Sharan Burrow's address to Congress 2007

TUC Congress - Brighton 2007 Sharan Burrow - ITUC President

Thank you, Alison.  Brendan, Frances, trade union colleagues, my international colleagues and, of course, proud members of the TUC, I am absolutely honoured to be here to take part in your 2007 Congress.  I stand before you as both the President of a sister confederation, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and, of course, as Alison said, as President of the International Trade Union Confederation.

I want actually to try to put what is going on in Australia in the context of a global struggle that you and every other union activist around the world is engaged in.  We have built a new International.  It took a lot of effort and a lot of people engaged in a commitment to unity, but Alison is right in that last year we were proudly able to bring together the majority of the union Movement around the world.  We also built a new global Council of Unions which brings the industrial union Movement internationally and the relevant bodies together to bring all of the resources we can to the priorities that must be fought and won.
 
However, the structures alone will not do the job.  We have to build a new internationalism.  It requires unity and strong practical solidarity built on both union and political power.  Union strength in our workplaces must extend to both union and political influence within and across borders or we will continue to fight the fight that every one of us is engaged in with an increasing sense of a globalisation that is spiraling out of control.

Our house, the union house, has a commitment to a shared humanity that demands peace, justice, equality and self‑determination for all.  That will never change.  It has withstood atrocities of all forms which have been visited on the lives and the livelihoods of workers and their families.  Equally, it has seen the celebration of great victories, liberation, emancipation, democracy, human and trade union rights, development and decent work; victories too numerous to detail, but victories of or with organised labour that has shaped a better world. 

However, we all know that that progress is stalling and in many nations it is seriously under threat.  I would say to you that for workers, for working families, the great Tory experiment has failed.  It has failed our workers; it has failed their families; it has failed our nation and it is creating an unjust globalisation that we cannot stand back and watch without taking action. 

Union voices have rallied around the world against the Washington consensus, which is the best description of this great Tory experiment.  You know it was wrong.  It was all about if the rich get richer, then it will trickle down and people will pick up the pieces.  Well, you knew there would be winners and losers; we all knew there would be winners and losers.  You knew that the demands for privatisation would rob developing nations of independent pathways to development and that that agenda would indeed have a backwash into our own backyards. 

The good news is, internationally, the Washington consensus is dying, if not dead.  The bad news is that it has left an impoverished legacy, and I have heard some of that today.  As a former teacher, with respect to yesterday's debate around the public services, I empathise with you and stand in solidarity for a better deal.

As the global economy grows, we should have cause for great celebration for the prosperity delivered to workers and their families.  It should be something we can take heart from all over the world.  The reality is that corporate greed is driving profit‑share at the expense of wages, at the expense of safe workplaces, at the expense of conditions and entitlements for workers and denying governments the necessary taxes for public services, such as health, education, transport, housing and the like. 

You know the statistics.  With more than 2 billion people living on less than US$2 a day, with 187 million unemployed, 80 million of them young people, and about 2.2 million dying at or from work every year, the scourge of child enforced labour growing in some nations, and almost 25% of the world's labour force, many of them in our own countries in precarious employment as well as those in the most vulnerable nations, more than 25%, a quarter, of the global workforce in distress because they cannot earn enough to live with dignity and security, there is one reality.  The corporate world is not contributing to the growth that we care about, decent work everywhere. 

The approach, therefore, of the "leave it to the market", the trickle‑down theory, has delivered a world that, in spite of massive growth, now has more people unemployed.  Experience has increased unrest in a world where there is substantial marginalisation amongst local communities has given us greater numbers of economic migrants and growing inequity economically both within and across nations.

When we talk to major advocates of this approach as a developmental framework, we know that they accept a blind faith in privatisation, trade liberalisation and globalisation with the attendant demands of a small government and deregulation that has had unacceptable consequences, and that the social dimensions of globalisation as a result require urgent attention that they simply will not address.

As a basis for trade with the imbalance of power between nations, this framework enhanced by the consequent self‑interest and the moral bankruptcy of a global economy without a commitment to human rights, labour rights, climate change and the environment has worked to perpetuate a culture of corporate greed which simply does not serve the interests of working people.

Capital has a global reach, but without global rules, without a global governance architecture that protects the rights of workers and their community, the corporate law of the jungle grows stronger and so does the dislocation, therefore, of jobs and the consequent divide between the rich and the poor within and across countries. 

This requires, as I said, both union and political action from us.  Unions are being instrumental in the fight to achieve legal entitlements, to organise and bargain for the redistribution of wealth nationally, and now we need to do it globally.  Equally, we must fight for the social wage commitments of quality public services, education, health care, housing and other areas of support for our communities. 

