As if Anthony Albanese and his clownshow government weren’t kicking enough own goals, now they’re getting crash-tackled by their own paymasters. Unions are the big backers of the Australian Labor Party – more than half of Labor’s declared donations come from unions and over a third of federal Labor MPs are former unionists; and, by party rule, 50 per cent of delegates at federal and state party conferences, which determine policy, must be unionists (it was 60 per cent until 2003).
But with the Albanese government forced, kicking and screaming, to tackle the corruption and criminality rampant in the powerful Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, suddenly the bruvvas are turning on their erstwhile mates.
Federal Labor has been warned blue-collar workers could desert the government in an election rebellion over its CFMEU legislation, as a key left-wing union voted to break away from the ACTU in one of the biggest splits in the union movement for decades.
Which is it? Blue-collar workers or union members? Just 12 per cent of workers are union members today and the vast majority of those are white-collar public sector workers: teachers, public servants and nurses. Just 10 per cent of mining workers or construction workers are union members.
Still, it’s not an entirely hollow threat. While the percentage of workers who are union members is small, the numbers are still enough to make a government elected with just a 32 per cent primary vote sweat.
The 100,000-member Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union voted to disaffiliate from the ACTU in protest at the peak union body not opposing government legislation forcing the CFMEU’s construction division into administration […]
The Australian can reveal four left-wing unions separately decided on Thursday to commit $1m towards the financing of the High Court challenge by sacked CFMEU officials to try to overturn the government’s legislation […]
Electrical Trades Union Victorian secretary Troy Gray and plumbers union Victorian secretary Earl Setches said the divisions among unions over the CFMEU legislation represented the biggest split in the union movement they had seen in decades. Mr Gray told The Australian he had never seen such anger at the Labor Party among blue-collar workers, predicting many would shift their vote at the election to the Greens.
The Greens? The Greens, even more than the old-school Liberals, are the Party of the Rich, not the worker. The Greens’ strident anti-mining and industry policies hardly make them attractive to blue-collar workers. Consider the visceral hate dished out to Bob Brown’s anti-coal “caravan”, as it headed further and further north from affluent harbourside Sydney to blue-collar Queensland mining towns.
Still, it’s not surprising that workers shafted by staggering cost-of-living rises are arcing up.
“There’s a real ‘f..k Labor, pay back Labor’ feeling among a lot of blue-collar workers that I have never seen before,” he said. “I have never seen the anti-Labor sentiment amongst blue-collar workers that I have seen in the last two weeks and I go back 35 years in the industry.
“That’s Labor’s biggest problem at the next election. They will never, ever, ever win the vote back of those blue-collar workers.”
ETU NSW secretary Allen Hicks agreed with Mr Gray’s comments about the level of anger among blue-collar workers towards the Albanese government.
“I think there are some very worrying times ahead for the Labor Party, as we know it, because people in the construction industry, blue-collar workers traditionally have voted Labor all of their lives, and their mothers and fathers have voted Labor all of their lives.
Are the union hacks simply missing the point? It’s not the CFMEU, it’s the cost of living. At most, the anti-CFMEU push is the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is a process that’s been gathering pace for years. Some of us generational Labor voters got the memo years ago – the bruvvas are just a decade or two slower on the uptake.
Aside from lost votes, though, where it’s really going to hurt the Labor movement is in the hip pocket.
Mr Hicks said the disaffiliation would cost the ACTU about $800,000 annually, while union members who volunteered to campaign for the ALP were “very disillusioned with the ALP in a big way now and Anthony Albanese is the one that has got to take full responsibility for that”.
In any case, Labor had no choice but to finally act on the CFMEU.
Many union leaders remain furious at the CFMEU and its sacked officials for causing years of damage to the reputation of the labour movement, insisting the government was left with little option but to legislate the takeover of the construction division […]
Supporters of the ACTU leadership […] point to the belligerence of CFMEU officials, singling out NSW secretary Darren Greenfield for refusing to stand down after being charged in 2021 with taking bribes. He denies any wrongdoing. “It’s like the CFMEU tipped a truckload of manure on the door of the ACTU and when the leaders are stuck with the job of cleaning it up they blame them for doing so,” one union leader said.
In this case, then, Albanese is just being wedged by events he had little control over. He was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
That doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to watch Labor implode, though. Pass the popcorn.
