The changing face of the unions as they dump the workers and move to some sort of corporate entity.

Is the Feminazi McManus a FRAUD ?



Australian unions launch campaign to re-elect an anti-working class Labor government
By Terry Cook and Oscar Grenfell 19 April 2018

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the national union umbrella federation, is conducting a multi-million dollar campaign entitled “Change the Rules.” The operation—which includes a blitz of television and social media advertising, and limited protests over the coming weeks—is a desperate attempt to channel mounting disaffection over social inequality, the rising cost of living and record-low wage growth behind the election of another pro-business federal Labor government.

Launching the campaign in a National Press Club address last month, ACTU secretary Sally McManus cynically invoked the deepening social crisis, for which the trade unions are responsible due to their collaboration with the successive governments and the corporate elite.

McManus denounced the extent of social inequality, which she observed was at a 70-year high. She reviewed the growing prevalence of casual and precarious employment, falling wages, the rising cost of living and increasing poverty.

McManus’ address included populist denunciations of big business and the Liberal-National Coalition government headed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “The billionaire class is not going to limit its greed,” she declared. “It needs limits imposed, and it is us, the people of Australia, who must do this.”

McManus pointed to mounting opposition in the working class, saying: “This crisis is making Australian workers angry. Angry at the indifference of the Turnbull government, which instructs us to wait patiently for the trickle-down to happen. Angry at CEOs whose pay and bonuses soar while families struggle to pay the bills.”

McManus and the ACTU know, however, that anger among workers is directed not only against the Coalition, but also at the trade unions and the Labor Party. Both are discredited bureaucratic shells, which function as the open instruments of the corporate elite.

Union membership has fallen to record lows, barely 10 percent across the private sector. Among young workers, the figure is less than 5 percent. Labor Party national president Mark Butler stated earlier this year that the unions had reached “a threshold we regarded years ago as existentially threatening,” while the Labor Party could not “credibly claim to be a mass-membership party.”

Under these conditions, Labor and the unions are terrified that they will be unable to suppress the emerging social and political struggles of the working class. They have followed closely the wave of strikes among American teachers, British lecturers, and other sections of workers around the world, which have developed as a rebellion against the thoroughly corporatised trade unions.

Already, a series of disputes in Australia, including those involving New South Wales rail staff this year and Victorian teachers last year, have led to near-rebellions by workers against union-brokered sell-out agreements.

Over the past year, McManus has attended a host of picket lines and protests, trying to head off an open confrontation between workers and the unions. In each instance, she has deployed fake-militant rhetoric to buttress the attempts by ACTU affiliates to isolate striking and locked-out workers, and help impose regressive enterprise agreements that slash wages and conditions and destroy jobs.

Addressing a union delegates meeting in Melbourne on April 17 to begin the campaign, McManus sought to present the unions as leading an offensive against “trickle-down economics” and “neoliberalism.”

McManus made clear, however, that the real aim of “Change the Rules” is to subordinate workers to the re-election of a Labor government. “We need to change the government, we need to kick out Malcolm Turnbull,” she declared, adding it was critical that the campaign secure Labor’s support.

McManus invoked the “Your Rights At Work” campaign waged by the unions in 2006–07 as a model to be emulated. That operation, which included the union suppression of strike activity to its lowest level in history, was aimed at channelling widespread hostility to the draconian “Work Choices” industrial legislation of the Howard Liberal-National government behind the election of a Labor government headed by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

McManus’ comments underscored the fraud at the centre of the union campaign. She said Labor had introduced the Fair Work Act to “rebuild things” and improve industrial relations. She claimed that Liberal-National governments had “misused” the legislation.

In reality, Labor’s Fair Work laws incorporated large aspects of Work Choices and enshrined some of the harshest anti-strike legislation in the world, while deliberately reinforcing the role of the unions to police these “rules.” The Fair Work Act has been enforced exactly as Labor and the unions intended: to make illegal virtually all industrial action; victimise workers who take up an industrial or political struggle; and impose ongoing pro-business restructuring in every industry.


Read more here

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/19/actu-a19.html

We all have a ringside seat to watch the death throes of the dying unions.
 

                
How the modern union has divested itself of members rights and seeks relevance by force.
NICK CATER Friday, May 25, 2018 

The union movement “has great funds and great influence,” Robert Menzies observed in 1942. “Trade unionism is rapidly becoming a great vested interest in Australia.”

Menzies, one suspects, would be surprised by the changing fortunes of the labour movement in the 40 years since his death. Membership has halved, but the unions are richer than ever. Their evolving business model means they no longer rely on membership fees for revenue.

Where their money comes from, and how they spend it, is the subject of a Menzies Research Centre research project, the results of which will be published later this year.

Union influence on the Labor Party is arguably greater than at any time since World War 2. Ben Chifley stood up to the militant coal miners who came close to shutting down supply in the 1940s. Bob Hawke deregistered the Builders Labourers Federation.

Bill Shorten, on the other hand, not only tolerates the lawless the CFMMEU but promises to change the law in the unions’ favour.

Campaigns by modern unions do not stop at achieving a better deal for the workers. They range across the progressive canvass. Their muscle can be seen at almost every polling booth, where their presence is deliberately intimidating.

They occupy a position of political influence unique in the world.



The British union movement has also changed dramatically in the last 40 years, as Paul Embery wrote this week in UnHerd.

It too is now controlled by university graduates rather than the workers. Like the British Labour Party to which it is attached, the union movement “has morphed into a bourgeois, liberal, London-centric outfit – and in doing so created a schism between itself and millions in the old working-class heartlands,” writes Embrey.

“The movement’s higher echelons are increasingly dominated by officials who were fast-tracked from university straight into policy and research departments, before securing their positions near the top.

“This shift in personnel has meant that trade unions today are far more focused on identity politics and social engineering than on the bread-and-butter task of winning better pay and conditions.”

Unlike Australia, however, the unions’ political influence has waned. The ability of unions to donate to political causes was constrained by legislation in 2016. Any fund set up for political objectives must be approved by members in a secret ballot.

Members are not obliged to contribute to political funds. Indeed, the law requires them to opt-in. The Labour Party was furious, forecasting that they might lose up to £8 million ($14 million) in annual revenue.

Some of the Conservative government’s proposals were withdrawn after a threatened rebellion in the House of Lords. The union movement remains strong, particularly in the public sector where it exercises considerable industrial muscle. Yet while Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to repeal the laws if elected, the Labour leadership has been reticent to launch a full campaign or put it in a manifesto.

Corbyn may have much in common with Shorten. But he is hardly a union puppet.

https://www.menziesrc.org/union-inc

DNA proves that this subject is just too hard for the Lefties' meager minds.

How does the pour soul explain why the unions have almost no members anymore ?

And the almost bankrupt unions had to pinch SUPER funds just to keep going ?

And now the financially stressed unions want to STEAL MONEY from the PENSIONERS ?

And why are the unions changing from worker based concepts to corporate based concepts as the articles which are too hard to understand explains ?