As the dust settles on the federal election and the rout of the Coalition, very little has changed for workers in this country. The cost of living continues to rise, while the climate crisis beckons perhaps another La Nina to drench the barely-recovered communities of Australia’s East. Queer workers are waiting to see if they’ll be the subject of another culture war sparked by the Religious Freedoms Bill and asylum seekers are still getting locked up in overseas detention camps as a cheap ploy to keep Australian workers pitted against their overseas colleagues rather than against their bosses and owners.

So where do workers go now that the so-called “labour” party is in power? The answer can be found in the powerful slate of union campaigns that have emerged over the past year, and the possibility of widespread, united strike action.

This year has seen a huge increase in industrial action in NSW compared to previous years, and it has been driven largely by workers in the public sector: nurses, midwives, teachers, transport staff, paramedics, and other workers have all walked off the job at some point this year, often in huge numbers. To understand why these strikes are significant, we must look to the recent history of industrial disputes in the Australian public sector.

***

The long decline of union density and industrial struggle in this country has its origins in the infamous 1983 Accords, which saw the ALP and union officials sell out workers’ ability to organise and take militant industrial action. These laws, and their later versions in 1996 and 2008 (including Gillard’s Fair Work Act), are the reason why it is illegal for workers to strike in solidarity with other workplaces or outside of dates specified by industrial relations bureaucrats. This system is enforced by harsh fines, which the government is now trying to increase to $55 000 for a single day of “illegal” strike action. It is also the reason why workers cannot win pay and conditions across an industry, but only at a specific workplace. 

The Accords ‘deal’ was specifically intended to co-opt the bureaucracy of the union movement and undercut the demands of rank-and-file workers, who were carrying out unprecedented levels of strike action during the 1970s and early 80s. The Accords gave union officials a seat at the legislative table, and in return, workers were told to discontinue industrial action and accept broader reforms like Medicare and compulsory superannuation rather than wage increases at the industry level. 

In practice, these restrictions have made it incredibly difficult for genuinely impactful strikes to occur, and made unions much less successful at winning better pay and conditions. Industries have fragmented, thus fragmenting their unions, and workers in general have lost sight of the power a union card can hold. This has led to a slow death spiral, with low density enabling a shift towards an insurance model of unionism, which in turn drives density lower as it is unable to deliver genuine material improvements for union members. In the public sector, density has dropped significantly, with industries like teaching, health, transport and public administration falling from over 50% in 1994 to between 20-30% in 2016 (ABS data). 

This density collapse has seriously affected the strength of the union movement. In 1985, there were 605 industrial disputes across Australia, compared to a mere 30 in 2022. In 1987, 1311 working days were lost to industrial action, while in 2020 only 33 days were lost. If industrial disputes are the practical schools of socialism, where workers learn who their class enemies are and how to beat them, then this decrease in strike frequency and intensity is resulting in a generation of workers who are increasingly less familiar with the benefits of class struggle and the methods of winning it. As a result, Australian workers are producing about 50% more value than 30 years ago, without a commensurate rise in wages (or welfare). More money has been going to the bosses, while we have been getting nothing. 

***

This historical context is what makes this year’s surge in industrial action so impressive. The NSW nurses and midwives strikes, for example, saw thousands walk off the job across the state earlier this year, with a subsequent mass meeting backing up the strike with a vote to increase the NSWNMA’s pay claim from 3% to 7%. Not only was this strike significant in scale, it was significant in its open defiance of the Industrial Relations Commission’s (IRC) order to stop the strike. While certainly not yet at the scale of the 1985-6 Victorian nurses strikes, which were fought over similar issues such as pay and ratios and which saw the state government nearly collapse, these NSW strikes are a positive revival of mass, defiant industrial action. 

