On December 28, 2015, the 21-month Royal Commission into trade union corruption in Australia, announced in 2014 by the Liberal-National Coalition government of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, handed down its final report. The intended target was not so much union corruption as the democratic right of workers to organise.
The contents of the report itself show that the unions have absolutely nothing to do with defending workers’ conditions. The Commission report’s case studies—based on hundreds of pages of submissions and testimonials during 155 days of public hearings—reveal the unions’ real day-to-day activities as labour management businesses, hostile to the interests of the workers they falsely claim to represent.
Not a single incident discussed in the report refers to an action by any union official to defend workers’ conditions. Instead, union bureaucrats and corporate managers conspire daily to tear them up. To the extent that conflicts emerge between the unions and corporations, they centre on which business entity will obtain a greater share of the profits extracted from the workers’ labour.
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