Whose side are you on, Labor?

CFMEU national secretary Dave Noonan in Adelaide last week. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

Last week, I was proud to spend a few days with 150 blue-collar workers in a hall in Adelaide.

Men, women, migrants, Australian-born, First Nation people, crane drivers, chippies, brickies, concreters, painters, scaffolders, plant operators and many other trades and callings from every state and territory.

They came together to discuss their construction industry and to make decisions for their national union, the CFMEU. Many of them worked for a change of government earlier this year.

Every one of them was shocked and dismayed by Labor’s decision to support the last batch of free-trade agreements signed by Scott Morrison.

They don’t expect the Prime Minister or the Liberals to stand up for workers’ rights or local jobs. After all, the Libs always have stood for big business and lower wages.

But they had hoped for much better from Labor, which started as a workers’ party, but so often seems to lose its way.

They know that workers on temporary visas often get ripped off by unscrupulous employers — just like on the John Holland site in Hobart last year, where workers from China went unpaid for eight weeks until the union stepped in and fixed the problem.

They know that the ABCC, Morrison’s “tough cop” in the building industry, turns a blind eye to these rip-offs, preferring to use its massive budget and coercive powers to prosecute workers and unions.

Women construction workers spoke about their experience in the industry — how they are often underestimated by management, relegated to the lower-skilled work and how they have to prove they’re better than the blokes time and time again to get respect.

They also told the conference that they often get solidarity and support from their male colleagues and the union.

The indigenous panel participants spoke of their paths into construction, about the troubled circumstances they grew up in, and how some of the government-funded training schemes didn’t provide decent training or work.

One young organiser spoke of the first-class training in the CFMEU apprenticeship scheme, another of his great-grandfather, the legendary indigenous leader William Cooper. Now he’s a leader of construction workers.

Workers talked about the way deregulation of the industry and the shortcuts in construction taken by some developers and builders led to the apartment crisis presently damaging the industry, a crisis that independent modelling tells us will cost $6.2bn to fix.

They heard how multinational construction giant CPB is screwing small businesses by forcing them to wait for 65 days for payment for the work they perform, putting businesses and workers under huge financial stress.

Delegates demanded that the company go back to the traditional 30-day payment scheme.

These workers heard from Patricia and Robert, from Pam, from Lana, Janine and Dave, and from Luisa. These families lost loved ones – sons, husbands and fathers on Australia’s construction sites, plunging their lives into trauma, grief and loss.

They wept with the families as they described the terrible events that turned their lives upside down and the help they received from the CFMEU, when it seemed that others had turned their backs.

It vowed to support these families’ courageous struggles for justice for those killed in the industry, and accountability for the employers whose callous disregard for safety led to the deaths.

And they heard how the Coalition’s so-called Ensuring Integrity Bill will empower the government to remove union leaders it doesn’t like, and how it will be simple for the government to deregister their union.

The laws that these workers and their union operate under are already the most draconian labour laws in the developed world.

Now this government wants to take unions out of the hands of their members, to shut down the debate and democratic policy forums of trade unions.

It wants to stop workers from blowing the whistle on dodgy developers and builders.

Yes, the union is strong, but that’s what the members demand in such a tough industry.

The members at the conference had questions as well: Why is Morrison doing so little to protect consumers from dodgy property developers?

Why has little or nothing been done about the rip-offs of the big four banks?

Why is it always unions, and only unions, who are in this government’s firing line?

The answer is that however much Morrison tries to look like a daggy uncle in a Sharks cap, his real intention is to keep wages low and corporate profits high.

If he cared about workers and small business, why would he turn a blind eye to them getting screwed by developers and multinational construction companies?

And the people at the conference had another important question.

This one’s not for Morrison, it’s for Albo and for Labor.

Whose side are you on?

Dave Noonan is the CFMEU construction and general division national secretary