pile-on is how little interest there is in making some sort of assessment as to how well or otherwise the construction section of the CFMEU has actually represented its members. The lack of interest in this, the lack of discussion — as much from people on the left, especially those in non-manual work — is the most striking thing about this issue. It’s particularly striking because CFMEU Construction has only managed to achieve this — for its members, and then dragging up the sector as a whole — by working outside the industrial system created by Labor in the Rudd/Gillard years.
So this sudden exposure is without context. The context required is that the combination of the Fair Work Commission, anti-strike laws, and the active complicity of the right-wing unions has turned Labor and the industrial system into a smooth machine for the suppression of wages, wage demands, improved on-site conditions, and the possibility of industrial action. The CFMEU’s chief rival, from which it had to carve out territory, is the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), Bill Shorten’s union and the keystone of what remains of his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-style faction. The job on the CFMEU will now be done by Tony Burke, whose career has been made on the back of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) — which is to say on the back of the retail workers the SDA has “represented”, i.e. sold to the supermarket duopoly and the fast food giants at a discount.
Thus, a mythology of what occurred is being played out. In this telling, CFMEU Construction (remember also this is simply the Victorian and Tasmanian branches) was gifted a huge field of organising by Victorian Labor, and became violent and corrupt from thereon, feeding off the fat. The truth is that the CFMEU carved out territory, which required the major developers and Labor to deal with them and to carve out some good deals.
That, in an ideal world, is not the best way to do the redistribution of capital and wages. It’s better done on a whole sector basis. But we don’t have a separate, militant union movement. We have a compromised one, incorporated into state apparatuses, and with one of its largest sectors dominated by the SDA, controlled by the right, whose self-appointed job for decades has been to discipline labour on behalf of capital.
Thus in Victoria, the rise of CFMEU Construction occurred at the same time as what has really been a single, 25-year Labor government began looking for ways to fill the encroaching demand and production gap that now haunts all Western economies. What better to fill a hole with than a bigger hole. Keynes’ famous remark about burying bottles full of money and tendering out digging them up came to fruition with the Metro tunnel, the West Gate tunnel, and the bizarre Suburban Rail Loop, the money in the hole being developers’ profits — and the workers’ wages, which did more to pump the local economy than repatriated developer profits did.
But the CFMEU does not have blanket coverage of construction in this state by any means. The AWU has a share, and many sites, especially smaller ones, are non-union. There, workers get a fraction of what they get on big builds, in conditions of reduced safety, lack of amenities, no sheds, no toilets — working either for small developers who are close to the margin, or larger housing estate developers who have over-leveraged. The sector is split: the state-funded developments are utterly secured. Contractor developers like Lendlease on the Metro desecration of the Flinders and Swanston Street block — history which could have been preserved, to be replaced by a mall that will begin dying as soon as it is opened — can and do go back to the government for top-ups whenever they need.
The other developers are in a more precarious situation (cry no tears; it’s usually because they drain their own companies of capital every time they get a win). The muscle appeared, from their side, before the unions began to tool up to match it. “Security firms” and then plain old bikies began appearing on sites on behalf of firms, precisely to keep union organisers off-site. Nine’s coverage features some nasty stories of bullying and worse by a process got well out of hand. It has no coverage of the everyday intimidation of unrepresented workers on small sites across the state and the country. And no-one with any investigative grunt has any interest in covering it.
Thus it has ever been. When the building unions first emerged as distinctive forces in the 1960s, they were organising men on low wages and no conditions, regarded as brute labour, pure metabolism. The refrain given to us at school in the 1970s was “study hard or you’ll end up as a ditch digger”. Communists organised these unions, catapulting their members from the bottom to the top, fighting the ridicule of the idea that labourers should have a decent wage, somewhere to eat their lunch, or not work on scaffolding in the rain.
Much has been made of the extraordinary and positive upheaval created by the 1970s Green Bans, and rightly so. But it’s a measure of our times that the social movement aspects of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation’s (BLF) power lingers as much in the memory as the relentless struggle to improve building workers’ wages and conditions. Indeed, what’s become most celebrated is the “Pink Ban”, when the NSW BLF stopped work on a Sydney Uni college that had thrown out a gay student — something many people feel more willing to identify with than the basic worker and class struggles that underpinned such action. But it wasn’t just that, then and now. The building unions have shifted the idea of what is “deserved”, of who gets what and why. The stream of disapproval from News Corpse and Nein is capital’s propaganda megaphone going full blast, saying, “ask for more and this is what you get”.
