Waterside battle anachronistic

Rusted-on readers will know that I have a special interest in the Maritime Union of Australia, which can hold the country’s economy to ransom despite representing just a microcosm of the national workforce.

Fewer than 12,000 members of the MUA can effectively shut down the handful of ports that handle the vast bulk of Australia’s trade.

The threat of such action hovers over the stevedoring and logistics companies that work for thousands of importers and exporters, big and small.

Typically, however, the union’s tactics are more subtle.

Instead, they throw their weight around in ways that industry outsiders rarely notice; picking off stevedoring companies one by one and extracting big pay rises and ridiculous concessions.

Right now it is DP World, a foreign company that operates in key ports around Australia and across the globe.

For months, DP World’s operations, including in Fremantle, have been disrupted by industrial tactics that are designed to extract more wealth for less toil, as per usual.

In workplaces where civility presides and labour unions don’t have absolute power, such practices are a thing of the past.

But for reasons I find unfathomable, the waterfront has been allowed to have a labour monopoly in a way that any other part of the economy, especially one of vital strategic interest to the nation, would not.

There would be an outcry if DP World had a monopoly and lorded it over port users in the same sort of way, with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission no doubt swashbuckling in to bring the company to heel.

But the MUA is treated with deference because of some mythical belief that waterside workers deserve the huge pay they are on. In reality, they have cushy jobs, mainly because of the huge investment in machines through the capital provided by foreign companies such as DP World.

It is time the waterfront was brought into the 21st century and labour was treated like any other monopoly; it is a bad thing to have a negotiating position that lacks such equity and comes with such menace.

Ports were ugly places a century or more ago. Waterside workers, who were typically unskilled labour at the time, were badly treated.

Perhaps it is no wonder they became so closely aligned with the communist ideology so contrary to the nation’s interests earlier in the 20th century, especially, but not limited to, WWII.

These days it would be hard to believe the MUA’s leaders would believe in such a fallible political doctrine, but they act in other ways that are so anachronistic it’s hard to be sure the old ways have not survived well past their use-by date.

Thuggery is also something that was historically associated with the docks, both at employer and worker level.

Who knows how much perceived labour menace on the docks these days is just for show? Nevertheless, I know journalists have been assaulted or felt threatened at union meetings in the past decade, so there is some level of truth to the rumour.

Of course, all this bad behaviour, both in the workplace and as a negotiating tactic, is difficult to challenge when the MUA is such a big player in the political world.

The MUA’s annual report for the financial year ending June 30 2022 – a period that covers the last federal election – shows the union spent almost $1.4 million on donations, presumably political.

According to analysis by the Grattan Institute, that is nearly half of the $3 million or so spent by the biggest donor to the Australian Labor Party during that year: the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, of which the MUA is a significant part.

The MUA’s 11,600 or so members pay about $1,800 a year each in subscription fees to the union, or about 1 per cent of their typical income, if the numbers I see reported are accurate.

Given they have generous conditions and pay rises that, mainly, exceed inflation, that 1 per cent earns itself back in spades year after year.

Pity that gets added on to every import and makes our exports less competitive, even more so when the cost of disruption is thrown in.

Like any communist might say, why should a handful of people be allowed to use their position of privilege to extract gains exclusively for themselves at great cost to the rest of us?