Bob Carnegie

Articles by Australian trade unionist and activist Bob Carnegie.

My life at work: on an offshore rig

Bob Carnegie is a seafarer on an offshore gas rig. What's the job like, and what do you do? I'm employed as a merchant seafarer on a semi-submersible gas rig off the north-west coast of Australia, the Ensco 7500. The reason I'm employed is that under Australian Marine Orders, self-propelled rigs have to have a certain marine complement. I work night shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, on a three-week cycle: three weeks on the rig, and then three weeks back home in Brisbane. For the merchant seafarers on the rig, a lot of our work is looking after life-saving equipment and trying to keep...

How to build a trade union

Bob Carnegie is an organiser for the Queensland Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF). He was previously an organiser for the Maritime Union of Australia, and has been a rank-and-file trade unionist in a number of industries, including construction and seafaring. The Queensland BLF today shows a pattern of industrial militancy and organisation substantially different from that to be found in unions in the countries of old trade union organisation like the UK. Job grievances, even when they immediately concern only one or a few workers, are routinely dealt with by strike action. The typical...

First person: A political odyssey

Bob Carnegie describes his political itinerary, from young cadre of the Stalinist movement through Maritime Union official to anti-Stalinist revolutionary. I always had a strong underlying humanist bias. I tended not to view things not just from an ideological viewpoint, as was the rule in the SPA [Socialist Party of Australia, a 'hardline' pro-USSR split-off from the Communist Party of Australia]. My moral break from authoritarian state-capitalism, or Stalinism, which still infects the Australian left and the Australian trade union movement to a much larger degree than people realise, took a...

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