Jail for holding a union BBQ?

We'll soon be hearing a lot about Noel Washington.

Washington is charged with refusing to attend a hearing of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). His trial is coming up soon. If found guilty he could go to jail for six months.

The ABCC is the body Howard set up to destroy building unions. The Conservatives used the usual arguments about lawlessness and thuggery on building sites as justification for establishing it.

The Cole Royal Commission into the building industry cost $66 million. For all the bluster about illegal union activity there was only ever one successful prosecution coming out of the Royal Commission and that was of a building company.

The building industry is a tough place. Construction companies are not filled with the milk of human kindness, and unions respond in kind to protect their members' lives and livelihoods. Because of Howard's restrictions on unions, and building unions in particular, it is now much harder for unions to enforce safety standards or impose penalities, like lost production time, on lax employers. The result? The number of injuries and deaths have begun to increase again.

So what did Washington, senior vice president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Engineering Union in Victoria, do that sees him face six months jail?

He held a lunch time BBQ in a park opposite a Bovis Lend Lease worksite and invited the workers there along. Howard's restrictive laws meant Washington couldn't have an onsite meeting during work time: 500 workers turned up.

The ABCC wants to know what they discussed. So they told Washington to attend an interview. One of the alleged contraventions of industrial law that occurred at the meeting is that someone supposedly urged workers to call a manager "Lassie" because he was a lap dog of the ABCC. Some crime!

Washington refused to attend. "The ABCC wants me to give evidence against a colleague about what was said at a union meeting ..." he said. He described this as un-Australian and undemocratic.

Bill Oliver, the CFMEU's Victorian Assistant State Secretary told a rally that "the ABCC has the power to compel people to attend interrogations under threat of six months jail. These men have no right to silence. Afterwards, they cannot speak to anyone about what is discussed in the interrogation - not even to their wives or families."

Washington asks "Where are we are living, Stalinist Russia?"

"This is about the defenceless people that the ABCC have picked on and will continue to pick on if these laws are kept in place," he said.

For him, this is about Brodene Wardley, an occupational health and safety representative who was interrogated for doing her job protecting the safety of workers; this is about Ivan Franjic, a 19-year-old apprentice who was interrogated after an accident where a worker was seriously injured.

This is about the delegate who stopped a job to raise money for the family of a worker who died from a workplace accident. The ABCC is pursuing the worker, not the company.

As Washington says:"All of these people and many, many more have been hauled into secret interrogations by the ABCC when they've done nothing wrong. Workers are phoned in their homes at night, intimidated into answering questions about union meetings."

The Rudd government could stop the action against Washington under present powers. But it has not done so. The ALP Government has decided to roll the ABCC into Work Fair Australia in 2010. Changing its name does not abolish the Commision. The failure of the Rudd Government to end the ABCC shows that its whole anti-work choices propaganda was a canard. It is keeping 95 per cent of Howard's anti-worker laws.

Unions are fighting back. Already there have been protest meetings and rallies, and more are planned. Not only building unions but other left unions see the danger that the ABCC represents and they too are rallying to support Washington.

In 1969 John Kerr jailed Clarrie O'Shea from the Tramways Union for refusing to pay fines imposed for taking industrial action. Left wing unions organised rolling general strikes across Australia. Within five days O'Shea was out of jail after a mysterious benefactor paid the fines. The penal powers became a dead letter for a decade. Employers were too scared to use them. It is possible we could see a re-run of 1969. If left unions were to do that, the ABCC would become a lame duck, forcing Rudd and Gillard to abolish it immediately.

And such concerted action could save Washington from six months in jail for undertaking normal union activity.

As the final line of the Ballad of 1891 says, where they jail someone for striking, it's a rich man's country yet. In Washington's case, he could be jailed for holding a BBQ and not telling the ABCC what his members talked about!

But if building and other workers take on the ABCC, they might just win and show that the rich don't always get their way.