General strike in New
South Wales
International Viewpoint #216 • November 11, 1991
CZECHO-SLOVAKIA / AUSTRALIA not to ratify the law, pointing out that figures such as Dubcek could be affected by it, while the "return to Europe", and therefore the international reputation of Czecho-Slovakia will be compromised.
Thus the Vice-President of the Federal
Assembly Zdenek Jicinsky: "this will make us look bad in the eyes of the inter-
ONE million workers took part in a 24-hour general strike in national community." However, Havel,
New South Wales on October 23, called by the state's Labor who cannot veto laws, has made it known that he will sign it, insisting that "1 cannot Council to protest the introduction of anti-union laws. allow myself a gesture of opposition that could lead to confrontation and chaos."
KEN DAVIS
According to Daniel Kroupa from the right wing Democratic Civil Alliance (ODA), "this law is a means not for attacking rival parties but for purging our new-born democracy". However, in fact, the lustrace is not only an attack on human rights but a sign of the authoritarian character of the current leaders.
It is enough simply to appear on an StB list — with only that agency knowing why and how — for a person to be considered guilty unless they can prove otherwise. Two protective clauses — one calling for the punishment of anyone publishing the StB list, and another calling for proof that a human rights violation had indeed been committed by an accused person - were chopped out of the law during the parliamentary debate.
The affected person has two weeks to leave their job, and does not even have the right to defend themselves in front of a commission. The appeal will only establish whether or not the name really appears on the StB and Communist Party lists.
Furthermore, private sector employers will have the right to ask their employees to produce an Interior Ministry certificate proving that they are "clean".
A law in the interests of the right
This law serves the particular interests of the right, at a time when the Prague Spring is increasingly presented as of no historical importance and its character as a genuine revolt against the Stalinist regime is denied. However, ex-Communists and collaborators continue to sit in the parliament and the right will protect all those who have rapidly changed their spots and who now vote for the right.
According to the law's supporters, the idea is to create a "climate of moral pressure". In reality however, while the green light has been given for a witch-hunt, the former political police has been reconverted into the Commission for the Defence of the Constitution and the economic mafia continues to work.
The constant demands for controls on the "dirty money" flowing around the privatization process have always run up against the opposition of Klaus and his 22 allies. *
F ERRIES, buses and trains were
stopped. Industry, mines and ports were silent. Schools, both state and religious, were closed. Post offices and large shops went unstaffed. Banks, colleges, libraries, museums and theatres were shut.
Despite court rulings against the public sector unions, government offices, both state and federal, were on strike. Community sector welfare and education agencies were closed. Radio broadcasts and daily newspapers were produced by managers while journalists struck.
Not since 1917 has New South Wales seen a general strike.
The mass media, now controlled in Australia by only two right wing press barons, Murdoch and Packer, went to great lengths to deny the effectiveness of the stoppage.
Employer spokesmen initially estimated 800,000 on strike, with a loss of $500 million in profits, only to revise the figure of strikers down to 400,000 in later media releases.
Newspapers and television featured managers and strike-breakers who had walked or cycled great distances to get to workplaces, or promoted the delights of car sharing to beat traffic jams.
Television and radio ran endless interviews with disgruntled individuals claiming the strike would achieve nothing and denouncing union tactics.
Vast majority support the strike
But the truth was that the vast majority of unionists supported the strike, leaving Sydney and the other New South Wales cities quieter than any Sunday or public holiday in memory.
In Sydney, to the surprise of union members, no mass rallies or marches were called.
The New South Wales Labor Party opposition failed even to endorse the strike call. Instead of rallying hundreds of thousands of workers to demand the ouster of the minority conservative government, the streets were deserted. No picket lines were set up to prevent scabbing, and union leaders went to great pains to exempt as many federal sector or "emergency" workers as possible.
The union leaders were pushed into the general strike "as a formality", due to the evident anger shown in major sectoral stoppages in recent weeks
On September 17, 15,000 workers rallied outside parliament in Sydney, during a strike by manufacturing, waterside and mining unions against the new law.
On October 15, 10,000 nurses demonstrated at parliament, during a stoppage of 80,000 health sector workers against hospital closures and under-funding of the health system.
The general strike served to bring to a head growing militancy and frustration in the union rank-and-file and the community in general, without allowing any ongoing strategy for defeating the New South Wales government or the capitalist offensive.
