Victorian Labor's attack on RAFFWU | Green Left Radio

Labor's anti-association bill is legislation that is designed to deregister RAF work.

It's legislation that's designed to shut down a fighting democratic union rafu is registered in victoria as an incorporated association what this legislation would do is empower consumer affairs victoria to remove the registration of incorporated associations that have an industrial relations purpose and it prohibits the registration of new ones so if the legislation were to pass rafu would be issued an ultimatum to either apply to become registered under the Fair Work Act or we would be wound up.

And that's a bit technical, but people might hear this argument sometimes from folks that, well, if RAFU is a union, it ought simply register under the Fair Work Act.

But I'll tell you right now, that argument is designed to mislead.

RAFU faces significant hurdles becoming registered because the Fair Work laws are designed to protect union monopolies.

In the real world, the idea that there's one union in one sector is a myth.

UWU, the United Workers Union, competes with the SDA in warehousing and in civil construction.

You'll find the AWU and the CFMEU competing.

But the system is designed to make it extremely hard to register a new union where there's already a registered association.

And we know that the SDA, the shoppies, have deep pockets and they would have already written their blank cheque to run the case opposing RAFWU's attempt to register.

Just to add a comment, it is actually a fundamental, I think, democratic right in a lot of ways for workers to be able to organise as a union in whatever form they may want it to be.

And I think probably one thing that has happened in the history of the union movement has there has been a lot of amalgamation of trade unions.

My union, United Workers Union, is one of the more classic examples of that level of kind of amalgamation.

And in some ways, There is a debate to be had for some of the industries within the United Workers Union.

Would some of those unions be better served operating as more separate sort of trade unions, et cetera, as they used to in the past? And I think that is a political debate that is not really being had right now, but it's also obviously the context of the decline in the union movement that has forced these amalgamations.

Yeah.

I think that there's a...

You raise some really valid points.

And the reality is that this is a bill that attacks the rights of workers to freely form their own associations and choose what unions they want to be members of.

This is an act that...

Well, a bit of legislation that belongs in the long history of anti-union and union-busting legislation.

In early days of trade unionism, there was the Combination Act that sentenced working men to hard labour if they tried to collaborate with each other to form unions or to refuse work.

This is just a bill that seeks to say, here are the protected state-sanctioned unions that are allowed to exist.

and no other group of workers are allowed to collectivise to agitate for their rights.

And that is an extremely dangerous precedent because you would have to take a profoundly narrow view of history to say there's never been a time when it was a good idea for workers to form a new union.