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by John Williams

The revelations of criminal or thuggish practices in the CFMEU exposed by Nine Entertainment (which includes Channel 9 and newspapers formerly belonging to Fairfax Media, such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) are not much of a surprise to anyone with a cursory interest in Australia’s sorry construction sector.

However, the timing of the exposé is curious, and political responses will be fascinating to watch. This train wreck has been coming for a long time.

The CFMEU (the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union) was formed in 1992. Its construction division was built primarily around the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU), which was traditionally Moscow-aligned and dominated by its Sydney-based national office and NSW branch, and brought together a range of smaller specialist unions and the remnants of the deregistered Builders Labourers Federation (BLF).

The Sydney BWIU leadership and the then ACTU Martin Ferguson-Bill Kelty leadership were confident that BLF die-hards, particularly in Melbourne, would be off the job and out of the industry in a matter of months.

The ACTU then supported decisions by the Industrial Relations Commission to remove recognition from the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASCJ, founded by ALP anti-communists in 1948 as a direct competitor to the BWIU) to do on-site construction work.

This effectively handed the newly amalgamated BWIU-CFMEU leadership a monopoly on building sites, replacing the delicate web of checks and balances between a variety of specialist trades and non-trades unions. These officials were gone by the end of the 1990s.

On a human level, the persistence of the BLF loyalists deserves some respect. They have proven to be wily, tough and committed – the old-school Maoism of the late Norm Gallagher and John Cummins replaced by an intense, in-your-face macho “nihilism” focused on power, militancy and winning at all costs.

One by one, the CFMEU state branches rolled over to this new version of the old “whatever it takes”. The “sons of the BLF” captured a rich prize set up for them by the ACTU.

Fall Guy

Cynics might wonder at the timing of the current media exposé.

As the Victorian Government’s $100 billion transport infrastructure “Big Build” is about to run into a wall of debt, and federal Labor’s promises of an unprecedented and prolonged residential housing boom prove to be just a dream, having the CFMEU as a convenient fall guy may make some political sense.

Profligate public works around the Labor states have driven construction costs sky-high, and some private-sector operators are close to the edge. This is a sector facing imminent stress fractures.

The usual government response to union malfeasance is to withdraw recognition from the union in the Fair Work Commission (deregistration). This is primarily a procedural penalty – excluding union reps from applications, hearings, becoming parties to agreements, representing individual members or groups of members with grievances – but it also withdraws “right of entry” into workplaces, if employers are game enough to check permits.

Calls for Plod

Coalition calls to reinstate the “cop on the beat” ABCC (the Australian Building and Construction Commission) will be popular and understandably hard to resist. Even Labor will have to be open to a punitive investigative arm being restored to the public regulator.

But, clearly, the Liberal solution of “fining misbehaviour into sullen acquiescence” just has not worked. If anything, the threat of fines has driven a lot of private negotiations “off the books”, making an opaque industry even murkier.

The CFMEU hated the ABCC and hated paying tens of millions in fines for taking unauthorised or illegal industrial action. But the union has maybe $200 million in fixed assets and annual revenue of $150 million – fines are an irritation, not an existential threat.

The hard yards for the Coalition is to divert some of the public-service millions away from the Fair Work and ABCC bureaucracies and into a positive non-union alternative for building workers – publicly regulated bargaining agents for individual workers that can win and retain their confidence on the ground for the long term.

As in 1985 with the BLF, once a majority of workers sign authorities nominating someone other than the CFMEU as their rep, it is game over.

There may be a lesson here from international practice. Sweden has publicly funded tripartite “employment security councils” (ESCs) that bring together employer and worker representatives, under government guidance, to plan industry growth, resolve skills shortages, and manage career paths and transitions.

Australia could use a dedicated Construction Industry ESC as a genuinely independent, non-union bargaining agent for building workers. If it went after the rogue bosses, as well as rogue unionists, and proved its bona fides on the hot-button issues of accurate pay and workplace safety for a sustained period, workers would come on board.

The macho individualism of many construction workers is not a natural fit for a CFMEU-enforced monopoly, and if workers had a real choice of competing unions and a credible, trusted non-union alternative, cultural change might start to build momentum. The Tax Office could dedicate resources to assist on pay and superannuation, and the state Workplace Occupational Health and Safety administrations could beef up their safety audits, to give workers a concrete sense that their lives and livelihoods are valued by the community.

A success story in 20 years might look something like perhaps a half of building workers reasonably happy with their non-union bargaining agents, ideally publicly regulated, maybe another 20 to 25 per cent actively choosing other unions as their reps, with whatever remnant remaining loyal to the CFMEU or whatever agencies its strategists create. A multi-player balance would serve Australia better than the current poisonous monopoly.

Until construction workers have real alternatives to choose from, the CFMEU with its toxic culture will fill the vacuum and reassert itself – not a matter of “if”, but more a case of “when” and “where”.

Complacency and negligence from federal Labor and the ACTU have allowed a CFMEU monopoly to consolidate and spread for a generation. So, it will take more than a generation to change attitudes at work.

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John Williams is a life member of the ALP.

Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.