The Guardian 7 May, 2008
Boeing workers stand up
to management’s tyranny
After nearly three weeks Boeing workers in Melbourne Hawker de Havilland plant voted to end their "illegal" strike and went back into work late last month, with their heads high, the union strengthened and delegates re-elected. General management and the Human Resources (HR) personnel left the field with a very bloody nose.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union struck a deal that saw the company withdraw its legal action against the workers and the union. The strike began sacked a supervisor. The union said the workers were satisfied with agreement.
After months of low-level harassment from management once the strike started, Boeing began an onslaught of threats of legal action, text and phone harassment, and clandestinely following workers and staking-out houses.
The Boeing HR department proved itself hopelessly inadequate in dealing with the dispute. With Boeing’s entire workforce on the other side of the gate they could not use their usual divide-and-rule techniques amongst the workforce, try as they might.
For ALP governments, and especially the federal ALP, this is the last thing they want to have fouling their sanctified air. It is easy to do big picture, moral and symbolic statements, but it is quite another to deal with the concrete causes of persistent injustices that occur in workplaces across the country.
The businesspersons’ and politicians’ rhetoric of a clever country, a skilled and competitive country, do not correspond to anything that is happening in many workplaces. In this manufacturing plant, Boeing, a key American transnational corporation, pays scant attention to the professional development of its employees here in Australia.
The Boeing workers’ victory is a victory in a number of areas;
1. The dispute was won at the gate. Their picket held the gate with support from community activists. Nothing got in or out of the plant for fifteen days.
2. It was clear that the dispute would escalate and bring public attention back on the substantive issue of the WorkChoice laws. The Rudd government’s proposed "period of transition" for reframing the industrial system would maintain and reinforce the opposition to collective rights critical to workers and their unions: the very laws that the majority has voted the ALP government to rescind. This has not been lost on workers and their families. The Rudd government intends to retain elements of the legislation that formally limit a union’s capacity to organise.
3. Boeing workers demonstrated in action the importance of organisation and the importance of unions and the critical role they will increasingly play in an organised opposition to anti-worker industrial laws and equally the general concerns and issues of civil and human rights and justice.
4. Boeing’s HR uses the code of conduct as a means to impose authority and disciplinary procedures whereas the intention of the code of conduct was to ensure better heath and wellbeing and thereby create a humane and productive work environment.
5. A humane workplace can only be achieved or developed by organised collective activity through the union. As much as anything else this dispute was about fundamental right to be treated with dignity and respect, individually and collectively. It is essential that shop committees and branches be actively supported and trained.