|
Foreign
workers
Media
coverage of the ALP’s deal with Rinehart to import 1,715 skilled and
semi-skilled construction workers for Roy Hill has been as intense as it
has been shallow. These notes place the 457 visas and Enterprise
Migration Agreements (EMAs) in larger contexts – industrial, economic,
political and social-cultural.
Labour
as variable capital
Our analysis starts from an apparent paradox: the import of
labour is the import of capital. Indeed, labour power
is capital’s protean form. Marx identified the human capacity to
labour as ‘variable capital’ because that is the only form that can
add more value (i.e. vary) than goes into its production. Marx calls
that extra ‘surplus value’. Profit comes through selling the
commodities in which that surplus value is embedded. In turn, profit
provides the means to accumulate more capital.
None
of that activity would be possible without variable capital. Deprived of
wage-slaves, Rinehart and her ilk would be in the same position as
Thomas Peel when he landed with the first permanent invaders at the Swan
River in 1827:
Mr
Peel …. took with him from England to … West Australia, means of
subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr Peel had
the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the
working-class …. Once arrived at this destination, ‘Mr Peel was
left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the
river.’ Unhappy Mr Peel who provided for everything except the
export of English modes of production to Swan River. (Marx, Capital,
volume one, chapter 33)
Rinehart
does not have to import capitalist power relationships since all workers
now face the necessity of selling their labour power in order to live.
Moreover, the state machinery is in place to organise capital and
disorganise labour, with 457s and EMAs as twin expressions of what a
ruling class does when it rules.
Contracts
The willingness of corporations to enter into EMAs seems to
be at odds with their opposition to pattern bargaining. After all,
mining corporations and the Business Council have been driving
individual workplace agreements. Those employment deals are built on the
lie that equality can exist between a corporation and an individual. In
pursuing EMAs, the BCA and Mining Council have not abandoned individual
contracts. Rather, they intend to impose them on each immigrant, just as
they force other wage-slaves to register as independent contractors so
they can underpay them. Therefore, it is vital for the Chinese that
their contracts not be ‘commercial in confidence’?
What
shortage?
Three question marks hang over talk about labour shortages: which kinds
of labour are in short supply?; where are the shortages?; can the
demands be met without importing labour? The bosses spin their case for
EMAs by blurring these issues.
An
employment agent pointed out that the problem arose when corporations
waited till the last minute to start recruiting. He had never had any
difficulty in filling applications to his labour-hire firm – if they
came soon enough.
Whether
or not there is a chronic or systemic shortage of skilled workers, there
certainly is a shortage of local tradespeople who will work on the cheap
and without protections. For fly-in/fly-out workers, the costs from
maintaining two tables mean that a wage of $100,000 or more in the
North-West becomes closer to the national average of $70,000 back in
Perth.
Shortages
on mine sites are not the same as shortages within the Australian labour
force. Skill shortages are in the pipeline because the sell-off of
government instrumentalities has slashed the number of apprentices.
BHP’s abandonment of iron-and-steel production has done the same.
No
less significant is the shortage of public servants and service sector
workers in the mining zones. Their absence is one more reason why
workers are reluctant to move there, or even to fly in and out. . This
is the old story of no support services from State governments that do
not exact royalties heavy enough to match these needs. In the 1960s,
Queensland workers across the Bowen Basin coal-fields struck to get
schools and hospitals. Rather than provide those amenities, their
absence has been marginalised as fly-in/fly-out.
(For
a first-hand account of how hard life is see www.workontherigs.com)
Take
the case of the workers who returned to a site to find that the bosses
had upended their living arrangements. They stopped work. Their unions
tried to sort things out only to be clobbered with million-dollar
penalties. The workers were cornered into agreeing not to take
industrial action for seven years to avoid thousands of dollars in fines
for each one of them. The company not only got off scot free but
benefitted from the no-strike clause. The bias is possible because
WorkChoices Lite (that is, Killard’s un-Fair Work Australia regime)
denies Australians the right to strike, a ban which contravenes
International Labour Organisation conventions.
As
if these state-enforced shackles were not bad enough, the bosses have
allies in the AWU – Australia’s Weakest Union. For 100 years, its
right-wing leaders have cut sweet-heart deals with employers. The AWU
offers lower wages and poorer conditions in return for ‘union’
coverage where the boss deducts the dues. This happened three years back
at the Westgate Bridge in Melbourne. Similar sell-outs are rife
throughout the resources sector.