The bus and train actions undertaken by the RTBU this year are significant and ongoing, causing major disruption to Sydney Trains in the first week of July. The Teachers Federation and Independent Education Union have also been taking serious industrial action over the last few months, culminating recently in an historic joint strike, with both unions marching on Macquarie Street together for the first time since 1996. These disputes are so large because these large, public industries have retained a relatively high level of union density, to the extent that the public sector represents a disproportionately large section of unionised labour in Australia. So, with teachers, transport workers, ambos, and nurses, with various other workers in the Public Service Association joining the growing strike wave, we are now in a scenario where, at least in NSW, a huge section of all unionised labour is taking industrial action this year.

***

A pessimist may look at this year’s disputes and see nothing more than a small blip, an anomaly in the trend of lower union density and class struggle in Australia. To be sure, since the sharp decline in the 80s, there have been spikes and momentary resurgences like this that have failed to revitalise unionism and class struggle in the long term. However, it would be wrong to see these strikes as coincidental. 

In the last few years, public sector wage cuts, cuts to public services, and privatisation in general have mixed with extraordinary social conditions like the COVID-19 pandemic to create a perfect storm of attacks against the working class. Understaffed and under-resourced nurses and ambos, whose wage growth was frozen at 2% by the NSW Liberal government, worked in highly dangerous pandemic conditions for nearly two years before these strikes. The same can be said for public transport workers and teachers. 

These strikes aren’t just isolated fights for better pay, but a broader fight against the capitalist logic that says workers (rather than bosses) ought to pay for these health and climate crises that they didn’t create. They are also focused on overcoming the largest single employer in NSW – the state government – and if successful, could set the standard for workers rights and pay expectations across the economy, perhaps beginning to reverse the downward spiral that workers have suffered over the last few decades. This moment is a huge opportunity, with the potential to topple a government, revitalise the public sector, and re-energise the rank-and-file union movement in Australia.

To succeed, workers must be able to break through both the legal restrictions on industrial action and the political limitations of a long-crippled union movement, something which can only be achieved through a mass, coordinated, united public sector strike campaign.

Touch One, Touch All

The fact that these strikes are a united defence against attempts to diminish public services makes them particularly relevant to workers all over the state. The public sector is the best example of work that is necessary for its social value, not for profit. This is what makes it important: it is the seed of a socialist economy that the state cannot fully stamp out, despite its best efforts. 

This becomes all the more true when we consider the largest issues facing the working class right now. If we are to halt climate change, we will need so much free and accessible public transport that using a car in most places is unnecessary. We’ll need more nurses and hospital staff to combat the increasing health threats brought about by capitalism’s ecological disasters. We will require a fully funded emergency service, including full-time firefighters and SES workers, most of whom are currently unpaid despite being tasked with increasingly demanding disaster responses. Public education and well-paid, properly resourced teachers are also essential to a sustainable society, from early childhood education through to tertiary and vocational education. These jobs are the “green jobs” which we so often talk about in demanding action on climate change.

We should not just defend the public service from cuts and privatisation, but work to transform the economy so that as many jobs as possible are publicly funded and fully resourced. Not because we want a bloated state bureaucracy, but because these are the jobs that need to be filled, even though they don’t turn a profit. In fighting for a fair deal, public sector workers in NSW are demanding the state recognise the social value of their labour, advancing the position of the working class as a whole. As socialists we must make this point clear and encourage all workers to recognise the significance of this fight. 

Practical Steps

These disputes will only become more significant over the next eight months, as the new state budget comes into effect, and pre-campaigning for the 2023 state election begins. This budget has done little for the workers currently on strike, still giving them a huge real wage cut. More nurses will supposedly be hired, but not enough to fulfil the staff-patient ratios the nurses and midwives are currently demanding. Teachers’ pay has been frozen to pre-budget levels, locking in an even more egregious pay cut. Meanwhile, Perottet’s government has dedicated huge funding to hire more police officers for an already overstaffed and over-resourced paramilitary police force. 

In response to this obscene misdirection of public funds, nurses have voted to increase their demand for wages to a 7% increase, public and Catholic school teachers have marched on Macquarie Street in a powerful display of solidarity, and Sydney rail workers have drastically slowed down the city for almost a week. Over the next eight months, Perottet’s austerity measures will continue to be directly confronted by mass worker power. When these workers withdraw their labour in a strike, the state has no option but to concede to their demands. 

