Australia

The Other America

I spent three interesting months in the U.S between April and the end of June. I was last there in 1992. Post 9/11 there are a lot more American flags around on houses, buses, trains etc and my experiences of airline workers in particular was that they are much more stressed. One pilot I spoke to told me he had taken a $ 75,000 pay cut in one year last year, the justification being less people travelling post 9/11. Retirement could not come quick enough for the older pilots. In California, Big Arnie has united public sector workers in opposition to him and his policies. Lacking the guile of...

Williamtown Boeing

Since May Boeing maintenance workers at the RAAF base at Williamtown, NSW have been trying to negotiate a collective agreement through their union. After years of being played off against each other in secret, individual contracts AWU workers finally demanded that Boeing negotiate a collective deal on wages and conditions. Boeing has responded with the use of scab labour. A continuous picket line has been held since June. AWU National Secretary Bill Shorten said: "We will be calling on Bob Baldwin, the local member, and his masters in Canberra to show some common sense and common decency and...

Gate Gourmet

In August Gate Gourmet, a US-owned firm, sacked workers at Heathrow Airport, London, who provide airline food for British Airways and replaced them by scab labour. In scenes reminiscent of the balaclavas and guard dogs escorting workers from the waterfront here in 1998, seven hundred Heathrow workers were fired over five hours, many with three minutes notice over a megaphone in the company's car park. They were replaced by a smaller number of temporary workers. Gate Gourmet serves both as a warning and as an example to the Australian labour movement. Other Heathrow workers have taken action...

Solidarity action can save workers’ rights

The right to have legal solidarity industrial action was lost in Australia years ago with the introduction of Sections 45 D & E of the Trade Practices Act. The last coalition government saw to that. Even more restrictions were introduced in the Workplace Relations Act, 1996. And there are more to come (see editorial). A Beazley led Opposition has made it clear that these anti-worker provisions will not be entirely revoked, though the impact may be softened somewhat. Coalition governments, the bosses and the courts understand that the collective defiance of workers can make anti-union laws...

Union rights: make Labor fight!

By Bob Carnegie and Martin Thomas This year, John Howard plans to bring in anti-union legislation more drastic than former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ever attempted in one instalment, and arguably more drastic than the sum total of the whole long series of laws introduced by Thatcher's government through the 1980s. It is an attempt to change the balance of class forces radically and suddenly - to set in train a process which will transfer most workers to individual non-union contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements, AWAs) in place of union-negotiated, publicly-registered...

Immigration controls, environment, and fossil fuels: a debate

A letter from James Sinnamon and a reply from Workers' Liberty Australia. Letter from James Sinnamon Hi comrades, Further to last night's conversation. Towards the end I frankly expressed my thoughts on what have been taboo subjects within socialist circles, that is, population levels and immigration. These issues are an aspect of a question which, as I have said, has been avoided by almost the whole socialist movement, that is the finiteness of this planet, and how we can hope to create a stable basis for a sustainable society within the constraints of the physical limits of our planet, given...

What we do

On the Sydney (Australia) demonstration of 18 March, as well as London’s, there was a voice for the Iraqi labour movement. Members of Workers’ Liberty Australia and other supporters of “Aus-Iraq” distributed a leaflet headed: “No to occupation, no to ethnic and sectarian division, yes to the civilising, unifying power of Iraq’s trade unions”. The Sydney demonstration, however, was small — fewer than a thousand. There were 800 in Dublin, 450 in Warsaw, and according to the Los Angeles Times 1000 in New York, 7000 in Chicago, 200 in Washington. 1000 in Stockholm, 2000 in Copenhagen. The London...

The real meaning of "anti-terror"

"We are all in serious trouble", said civil-liberties lawyer Julian Burnside, as Australia expelled US activist Scott Parkin on unspecified grounds of "national security". Parkin was flown out of Melbourne on 15 September. He was apparently pressured into letting legal challenges slide by the cops telling him that if he continued to contest the case they would not give him any more information on why they wanted to deport him, but would hold him longer in solitary imprisonment - and he would lose his right ever to leave the USA again. They had already held him for five nights after getting his...

NZ Labour not dead

I’m not sure that Mike Kyriazopoulos was right when he wrote (Solidarity 3/79) that “from a working-class point of view, there remains nothing to choose between Labour and the opposition National Party” in New Zealand. He is right that the NZ Labour Party is thoroughly pro-capitalist. In government it has continued the free-marketist policies of the 1984-90 Labour and 1990s National Party governments, with only marginal concessions. However, many worker-based parties throughout the world have had pro-capitalist leaderships and, in office, carried out pro-capitalist policies, while still being...

NZ: Fighting for workers' representation

New Zealand goes to the polls on 17 September to elect a new government. A close look at the parties shows that, from a working class point of view, there remains nothing to choose from between Labour and the opposition National Party. For instance, Labour, worried by slipping support,have announced a vote-catching policy of cancelling interest on student loans. Yet the accumulated student debt of $7 billion is a result of “user pays” policies introduced by Labour in the 1980s and pursued and extended by National Party through the following decade. NZ Workers have tried, with some limited...

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