The ACTU isnt happy union corruption and thuggery is being investigated by the Royal Commission, so how does it deal with the allegations - by personally attacking the commissioner and senior counsel for the commission. The ACTU and other unions should realise power is one thing - corrupted power is something else completely. #auspol #BSWNBPM #sameoldlabor #springst #unioncorruption -THE ACTU has launched a personal attack on the royal commission into union corruption, slamming its commissioner and counsel assisting for confusing workplace bargaining with wrongdoing, corruption and an illegitimate use of power. Tim Lyons, ACTU assistant secretary, last night accused royal commissioner Dyson Heydon QC and senior counsel Jeremy Stoljar SC of failing to understand the role of unions that they had been asked to investigate. Referring to Mr Heydon’s opening remarks, Mr Lyons said the comment that the commission’s terms of reference did not assume it was desirable to abolish trade unions was about as reassuring as Tony Abbott saying “good unions have nothing to fear”. Proceedings had since revealed little or no sympathy for the purpose of trade unionism in representing workers or the valuable role they played in the community and economy. “I smell a fundamental clash of world views,” Mr Lyons said in a speech to the Sydney-based Chifley Research Centre. While some unions have reluctantly made submissions to the commission, the ACTU has stayed outside the process, branding it a witch-hunt. Mr Lyons’s speech is the ACTU’s first detailed response to the commission, which is due to receive final submissions from Mr Stoljar tomorrow for the first part of Mr Heydon’s report in December. The government this month agreed to extend the commission for a further year, prompting protests of a Coalition ploy to maximise damage for the ALP in an election year. Mr Lyons claimed Mr Stoljar was “openly contemptuous” of the idea people might want to do something “out of solidarity” when he was interrogating a former union official. “In the absence of understanding solidarity, the commission views conduct through the prism of competition law — cartels and collusion,” he said. “In fact, one thing that unions have always tried to do, and still try to do everywhere, is to take wages and conditions out of competition. Ideally, this means firms compete on the basis of service, innovation and productivity and not on the basis of labour costs.” Contrary to the commission’s mindset, Mr Lyons said, unions must organise across industries and sectors or else wages and other standards would be inevitably undermined by firms paying less. “I fear that much of the underlying approach of the commission is informed by the assumption that collective power, union power, is de facto illegitimate, to be tolerated at the margins, if at all. “A union with no power is not much use to anybody. When people decry union power, what they actually mean is that workers should never have their view prevail over the employer’s, and have no real voice against capital in politics.”- theaustralian.au/national-affairs/industrial-relations/actu-slams-head-of-royal-commission-into-union-corruption-dyson-heydon/story-fn59noo3-1227106438222
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 07:12:38 +0000
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