From Monocultural to Multilingual: Strategic Innovation in an Australian Construction Union

We present a detailed case study of the relationship between migrant labour and a labour union in a period immediately after twelve years of hostile neo-liberal politics in Australia: 1996-2007. We find that Australia’s Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) Construction & General Division has reinvented itself in the face of sustained institutional hostility at governmental and industrial levels. In the process the union has become a valuable arm of assistance for migrant workers in their endeavors to access acceptable wages, decent working conditions, and post-Dickensian standards of workplace safety. We present two micro-cases that detail worker exploitation and the strategic counter-moves of the union aimed at deepening the solidarity existing in marginalized groups of South Korean and Indian workers. We document a dedicated organizational strategy of humanitarian action towards migrant workers which both goes far beyond the normal expectations of union membership and contrasts with governmental moves to typecast Australian unions as selfish, violent, and irrelevant. The South Korean ceramic tilers, under the leadership of the CFMEU’s Mr Chikmann Koh, can be held out to be a case of ‘social movement unionism’.