This is the second instalment of a two-part series. Read the first part here.
I got off the bus at Carlton Gardens. It was a Tuesday morning, around 11am. As I walked along the edge of the park, I could already see an immense crowd swelling in the distance. I hurried towards it, down Victoria Street, past the police barricades, and onto the intersection outside Trades Hall, where I entered the ranks of thousands and thousands of men, and a much smaller number of women—later, news sources estimated 50,000 protestors in total—in sand-coloured boots and CFMEU swag. Some workers played tinny techno music from portable speakers. A group in front of me compared notes on who hadn’t shown up: “Where’s Timbers, eh? I don’t see bloody Marco or Jimbo. And Skimby…Gizza?” They shook their heads and tutted. The Eight Hour Day Monument, a modest pole on a plinth commemorating the achievement of an eight hour work day, was plumed with vape exhalations and cigarette smoke; after half an hour of moving through this fug, I felt lightheaded. The slogans on the backs of T-shirts and hoodies blurred into one: “SCAFFOLDER…TOO TOUGH…IF PROVOKED WILL STRIKE…” and then, in sharp relief: “NOTHING YOU DO ON SITE WILL BE AS IMPORTANT AS GOING HOME TO YOUR LOVED ONES & FAMILY.”
Union members had walked off the job to protest the construction division of the CFMEU being forced into administration—read, handed off to a few senior lawyers and one sweater-vest-clad “ex-communist” who now controlled every aspect of union activity—in the wake of allegations of corruption and violence. The legislation that made this happen empowers the ring-in bosses to, ostensibly, clean up the union. Among other measures, they can override the union’s constitution and sack staff without requiring a fair hearing first, even those who haven’t been accused of any wrongdoing. “Draconian” might apply; others have opted for “dictatorship.”
The crowd began moving towards the Paris End of town, heading for the Fair Work Commission on Exhibition Street. I tried to squeeze past a seemingly immovable band of laughing, bantering construction workers. When one of them spotted me struggling, he picked up the smallest member of the group like he was nothing more than a doll and placed him to one side. Then they all bowed me through. Dotted throughout the crowd, an occasional scrawny, bum-bag wearing millennial stood out dramatically against a backdrop of orange-clad muscles and guts—precariats clear-eyed about their class allegiance with tradies, or yuppie university students enjoying a morning of blue-collar cosplay, depending on whether you read Jacobin or The Australian. I bumped into a couple of acquaintances who bemoaned the state of their own union, which is currently trying to replace some of its flesh-and-blood organisers with AI-powered chatbots. They laughed at the absurdity of this. I wondered if it was an ASIO-LNP inside job. Conspiracy or not, I took it as a dire warning about what the CFMEU could suffer at the hands of overeager bureaucrats.
Up ahead, I saw the red banner of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) borne aloft by its secretary, Josh Cullinan—blonde, lean, fifty-ish, perennially in a hoodie. Beneath it marched a handful of members and organisers, including one with a tupperware container of cookies and marzipan. At every grassroots activist or union gathering, there is always someone bearing a similar vessel, attempting to feed the revolution while accounting for modern humanity’s vast and elaborate dietary requirements. I fossicked for a piece of marzipan as they asked anxiously: “You’re not allergic to peanuts, are you?”
Aside from RAFFWU’s banners, I could see endless blue waves of Maritime Union banners, plenty of lightning-struck Electrical Trades Union flags, and a handful of star-spangled Communications, Electrical & Plumbing Union flags. A lone NTEU banner was walked along by only two members. Where were all the other unions?
