As the stand-off on the CSL Yarra entered its second week, pressure built on the Howard Government to secure the future of Australian shipping.
The Australian crew of the Yarra are holed up at Port Pirie, refusing to leave the ship after the company sold the vessel to a Bahamas-based holding company and announced plans to replace the crew with low-wage Ukrainian seamen.
The captain has left the ship and power supplies have been cut, but the crew remain determined to stick it out, despite threats of legal action.
MUA officials have been backed by the ACTU and Australian Workers Union, whose members at Adelaide Brighton Cement are responsible for unloading cargo from the Yarra's sister ship, the CSL Pacific.
Talks today with unions, CSL and Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson failed to make headway, but public pressure for a political resolution to the stand-off is growing.
Barrels of Weapons
The MUA argues that opening the coast to Flag of Convenience shipping does not just undermine Australian jobs, but Australian shipping as well.
Reports from Lloyds List of London today state that Panama has ordered the arrest of the Panama-flagged bulker Otterloo for international arms trafficking.
The Nicaraguan and Panamanian governments are investigating the Otterloo's shipment of 14 containers of arms which left the Nicaraguan port of Rama in November, 2001, destined for Panama and the country's national police force, but were diverted to Colombian paramilitaries. The ship remains at the Atlantic port of Colon.
Panama runs the largest Flag of Convenience fleet in the world and has also been involved in a government inquiry in recent years after the International Transport Workers' Federation publicly demonstrated how unqualified people could buy officers' papers over a fax machine
Maritime Union national secretary Paddy Crumlin, described Port Pirie as the new Woomera. Mr Crumlin said the dispute made a mockery of Government's so called 'border controls'.
"They don't mind if they're marching Australian workers into the courts but they're not interested at all in applying the Immigration Act, the Customs Act, the Workplace Relations Act or Australia's taxation laws," Crumlin says.
Workers Speak Out
Meanwhile, the workers on board have released an open letter to John Anderson:
"A letter to Transport Minister John Anderson urging a change in the government policy of promoting flag of convenience shipping and guest workers on our coast from the MUA crew of the Yarra:
"Mr Anderson, This morning the crew of the CSL Yarra are still on board the ship despite all attempts to remove us. We have no power, cooking facilities nor toilets.
"We do not like being on board in these conditions but the alternative is to walk away from our livelihoods and our futures.
"We are Australian workers who contribute to our communities in every way. We share hopes and dreams for our kids and expect that we will be able to provide for them as they grow into adults.
"We pay taxes and in return demand from our elected representatives an honest government that will put the best interest of our country and people before any other concern.
"We are taking this stand on the CSL Yarra in the hope that we can draw attention to the fact that under your government's policy you open the door for foreign shipowners to take over a proud Australian industry - one on which our society has relied upon for over 200 years.
"We are taking this stand for Australian men and women and for future generations.
"We are taking this stand because we refuse to watch the red ensign of our Australian maritime heritage being replace with a flag of convenience.
"Mr Anderson, we urge you to reconsider your position toward us and everyone remotely connected to our industry. We assure you that our resolve to save Australian shipping will not waiver.
Signed by all the MUA members on the CSL YARRA"
Once again, it is the CFMEU rather than the Commission or any Government agency, that has uncovered large-scale rorting of safety requirements, wages, tax, super and workers comp provisions.
The union has thrown a picket around the Gazebo Hotel site in Kings Cross and invited Cole to sift the evidence for himself.
"We've done all the work and we have invited Commissioner Cole to see the results," CFMEU secretary Andrew Ferguson said.
"The Commissioner must get out of his courtroom and visit building sites if he wants to really understand the industry."
Cole won't miss the Gazebo. Besides the picketers, it is adorned with a 10m sign proclaiming "this site is closed" and inflatable eight metre rort rat, Stinky, is standing guard.
The Gazebo redevelopment is a classic example of building industry problems the commission has yet to confront.
