Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!: Builders Labourers Fight Deregistration, 1981-94

By Liz Ross, Carlton North: The Vulgar Press, 2004, 352 pages, paperback, $35.00. Reviewed by Amanda McLeod in the March 2005 issue.

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In April 1986, after years of sustained attacks by the State, employers and the union movement, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) was deregistered. Beginning in the aftermath of 1974 with Malcolm Fraser's conservative Coalition Government's attacks, Liz Ross' Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win chronicles the history of the BLF's fight against deregistration.

In essence this book focuses on an unquestionably complex and controversial beast. As readers, we are asked to decide if the BLF was 'a rouge union deserving its fate or a militant union brought down because it was prepared to fight?' (263). In her forthright, partisan and ultimately persuasive account, Ross, using extensive interviews with former officials and rank and file members, clearly favours the latter interpretation, presenting the BLF, which at its peak had 55,000 members (282), as 'the most effective industrial fighting machine in Australia' (140). The BLF gains for its members, and all building workers, were significant, with the Federation winning better wages and shorter hours by militant industrial action (43). During the early 1970s, the NSW branch of the BLF, for example, was 'widely recognised as one of the most progressive unions in the country, with policies such as green bans, the permanency scheme, workers' control, encouraging women to work in the industry and limited tenure of office' (168).

One of the most striking aspects of Ross' account is her contention that most union leaders and the ACTU backed deregistration of the BLF. She argues that because the BLF's campaigns got results 'coupled with high rates of unionism' the Federation was a prime target for the employers (27). However, it was not only employers who sought to crush the BLF; Labor governments, at the federal and state level, waged a systematic campaign against the Federation (117).

In essence, Ross argues that the 1986 deregistration by 'Labor governments effectively banned the Federation, making its members outcasts and its activities illegal, all with the backing of the union movement'. What Ross finds hardest to stomach was that 'it was done by the ALP, a party founded by the trade union movement to carry the workers' message into parliament' (140). The ALP, she notes, had 'abandoned ... [the] solidarity of people' instead supporting 'the people who create the wealth' (190).

'History will see that there was an impartial judge, the ALP's Gary Punch had claimed, not the lynching of a union, but rather collective action ... against a union that now can be regarded only as the Libya of Australian industrial relations'. While Ross' history is by no means impartial, it does not make it any less persuasive. It is in her critique of Labor's involvement that Ross vents the most anger arguing that, in the case of the Federation, it had the 'dice loaded against it' (144).

As the campaign against the BLF gained momentum, Victorian Premier John Cain said 'Yes, I think this is war' (138). Ross argues that Labor used the campaign against the BLF to hide its own internal crises, from the ALP-ACTU Accord process -- which had promised to be a 'new age of cooperation and enlightenment between labor and capital' -- to other political disputes such as the 1985 Nunawading by-election (19, 124, 131).

The media was quick to pick up on allegations of 'corruption, ... violence and intimidation by BLF heavies' undermining public support for the union. But, Ross claims, 'the major players knew this was window dressing. At stake was the profitability of Australian business, especially in construction, several governments' lifeline to a buoyant economy' (140). Labor used the same tactics as the right and the media, noted Food Preservers Union organisers Denis Evans, arguing that 'It's still pretty much the same vocabulary as they use now -- it's thugs, bully boys and holding the country to ransom and un-Australian and un-Victorian ... It's not true, but it works' (205).

Despite the controversies, the BLF's wins for its members were widely acknowledged, when the BLF was finally deregistered, 'even [conservative business-oriented] newspapers like the Financial Review acknowledged that the union achieved more for its members than probably any other in the past 20 years' (282).

While Ross notes that the first task in the move towards deregistration was to remove Norm Gallagher who had been criticised and jailed on allegations of corruption (118), she avoids criticisms that there was truth in the accusations levelled against him and the Federation by persuasively demonstrating that 'regardless of what the BLF might have been able to do prior to deregistration, the Federation faced its last years attacked on all sides -- a savage slump in the industry, multiskilling and award restructuring, deregistration extended from five to ten years, redundancy and C+BUS [the industry's superannuation scheme], you name it and the bosses had the Federation in their sights' (268). Ross deftly avoids the Gallagher controversy by characterising the BLF as a rank and file fighting union, rather than a puppet organisation controlled by a handful of individuals.

