These are the fights that mattered most
Former ACTU Secretary Greg Combet reflects on the big battles of his career in unions. By Mark Phillips
OF all the many fights over his quarter of a century of involvement in the labour movement, none makes Greg Combet prouder than the battle for justice for victims of James Hardie’s asbestos products.
To Mr Combet, the James Hardie campaign was personal. Over the years, he had come face-to-face with many victims of asbestos-related diseases like mesothelioma.
He had seen the impact of asbestos on people’s lives during his early days in the union movement in a workers’ health centre in Lidcombe and with the Waterside Workers’ Federation.
“This is a really bad way to die. Asbestosis is ugly, you gradually just lose your lung capacity,” Mr Combet says.
“Mesothelioma is a terrible cancer to die from. I’d seen people die of it, it’d always made me angry. So when this came along, it was a very emotional fight.”
“This” was the ploy by James Hardie to shift its assets offshore so that they were beyond the reach of Australian victims seeking compensation for diseases caused by its asbestos products.
READ part one of our interview with Greg Combet.
The James Hardie campaign is one of four that Mr Combet writes extensively about in his new memoir, The Fights of My Life (co-written by Mark Davis), alongside the 1998 waterfront dispute, the collapse of Ansett airlines in 2001, and the Your Rights At Work campaign of 2005–2007.
Each is different in its way, and each has helped to define the modern labour movement.
Mr Combet has never been the type of person to dwell on defeats or revel in victories.
His attitude has always been to move onto the next battle. But writing the book has allowed him the time to reflect on the meaning of some of those great fights.
Collectively, Mr Combet says the lessons from these campaigns is that the fight for a better life for working people, and to protect what has been won, never ends.
A matter of life and death
Mr Combet is most proud of the James Hardie campaign for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it reflected all the values he had learnt throughout his many years with unions.
“It’s about life and death — it’s people’s lives and how they can be destroyed by corporate malfeasance,” he says.
“Of course in this case, James Hardie behaved appallingly.
“They knew for decades and decades they were producing a product that killed people and they hid it, avoided liability for compensation as long as possible and it ultimately culminated in their attempts to shift all their assets overseas and separate them from the Australian victims who would be seeking compensation in years to come.
“And it outraged me so much that we just fought them with a ferocity.”
Lacking the financial and legal firepower of the James Hardie company, Mr Combet realised the fight had to be won in the battlefield of public opinion first.
It was in the battle for hearts and minds that the late Bernie Banton was so important, Mr Combet says.
Not only was Mr Banton, who died from asbestos-related diseases in 2007, a forceful advocate for the cause and a key part of the unions’ communications strategy, but he also sat in on tense negotiations with James Hardie’s army of lawyers.
“The Hardies people all the time were trying to divert the discussion, make it legalistic and all the rest, and I was able to just point down the table and say, ‘Well, tell that to Bernie, will you’. And he’d just bring them back to earth,” Mr Combet says.
History records that James Hardie was brought to justice and a sustainable fund was established to compensate future victims. Mr Combet says it was at its time one of the biggest personal injury settlement in the world.
“The Hardies campaign really was a special thing for me, it was a bit of a personal crusade for many of us who were involved in it and we brought the company to justice against all the odds.
“Basically had nothing going for us except the force of moral suasion, and we brought them to justice . . . I was really proud of that.”
A fight for survival
Greg Combet first came to public prominence as the co-ordinator of the union campaign during the 1998 waterfront dispute, when Patrick Stevedores sacked its workforce and attempted to replace them with non-union labour.
Mr Combet was then Assistant Secretary of the ACTU, but knew the wharves very well: he had come to the peak body from the Waterside Workers’ Federation and was entrusted by then-ACTU Secretary Bill Kelty to run the campaign.
From the start, the ACTU recognised the waterfront dispute was important not just for wharfies, but the for the survival of unions in Australia.
“That was a huge struggle,” Mr Combet says.
“I’m a student of labour history, and I can’t think of a bigger, more significant industrial dispute in our history.
“We knew it was all up for grabs. It was early in the Howard government and John Howard made that his biggest initiative in his first term of government and they kept saying ‘Watch this space, we’ll get the MUA’.
