I’m astonished to see The Project featuring this very common sense segment, complete with some great data from the IPA, and a killer quote from the HR Nichols’ Society’s Executive Director John Slater. Watch the video:
And take particular note of the way they closed, with the quote from John Slater:
We need courage on the part of building companies, sub-contractors, and politicians, to crack Australia’s construction cartel.
I couldn’t agree more.
See, I’m a huge believer in freedom of association, so I have no problem with people organizing into unions if they wish. If people believe their best interest is served by organizing into groups and they voluntarily choose to have that group represent them on matters of pay, safety, and workplace conditions, then so much the better! Have at it…
But Unions are not voluntary, at least not in the Construction industry, and not in any meaningful sense of the word ‘voluntary’. Oh sure, they’re ‘voluntary’ in the sense that compulsory unionism has been outlawed, but as a construction worker you’d be hard pressed to stay in work (at least on any government funded construction site or large project) without it, and as a developer if you try to build a major project as a ‘non union’ site, you’re going to have a really bad time.
I mean, really bad.
Illegal strikes and blockades, sometimes involving violence, are not out of the question:
The CFMEU will pay $3.55 million to building company Grocon over the blockade of several of its sites in Melbourne, including the Myer Emporium project.
Grocon had sought damages through the courts, but the matter has now been resolved.
The battle for control of the Grocon Emporium site spilled onto the streets in August 2012, when police had to use pepper spray and horses to try to subdue hundreds of angry union protesters.
The four-day blockade of the Melbourne CBD site in 2012 was deemed illegal and last year, the union was fined $1.25 million over the protest action.
And that wasn’t even a non-union site! That was just a boring old pay dispute!
Then there’s the illegal secondary boycott of Boral which the CFMEU maintained for years: (I should say ‘allegedly’, given no conviction was recorded… but really, who are we kidding?)
Australia’s biggest construction union will pay up to $9 million as part of a massive settlement over its alleged black ban of concrete giant Boral in central Melbourne.
In one of the largest ever industrial payouts, the powerful Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union will pay Boral more than $4 million in damages, plus legal costs, and will enter into a binding agreement that prohibits the union from interfering with Boral’s business for a three-year period.
No wonder they need so many members… who else is going to fund all the payouts from their illegal activities?
The CFMEU also have a long history of mixing with organised criminals and using threats and standover tactics to get what they want:
Union officials have formed corrupt relationships with organised crime figures, receiving kickbacks in exchange for arranging lucrative contracts in the construction industry.
A joint investigation by ABC’s 7.30 program and Fairfax Media has discovered that bribery, extortion and threats of violence are used to cement the influence of crime figures on Australia’s construction sites.
Companies connected to major crime figures have won contracts on private and government projects, including Victoria’s desalination plant and the Barangaroo development in Sydney.
Evidence including covertly recorded conversations, bank records, police intelligence files and whistleblower accounts implicate a number of senior members of the influential Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in New South Wales and Victoria in corruption.
And if you think that none of this affects you, because you’re not a construction worker, consider how many more Billions of dollars in taxes you’re having to pay to get basic infrastructure built, and also know that the big unions are heavy hitters in the world of the Australian Labor Party, and no one gets pre-selected (much less becomes leader of the party) without the unions say-so. The unions pick who rises, and who falls, in all branches of the Labor Party in Australia, as they were keen to point out to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews just yesterday:
One of Victoria’s biggest unions has told Premier Daniel Andrews to stop supporting construction company Grocon or it will pull support for the Labor government.
On Saturday, CFMEU construction and general division secretary John Setka labelled the Andrews government “a f–king disgrace” on Twitter, after Police Minister Lisa Neville praised Grocon on social media for the company’s work cleaning up Wye River after last summer’s fire.
On Monday Mr Setka wrote a letter on behalf of his 30,000 members to the Premier saying the union “cannot and will not continue to support your government if it continues with the pathetically weak and morally corrupt stance of promoting and supporting companies such as Grocon.”
“I write to you in dismay and utter disgust that you, the Premier of Victoria and leader of the Victorian Labor Party, and a growing number of your ministers, continue to promote … Grocon,” he wrote.
Threats to pull your support are no small thing in the world of the union dominated Labor Party. So these violence-prone thugs are using threats and intimidation to tell an elected State Premier what to do. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?
But what most people don’t realise is that unions do not help their workers. Or at least, only help them as a side-effect to their primary purpose: becoming bigger and more powerful. This is true of almost every organisation, business, government department, or union. They exist for themselves first, and for their ‘members’, or ‘customers’, or ‘constituents’, as the case may be, second. And anything they do for their members is strictly as a side-effect of looking after themselves.
I’ll say that again: Every organisation must look after itself first. Everything else comes second, including you.
This is just as true of membership organisations like unions as it is of businesses. The difference is that we all know a business is there to benefit itself. And that’s ok. We know they’re there to make money, but we freely and voluntarily decide whether or not to do business with them, on the basis of whether we feel it’s sufficiently in our own interest. Unions, on the other hand use compulsion, intimidation, and coercion to force you to do what they want… and they claim to put their members first… and that’s a lie.
Unions are about power, first and foremost. And if you don’t already believe that just by looking at the way they behave, let me tell you about the time I watched ‘my’ union (not the CFMEU, just to be clear) run everyone out of a job, for the sake of getting more power.
For 7 years I worked as a forklift driver and warehouse operator at a huge logistics firm in the western suburbs of Melbourne. We were on good money. No, check that, we were on GREAT money. I’ve never made more money before or since. I never saw less than $32ph, (this was over 10 years ago) and could get $70ph+ on public holidays. It was great!