For
example, a few years back, militant unions set about rebuilding
membership in the north-west to regain collective agreements. No sooner
had they succeeded in getting their numbers up again than the AWU butted
in with one of its sweetheart deals. With ex-AWU heavy Shorten in charge
of industrial relations, what chance is there that any of the Chinese
construction workers will get access to officials from the CFMEU, AMWU
and MUA?
Those
unions must see whether the law against ‘slavery’, which is finally
being used to protect sex workers, can protect the EMA workforce. The
departments of Industrial Relations and of Immigration need to track the
entrants back to their points of recruitment. Only then can we be
certain that they have not entered into debt arrangements (peonage) with
‘labour-hire’ firms in China. Queensland unions recently exposed one
variant of that arrangement, putting those 457-workers were in an even
worse position than other wage-slaves. [Most of the Chinese who came to
the gold-fields in the second half of the nineteenth century were under
contract.]
The
lower the level of competency in English required under EMAs will
increase the risks of injury. The government agencies responsible for
OH&S never come within coo-ee of catching one violation in a
hundred. (This deliberate failure is
documented throughout my Framework of Flesh.) The only security is an
active union with strong job delegates and site committees. But un-FairWork
Australia outlaws those essentials. In addition, countless examples of
underpayment exist along with cash-in-hand scams. When that dodge does
not work, construction contractors arrange to go broke to escape paying
entitlements - only to pop up the next day under a new company name.
Given all these constraints, what chance will an individual foreign
worker have of making sure that his wages and conditions are even up to
the FairWork standards?
Citizenship?
Alongside the economic and industrial aspects of 457s and
EMAs is the linking of one’s rights at work with one’s status in
society. All immigrant wage-slaves should be able to become citizens.
Between
1788 and 1996, the only large-scale official importation of contract
labourers were the Pacific Islanders, mostly for the sugar industry.
Their arrival was part of Empire-wide transfers of labour under what
scholars call ‘a new system of slavery’ following the 1833 abolition
of chattel slavery across the British Empire. From 1863, some 62,000
workers were brought here, indentured on two-year contracts, after which
they were supposed to return home. Perhaps a quarter signed up for
further contracts, or for pastoral work. When the new Commonwealth
enforced its Immigration Restriction Act (White Australia) after 1906,
more than 7,000 were sent back. Some 1,700 were allowed to stay. (For
one of their stories see Faith Bandler’s 1977 novel about her father,
Wacvie.)
After
1945, the post-war immigration scheme aimed to build the population as
well as a labour force. To spur the assimilation of non-Britishers, they
were called ‘New Australians’. Whatever the failings in this
approach, it had the virtue of linking a job with citizenship. The
opposite was happening in Europe where Germany had Turkish ‘guest
workers’ while France drew on its North African colonies.
Introducing
457 Visas ruptured the assumption that coming to work here opens the
path to citizenship. This disconnect compounds the rupture that
fly-in/fly-out inflicts on local communities and on unionism. From
Collinsville in Queensland to Wonthaggi in Victoria, coal miners had
learnt that class consciousness flourishes from living together as well
as working side by side. Bosses are well aware of the ties between
workplace solidarity and community. From the early 1950s, coal-mine
owners saw in mechanisation a way to break the militant Miners’
Federation through depopulating towns in the Hunter Valley.
The
current break between labour and community could prove as profound a
change as was the installation of non-discriminatory immigration from
the early 1970s. Persistent concentrations of non-citizen labour-forces
could erupt into conflict if their emergence is not blocked. The
interlock of citizenship and unionism therefore needs to be brought
forward in the debate about EMAs and 457s.
Refugees
Around the world, some seventeen million people are in
refugee camps. The proposed 1,715 imports are one in ten thousand of
those. If there does prove to be a shortage of workers inside Australia,
why not ask the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to sort through the
computer lists for suitable applicants? They could all be recruited from
the Palestinian camps. That solution is in keeping with what Minister
for Immigration Arthur Calwell did in the late 1940s by taking displaced
persons.
Queue-jumpers
A few days before the news splash about the 1,715 imports for
Rinehart came word of another policy, one which has been lost from
sight. The minister announced that a Chinese could buy permanent
residency for an investment of $5m. Will ASIO interrogate these
queue-jumpers? It is unlikely that anyone on the mainland could have
accumulated a spare $5m. without being corrupt. The entry fee is a
reversion to the property qualifications once needed to stand as a
candidate or to vote. This $5m. scheme is thus un-Australian in the
sense that social democrats fought for over 100 years to remove such
expressions of class power.
These
three policies – 457s, EMAs and the $5m. -
tell us how filthy lucre has conquered commitment to building an
Australia in which union activism is an element in citizenship.
|