“We knew it was a big thing and if we’d lost where would that have left everyone else?
“Any union could have been busted using those tactics, training military people in a foreign company, bringing them back, terminating them through a corporate restructuring, busting unionism and collective bargaining.
“We knew what we were up against and the significance of it.”
Mr Combet says the MUA prevailed because the entire union movement united to support the union’s members.
“There had been over-arching industrial campaigns before, but this one was just a bare knuckle fight with no holds barred, all the forces of institutional power, the law and courts and police against you, and governments.
“It was a pretty different environment so we had to really pull together.
“It was a true national effort, all historical, internal political divisions put aside, everyone knew what we were fighting for and put their shoulders to the wheel. It was a great thing to be involved with.”
Mr Combet says that history has judged the union campaign to have been successful on its own terms.
“It was a great victory for the union movement. People often ask me, and I observe in the book, who won the dispute? How do you judge that?
“I said you’ve always got to judge by people’s objectives.
“We had the objective of getting the workers their jobs back after they’d been terminated by Patricks and we won. We got that.
“Getting them paid for all the time they’d been locked out. And we won that.
“Getting a new collective agreement, that protected their pay and conditions. And we won that.
“The people who were made redundant, getting them all their entitlements paid. And we won that. And it was all voluntary redundancy. All the restructuring was negotiated and agreed.
“Everything that we set out to do, keeping collective bargaining, keeping union representation, all of it was bound up in our slogan, MUA here to stay. And the MUA’s still there. Chris Corrigan’s gone. Peter Reith’s gone.
“I used to say that to the guys on the job when we were in desperate straits, thinking ‘God are we ever going to win this?’, I used to say, ‘We’ll see them off’. And we did see them off.”
Worth fighting for
The other two big fights recounted in Mr Combet’s book are the Ansett collapse and the Your Rights At Work campaign.
Ansett came between the waterfront dispute and James Hardie, and was about ensuring that the debt-shackled airline’s 15,000 employees received all their entitlements after it was grounded in September 2001 (it was eventually wound up early in 2002).
A secondary aim was to improve the rights and protection of all workers’ entitlements in company collapses.
“Getting Ansett flying again was obviously extremely important to save jobs, but the principle importance of it was the employee entitlements,” Combet says.
“I think they ended up with 98 cents in the dollar, and I remember when I first went around to Ansett headquarters, just around from [the ACTU offices in] Swanston Street, on the day of the collapse, and I got the first picture of the financial state of the company, I was desperately worried that we’d get nothing.”
In many ways, the Your Rights At Work campaign was the culmination of everything Mr Combet had learnt over his years in unions, and although he was not there for the end — having been pre-selected for federal Parliament — he is immensely proud of it.
But, as he explains, it was born out of despair.
“After the 2004 election and Howard got control of the Senate from the first of July 2005, I just thought bugger this, this has gone on too long, the Labor caucus is making poor decisions about leadership, the union movement needs to stand up taller in national politics and influence the agenda and contribute to the defeat of the Howard government.
“We made that decision early in 2005 . . . we decided we’re really going to take this on in a significant way. We’re not going to do a campaign in the four weeks of the election, but we’re going to do it for three years right up to the 2007 election. And that’s what we did.”
Your Rights At Work united all unions to campaign on two levels: an “air war” in the media, and a “ground war” in 24 marginal Coalition-held electorates.
The union movement influenced the results of 22 of those electorates swinging to Labor, but Mr Combet says just as importantly was changing the public conversation about workplace issues.
“Unions talk a lot about the IR system, or Awards or the Commission, the institutions and functions of the industrial relations system that don’t relate that well to people.
“We wanted to use that campaign to relate directly to people’s workplace and family and community concerns and involve them in their own interests in making change, and it demonstrably succeeded in doing that.
“I’m tremendously proud of that. And there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that campaign laid the basis for Labor’s victory in 2007.”
This is the second of a two-part interview with Greg Combet about his new book, The Fights of My Life, published by Melbourne University Publishing. Read part one here.
Mark Phillips is editor of Working Life
Published on 4 August 2014.
