In the last couple of months Kevin Rudd has taken great pains to put distance between himself and trade unions. But, as Vince Caughley and Tom Barnes argue, he is taking Labor down a dangerous road.

Kevin Rudd has been talking tough in recent weeks. He's been taking on the "bully boy", drawing a "line in the sand", telling others to "go jump in the lake".

The only problem is the machismo hasn't been directed at the Liberals or big business for, say, getting Australia included on the International Labor Organisation's list of the world's 25 worst labour regimes. It's been aimed at union officials.

Each time the Liberals/business scare campaign digs up another outrageous, shocking and disturbing example of a union official swearing, organising in the workplace or campaigning within the ALP, Rudd's response has been to take the bait and be seen to be tough on "union influence".

For Rudd and his campaign strategists, this response is part of Labor's attempt to capture the middle ground in order to get over the line.

Of course, the polls continue to look good for Labor. But it's a big mistake to see the positive numbers as a vindication of Rudd's strategy.

The reality is that the unpopularity of Howard's neo-liberal policies, combined with the efforts of the Rights at Work campaign, has thrust Labor into an election-winning position.

The danger is that by attacking unions, back-tracking over policy to get rid of AWAs and the right to strike, and offering nothing new, Labor will squander an election-winning lead and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Healthy democracy

For starters, most people don't take the hype about union power seriously. Most may not be hard-core unionists, but they don't hate unions-they see them as part of a healthy democracy.

This is even backed by the Liberals' Office of the Employee Advocate research. Its 2004 "freedom of association survey" of 3156 people in 17 industries, with the majority of the sample drawn from non-unionised employees, found that 76 per cent of all employees (and 63 per cent of non-union members) valued the presence of a union in the workplace.

Questions were scrutinised by both the ACTU and the Chamber of Commerce.

More importantly, Labor cannot afford to take the country's 1.8 million union members for granted, even with WorkChoices so hated.

What short memories people have. At the last election, nearly half of blue-collar union members in Victoria voted Liberal. Why? Because Labor offered them nothing.

Okay, a lot more unionists are likely to vote Labor this time. But this does not mean that this problem has gone away.

At this stage, beyond removing the worst excesses of Howard's policies, Rudd is offering us less than Latham, who at least promised Medicare Gold and troops out of Iraq by Christmas.

Latham offered less than Beazley, who promised to rollback the GST in 1998. Labor's current IR policy is worse than the Liberals' original 1996 Workplace Relations Act and, in important key areas such as the right to strike, is worse than the 1999 Second Wave amendments to the Act.

In other words, they are giving us less reason to vote for them, not more.

So while we want to see the end of Howard, we obviously must not go quiet or soft on Rudd and Labor in the process. It certainly won't help Labor win the election-doing so only serves to encourage rightwing ALP policy.

So we need to oppose the anti-union witch-hunt in the Labor Party. At the same time, we need a sensible discussion among trade union members about building an alternative to Labor.

For example, unions should discuss donating money to the Greens election campaign, as the ETU in Victoria have done (see back-page).

Yes, Bob Brown equivocates about preferencing Labor and, yes, this is a problem. But the more union money that flows into the Greens campaign, the more it will strengthen the hand of those inside the Greens who are clear about the need to get Labor elected and who want to build a genuine leftwing alternative to Labor.