By Kane Pearson - Southside Brisbane Organiser
Brothers and sisters as we head into this new and very important round of EBA negotiations we must realise that we all have a part to play.
We must all be involved in every step along the way to ensure we hit the ground running and are ready to unite if things get nasty.
Hopefully by now most of you have seen a log of claims with the rates of pay increases we are seeking regarding hourly, travel, site, BUSS(Q) BERT and CIPQ and all the goodies.
There is even a $6.50 all-purpose allowance that will be paid on all hours of work paid. That means overtime, annual leave, RDOs, sick; pay the lot.
Now we all know how tight things have got regarding the cost of living and trying to keep our heads above water. To add salt to the wounds we also have watched this boom in Queensland turn builders and bosses into millionaires, all off our sweat. While the working class was handed AWAs, cutting their rates of pay, taking away their holidays and overtime rates the Liberals made it illegal for the worker to be represented on the job by their union.
To enforce this they recruited a dog squad consisting of ex federal police and gave them an endless money supply and only one mission: to destroy the building unions of Australia.
That’s right: people that have no experience in our industry or any right to be in our industry were left in charge of it.
What a disgrace. But if that’s not bad enough they were also given the right to summons any worker who had the hide to stand up for himself and interrogate them without representation. A law not seen anywhere else in the Western World. If you do not turn up to the interrogation you are given 6 months jail and a $28,000 fine. Once again what a disgrace. Let me tell you comrades if you haven’t worked it out by now, the Liberals realised to conquer the building industry of Australia they had to get rid of the unions, just like they did with the coal miners and the docks.
Howard’s method was divide and conquer, and his conquer plan with our industry was to keep the union off building sites and out of sight out of mind.
He counted on the membership turning on us by saying we never see the union anymore and what are they doing for us. He was a strategist but in the end he didn’t have what was needed to destroy our industry.
To our credit we came out the other end of 11 years of an anti union dictator with only a few battle scars and looking forward to a very bright future.
John Howard will go to the grave knowing he could not defeat the building unions of Australia and the militants who are its members.
But my comrades this does not mean the battle is over. Far from it. I know that the main interest when it comes to talking about EBAs is the pay increases but let me tell you that is not where our major battle lies.
Through this round of negotiations that battle will be for our RDOs and the 36 hour week. Because just as we, the union, go to the rank and file with the log of claims to gather support, the Master Builders go to the builders and bosses with their grand plan on how to keep the money in their pockets.
But they also think they can take away the conditions we have already won. High on their agenda and most threatening to our industry is their push to get us back to a 38 hour week.
Their argument will be that RDOs have become irrelevant because nobody is taking them anyway and they will have the stats to show the numbers on building sites working on RDOs.
And trust me this is no scare tactic. They see it as another day on the their calendar that they can flog the ass of their workforce and boost those excessive hours right up.
After all this is an easy decision for them because while the workers on their jobs are still pouring columns at 7 o’clock at night; working through lunch; having to start concrete pours at 1 in the morning; crane crews that are still emptying bins and doing clean up 12 hours into their day because there was no time allowed during the day; steelies tying steel in excessive heat for 10 hours; yes while all this is going on the master builders and the people they represent can’t see what all the fuss is about.
Because they are eating dinner with their family at night; they never have to miss lunch, they don’t have to see disappointment on their son or daughters face when they are told, “sorry kids but daddy has to work this weekend. I can’t come and watch you play the boss really needs me there.”
They don’t have to see this look because they are at the game with their kids; they don’t have to resort to drugs or drinking because exhaustion has made them emotionally detached from everyone especially their family. They don’t have to worry about getting to a point in life where they are standing on a chair tying rope around their neck because work has consumed their life.
You have lost your family, because they never see you and when they do you are drunk, stoned or just too exhausted to connect with anyone.
But they don’t have any of these concerns because their jobs don’t require them to work every waking hour of the day and still they want more.
Well the time has come to fight to retain our lives and to say: “enough is enough.”
We will not be treated like a production line; chewed up and spat out.
The first and easiest way to show how we feel about this form of slavery is by everybody taking every RDO on our calendar. No exceptions; one out all out,
I say it is the easiest because we all ready have them and we are protected by our agreements. In other words they have already been fought for; they were won by fellow rank and filers sitting on the grass and demanding them,
All we have to do now is show strength by saying no to working our RDOs and let us, as the workers and backbone of this industry, make the decisions on what is best for us and how jobs should be run.
Take it out of the hands of greedy builders, bosses and the anti worker dog squad they hide behind. The building industry’s future is in our hands and now comrades is the time to show strength and claim what is rightfully ours.
United we stand. Divided we fall
