From rak608@cscgpo.anu.edu.au Sun May 2 19:40:29 1993 Date: Mon, 29 Mar 93 14:20:17 EST From: Rick A Kuhn To: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu Subject: Material from latest "Socialist" (Australia) Paul I'm afraid I've mislaid your ftp address for ftp'ing the following material to you. Rick _______________________________________________________________________________ Rick Kuhn Department of Political Science (Arts) phone +61 6 249-3851 Australian National University fax +61 6 249-5054 GPO Box 4, ACT 2601 internet: Rick.Kuhn@anu.edu.au Australia _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ The follow material comes from the Socialist, the newspaper of the International Socialist Organisation (Australia) Subscriptions Au$50 for a year air mail GPO Box 1473N Melbourne VIC 3001 Australia _______________________________________________________________________________ Socialist 275 April 1993 _______________________________________________________________________________ Workers' anger stopped the Liberals The 13 March federal election saw the Liberals go down to a humiliating defeat. The Liberal camp has been thrown into disarray. They thought the recession would deliver them victory on a plate but their best chance to win government in ten years has ended in disaster. Their misery is our joy. The result was a smack in the face for the right who were preparing for open slather attacks against us. Many bosses were drooling over the prospect of a Liberal win that would lay the ground for Jeff Kennett-style attacks on the unions everywhere. But workers' anger blocked Hewson in the polls. Workers refused to see their awards abolished and their unions smashed. They weren't prepared to have Medicare gutted and they rejected a GST that would have added 15% to the necessities of life so that the rich could get tax cuts. The Liberal election rallies in the final week of the campaign showed the hatred that existed for their policies. In Sydney, protestors almost drowned Hewson out chanting against the GST. In Brisbane, three thousand came to abuse him, outnumbering his supporters. Hewson had to speak from the back of a truck because building workers refused to erect a stage. We wiped the floor with Hewson. Now we have to use this victory to draw the line against any attack whether from Kennett, Keating or the bosses who back them. At Fairfax newspapers the bosses were anticipating a Liberal government and moved to scrap public holidays from the award. But workers struck on the Friday before the elections and forced them to back down. This is the sort of fight that's needed from now on. LABOR'S vote actually increased in the election but not for love of Keating. He is despised as the man who gave us "the recession we had to have". His talk of recovery is a bad joke when more and more workers join the dole queues every day. The banners that Labor held aloft during the campaign were award restructuring and enterprise bargaining. But in workplace after workplace they are hated as jobs and hard-won working conditions are traded off. At the same time, Keating's main election promise gave the bosses $2 billion worth of tax cuts. We can only expect more of the same from another three years of Keating. For the past ten years, the Labor government has looked after the bosses' interest at our expense. It embraced the market--deregulating the financial system and privatising the Commonwealth Bank. It smashed the Builders' Labourers Federation and cut workers' wages by 15% under the Accord. It brought in the teriary tax ditching its free education platform. Keating has no answers for the economy except to make workers give up even more. During the elections he didn't even pretend that he could fix unemployment. And just look at the rotten enterprise deals that Labor tried to stitch up in the weeks before the election. Medicare management wanted workers to agree to compulsory transfers, cuts to the higher duties allowance and limits on other public servant's conditions. In the Department of Social Security, they wanted workers to work on Saturdays without penalties and give up public holidays. Already bureaucrats in the Prime Minister's department have warned Keating that government spending is way out of line and that all the promises he made during his election campaign are not worth the paper they are printed on. We've beaten back the Liberals but that doesn't mean we have to cop Liberal Party policies from a Labor government. Now is the time to draw the line. We have to throw out rotten enterprise deals and fight for every job. We have to resist any further attempts by Keating to undermine welfare or health or education. The fact that we pushed back Hewson should make us feel confident about resisting such attacks. Some workers have already said that enough is enough. In DSS, workers in at least five workplaces in Sydney and Melbourne unanimously rejected a Public Sector Union log of claims because it made too many concessions to management's demands. At Manly Council in Sydney, garbage collectors are fighting for a return to their award after council bosses cheated them of a pay rise. After a two day strike, hospital staff from the Concorde Repratriation Hospital won an assurance that jobs would not be lost in the transfer to the state government. These are the examples we need to build on. They are the real alternative to the Liberals. _______________________________________________________________________________ Indonesian workers on the move THE workers' movement is on the rise in Indonesia. By the end of last year there was a rising tide of strikes in the industrial areas around Jakarta, including Tangerang and Bekasi, and the town of Bogor in West Java. The image of Indonesia as rural and backward is one-sided. Indonesia has many modern industries with large concentrations of workers. There are two driving forces behind the rise of the movement. One is the very success of Indonesia's rulers in industrialising. The other is the rising expectations of a new working class whose official minimum wage is less than 60 per cent of the government "minimum physical needs" level. A ten-hour day is often extended to 12 or 14 hours by compulsory overtime. Now the workers want better. A militant strike in May 1991 by 4700 workers at a shoe factory in Tangerang demanded higher wages and non-compulsory overtime. At the Gajah Tunggal tyre complex 14,000 workers downed tools calling for the government-set mimimum wage, allowances and the right organise an independent union. Strikes jumped 200 per cent in 1990 to 61. In 1991 there were 130. Last year there were 193 strikes involving 142,365 workers. To head off the movement, the government lifted a 27-year ban on strikes and is renovating its official union, SPSI, so it can channel militancy into "responsible" hands. In June 1991, Jakarta's City Police Chief, Major-General Ritonga, urged all companies to set up SPSI unions and to make sure they took up workers' demands. There is little chance of SPSI doing this as its head owns four textile factories and is chair of the Textile Employers Federation! One union taking up workers' demands is Setia Kawan (Solidarity) It is illegal and persecuted, but could still claim a membership of 3500 in December 1990 and influence over 30,000 workers. A feel for Indonesian workers' confidence is a strike by 750 textile workers in November last year for an 80 per cent pay rise. Another strike by 350 women won menstruation leave. Indonesia's military rulers are wavering. Last December, the Director General of Manpower Control and Labour, Payaman, warned employers not to exploit workers, whilst his Minister Batubara threatened to punish strikers. The groundwork is being laid in Indonesia for enormous class battles. Bosnia peace fraud THE so-called peace process in Bosnia drags on while the war wrecks hundreds of thousands of lives. That's because the "solution" proposed by Lord Owen, the European Community mediator, is simply a version of the carve-up of Bosnia which led to the fighting in the first place. The new map would cut Bosnia into ten semi-autonomous regions along ethnic lines. It would be only a matter of time before any ceasefire on this basis led to mass expulsions to create ethnically "pure" regions, or fighting over disputed territory. The only real solution is the kind of struggle that brought together hundreds of thousands of workers across the former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. A huge wave of strikes against falling living standards united Serb, Croat, Muslim and Albanian workers. Since then, nationalist leaders such as the Croat Tudjman and the Serb Milosevic have managed to channel the anger into war and nationalist hatred. But the road to unity from below has not been completely closed. Last year hundreds of thousands rallied against the war in Belgrade and 100,000 have refused to fight in the Serb army. The great powers are threatening to intervene militarily to enforce a deal. But it is the US and the main European nations who are the biggest obstacle to real peace. They will never stand by and watch nationalist rulers, whatever their crimes, defeated by mass workers' uprisings. The economy of the region is close to collapse. Embargoes and war mean starvation, horror and dislocation for millions. Even workers who today support their nationalist leaders' war can at some point begin to direct their anger against those rulers themselves. Then the class struggles of the 1980s can again point the way out of the mess. This is the only road to peace today for workers in the Balkans.