Construction contractor, Australian Development Corporation Pty Ltd, hired around 15 backpackers, primarily from the British Isles and Canada, and set about undercutting wages and entitlements.
Since the site was shut down on Thursday the CFMEU has launched investigations into the following issues ...
- pay rates
- cash payments
- super and workers comp liabilities
- compliance with tax laws
- provisions for other employee entitlements
- the apparent failure to run safety induction courses in the country's most dangerous industry
When backpackers, being paid half the going rate, fronted the company about their entitlements they were summarily dismissed.
"We're fighting for these young people because they are just being used. But we are insisting that any additional work be offered to Australian building workers," Ferguson explained.
"The real problem is Federal Government doesn't believe in regulation and does nothing to police these situations.
"They give the owners an incentive to find crooks who will do it on the cheap. Genuine operators and workers whose families rely on this industry lose out.
"It's a ridiculous situation. We are talking about Australian law and the Australian taxation system and the only organisations defending them are trade unions."
The CFMEU has yet to track down the principals behind Australian Development Corporation but suspect their company is a one-job operation.
Typically, in those situations, owners take the money, close the doors and leave workers, state and federal governments, and often sub-contractors, out of pocket.
After 30 years service at the company�s Campsie plant she was fired because of an injury sustained on the job and denied $70,000 in redundancy entitlements.
Labor Council is informing affiliates of Sunbeam's behaviour in the lead-up to Mother's Day.
ETU secretary, Bernie Riordan, said Karagiorga had had an unblemished work record before injuring her back and shoulder in May, 2000. Eleven months later the pain became unbearable and she filed a successful workers compensation claim.
Karagiorga went back on a return to work program and the company steadily increased her hours. Then, in January of this year with the plant facing closure, Sunbeam sacked her, citing the injury.
Riordan said Sunbeam had refused to pay $500 for a medical report it had insisted on, which declared her fit for employment.
"It is clear Sunbeam fired Rina after 30 years of loyal service, purely to escape their obligation to pay her her entitlement," Riordan said.
The Karagiorga case, and Mother's Day, highlight Sunbeam's diminished Australian links.
The company used to brand itself the Great Australian at this time of the year but, more recently, has stripped Campsie of plant and machinery for domestic appliance manufacture and shipped them to China.
Irons and frying pans carrying the Sunbeam brand no longer provide wages for Australians and the entire Campsie operation is marked for closure on May 15.
ETU organiser Steve Robinson has watched the site being gutted over recent years.
"Sunbeam is as good as dead as an Australian operation," he told Workers Online. "All the appliances you associate with the brand are now made offshore.
"They decided they could get a better return for shareholders by slashing labour costs and went ahead without any consultations."
While the union movement has generally accepted the $18 a week increase - the largest ever handed down by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission - it has riled LHMU members around the country.
For a little over two hours some of the lowest paid workers in the city occupied one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the CBD - the corner of Collins and Exhibition streets.
That's just down the road from the snobby Melbourne Club for millionaires, and Nauru House, where the Living Wage Case decision was handed down.
LHMU national secretary, Jeff Lawrence, says today's action is the first in a national campaign for low waged workers to get decent pay and conditions.
"The LHMU will call on the ACTU executive to institute a review of the union movement's approach to the annual Living Wage Case - so as to involve more and more workers in their campaigns for low-waged working families," Lawrence says
Ken Jackson, a car park attendant, thought the Melbourne morning protest by LHMU members was fantastic. "It showed what car park attendants, cleaners and security workers can do if they stand together," Jackson says.
Courageous Decision
But ACTU President Sharan Burrow says the full bench of the Commission had shown some courage in the face of the meanness of the Howard Government.
"Award workers have not won the lottery but $18 a week will make a difference for many low paid people," Burrow says.
"The challenge now for Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott is to make good on the Government's promise of further support for working families."
The ACTU had sought a $25 a week increase on all award rates. The Federal Government unsuccessfully argued for only $10 a week restricted to employees earning less that $507 a week.