Ross does note, however, that internal squabbles and unpreparedness might have played a part in the BLF's own downfall. 'Peter O'Dea [ACT BLF secretary] insists the Federation could have been better prepared. There was a state of shock, because right up to the act of deregistration itself, there was a huge amount of denial going on in the Federal Management Committee' (175).

Ross goes further than merely chronicling the attacks on the BLF, arguing that deregistration had wider consequences. With hindsight, the attacks, writes Ross, can now be seen as a smokescreen for an attack on the union movement as a whole. 'Employers, says [union activist] Ronnie, were very clever claiming to target just one rogue union. [But was part of a wider campaign] it was Dollar Sweets, Mudginberri, Robe River, the whole thing, people couldn't really see that. The BLs for some reason couldn't switch it into the big struggle that it should have been' (177).

My main criticism of this book is the author's use of abbreviations, which at times become taxing and weight the text down unnecessarily. I admit this is a minor criticism, but one I found striking as I was constantly forced to flip back and forwards to decipher the list of abbreviated unions' names. Nevertheless, the almost endless list of unions covered in this book is testament to the research undertaken by Ross and evidence of the role played by the union movement as a whole on both sides of the deregistration process.

Throughout Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, Ross laments the lack of solidarity within the union movement (164) and struggles to countenance the part of Labor in bringing down the BLF. One is led to wonder what the future holds for the Australian union movement, and the global movement more generally. While deregistration of the BLF in 1986 was without precedent, the Australian union movement has been destabilised in its aftermath. The Coalition Government's Workplace Relations Act (1996) destroyed any concept of compulsory union membership, further weakening union bargaining power. After July 2005, when the Coalition government gains control of the Senate, unionism's future is even less certain. Despite the sustained attacks, the 1986 deregistration and forcing members to join other unions, Ross argues that extension of deregistration in 1990, 'was tacit acknowledgement that the BLF had survived' (255). Almost twenty years after deregistration and despite finally merging with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in 1994, the BLF's Eureka flag can still be seen on city building sites. Although severely threatened, by failing membership rates and campaigns to weaken it, the union movement is far from dead; one can only hope that union militancy -- that result in real changes for workers -- as exemplified by BLF is only dormant and waiting for revitalisation.

Citation

• Amanda McLeod. 'Review: Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!: Builders Labourers Fight Deregistration, 1981-94 by Liz Ross' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), March 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 20 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• An inevitably controversial look at the history of the struggles on the Builders Labourers Federation and the twenty year campaign to smash Australia's most militant union.
  
  “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!” If one phrase can sum up the militant Builders Labourers Federation it was this. Because they believed this, and backed it with action on the job - the courts and governments of the 1980s declared the BLF had to go.
  
  Conservative governments took the first steps, but it was Labor -- backed by leading members of the ACTU and union movement - which finished the job. Subject to a Royal Commission, accusations of corruption against union secretary Norm Gallagher, trials, Arbitration Commission hearings and coordinated federal and state legislation the BLF was under siege for years. Then in 1986 the full force of governments and their police fell on the union when it was formally deregistered. But this is not a story of defeat and despair. It is a story of resistance, much of it told in the words of the most important actors in this drama - rank and file workers. Builders Labourers and their supporters in other unions and the community waged a long struggle for union rights and militancy that has important lessons for today.
  
  While highlighting the rank and file struggle, Liz Ross pulls together all the threads in this complex story and provides a left-wing analysis of the role of the employers, ALP and union leaders, and the historic ALP-ACTU Accord.
  
  Here is the full story for the first time. The book is meticulously researched, with extensive use of archives, original union material and fify-seven interviews with participants. The author was also directly involved in many of the events she describes.

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