Anti-union laws

"Fellow workers, comrades... we won!" Bob Carnegie charges dropped!

On Friday 16 August, contempt of court charges were dropped against Bob Carnegie, the Workers' Liberty Australia member and union activist prosecuted for assisting a construction strike in Brisbane in August-October 2012. 2,000 construction workers stopped work to attend a solidarity demonstration at the Federal Court in Brisbane, with around 100 cramming into the courtroom and erupting into applause when the judge announced the verdict. He ruled that the terms of construction company Abigroup's injunction, aimed at keeping Bob away from the construction site, were not sufficiently clear...

New Bob Carnegie campaign leaflet available

The Bob Carnegie Defence Campaign has produced a new leaflet, available for download now. Click here to download the PDF. Please distribute the leaflet in your union branch/campaign group.

Bad precedent

The Victoria branch of the construction section of Australia's big CFMEU union has been found guilty of contempt of court after it failed to comply with “restraining orders” issued to prevent it blockading construction sites in Melbourne in August and September 2012. The sites (the Myer Emporium site and the Footscray site) were operated by construction company Grocon. CFMEU’s grievance related to issues of health and safety on the sites. Grocon now plans to sue the CFMEU for $10.5 million in damages for money it lost during the blockades to Myer Emporium, Footscray, and two other sites. The...

Now bury Thatcherism

What we hold against Margaret Thatcher is not that she was “divisive”. We, revolutionary socialists, are “divisive” too — only we want to rally the worse-off to defeat the rich, while Thatcher rallied the rich to defeat the worse-off. In a recent opinion poll, a clear majority (60%) thought that the taxpayer should not cover the cost of Thatcher’s funeral, and an equally clear majority, 59% to 18%, thought “Thatcher was the most divisive Prime Minister this country has had that I can remember”. The thing Thatcher is most remembered for, according to the poll, is “curbing the power of trade...

Thatcher: now her politics must die

If we believed in a hell, we would have no doubt Margaret Thatcher would now be in it. Now we must send to hell, too, the politics which she represented. Labour leader Ed Miliband declared that: “We greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength”. With a low-key comment that he “disagreed” a bit with Thatcher, he said that she had “moved the centre ground of British politics”. That, from a Labour leadership always keen to claim that it is occupying that same “centre ground”. In 2002 the Labour government — Labour, not Tory — repealed old rules banning monuments for living...

Tories test water on strike bans

On 18 March, Parliament began debating a new bill which could remove the right to strike for some civil servants. The Crime and Courts Bill would prevent staff employed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) from striking. The ban would affect 3,500 members of the civil service union PCS. Many of the workers affected are immigration and customs officers, people whose work frequently involves state violence against immigrants and asylum seekers. Their jobs are ones which socialists want to see radically reformed and repurposed entirely. But their right to withdraw their labour is what creates the...

Mass arrests of trade unionists in Turkey

On 19 February, more than 100 trade unionists were arrested in co-ordinated raids by the authorities in 28 provinces across Turkey. The workers are members of KESK, a federation of public sector unions, and include many members of teachers' union Egitim Sen. The arrests come in the aftermath of the suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara on 1 February, carried out by a self-styled "leftist" terrorist group. This move is a transparent attempt by the Turkish government to link legitimate, democratic trade unions with this act of terrorism. Sadly, mass arrests of trade unionists are not...

How workers' action freed the Pentonville Five

Vic Turner carried aloft as the Pentonville Five are released From Workers' Liberty magazine 41, July 1997 Part two, on the role of the left, here It is July 1972. With the union leaders safely in talks with Tory Prime Minister] Heath and knuckling under to his Industrial Relations Act (IRA), the Tories now went for the real union power on the docks: the rank and file. They were going to make an example of five dockers from east London to cauterise resistance to the long-term running down of the docks, to stop the unofficial blacking (refusal to unload) of lorries and picketing at the...

European Court of Human Rights approves hearing on Britain's anti-strike laws

The European Court of Human Rights has given initial approval to a submission from railworkers’ union RMT which contends that Britain’s anti-union laws are unfairly restrictive. The submission claims that the restrictions placed on the right to strike in Britain contravene Article 11 of the European Declaration of Human Rights. The British government must now respond to the submission and, if the ECHR is not satisfied by its justifications for the UK’s anti-union laws, a full hearing will be held next year. Senior Tory figures like London Mayor Boris Johnson are clearly unsettled by the ruling...

QCH dispute enters sixth week

Why is there a community protest at the Queensland Children’s Hospital site in Brisbane, Australia? Workers are demanding a union enterprise bargaining agreement with the main contractor, Abigroup, and a clause to ensure that all workers employed by subcontractors on the site are paid the rate for the job. Almost all the workers on the site are employed by subcontractors rather than Abigroup, and rates for similar jobs with different subcontractors can vary by up to $10 an hour. How did the dispute start? It started on 6 August when a gyprocking subcontractor failed, leaving the workers...

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