Anti-Qantas rhetoric flies in the face of reason

Kudelka cartoon

AS outsiders, most of us are blissfully unaware of internal Labor Party skirmishes. However, those battles become a matter of public importance when those pursuing private ambitions act in a way that might appear inconsistent with performing their public responsibilities.

That's why it pays to remember that while the Qantas dispute is a protracted battle between Qantas and its union-led workforce over pay and conditions, Transport Workers Union boss Tony Sheldon is also running a campaign of his own.

Beneath the surface of Sheldon's recent public relations blitz as a union leader fighting for the future of his members is a far more private internal battle for his own future. The media-savvy union boss also wants to be the next ALP national president. Perhaps to fully understand Sheldon's campaign against Qantas, it might help to understand the internal dynamics behind his bid for the presidency.

The incumbent ALP president, Jenny McAllister, is up for re-election at the party's national conference on December 2. Under changes brought in by former ALP leader Simon Crean at the 2002 national conference, the ALP president is elected directly by all party members, with the vote determining a rotating presidency for the next three years.

The candidate with the most votes is elected president for the first year, taking up that position at the start of the 2011 national conference. The runner-up takes up the position for the second year and the third placegetter gets the guernsey in the third year.

As a member of Rainbow Labor and Labor for Refugees, McAllister is being challenged by Sheldon, an influential member from the party's right-wing faction in NSW who has not entered the race to run third.

Voting closes in a few weeks on November 18 and while Labor Party rules forbid candidates from "campaigning in the media (including media interviews, articles, press conferences and statements, whether unsolicited or not)", happily for Sheldon's bid for the ALP presidency, his high-profile dispute with Qantas has given him prime-time publicity to woo votes from party members.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to win the ALP presidency. Plenty of others are also campaigning for the same gig.

But Sheldon is running his two campaigns in tandem and that means it is not entirely clear where his fight for Qantas workers starts and where Sheldon's fight for his own interests stops.

Qantas customers and the many thousands of Australians whose livelihoods depend on Qantas remaining a viable airline are entitled to look cynically at TWU tactics throughout this protracted dispute.

More to the point, TWU members are entitled to ask: has Sheldon ramped up his anti-Qantas, anti-management rhetoric as part of his bid for the ALP presidency? And are the interests of TWU workers at Qantas best served by a bloviating Sheldon, looking for a party political promotion? After all, the more Sheldon is out there in the media using union muscle against Qantas, the more the TWU boss promotes himself for the ALP presidency, the working-class champion taking on a corporate Goliath. That's a useful piece of imagery when you are engaged in an internal Labor Party contest.

Casting an eye across the broader union movement, it is increasingly clear that a distinction needs to be made between union leaders and their members. The behaviour of the former is not always in the best interests of the latter. One need only look at the appalling shenanigans at the Health Services Union to understand how the interests of even the lowest paid workers are sidelined when some union bosses pursue their own self-interest.

As one Labor insider told The Australian, the union movement has been quiet about condemning misbehaviour at the HSU because rorting by union bosses at the expense of union members is not confined to the HSU.

The questions about Sheldon's conduct are entirely different, of course. There is no suggestion of fraud or illegality. Yet a nagging question remains as to whether Sheldon's actions are in the best interests of his union members.

Your average baggage handler at Qantas is earning $75,000, 12 per cent more than their counterparts at Virgin. While Qantas offered a 3 per cent pay increase, Sheldon knocked it back. That would have put Qantas baggage handlers on a wage 15 per cent higher than Virgin employees doing the same job.

More critically, Sheldon's "job security" demands might sound like the language of a fine union leader. But restricting the company's ability to adapt in a highly competitive industry won't help members, let alone improve their job security, if it undermines the viability of the airline. The union-led war of attrition against Qantas is blind to the economic realities of the industry, ignorant of the challenges facing Qantas and reckless as to the genuine interests of union members.

While union members ought to be asking questions of Sheldon, the rest of us should be asking some questions of the federal Labor government. For starters, to what extent has the response of the Gillard government to the Qantas dispute been influenced by Sheldon's candidacy for ALP presidency? Happily for Julia Gillard and her supporters in Labor's right-wing factions, Sheldon has labelled moves for the ALP to move to the Left as "foolish".

Is Sheldon Gillard's favoured candidate for the presidency? And is it just another happy coincidence that Gillard and her ministers sounded like mouthpieces for the TWU boss when Qantas grounded its aircraft last weekend? It sure gets murky when one scratches the surface of Labor politics, union and factional tribalism and the pursuit of personal aggrandisement, not to mention political survival.

The pumped-up, partisan, anti-Qantas rhetoric from the Gillard government this past week has been extraordinary. Bumping aside the ineffective Workplace Relations Minister, a smiling Bill Shorten swanned about at the Fair Work Australia hearing and fronted the cameras to mouth off at Qantas as if he had never vacated the boss's office at the Australian Workers Union. The Prime Minister kept repeating the "extreme action" of Qantas like a Hare Krishna mantra. Anthony Albanese did his frothing anti-Qantas routine. And on it went from a federal government that promised Australians it would not take sides in the dispute.

Apart from the rational and fair-minded Martin Ferguson, Gillard and her ministers have had very little to say about the months of guerilla warfare aimed at Qantas by three unions. Nothing about the threats to "slow-bake" Qantas. Nothing about union bosses who call strikes, only to cancel them at the last minute, disrupting customers and Qantas but ensuring union members don't lose a day's pay. Nothing about the outdated mentality of union demands to essentially take control of Qantas management.

Even Ferguson, the stalwart Labor man, must be asking quiet questions about the intermingling private conflicts arising from Sheldon's bid for the ALP presidency, Gillard's bid to survive as PM and the very public bidding that some Labor ministers do for their union paymasters at the expense of the rest of the country.