Right wing push through new laws
Although re-elected without a majority in May, the right wing Liberal-National coalition government led by Nick Greiner has been able to push through the new leg islation, relying on the votes of conserva-
"independents" in both houses of
The laws are designed to dismantle the current industrial court system which sets awards on pay and conditions after disputes between representative unions and employer federations.
They seek to break union power by out-
"closed shop" workplaces and industries where all workers have to belong to the union.
Industrial awards will be replaced by a patchwork of fixed term "voluntary employment contracts" and enterprise bargaining, disadvantaging part-time and poorly organized sectors. "Women and migrant workers will suffer most" according to the official strike call.
By excluding unions from the negotiating process and encouraging company unions, the laws will leave individual employees negotiating with the bosses on wages and conditions
Union officers will have to give seven days notice before entering any workplace and strikes during the time of an enterprise agreement can be punished
AUSTRALIA / SOUTH AFRICA with transitional program fines of $10,000 per day for each worker.
Union decisions must be taken by costly and slow postal ballots, not by elected delegates or mass meetings.
IN THE course of the 1980s South Africa experienced a series
The new laws are a charter for employ ers to sack unionised workers and abolish of social and political confrontations of a breadth penalty rates for nightwork, overtime pay, unprecedented in the country's history, in the course of which the 17% pay loading on the four weeks some tens of thousands of women and men engaged in the annual leave traditional in Australia, redundancy payouts, sick leave and job assault against apartheid. After several years of struggle, of security provisions.
repression, of hope and of fear history suddenly seemed to
The New South
Wales laws are accelerate — the regime decided to negotiate with its eternal designed as a model for national legislation, if the conservatives defeat the Hawke labor government at the next federal
Already, under a federal Labor government and with Labor governments in all states other than New South Wales, wages have been lowered much faster than in other OECD countries. Unemployment is
Unions leaderships have collaborated on seven official (and almost annual) austerity "Accords" with the federal Labor government and employers.
The week of the strike, the federal industrial relations minister repeated that the Accord strategy remained in force — unions should hoid down wages and accept mass unemployment in order to boost profits and allow re-investment in manufacturing.
Sell off of public assets begins
The state and federal governments, both
Labor and Liberal, have begun to sell off public assets. Airlines, banks and telecommunications are
Gone are the promises to maintain the
"social wage".
Fees have been re-introduced for tertary education, unemployment benefits are disappearing in favour of compulsory
"retraining" programs, welfare services and pensions are being cut, and new patient charges and hospital closures are whittling away the national
Despite the sacrifices by working people during a decade of Labor governments, profits have risen enormously in many sectors, without any re-investment in manufacturing industry and job creation.
The wealth boost Labor gave the capitalists has allowed fruitless speculative investments and imperialist investment in super-exploitative industries in South-
East Asia, Chile and the Pacific.
The only strategic difference between
Labor and Liberal-National opposition is on how best to squeeze the workers — through agreements with the union leaders or through smashing the unions outright.* enemy, the ANC. PETER BLUMER
F OR most activists this turning
point could only appear, at first glance, as the fruit of their struggles alone. And it is true that the debate inside the South African ruling class was, from 1984 to 1987, profoundly affected by fear of the generalized social disorder which threatened the racist institutions as much as the productive appara-
But once the first negotiations had started all seemed strangely changed. The regime, which had appeared to be reacting with its back to the wall, took a series of initiatives, itself accelerating the pace of reform, while the ANC for its part seemed entrammelled in contradictions.
To understand this apparent paradox, it is necessary of course to take into account the new international situation, the pressure of the Soviets and the winding down of the struggles from 1987 onwards, as we have already done previously in these col-
But the current political process can only be fully understood by recognizing that the apartheid economic system had already entered its final crisis at the end of
A new economic model
The regime is thus currently only exploiting the political factors mentioned above to implement a new economic model which has been objectively necessary for more than ten years.
The combination of a political conjuncture which is hardly favourable to the popular movement, on the one hand, and the capacity of South African capitalism to bring about its own transformation, on the other, has allowed De Klerk to keep the initiative in the current context.
At the beginning of the 1980s, South Africa entered a grave recession, despite the profits accumulated thanks to the sharp rise in the gold price in preceding years. This recession continued throughout the decade. It has a double origin.