This is not the strategy favoured by most current union officials, however, especially those with close ties to the leaders of the Labor Party. The union movement since the Accords has been one of negotiation, not a fighting movement which demands change through escalating and committed industrial action. There is a real possibility that union leaders will seek to “wind down” the current strikes once the state election is called, to campaign for and then work cooperatively with an incoming Labor government. This may be led by officials of the more conservative public sector unions, like the FBEU and the HSU, which have previously spent upwards of one million dollars on ALP campaigning despite having thousands fewer members than unions not affiliated with the party, like the NSW Teachers Federation. 

Even the Federation’s leader, though, has indicated that campaigning may stop before the election, with President Angelo Gavrielatos declaring at the most recent rally that: “We will keep campaigning until election day next March if we have to. Too much is at stake for us not to continue.” This is alarmingly short-sighted, and may mean that this year’s militancy could soon drift into the malaise of ALP-governed states like Queensland and Victoria, where public sector unions have been silent despite facing lower wage caps than NSW.

Ultimately, when we rely on opposition politicians and bureaucratic negotiations, we are only as strong as those individuals and their willingness to stand up for our demands. Their power is written on paper and can be distorted, abused, or simply revoked by backroom deals. It is extremely dangerous and contrary to our interests to put energy into election campaigns that might see one or two demands won at best, but at worst will see industrial actions completely sapped of energy and resources without any guarantee of success – in other words, crushed. 

This is all the more true for the current industrial disputes in NSW, since the state Labor Party has clearly shown itself to be against the striking workers. While saying they supported the pay demands of the nurses and midwives, NSW Labor took a stand against staff-patient ratios because they did not want to seem “beholden to the union movement.” Just last week, NSW Labor voted with the government in the Upper House against hearing a bill that would repeal the public sector wage freeze (which, though implemented by a Coalition government, was actually devised in 2008 by NSW Labor). This, despite leader Chris Minns claiming online that a Labor government would “abolish” the wage cap, evidently only after unions agree to call off their strikes and campaign for his election. 

For this reason, the ongoing industrial actions must maintain the mass participation of workers, and unionists must begin calling for more unified mass rallies and coordinated strike actions. The large rallies of nurses and midwives and teachers not only allowed the rank and file to physically experience solidarity on the streets, but gave other members of the working class an opportunity to join these demonstrations in solidarity. This mass involvement of the rank-and-file is also essential to combat any attempts by union officials to dilute their demands through backroom deals with the government, or to divert these industrial actions towards electoralism or lobbying individual politicians. 

It is also important that these actions link themselves more closely to each other, and this can only truly happen from below. The state budget is a coordinated attack on the public sector, and so workers in the public sector must have a coordinated defence. A mass general strike of hospital staff, ambos, transport workers, and teachers would give the government no choice but to cave to worker demands. While an ambitious hope, already we are seeing teachers from two different unions striking together. With a union movement that is generally beholden to our draconian industrial relations laws, it is difficult for other workers to take mass industrial action in solidarity with our public sector comrades. However, it is not impossible, and even small solidarity contingents of other unionists or activist groups can help support more and greater mobilisations of workers across industries, sectors, and workplaces.

Finally, in order for these and other workers to win meaningful gains, industrial relations laws will have to be defied on mass. The NSW government has recently moved to increase penalties for unions who take “illegal” industrial action. Since the Industrial Relations Commission is effectively run by the government (the bosses), any industrial actions which actually threaten profits (i.e. any meaningful industrial action) will most likely be deemed illegal. This means that, if workers are to take strike action that will win them their demands, they will have to be prepared to break the law. The nurses’ union has already done this, as has the RTBU, but as fines are imposed, workers will have to resist any calls to limit their industrial action in order to placate the IRC. Again, this will require all the unions to be unified in resisting these fines and bans on strike action, as only through unity do we have the strength to break these laws and win.

We all have an interest in a world where workers’ needs are not sacrificed for the profits of bosses. We can only win this by fighting as a united working class, not by asking politicians or officials to do the fighting for us.