The NSW Labor Council and other peak state union bodies are preparing cases to flow the decision on to state-based awards.
The suggestion, which will send shivers through both trade union and employer ranks, was part of the wash-up from Abbott's latest bid to hijack state industrial relations into the federal sphere.
NSW Industrial Relations Minister John Della Bosca flatly rejects the Abbott proposal. "Why would we hand our model co-operative system to a Federal Government that uses lock-outs, Dobermans and balaclavas to manage industrial disputes?" he asked.
"NSW workers and employers would lose their rights to a genuine umpire, lose benefits like parental leave for casuals and lose the collective and orderly framework which has delivered for the NSW economy."
But when Della Bosca challenged Gallacher in the State Parliament to make a similar commitment all that was forthcoming was: "Well, mate, I will answer that next year when I am in your spot."
Della Bosca says this shows the Liberals have no policy on IR. "The Leader of the Opposition does not intend to tell the people of this State what his approach to industrial relations is until after the next election.
"Will he hand the harmonious New South Wales system back to those who reintroduced lockouts as a means of managing disputes, those who gave us month-long stoppages, Doberman dogs and people in balaclavas as a means of resolving industrial disputes?"
A 38-hour week with overtime or time in lieu arrangements for working extra hours might not seem much to ask but for many workers in the IT industry realising the dream seems about as unlikely as achieving job security in the unstable sector.
Yet this was one of the first basic requirements listed in a 10-point manifesto drafted at public meeting of IT workers, organised by the IT Workers Alliance.
The meeting was held as part of the Alliance's efforts to help workers in the highly individualised industry find the collective voice needed for them to achieve a better deal.
Working with IT employees, the IT Workers Alliance now aims to turn their wish list into reality by organising individual workplaces.
To provide feedback on the plan or to view comments already made, please visit the Flames section of the IT Alliance's website.
The 10 point plan includes:
1. $20 an hour minimum wage.
2. Fair pay based on clear skill levels.
3. 38 Hour Week - an overtime or time off in lieu arrangement for extra hours.
4. On the job training.
5. Promotion opportunities based on training and skills.
6. Five weeks paid holiday and nine weeks paid maternity leave.
7. Protection of privacy at work.
8. Portability of entitlements from job to job.
9. Entitlement protection during takeover and collapses.
10. Recognition of a worker's rights on his or her creative work.
Workers Online understands the Wentworth Liberal has written to the NSW Government condemning it for agreeing to meet its share of the 6.5 percent wage increase.
Australian Services Union state secretary, Luke Foley, told a rally outside the Prime Minister's Sydney office that Wentworth Liberal King had insulted low-paid members who worked with the disadvantaged.
Some members claimed King had told them he had taken a pay cut to enter politics and that people employed by charities shouldn't expect to be well paid.
"If the Howard Government does not come through our next rally will be outside the Rose Bay mansion of Peter King, QC, MP, in Dover Rd," Foley told cheering supporters.
"Any Government that won't adequately fund the community sector is a bunch of thieving, immoral barbarians,"
ACTU industrial officer Cath Bowtell gave the wide-rangeing, multi-party senate critique six out of 10 on the score of defending civil liberties.
"There were some abonimable proposals in the bill," Bowtell said. "Everybody who looked at the legislation saw them and the Senate committee has picked up the worst of them.
"Importantly, the changes would go some way towards identifying real terrorism but some concerns have been missed.
"It is a step in the right direction but it doesn't go far enough."
Bowtell nominated picketers as a group who could still be identified as terrorists because, legally, the action has been idenfitied as "intimidatory".
Unions also have concerns over ancillary offences, such as aiding or teaching a terrorist, carrying possible 25-year prison sentences whether or not a terrorist act is committed.
The Senate has watered down insistence that the onus of proof lie with defendants in such cases but Bowtell says the retention of "strict liability" is not good enough.
"For that sort of sentence the normal test is intention or negligence," she explained. "Even the Senate recommendation don't require intent and that is a dangerous situation."
