Late in 2024, the Painters and Dockers working on Garden Island in Sydney won their first ever Collective Agreement, one of three Collective Agreements won by Painters and Dockers in Australia last year. The culmination of a year-long struggle, the agreement nailed down a raft of conditions including a thumping 10.5 per cent pay increase across the board, as well as Domestic Violence Solidarity Leave.

Most significantly, however, the workers won what could be an Australian-first in migrant working-class struggle. Their employer has been forced to concede that they will only bring in workers on visas that have a pathway to permanent residence, and will pay all of the costs for the visa applications. Further, their new agreement means that their employer must sponsor them for permanent residence as soon as they become eligible. They cannot pick favourites. They cannot refuse.

For this group of workers — and for the growing ranks of temporary migrant workers in Australia — this last win is a big deal.

The Painters and Dockers are one of the most (in)famous working-class organisations in Australian history. Founded in the then gritty Sydney-waterfront suburb of Balmain, the P&Ds did the hardest, filthiest labouring work in the Australian ship building industry for almost 100 years. They were famous for a lot of things — the waterfront has never been a bastion of bourgeoisie manners — but mostly they’re remembered among the working class for their tough, unbreakable solidarity.

Ship repair is hard, unforgiving work. Marty Maribito, an old P&D (now a linesman), loves telling the story of how in the late 1980s, P&Ds had to clean out torpedo-launching tubes. “You had to climb right bloody in there and squeeze the whole way through!”

The P&Ds were men drawn from tough working-class suburbs. Men from families who owned nothing and had nothing to exchange but their sweat. Through rigorous discipline, they maintained a formidable collective organisation under constant pressure from some of the most powerful capital interests in the country, and their mates in Government.

The union forced ultra-wealthy ship owners to pay Union wages — of course — but the real significance of their contribution lies in their refusal to be treated as disposable commodities in the vast global economy of shipbuilding. Through organisation and grit, they built for themselves the power to live with dignity.

As the union faced a storm of hysterical squealing by polite society, the automation and collapse of Australian ship building, and a remaining membership of less than one thousand, the Federal ALP made their move. The P&Ds were deregistered in 1993.

In a shock to everyone, stripped of union organisation by the Labour Party, by 2024 pay and conditions for the remaining P&Ds had collapsed. Still performing hot, intense physical labour, Painters and Dockers on Sydney Harbour were earning about $23 an hour. By contrast, linesmen like Marty, who remained organized and in the MUA over the same period, were earning $45.

The Garden Island dry dock on Sydney Harbour is the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. It is essentially an enormous cavity excavated out of the earth abutting the harbour, with huge steel gates to regulate the flow of water. Ships are floated into the dock before workers then close the gates and pump out the water, leaving the massive hulls exposed and accessible for P&Ds to climb in and perform the necessary repair and maintenance work. When there is a surge of work, there can be up to 200 P&Ds working at Garden Island alone.

While the Spirit of Tasmania, the Manly Ferry and the NZ Inter-Islanders all get work done in Sydney, the bulk of the large ship repairs done in Australia are military. Some of the world’s biggest, most profitable companies have secured government contracts worth hundreds of millions to do the work keeping the Australian Navy afloat. Google companies targeted by Palestinian solidarity activists and you will pull a reasonably representative list.

Wearing cloying protective overalls and suffocating safety equipment, workers enter the dock to sandblast the immense steel panels clean of old paint and rust, and then re-spray with layers of heavy industrial paints. It’s not easy work. Not unlike in a whole spread of work at the bottom of the Australian economy (care work, agricultural labour etc) the deterioration of pay and conditions has reached the point where contractors struggle to attract and maintain a workforce that is adequately skilled and prepared to do it.

While there is a small number of locals working in the dry dock, wily contractors have discovered that there is a tidily profitable little niche in finding workers to feed into the contract-mills of these ravenous multi-national billion-dollar military behemoths. Using “skilled worker shortage” visa schemes, these contractors have built labour supply chains that pick up experienced, capable P&Ds from the vast heaving cities of the Global South (mostly the Philippines) and deliver them to the ship repair yards of Australia, spray gun in hand.

The blinding reality of extreme, increasing global inequality means that, despite the shitty pay, hard work and distance from home, there are many, many people for whom this represents a very good opportunity.

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On a warm February evening on Sussex St, the MUA organised an event to celebration the spectacular win brought down by the P&Ds on Sydney Harbour. As well as inviting all of the new members into the Union rooms for the obligatory pizza and beers, a handful of ex-P&Ds from back in the day came down to pass the baton. At the event, three new P&Ds were discussing with some of the old hands their last stints before landing the job in Australia. One young bloke had last been in Japan, working for less than $10 an hour. Another two in the Gulf States on less than $5.

The contractors rent whole apartment buildings in Western Sydney to house their migrant workforce in shared flats, with the company logos emblazoned across the front doors. Most of the newly arrived workers don’t have a life outside of the dry dock: no family obligations, no footy club events, no time off for old school re-unions. This makes them mobile, available at the drop of a hat to work a Saturday shutdown, or relocate to Darwin for a two-week stint with only a few days’ notice.

Living in company housing, with working visas contingent on the benevolence of contractors, the P&Ds were too scared of retribution to talk openly in the workplace, so it was in these Western Sydney apartments that they decided to get organised. Over foil trays of food and Jim Beam drank out of plastic cups, MUA officials stuck butchers’ paper to the walls of the apartments and drew diagrams explaining the Australian industrial relations system. With translation done by comrades from Filipino community organisations, they made charts showing the gap between wages in organised maritime workplaces and the P&D ship yards. To determined grins and nervous laughter, they outlined how to take strike action without getting sacked.

