Green Bans are the way to stop motorways, etc!

Jack Mundey being removed by Police 1973


There are some nice photos on the Green Party Trade Union blog here

These are some thoughts from me, see some of you in Reading in a hour or two for Green Party Conference.


Over the weekend the first world's first trade union climate change conference was held in London with input from trade union leaders like Matt Wrack from the FBU and Frances O’ Grady who has been TUC Deputy General Secretary since January 2003. The usual suspects like Caroline Lucas MEP, John McDonnell and myself spoke as well. A healthy 300 delegates came and a trade union climate campaign has been launched

This red green alliance might seem unlike, after all isn't it a choice between jobs and the environment? Certainly the Green Party have held frank discussions with trade unionists who want to expand Sellafield and build a new runway at Heathrow, we have to be frank about disagreement http://gptublog.blogspot.com/2008/02/meeting-with-mick-rix-gmb.html.

Yet there is common ground. There is potential for creating huge numbers of jobs in renewable energy, insulation and green transport schemes. Likewise as one wag once put it, if work was that good the rich would keep it all for themselves...a green future has to involve worksharing and social equality. In Britain we work the longest hours in Western Europe which brings no benefit to workers or their families. Environmental damage hits workers first, Engels 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' written in the 1840s showed how workers were harmed by pollution in the factories. At the weekend conference Matt Wrack told us how call outs to heathland fires were increasing with rising temperatures including the destruction of 90% of Ilkely Moor

One idea that I urged the conference goers to adopt was eco industrial action. In the 1970s the Australian Builders Labourers Federation refused to build environmentally damaging projects.

Jack Mundey their leader argued:

"I think the Green Bans were probably the most exciting innovation that the Builders Labourers became involved in. There was so much development taking place and at the outset there was this feeling that 'all development was good - it was progress'.

"But as historical buildings, and buildings worthy of preservation were knocked down, and whole neighbourhoods were disrupted - for example all the working class people in the Rocks were going to be thrown out for high-rise development - a segment of the population said 'well, we should be concerned about our vanishing heritage'. http://www.cfmeu.asn.au/construction/history/green.html

In the 1980s the National Union of Seamen, now the RMT, blocked all sea dumping of nuclear waste http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/97/oceandump/radioactive/reports/history.html. Now is the time to work with unions to preserve that planet and eco industrial action is part of the process.

Conversion plans to green production first develop by shop steward Mike Cooley in the 1970s at Lucas Aerospace also need to be put into action http://www.rightlivelihood.org/cooley.html.

'Lucas workers threatened with unemployment organised across factory and union boundaries to draw up their own plan for socially useful production, detailing 150 products which they and Lucas could make, including kidney machines, heat pumps, a road-rail bus and airships.'

Greens need to seriously address union concerns and we need legislation to restore the power of unions before Thatcher gutted them. Unrestrained neo-liberal globalisation will wreck the planet and massively increase inequality, strong unions are part of the process of taming the beast. Any one for organic beer and vegetarian sandwiches, greens and trade unions need to talk more.


The photo at the top is from a Green Ban protest at the Rocks in Australia:

In the early 1970s ‘Green Bans’ were imposed on the redevelopment of The Rocks, to be lifted only when residents were to received assurance from the Government that local people would be rehoused in the area.

In 1973, protesters clashed with police in what is now The Rocks Square, when non-union labour was engaged to demolish shed to make way for a theatre.



In 1975 a compromise was reached and the bans were lifted. All buildings north of the Cahill Expressway were to be retained, conserved and restored.



The Green Bans had far reaching political repercussions as well. In that year the Australian Heritage Commission Act was passed. It set about the identification and protection of both built and natural items considered important to the people of Australia.



The Red Ban Add by SCRA 1973. By 1977 the NSW Government had passed its own Heritage Act which is still regarded as one of the strongest legislative controls for managing heritage items in the world.'

Read more here.