Well—the schism had begun, or deepened; fault lines were being drawn. On the one side of the union acronym salad, the CFMEU, MUA, CEPU, the ETU, and the United Firefighters Union had banded together. On the other side, there was the union coalition, Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), who suspended the CFMEU when the allegations first broke; the national leadership of the nurses and teachers’ unions, who spoke out to condemn Setka last June, even before the “Building Bad” allegations dropped; and pretty much all of the ALP and LNP. The split isn’t quite as simple as blue-collar vs. white-collar workers, but it’s certainly trending that way. Blue-collar unions have been talking about holding their own summit and cutting the ACTU out of the picture. Meanwhile, RAFFWU, the Sydney University branch of the NTEU, and the Greens have all released statements or passed motions supporting the CFMEU against the administration—gestures of solidarity across a rapidly widening division.
Outside Fair Work, the rally stopped. Lunch-breaking bureaucrats stood watching, boxed salads in hand. A chant started up: “JOHNNY SETKA, HERE TO STAY, JOHNNY SETKA, HERE TO STAY!” Fists pumped in the air. I awkwardly hovered my hand around chest height. A woman worker in front of me began casually texting until the chant died down.
I ran into two unionist friends, and we walked and talked towards the makeshift stage. One, a sex worker, half-joked about how she’d probably slept with dozens of the men here—“possibly hundreds”—at various Melbourne brothels over the years. We mused about what would happen to the economy downstream of construction work. Would sex work take a hit if the CFMEU went under? My friend predicted an uptick in clients trying to weasel cheaper services from the girls. She glared around preemptively, wagging a finger topped by a long, glossy, baby-pink acrylic nail: “God forgives, sex workers do not.”
My other companion, a delegate at his union, told me his thoughts on the whole sorry state of affairs. “I think we’ve already lost,” he said, gesturing around us. “I think we lost when the bill passed.” The CFMEU had since mounted a legal challenge against the legislation, but my friend predicted it would go nowhere, and cost a lot in the process. He spoke about how he thought CFMEU officials had, partially, failed their members. They should have taken the allegations much more seriously when they first knew about them. They should have called mass meetings and made themselves answerable to the rank-and-file. “They’re custodians of the union; they don’t own it.”
When I published the first instalment of this piece, the legislation was in the process of passing through Parliament. It got through on August 20th. Three days later, Mark Irving KC was appointed federal administrator and took control of all construction branches of the CFMEU. A tertiary education unionist, Grahame McCulloch, was appointed to oversee Victoria. That same day, Irving stood down 270 union officials. Four days later, this rally. A couple weeks after that, and less than a month after his appointment, McCulloch resigned amidst claims that he’d made creepy comments to CFMEU women as he went about attempting to clean up the branch. Things are moving fast. By the time this piece comes out, anything could have happened. Imagine that you’re viewing footage of a majestic rock formation shifting, eroding, and re-forming over hundreds of years. Now fast forward through that footage. The sped-up version is what’s happening to the industrial landscape right now. You would need a God-tier perspective to grasp it all.
*
In lieu of contact with the divine, I had a Gmail account and an iPhone with a cracked screen. Last column, I spoke with rank-and-file unionists to hear their thoughts about the CFMEU and the allegations against it. This time, I wanted to figure out what might happen in the wake of all this change—not just to the construction division, but to the broader union movement in this country.
I began by reaching out to Ben Schneiders, a journalist at The Age. He was on holiday in Amsterdam when we spoke over the phone. It was his early morning, my afternoon. He was walking along a canal. Birds were chirping in the background. I could practically hear the whizz of efficient bicycles pedalled by healthy Dutch legs.
Schneiders has worked as a journalist for over twenty years, mostly at The Age as an investigative reporter, and before that, as an industrial relations reporter. He is the author of a book called Hard Labour: Wage Theft in the Age of Inequality (2022), which weaves worker accounts of wage theft into a damning analysis of a system propped up by underpayment. He’s been writing about the CFMEU since 2007, and is part of the team breaking the latest round of allegations; along with Nick McKenzie and David Marin-Guzman, his byline was on the first piece in the “Building Bad” series. I wondered if, having spent more than fifteen years covering the CFMEU, his opinions on the union had shifted over time?
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