Public services are as important today as they have ever been.  This requires that we recognise that whilst the priorities for global justice are established by all of us in our own environments, where we act together and succeed with those of just one affiliate, one global union federation or, indeed, the new international, we succeed for all.  It requires us to organise, to organise in our workplaces, in our communities, across both our domestic borders and, indeed, our international borders.  We need to organise for political power.  We need to do whatever it takes. 

If you consider what is going on in my country right now, that is exactly what the struggle is.  We are engaged in a struggle for the very decent heart of a democratic nation.  We have seen 11 years of a Conservative Government, a Tory Government, that set out to tear up workers' rights, to take away job security by ripping up unfair dismissal protections, to take away income security by allowing employers to determine the nature of the employment contract.  We have a saying that Australia is now a "take it or leave it" workplace:  sign the contract.  Let the boss determine the wages and conditions or do not take the job.  It is perfectly legal to walk into a job and lose decades of conditions established through struggle, like overtime, shift allowances, public holiday pay and meal breaks, even.  The list is endless.   The bosses can simply determine that provide they meet five minimum standards, standards you can still drive a truck through, like averaged working hours on a weekly basis, then they can do what they like.  "Sign the contract or you do not get the job". 

Needless to say, that means they can take away the right to collective bargaining by simply refusing to do so. 
Freedom of  association, the right to organise and collectively bargain is only maintained in Australia right now, not by right or by legislation, but, indeed, by the strength of our own solidarity.  Working people are being hurt every day, losing their jobs and losing income simply because an employer decides that that is fair game.

Well, we decided that this not only was not good for working families, but it is not the basis on which you can build a decent country or a decent democracy.  When you have a Prime Minister who basically two weeks ago stood up and told the nation that he is frightened ‑ he is frightened ‑ that if rights at work are reinstated, we will see unions at the pay bargaining tables of companies across the nation by right, the right of representation, then what you have is the shocking notion that a Prime Minister of a democracy would stand up and say he does not believe, genuinely does not believe, in the open right to freedom of association and the right to representation that comes along with it.

So we decided we had to fight back.  That set of laws, work choices that tore up workers' rights, that threatened the minimum wage, that took away our industrial umpire, as well as all those fundamental ILO standards, is supported by two other pieces of equally shocking legislation.  Time does not permit to show you a video, but let me tell you that when we have laws that are the death of permanent work, because contract work is now the basis on which any employer can decide to take your labour, pay you for your labour but not have an employment right with you, and in so doing make you responsible for all of the conditions, your pension, your overtime arrangements, your leave, your workers' compensation or health and safety support –- I am talking about all of those things you can be made responsible for by a decision of the nature of the employment relationship -- that is the end of permanent work in my country if we cannot see this Government off.

It gets worse.  We have a piece of legislation that should not exist anywhere in the democratic world.  It is aimed at our unions in the building and construction sector right now, but it has implications if the Tories win again for us to be all subject to coercive powers that allow interrogation, jail and fines for ordinary industrial activity.

You can be fined or jailed for having a union meeting and refuse to talk to a secret task force about who was there and what you talked about.  It is as simple as that.  You can have a dispute with the employer and months later find yourself, after it is done and dusted, summonsed to appear in court facing fines of up to $30,000 as an individual worker for an act of solidarity, for standing in solidarity with your colleagues when a representative of yours was sacked, harassed or suffered other industrial threats. 

These three bits of legislation, along with the punitive action now where we are punishing the most vulnerable in my country, those who are disabled, single mothers, where we are threatening migrant rights, mean that we are seeing the breakdown of a proud multicultural tradition of a migrant nation because temporary workers are being brought into the country to fill so‑called skill deficits.  We absolutely welcome the temporary workers, absolutely welcome our workers from neighbouring countries, our brothers and sisters, but we will not stand back and see them refused the right to join a union or exploited about equivalent wages and conditions to those of Australian workers.  All this paints a horrible picture for a proud democracy where we have said that workers' rights sit at the core of a decent nation. 

We have spent two years fighting back because it has forced us to change the way we conduct politics.  I think it has to force us right around the world to think again about how we build union power.  We know how to organise in our workplaces, but I can tell you, as a Movement, we have never seriously sought actually to organise in our communities before and to have a systematic conversation that employed every technique we could think of. 