Bowtell said the ACTU would be lobbying for further changes to the proposed legislation.
Australians Services Union secretary Michael Want says payroll officers are adamant they face enough problems already over wage payments.
Labor Council will meet with Treasurer Michael Egan in a bid to get procedures in place that will deflect the anger of affected employees.
Secretary John Robertson said there was already a requirment on employers to ensure there was no harrasment or bullying in the workplace.
"Payroll officers regularly find themselves confronted by workers who aren't all that impressed. Potentially, this just adds to their problems," he said.
Australian unions are gearing up to target firms `involved in the travel industry, calling on them to cease organising travel to Burma and calling on all travelers to bypass the country.
Companies specifically targeted include Captain's Choice Tours, who are chartering a Qantas plane that will fly into Rangoon later this year and Lonely Planet which has released a Burmese travel book.
A British campaign saw Lonely Planet receive postcards from consumers saying they would not buy their books until they discontinued the Burma line. Details of the Australian campaign will be finalized this month.
International Unions Consider Release
The International Confederation of Trade Unions has welcomed Suu Kyi's release but says pressure on the the military junta (SPDC) needs to be maintained until all trade union and political prisoners have been released and until there is full restoration of all democratic, trade union and other human rights in Burma.
To this end the meeting called on Burma:
� to immediately take action to eliminate forced labour, including forced portering, as demanded by the ILO since August 1998
� to immediately agree to the establishment of a permanent ILO office and presence in Burma.
They also stressed the need for the ICFTU to maintain pressure on the ILO to maintain the measures adopted by the International Labour Conference 2000 aimed at compelling Burma to meet its obligations to eliminate forced labour in that country.
The meeting also emphasised the need to continue to maintain pressure on the multinational corporations who continue to trade and invest in Burma.
by HT Lee
They want to set up a parliamentary committee to investigate all aspects of the draft agreement.
On 5 July 2001 Australia and East Timor signed a one-page Memorandum of Association stating that the Timor Sea Arrangement (TSA)--negotiated over two years--would be appropriate for adoption by a future parliament of East Timor as an agreement between the countries.
Australia is pressurising the East Timorese leadership to ratify that arrangement and thence convert it into a treaty by or immediately after independence on 20 May.
A sticking point appears to be Australia's insistence that Annex E of the TSA which clearly defines that only 20% of Greater Sunrise falls within the Joint Petroleum Development Area (JPDA) must be accepted before the agreement can be signed.
The remaining 80% of Greater Sunrise is in what is deemed to be Australian territorial waters--that is within Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) adjacent to the JPDA and therefore is not subjected to any sharing of the revenue--East Timor is entitled to a 90:10 split under the TSA.
Greater Sunrise is the biggest of the three oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea. It has a gas reserve of 300 million barrels of condensate and 177 million tonnes of LNG, returning an estimated tax revenue expressed in cumulative dollars of the day of US$36 billion. It is expected to begin production from 2008 to 2050. If the TSA is ratified East Timor is only entitled to 18% of the $US36 billion.
Speaking from Dili, Eusebio Guterres, an opposition assemble member from Partido Democr�tico (PD) said: 'Australian parliaments have parliamentary committees set up to investigate matters of importance to the nation. Why shouldn't we also have that?'
Eusebio said the support to delay the signing of the TSA is coming not just from opposition assembly members but also from the ruling party Fretelin itself--according to him at least four members of Fretelin are opposed to signing the TSA as it stands.
However, there appears to be a whispering campaign to make the assembly members and the East Timorese believe that as soon as the TSA is signed, the money from the oil and gas revenue would immediately flow into East Timor.
The fact of the matter is Bayu-Undan with an estimated tax revenue in cumulative dollars of the day of US$12 over 30 years, will not began production until 2005--under the TSA the revenue split is 90:10 in favour of East Timor.