So how did it get a little, er, off course? The ’70s and ’80s BLF was a mix of muscle and politics, with the Maoist Communist Party of Australia playing a significant role. The Maoists were not fussed about involvement with muscle, and they had a specific analysis that low-wage Australian workers were in a contradictory situation — bottom of the pole in a country that was both part of the West and its underdeveloped periphery — and so they applied guerrilla rather than mass tactics to industrial action. The most spectacular action was to leave a concrete pour on those boxy ’70s skyscrapers that took forever to build. The concrete would set unshaped at the 29th floor, requiring it to be jackhammered out and redone at fantastic expense.
John Cummins, the Maoist de facto BLF commander of those days, was John Setka’s mentor, and some of that survives in the CFMEU’s current tactics. Not enough of the politics did, and to pre-empt the critics licking their pens, it is fair to say that the Setka leadership took on decadence not unknown to leaders in the Communist tradition. The capper was probably Setka slapping on black bans and putting out a wanted poster for a new AFL official who was ex-ABCC. Look, I’m sorry, I thought that was hilarious. But it was a sign that things had got out of control.
They had been for a while. The Victorian CFMEU, and the rail and tram union, and a few others, had carved themselves out of the Victorian Socialist Left (SL) faction and started up an “Industrial Left” faction. This was ostensibly to present a more militant policy on industrial action, and so they did. They then became fixated on the cause of getting the late Jane Garrett into the state upper house, after she’d been denied a winnable position by the SL, having cut and run from her suddenly marginal — and now Green — seat of Brunswick.
The “Industrial Left” then joined with the magical travelling Merry Pranksters faction, the “Centre Alliance” that Adem Somyurek had set up with… the AWU (all detailed in my Red Brotherhood At War series, from a few years back), an outfit which looked like it might get control of the party, before journalist Nick McKenzie took that apart too, with some military-quality surveillance tapes of Somyurek stacking branches, like one of those sped-up videos of a mouse building a nest.
This was of course entwined with the history of John Setka and Emma Walters, his high-powered Labor insider wife, played out across years, amid fusillades of leaked text messages, accusations and convictions for domestic violence, Walters drunk driving across the state, Setka pitching an iPad at her, accusations of sustained family violence, separation, and the finale of Walters convicted of making a threat to kill Setka and escaping a recorded conviction.
This is particularly regrettable, because enough of the CFMEU’s radicalism has survived to ensure that the leadership has made sustained drives to get more women on sites, more Indigenous workers, and to push back against residual sexist attitudes. The Nine press has so far spoken to everyone except rank-and-file CFMEU on site. One can only admire their virtue in not letting their story of corruption, bullying and alleged betrayal not be polluted by any investigation of what the union actually thinks of its own leadership.
But that is very much the cast of the whole story. The actual workers being represented matter zero. The Nine investigation has turfed up some ugly and misguided individual actions, such as the alleged CFMEU involvement in the workplace bullying of Ben Nash, a young Gunditjmara man whose employer the CFMEU was allegedly shutting out, and who suicided the day after being treated badly. It’s a ghastly story. But the CFMEU’s involvement remains a series of accusations by Ben Nash’s mother, yet to be tested in a coronial inquiry. Young worker bullying is something to be wiped out, but is less frequent (though possibly more impactful) than it once was.
But it’s a tenuous story to base accusations of an empire of thuggery, corruption etc on, and it seems obvious that the Indigenous angle of the story will, and is possibly intended, to stampede progressive people away from CFMEU support. Class, in our era, barely exists in a “real” capacity (except in everything you do). But gender and race are paramount.
The degree to which these single stories are being republicised and recirculated suggests to me that they don’t have a whole lot to throw at the CFMEU. People also need to remember the lessons of Abbott’s royal commission, which saw the union accused of innumerable crimes, the smallest fraction of which came to actual charge and conviction (it backfired on Abbott, though: Blue drongo a la TURC)
Yesterday’s story in The Age is a demonstration of just how much militant action is being dodged up as criminality. The headline: “CFMEU fined $150,000 after bullying staff at West Gate tunnel project”. The actual story? Two CFMEU organisers held up work on the West Gate tunnel for six hours until they were presented with evidence WorkSafe had signed off on the site. According to the story, the organisers were guilty of “remonstrating” with officials. Oh no! Not remonstrating! On grounds of safety! We must stop this remonstration outbreak before it spreads!
So it’s a beat-up, as part of the campaign, the sort that is now, sadly, as typical of Nine print as it is of News Corpse. Even if there were a… tactical element to the CFMEU’s actions, this is not thuggery. This is not bullying. This is industrial action, power against power.
Without casting shade on the journalists who put this together, the whole investigation seems to be part of Nine print’s relentless centre-right politicisation (funny for it to be throwing stones about the moral corruption of stated purpose), with the aim of doing what the broken-down Victorian Liberal Party can’t do itself: edge the Labor government out of power. What the investigation has so far revealed is some isolated serious incidents, some kickbacks — to the union, not individuals — and the amazing, simply amazing revelation that Sally McManus, the head of the ACTU, headquartered in Melbourne, did not know there were bikies tied up with the CFMEU.