We actually took the cost of two cups of coffee, $5, voluntarily from each member in Australia and we built a national advertising capacity on national television in prime advertising time where we now tell the stories of working people hurt by a lack of rights and hurt by the Government's legislation.  For every dollar we have spent, the business community and the Government have spent $15 and we have beaten them.  It is now one of the number one issues for the forthcoming election. 

However, if that is all we did, it would not be enough.  We have actually systematically engaged ‑ and we thank those unions around the world who have helped us to understand how to effect this ‑ with our own members in phone conversations, door knocks, house visits, talking to people, not just in their workplaces, but one‑on‑one conversations about what it is that is at risk for them and for their children and their grandchildren.

We have a parallel to that.  We have built community campaigns where we have community organisers now working in our communities in those electorates we need to win and they have been there for two years.  They have built the kind of community campaign that sees non‑union members and union members working together with church groups and women's groups with community organisations to say that rights at work must be reinstated. 

In addition to that, we have mobilised like never before.  In the face of no‑strike legislation, other than in a protected bargaining period, we have mobilised on three separate occasions more than half a million workers and linked them by Sky channel in the same meeting right across the country.

Our Conservatives are in a panic.  We face an election within weeks.  We need you to keep your fingers crossed because we hope that we will get one simple victory.  We hope we will get a Labour Party ‑ that is a good thing ‑ but it goes way beyond politics, about whether it is Labour or Conservative or Green or Democrat or Independent.  This is a message from working Australians which says:  "You can’t tear up people's rights.  You can’t put your  hand up and get them both to represent working people and their families.  You can’t tear up their rights without consulting them, without asking them how to vote, vote for legislation some 23 times which takes away job security, income security and fundamental rights, and then put your hand up again in a democracy and get re‑elected.  It does not work like that." 
So it is a simple message that says it does not matter where you come from; if you do not protect working people, you seek to tear up their rights, do not expect to get re‑elected.  So keep your fingers crossed that within just a matter of weeks we will see off the Tories in our land who have sought to redefine an Australia that we do not recognise.

I wish it was just Australia, but indeed it is not.  Whilst we all have to fight within our own nations, I am enormously grateful for the solidarity of the TUC, for other confederations around the country, and we will again draw on that solidarity as we seek to rewrite labour laws in Australia, should we see the Government defeated in the next few weeks. 
The message for us is that we cannot indulge in isolationism.  A new ‘international’ alone or a union campaign alone in my own country, without a sense of purpose, is about the kind of nation or the globalization we want to see. So whether it is a campaign for labour laws in specific countries, public services bargaining with a multi-national company, our vision for reform of the UN structures or other issues of social justice, we know one thing.  Isolationism and whingeing about our plight in life will not change the political landscape or the legislative landscape and will not do anything about the ugly face of globalization.  So union strength must mean political strength as well as industrial strength.  

On the global scale our commitment to the Millennium development goals and the calls for action against poverty is simply the beginning.  We must build the alliances that allow us to effect a serious drive for political influence, setting the political agenda, holding governments to account and seeing off the damaging effects of conservative governments everywhere.   With very few exceptions, the governments of the world have moved to the right.  They are easily seduced by the corporate board rooms.  They are intimidated by the dominant financial policies of the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD when, indeed, they are not leading it.  They are timid in opposition to the rise in social division, racism and xenophobia.  Only when unions and civil society stand together against the might of the corporate world and in defence of good political leaders will we see the pendulum swing back the other way. 

I am optimistic, even as I recognize the often overwhelming challenge of the struggle ahead of us, not the least of which is, as I said, central to the heart of my very own country right now.   

Our political campaigns together must mean political power and success if we are going to achieve a legacy that we are proud to hand on our children and grandchildren and if we are going to use the legacy that was handed to us to dig deeper wells, as somebody said last night, for our grandchildren to drink from.

We know that the challenge for us is to be able to mobilize on a scale that can both influence the ballot box and then hold governments to account as we drive a consciousness that democracy extends well beyond polling day.  In terms of UN reform, democracy must sit at the heart of a global governance structure that will make it possible for workers to feel confident to build a secure future; human rights, workers’ rights, quality education and social justice.  Broadly speaking, we know that without skills, without job security and without the rights that protect working people and their families, our future is not what we would want it to be. 

The TUC, the ITUC, all of us, must have one ambition.  We cannot rest on isolationism.   We cannot rest on simply knowing what is right.  We must take the fight, the arguments, the conversation, the communication and the good old-fashioned organizing framework we know so well to our communities and we must enable those communities to demand of democracies all around the world a decent future where people, again, sit at the heart of a fair globalization.  Thank you.