Jail for holding a union BBQ?

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.