Why does this strike one as so overblown, misplaced and po-faced an investigation? Probably because, I mean, the whole Victorian construction industry is a massive, massive boondoggle. It’s a game in which a Labor government has created high-volume infrastructure projects of dubious optimal utility, contracted them out with value-capture real-estate planning waivers to major corporations, who then pay whatever the CFMEU, ETU and other unions ask for, and then go back to the government when more taxpayer money is required to complete the project.
Why wouldn’t The Age, the paper of the big end of town, make a more comprehensive investigation into construction as a whole, as a vast enterprise? Because it’s the big end of town wot’s doing it, of course. John Holland and Lendlease, the major companies behind Metro and other projects, don’t need to be shaken down by the CFMEU to pay any rate going. They’ve lined up to do it. Documenting and anatomising the comprehensive state/capital/big union stitch-up might have been more revealing, and a greater public service, than a few gotchas on a union leadership. Which is, of course, why The Age and 60 Minutes did not do it that way.
Maybe some of those lending their assistance to this believe that by clearing the ground of a leadership who admittedly seem to have gone on the turn, they will allow a space for new shoots etc etc to grow. Well, don’t count on it. The lesson intended for the public in this special is not that bad people can take over unions, or corruption can flourish unchecked, but that any industrial activity outside the law — a law, brought in by Labor governments, that is closer to 19th-century master-and-servant law than it has been at any time since 1907 — is thuggery, is wrong, is breaking bad. Keep your head down, pay your dues, watch the student politicians slide into management positions in your union, and then into politics, and then into consultancies and directorships, and take what they let you have while they claim to represent you.
The CFMEU Construction branch and its predecessors have stood against that, and done what radicals are supposed to do — fight for people who the system takes as nothing but their labour, a system that once offered a house and a life, and now offers eternal renting, a bedroom of your own, and a half-full shopping basket. The CFMEU’s predecessors got solidarity. The CFMEU is getting a lot less, especially from those in the knowledge class, many of whom have melted away. Whatever the new gender mix on site, the leadership is still very male, very blokey, and heh, very Croatian, another story in itself. The rainbow flag waves over every site, and a photo of Ante Pavelić sits on a thousand mantelpieces, amazing.
What’s rotten and very much a win by the right is that many thousands of people will be tut-tutting while they read about the doings of this “thuggish” union — stopping work happening! breaking the law! — even as they suffer through working conditions creating lifelong precarity and continuous exhaustion. The steady squeeze on millions of workers is dealt with by ironic humour, in sectors from hospitality to academia. But it covers the full tragedy of what has occurred.
Jobs that once promised a full life for diligent work now offer a strained and limited existence, life passing by consumed by duty, or by the mix of fear and parsimony dictated by the low-wage, short-term contract. Does one really believe that wage theft in bars and restaurants would have been so open, so gluttonous, so cruel and indifferent, had hospo and retail had a major union as militant as the CFMEU? Or would, with a bit of a reminder, a thousand venues suddenly have found some cash and benefits they forgot to pay over, lickety-split?
Through all this, one comes neither to bury John Setka nor to praise him, nor to romanticise any violence that may have arisen, nor to finally adjudicate whether this state branch has done more harm or good to the federal body it is part of. The leadership is a collective, and who did what, good and bad, is as much a mystery to outsiders as is any merry band of bruvvers. But now is the time to show some basic solidarity, the 13th rule of strife being if you can show it, as you should, for people half a world away, after a brutal and nihilistic terrorist attack made in their name, you should be able to show it for a union in your city, your country, whose main crime appears to be to have gained, quite possibly, the best deal for manual workers in the history of the world.
Unless one retains the bourgeois illusion that one deserves to be paid more because of having done a degree in semiotics and film noir, still being paid off, the success of the CFMEU should be taken, by workers everywhere, more as an affirmative lesson, not a warning. Forget the nonsense about lollipop sign holders etc etc. Construction remains hard, long, and sometimes dangerous work. Good luck to anyone who got a share of the profits of it, by the CFMEU. Solidarity can be built from it, but it is made, not given, by the hard labour of organising. We will see how much of it the Victorian CFMEU Construction branch has to call on — from members and others — as this goes into the next chapter. From A Worker Reads History, let Bert play it out:
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every 10 years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. To speak to a First Nations crisis supporter, call 13 YARN (13 9276). In an emergency, call 000.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
Note: This story originally included the sentence, “This was of course entwined with the soap opera of John Setka and Emma Walters…” — the wording has been changed to “This was of course entwined with the history of John Setka and Emma Walters…” in line with our guidelines around writing about domestic violence.