The handful of tough old waterfront workers still in the dock implored their new comrades to be courageous and have a crack. The group that had been around for a while and already secured permanent residence spoke with confidence that the union officials were legit, could be trusted.

While workers were  generally grateful for the opportunity represented by the job, it was impossible to miss that there is eye-watering profits generated out of these contracts for the men in suits, while mere crumbs were sprinkled down to the crew in the dry dock. After all, the spectacular wealth being shovelled into filthy great hoards in Australia is on display for all to see on Sydney Harbour. Celebrating obnoxious levels of inequality is a favoured pastime.

Together as a group, the workers joined the Union and pulled the trigger on negotiations.

The company wasn’t stoked, but nor was it caught entirely by surprise. This particular contractor had already faced a revolt from its workforce on the waterfront in Adelaide and Fremantle. If there is one thing bosses worldwide know for certain is that once word starts spreading that the Union is on the march, it’s very, very hard to plug it.

What followed was a beautiful demonstration of trust and courage in motion. Every time the managers threw a crumb at the workers, the delegates looked to the MUA officials. Every time, the officials said no. Hold the line, not enough.

Pressure built and tensions started to spill. The Sydney workers were taking the gains already made by their comrades in the other states and pushing forward for more. Managers were getting frustrated and letting it show.

Union officials went to the sprawling canteen at the dry dock, spent twenty minutes throwing the manager out so the meeting could take place in private, and then put it on the crew: the delegates had moved the company as far as they could with words alone at the negotiating table. The company was moving on wages, albeit not far enough. Far more importantly, it would not budge on visas and the right to sponsorship. Without this, the workers would be left standing on quicksand. Sure, you could “exercise your entitlements under the agreement,” but without guaranteed PR sponsorship, there is only so much exercising of entitlements anyone is going to do before you’re exercising yourself into in an economy aisle seat back to Dubai and $3/hr.

The workers at the dry dock either had to cop what was being thrown at them, or vote for strike action. It would be insincere to claim that this wasn’t a pivotal moment in the campaign. Compared to the very real and present alternative, this gig was bloody good. Bar a few old hands, most of these workers had only joined the Union six months prior. The trust was real, but it was not deep.

The vote was called, the hands went up. Strike action it was.

As it turns out, the Garden Island P&Ds never had to walk off the job. The Construction Division of the CFMEU was organising this same contractor’s workers on a construction job elsewhere in the city. The MUA officials called their comrades at Construction and explained what was at stake.

It’s got to be said that, as with the P&Ds that came before them, the hysterical squealing by bourgeoisie society about the Construction union concealed far more than it opened up to scrutiny. The CFMEU in NSW has been unwavering in their support of migrant workers, winning industrial outcomes only distantly dreamed of by their handwringing counterparts in other Unions, and under extremely difficult circumstances. Just like the P&Ds themselves, they have done this with grit, determination and above all, principled solidarity.

The CFMEU made it clear to the contractor that the P&Ds had the unwavering, complete solidarity of the Construction union, and that the days were over where the contractor could — without a fight —hold out job security and the right to PR sponsorship as a honey-pot for the compliant.

Sensing that with the support of these mad, militant Union leaders their workforce might just be audacious enough to seriously take them on, the scale of the fight was heading in the completely wrong direction for the company. The contractor folded.

This new generation of P&Ds are just a little corner of the swelling ranks of the migrant working class in Australia. Walk down any street on Australia’s East Coast and it’s immediately clear the strategy being deployed by the powerful to deal with repressed wages and labour supply at the bottom of the economy: leverage global inequality and weaponise migration pathways.

There are significant sections of this class of people prepared to join Unions and prepared to have a crack. In just one of the little-known aspects of the work of the CFMEU, right across the construction industry there are thousands who have joined their Union prepared to fight and claw back some dignity from the vast and wildly profitable machinery of property development.

Incredible, tenacious, granular organising in the agricultural industry has built a Union of farm labourers that have put an ultimatum to the obscenely wealthy stratosphere of Australian capital that sit at the top of our broken food production system: give us the space to live honest, dignified lives, or you can “pick your own fucken’ fruit.”

For those among us determined to continue to organise our class into a collective force capable of seriously contesting the powerful ruling class establishment in this country, we have to make decisions about what work we prioritise. About into which struggles we focus our resources, and why we choose to sink ourselves into those, and not others.

Do we desperately plead to government apparatchiks that they build a fortress around our economy to protect our right to the ballooning mortgages, decaying public healthcare and cheap commodities thrown down to us from the table? Or do we embrace the mess and chaos of the working class as it is and together fight like hell to build the power to live with dignity?

On that warm February evening on Sussex St, Darren “Ducka” Duckworth stood in front of a huge painting at the Sydney headquarters of the Maritime Union of Australia. He was at the event celebrating the new P&D agreement freshly minted in Sydney. He pointed out the slogan beautifully painted along the bottom of the canvas to a group of Filipino labourers, stubbies in hand, leaning in to try and understand him through his thick seamen’s turn of phrase: “touch one, touch all.” Ducka, a former P&D himself, said the slogan captures what the Painters and Dockers were all about.

The P&Ds always knew that they had to back one another to defend themselves from the bosses. That’s what this means. As Unionists we are never alone. We stand together, and if we have to, we fucken’ fight together, too. That’s why we are so proud to have you all as part of our Union — cos youse’ have shown that’s what youse’ live by, too.