Darren Greenfield and his son Michael have been jailed for corruption. Good riddance. Those in the labour movement who defended them must recant or resign. Former CFMEU organiser Andrew Quirk, who blew the whistle on union corruption 10 years ago, outlines the levels of hell beneath the crisis.
With the Greenfields behind bars, militant workers should be glad to see the back of such criminal elements, but must be mindful of two things. One, their buffoonery and criminality merely allowed for a narrative aimed not so much as a cover up but a smother up. A layer of state administrative plaster holding up a shonky building. Looks nice and clean from a distance but, above all, not militant. However, the whole edifice will fall down the moment the administrator leaves the building.
Second, if you think the Greenfield incident was a one-off in the industry, well… perhaps have a good, hard think about the past 10 years.
The best defence for criminality in the union movement most people come up with is ‘whataboutism’ and ‘but the bosses are worse’. Yes, we know. White collar criminals get slaps on wrists. Corporate killing is whitewashed. But our benchmark for morality is not the capitalist class, it is working class democracy.
Over the past decade, the CFMEU leadership fundamentally failed that test, and with it much of the labour movement. But the administration has no answer. It has increasingly proved itself a deliberate weapon to tame a militant section of the workers’ movement and solve a political crisis for the ALP leadership.
The crisis continuing to roil through the CFMEU Construction Division is not a morality tale of “bad apples” or an inevitable outcome of militant unionism, no matter how much the mainstream media paints it that way. It is the product of what can be described as three layers of failure – political, media and labour movement – stacked on top of each other like Dante’s upper circles of hell. And if Dante is right, there are six darker layers still to be revealed.
The first failure: the political class
For well over a decade, senior figures in the ALP – including those now occupying the highest offices in the land – have been aware of the penetration of criminal elements into sections of the CFMEU leadership.
I know, because I told them more than a decade ago.
Everyone in the movement knew the problem was real long before the Building Bad series in the Nine newspapers, long before the administrators marched in and long before the current round of courtroom drama. Yet nothing was done.
Successive party leaderships preferred to look the other way, keeping the CFMEU’s institutional loyalty while avoiding any real confrontation with the rot. Sections of the ALP ‘left’, reliant on affiliates to sandbag their parliamentary pre-selections, continued to excuse the rot.
Faced with public scandal and political exposure, the “solution” has been to bring in a state-run administration, sold as a moral reckoning. It is nothing of the sort. It is a political fix – a way to absolve the ALP leadership for allowing this mess to fester, while shifting responsibility onto the union’s rank and file, who have been lions led by donkeys.
And into this vacuum steps Zach Smith – a man widely seen as aiming to parlay his position into a future political career. According to reporting this month, Smith threatened Victorian organisers with dismissal from the administrator if they refused redundancies. Soon followed the clearing out of 11 officials associated with the Setka leadership. It is hard to imagine a more craven performance – using a state intervention the union never asked for, and never should have accepted, to posture as a decisive reformer.
Second failure: the media
The mainstream media has eagerly accepted the political frame. Instead of asking why governments tolerated the degeneration of sections of the union for so long, they have reduced this complex, decades-long problem to a pulp gangster narrative of “crooks versus the pristine state”.
The reporting on the latest developments – including the sentencing of the Greenfields and the Queensland inquiry – has documented some facts of the case. But the broader political question continues to go unanswered: why did the ALP and ACTU leaderships ignore this behaviour for years? Why has the state now responded to weaponise the crisis to weaken one of the few unions still capable of conducting militant industrial struggle?
With almost no exceptions, this has not been journalism exposing corruption to strengthen workers’ safety and workers’ power. It is journalism serving the familiar agenda of defanging a militant union with a slice of cops and robbers.
Third failure: the union movement and the left
Inside the movement, the response has been no better. Some unions and left organisations have lined up behind the administrator, arguing that state intervention is the only way out. Others have backed the remnants of the old leadership – including those responsible for protecting or enabling the very behaviour now on display.
Meanwhile the hapless “Trade Unions for Democracy” push has all but evaporated, having pissed hundreds of thousands of dollars against a wall in a hapless High Court case. It has been unable to offer a program or a strategy capable of uniting the rank and file around democratic control and a fight to reclaim the union from below.
The result? A layer of tainted organisers and officials now sheltered elsewhere in the movement, waiting for the dust to settle so they can return. And a union membership left without a coherent, principled path forward. Meanwhile, the criminal elements remain unvanquished, just biding their time in the wings
There is no shortcut, no saviour from above, no administrator who can rebuild what generations of construction workers created. Only the membership can reclaim this union – and that fight must begin now, before the remaining layers of hell open beneath us.
We live beneath the gaze of the politicians, all seeing blind third eye. If they wish to see corruption in the building industry, they will. If they do not wish it, they will not see it. In this convenience, our livelihoods and safety matter, not a jot.
Bosses and spivs care not a jot for our safety
I took this photo at Burwood in Sydney on 15 February this year. It is probably the largest demolition collapse since 1989 that I know of.
I don’t know what the story is here. There was a brief flurry of media reporting and a SafeWork NSW announced an inquiry, but no determination seems to have been reached. For its part, the CFMEU NSW construction division couldn’t manage a social media post.
This illustrates the fact that there are always cowboys out there in the building industry. And with the CFMEU under administration, it is distracted from its core business of keeping building workers safe.
It also underlines the fact that most building workers have a better gut instinct about how the law works than the spivs running the current administration know about the building industry.
These people are going to kill some of us, even if they don’t mean to. They have all the arrogance of newly graduated engineers, unfortunately their actual qualifications are administrative and legal. Good luck out there.
Andrew Quirk was an elected CFMEU organiser in NSW from 2003 to 2015. He was sacked in 2015 as a whistleblower for calling out organised crime’s influence in the branch. After eight years and $1.5m of members’ money wasted, the courts found in Andrew’s favour that the dismissal was unlawful.