Union pickets are a law unto themselves

MUA members at the Port of Brisbane. Picture: Darren England

If you’ve ever built or renovated, you may relate to this. Laying the finest carpet is pointless when the floor underneath is not level or flat. Papering a wall with the most exquisite wallpaper is senseless if that wall is not straight.

In the same way, talking about industrial relations reform is a waste of our time until we can manage to have our existing laws upheld. New laws, introduced into an environment where other laws are ignored, are of no use to anyone. Is there anyone in Canberra who can make the premiers make their police do their job? If not, can you please turn off the lights, lock the doors and catch some economy flights home?

For more than a week now, right down the eastern seaboard, in each state, illegal road blockades by union workers and other random people, referred to by the unions as “concerned community members”, have been ongoing. The police, whose job it is to uphold the law and keep the roads clear, are sitting and looking. Not acting but looking, looking, looking.

In Sydney and Brisbane, the blockades are at the ports. These are in place because workers were made redundant and there is unhappiness that the decision was delivered via email and text. In Melbourne the blockade is outside a warehouse, over company plans to use labour hire workers.

To be frank, the real reason the blockades are in place is probably because the union movement needs to fire the gun on a Work Choices-style election campaign and these disputes are a convenient trigger. However, the reasons the blockades are in place do not matter; all that matters is that the blockades are still in place because they haven’t been cleared because all the police will do is sit and look.

Formal orders to return to work, against any workers striking to take part in the blockades, have been issued and ignored. Orders from the Fair Work Commission do not apply to concerned community members, they apply only to workers. As long as striking workers know the police will allow community members to block the road to the workplace and cripple the employer, they will be happy to keep defying orders of the Fair Work Commission.

Workers don’t even have to turn up at the blockades; community members are there to block the road for them. In this way, the gross negligence of our police makes the Fair Work Commission impotent.

Apart from return to work orders, the law provides employers another remedy to the defiance of unlawfully striking workers; anyone who goes on strike unlawfully can be dismissed without redress.

However, people know they won’t be dismissed because they know the company cannot function because the access to the workplace is being blocked by concerned community members and the police won’t clear those people off the roads. In this way, the gross negligence of our police makes the Fair Work Act inoperable.

Our laws give us the right to strike, to assemble and protest, but our laws do not give us the right to impede or restrict the movement of others, or to trespass. These blockades, being called community pickets, do all that, and their use is gathering momentum. Because everyone knows the police won’t do their jobs, industrial relations disputes are moving out of the workplace arena and into the civil arena because this is the way the law can be flouted.

The community picket technique is incredibly powerful because union officials do not need to convince workers to do anything. The squeeze can be put on companies where there are no union members at all.

All that is needed is a handful of people and a couple of cars to block someone’s driveway for a week or so, until the person gives in. It has worked time and time again.

If our authorities are allowed to shirk their duty to uphold our basic rule of law and repeatedly fail to clear roads when they should be cleared, and ensure that our citizens can move about this country unimpeded and access their own property freely, then a dangerous precedent is set. Follow the scenario to the logical conclusion; if unions know they can freely get away with sending people to block roads, then road blocking — which is devastating in impact and neuters our Fair Work system — is what we will experience.

The federal government has been asked to comment, but only in relation to how the sackings were done. Understandably, it is reluctant to express a view. Strikes, sacking and workplace disputes are best kept between workers and bosses. However, the government must do something about the police inaction regarding the blockades. Freedom of movement and access is a law-and-order issue for citizens, and not a workplace issue.