The union constantly agitated for more pay. 5%+ annual payrises were the minimum they would accept. If management countered at 4.5% it was as if the world had ended. After about 3 years in the company I began to be concerned for the future of the whole company, and for my job. See, I knew (and the union loved to remind us) that other people were driving forklifts for $20ph. But I also took into account the (well known) fact that every three years the contract with our anchor customer (who single handedly accounted for 95%+ of our work) went up for tender… I began to think that sooner or later someone paying their people $20ph was going to make our customer an offer they couldn’t refuse, and we’d all be out of a job.
I began to say as much, at first quietly, but then more loudly. This didn’t make me any friends in the union.
A number of people in the company actually agreed with me, and I’m grateful to the few who joined me in speaking out, but ultimately it was the people who were going to be hurt the most by the union who were the unions biggest allies. It was the 40+ year old men with limited future prospects who were the most committed union members. They felt they had the most to lose, so they convinced themselves that the union was their best chance at protecting their future. They told themselves that having the union on their side would help them.
How wrong they were.
After 4 years at the company our contract with the client was up for tender, and to my surprise, we got it! Life went on as normal and most of my fellow employees seemed to take it all for granted. Of course we got the contract, of course life goes on, of course we’re going to demand another 3 years of 5%pa pay increases at our next EBA negotiations…
The EBA negotiations that followed a year or so later got heated. Management knew it was getting harder for them to keep the place busy, so they pushed back against the union harder than they had in the past. The union went nuclear. The details are fuzzy to me now, it was a number of years ago, but as I recall an offer of 4%pa payrises was rejected out of hand as insulting, there were threats of strikes, there was a deliberate ‘go slow’ campaign from certain workers, and the union were dead-set-certain that this was all out war and nothing less than 5% was ever going to be accepted.
This dragged on for a few months, with the existing EBA lapsing and tensions rising with each passing union meeting and each failed negotiation.
I wasn’t a member, so I didn’t have the ‘privilege’ of voting (for my own pay packet, no less!) so again I’m not certain of the details, but at least one offer was voted down by the union members, cheered on by the union delegates, and there were probably 2 or 3 such votes over the months. I don’t know because I stopped attending the meetings and kept working instead… just to piss them off.
Then suddenly everything changed. The union delegates had a spring in their step, another meeting was called, and this one was going to be different! The union reps themselves spread whispers of a breakthrough, finally we had a deal we could agree to!
I didn’t attend the meeting, but I found out later that the deal they voted to accept, the one the union delegates had said was different… was exactly the same. It was the same offer that had been rejected as ‘insulting’ at least once, perhaps two or three times, before.
Something didn’t smell right. So I put the feelers out and the word on the street was…
The company had offered to hand over some of its other sites to this union if they got the members to agree to the offer.
In other words, the change of heart was not because the deal was better for the workers, but because it was better for the UNION.
The union gained more power, so suddenly the membership were joyfully bullied into accepting what had once been an ‘insulting offer’. The union gained more sites, more members, and as a result, more influence on the grand political stage.
As I said at the outset, every organisation, including a union, must put itself first. And that’s ok… except when that organisation claims to put you first, or when that organisation has the power to coerce. Like a union. Or a government.
To finish the story, the very next time the contract with our major customer went up for tender… we lost. Someone else was cheaper, by a big enough margin that our customer was willing to pay the costs of changing logistics suppliers, and take the risks of an unknown supplier, rather than keep paying the premium we were charging so our union could get their absurd pay rises.
Do you know what happens to your cushy high paying job when your company loses 90% of its customer base?
You don’t have it anymore.
There were a lot of unemployed people all of a sudden. They had to go and find work elsewhere… but who had the work? The place that was paying $20ph of course. Well this was an outrage! The union reps beat their chest and promised action and said they were doing everything they could and talked and talked and bla bla bla. In the end they were just raging against an unstoppable force: Closure.
This whole situation didn’t hurt me much. I stopped driving forklifts and moved into the Video / Film / TV production industry full-time. (Shameless self-promotion: Do you need a TV commercial or corporate video produced? Check out www.indimax.com.au We’re not a ‘budget’ company, but we’ll do more for your budget than anyone else will) No I’m not earning anywhere near as much, but my bills are paid (most of the time) and life is still pretty good.
The people who really got hurt are the ones who struggled to find new employment, struggled to switch to a different industry, struggled to make ends-meet… It was the 40+ and especially the 50+yo men who had been cheering the union on as they pushed for ever-higher payrises. They are the ones who got hurt. They supported the union, the union kept ‘winning’, and they partied right up until they ‘won’ their way out of a job.
There’s a few of them that I know of who still haven’t found new work, 5+ years later.
Why? Because the union didn’t have a grip on reality or the consequences of their actions, and because the union wasn’t really there for their members, but for themselves. Political power, number of sites, number of members… that’s what unions are about. Looking after those members is secondary.
So yes, as John Slater put it so well in the video above:
We need courage on the part of building companies, sub-contractors, and politicians, to crack Australia’s construction cartel.
For the sake of taxpayers, for the sake of the cost of construction and infrastructure… and for the sake of workers. Unions must be stripped of their power to compel people, whether legally or otherwise, to do or not do anything. They must offer value such that people voluntarily choose to engage with them, or they must cease to be.
Voluntary interactions make the world a better place. Compulsion usually has the opposite effect no matter who does it, or why, or whether it’s ‘for your own good’. Unions need to abide by that just as much as government, just as much as businesses, and just as much as you and I.
Unions don’t exist for their members… members exist for their unions. They are the source of money (to pay for the lawsuits), the source of power (to get ahead in the Labor Party), and the perfect cover for the ‘workers champion’ power hungry union elites who trample their members on their way to the top.
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