Labor leader flashcards class
Today will be the same for decades!
Defining the working class
Who agrees with the SA Labor Premier’s (Peter Malinauskas) definition of the working class of the future?
“”My message to One Nation voters is who’s going to feed you and bathe you and wipe your bum when you’re 90?” he said during a later Q&A session.
“Because it ain’t going to be your kids, because if I get my way they’re going to be working on submarines with high paying jobs so they can afford to own their home that has to be built by someone, and who’s going to do that work?”
It seems this statement is accurate and part of a rebuttal to what One Nation is saying about migration, including in SA, ahead of an election.
It strikes a chord. During the COVID period, I was in hospital for a few days. All the usual precautions were taken, including more precise, less available rostering of the skilled medical teams (mainly Anglo-Australians). Not so the cleaners, almost all Asian and Middle Eastern background. They were at work on time every day, meticulously cleaning every surface to destroy the spread of the virus. Mainly women, I learned from them the strain of the 1-1.5 hours of buses and trains to get to work each day, and the same to get home. Their dedication was at the highest level, doing work COVID-proven to be even more essential than some of the tasks of the professional trained workers in nursing, doctoring, physio and so on.
So, two states and Bass Strait away, I almost say “snap” to Malinauskas, because the use of migrant labour (temporary and other) is commonplace in the fields, not just cleaning, health and other care services, in these parts.
Also common is the oft-strained conversation with other locals along these lines:
“I know a lot of out of work Aussie teenagers who have grown up here will not work in those jobs. They rather take the dole and live at home, then they complain about it.”
The detail varies, but that is the gist every time. It’s a regular yarn that weaves in the defunding and state mismanagement of TAFE.
I have used something like the Malinauskas rebuttal often, mostly against One Nation sympathisers. It works.
However, a closer look shows the Malinauskas form fails in a very serious way.
Must it forever be so?
Essentially, he says that in principle the working class in future decades will be the same as today’s, and that is desirable.
Three questions arise. First, will it be? Second, should it be? Third, what would be better?
On the first question, Malinauskas is describing a white labour aristocracy who, in their own ageing, are loaded with stronger-than-average super accounts, having served the masters of war who need them to build the means of destruction for their wealth accumulation. They will be cared for by the migrant workers who do the job now.
There are reasons why what Malinauskas wants will not happen. The trajectory of capitalism will require the composition of the working class to change. Yes, we still have a working class, just like we always have, but its composition has changed relative to 25 years and 50 or 60 years ago. Change and continuity, and their interaction, are essential to understand any aspect of capitalism, including those who do the work.
As the years unfold, various developments in their own countries will reduce or change in other ways what drives migrant workers to leave their homeland to work for wages in Australia. Liberation will happen in various forms, if China and the BRICS countries keep providing positive support to developing countries, relative to their rotten experience with the USA, their generations of workers will get jobs at home. They will be less available to serve higher-waged workers and the capitalist class inside Australia’s borders.
Segmentation and exploitation
The second question. Is Malinauskas’ active assertion of a segmented working class - as it is now - really ok? The answer depends on who you are. If you are an employer, the answer is YES. Malinauskas was speaking at a business luncheon. Most at the lunch tables want a segmented working class because it devalues solidarity in the working class. It may or may not defeat solidarity, but it makes it much easier for employers to hyper-exploit workers and be protected by the government when they do so. And of course, it has racist and patriarchal characteristics.
Historically, that has always been Labor’s right-wing tendency, going back to its origins. There is plenty of labour history available to confirm that, and the efforts of those in the ALP and to the left of it who struggled against it.
However, Malinauskas here assertively advocates it, and, given his background in the SDA, no one should be surprised. It’s a version of Labor’s “aspirational” value, given the serve it deserves in former Labor speechwriter Don Watson’s “Dictionary of Weasel Words” (p. 32).
The third question must be tackled: what would be better?
Partly, that is because One Nation is proposing a racist immigration policy that is gaining traction within the Australian working class. What ON wants would be even worse than Malinauskas’ quixotic desire for the present to be the same 10-20 years from now. ON, funded by the likes of Gina Rhinehart, would smash any effort by migrant workers to form or join effective unions, able and willing to organise industrial action that hurts employers enough to win concessions from them. ON guarantees an inadequate workforce for any type of future.
What Malinauskas and One Nation share is idealism; only the detail differs.
From idealism to protagonism?
So, the question is really for those to the left of the ALP and the Greens (whose SA leader was all over the shop as well). Our answer involves 2 parts: the proposals we put forward and the strategy we develop to win them.
Our starting point must explain how working-class segmentation entrenches competitive layers of exploitation. Although there is a common rate of exploitation, there are, of course, different rates of exploitation for segments of the working class above and below it. The employers want that to continue. It is a product of and nurtures competition between workers and a sense of superiority in an influential minority. Laborism that wants more competition in effect intensifies competition between workers, especially at 13% union density.
What are the implications for the working class when its highest and most securely paid make weapons of war for profit-taking by the military-industrial complex?
Within Australian capitalism, our proposals must focus on how to organise the unorganised, especially the lowest-paid, how the highest-paid can learn about wages solidarity towards the rest of the working class, and to shift wages and conditions bargaining from consultative negotiations to industrial action.
That makes universal free vocational education delivered by a TAFE-like government body, and closing the gender pay gap, even more intense focal points.
Reality challenges the Malinauskas/Labor ideal
Coinciding with the public exchanges over Malinauskas’ business lunch speech, we learned also of the Hungry Panda industrial dispute. Relying only on the ABC report at this stage, it seems a perfect example of segmented working-class struggle right now, the one that Labor and businesses prefer. The workers deliver food. Essential during the pandemic. The ABC report suggests that official, established unionism is not involved. Their action can be called “combination” – the unofficial, non-institutional union workers create themselves when the official one does not exist or does not wish to be there. As always, this “combination activity” is under attack.
How should left activists in unions respond to this and similar disputes? How would the socialist approach stand as different and useful to the Hungry Panda workers relative to Malinauskas Labor’s same-old, same-old?