On the other hand the oil field of Laminaria/Corralina which has already began production and had returned a revenue of US$650 to Australia is not in the JPDA and therefore if the TSA is ratified, will not return any revenue to East Timor.
Eusebio is opposed to the secrecy of the whole negotiations--only a handful of people, behind closed doors, were involved--most of them foreign UN advisers to Chief Minister Alkatiri and Foreign Minister Horta.
'We must have open democracy,' Eusebio said, 'Parliament must not be used as a rubber stamp. For democracy to work, important national matters must no be discussed behind closed doors and decided by a few people. All MPs must be fully briefed and understand the issue before they vote on it. That is parliamentary democracy.'
As the internationl media gathers in Dili for the independence celebration on 20 May Eusebio and his colleagues are planning to hold a series of press conferences to highlight the matter.
They want to put into practice open parliamentary democracy. They want the ratification of the TSA delayed for six months while the parliamentary committee investigates the matter not under closed doors, but as a open committee so as to enable everyone to fully understood the issues involved.
We must not try to frustrate their wishes--we must allow them and support them to set up the parliamentary committee. And at the end of the day, if they decide to accept the TSA as it stands--that is their business. After all, that is democracy, and they would have been given the opportunity to participate in it.
"Our members should be counted as heroes for protecting the lives of airline passengers - and protecting the multi-million dollar flying machines these passengers use to get to the mainland," LHMU Airport Security Union Tasmanian secretary, Dave O'Byrne said.
" Instead they are being treated as dirt - with no respect from the travelling public, and no respect from the airline industry."
Mr O'Byrne detailed some of the incidents at a media conference at Launceston airport this week.
The LHMU Airport Security Union has called a national delegates meeting for May 21 and 22, to discuss the progress of their Securing Our Airports campaign - passenger violence at airports will be high on the agenda.
Last week one angry passenger - who had set off the metal detector a number of times - stripped down to his jocks and screamed abuse at airport screeners - while holding up at least 50 passengers waiting to board a delayed flight.
The man swore and yelled at the airport screener.
Less than eight weeks ago a female passenger asked to remove a pair of scissors and a corkscrew from her bag got very angry, started to swear and then told a female airport security worker to "f*cking well stick it up your a**e".
Airport Security union members are not getting support or back up from their company or the airlines.
Designer Julia Murray calls her exclusively hessian range a "back to basics" approach which reflects the clothing production process.
"Other designers have declared catwalks passe," she explained. "We've gone further and replaced the catwalk with a sweatshop.
"Australian fashion has an embarrassing itch that needs to be scratched. Hessian is a constant reminder of that reality."
Her "art imitates life" approach to design is a reflection of an industry that sells glamour on the back of 300,000 outworkers, working in cramped conditions for as little as $3 an hour.
Only four clothing companies, none of them fashion labels, have been accredited to use the No Sweatshop Label which seeks to establish decent standards in the production process.
Murray predicts hessian will be the "new black" this season.
The fabric, constantly over-looked by more conventional designers, poses the question of whether modern consumers will invest in reality over fantasy.
"Hessian is the perfect reality check for the industry," Murray says.
For more information about the Fair Wear collection, contact Julia Murray,
(02) 9380 9091 or 0403 128 013. For information on the No Sweatshop label, see www.NoSweatShopLabel.com
Labor Council is seeking a meeting with the Premier over new child protection legislation that is seeing thousands of teachers wrongfully subjected to stressful and humiliating child abuse investigations.
Under amendments to the Child Protection Act, many teachers are being forced to endure extended investigations into trivial matters that never before would have been reportable offences, with a number of minor complaints now routinely upheld as instances of child abuse.
These can include anything from a one-off outburst by teachers regularly subjected to ridicule and provocation by their students to incidental contact between student and teacher but without the risk, intention or instance of harm.
The problem stems largely from the Child Protection Act's overly broad definitions of the term 'child abuse' combined with a mandatory requirement that all accusations of child abuse be officially notified to the Department of Community Services and investigated by the Ombudsman.
Under the definitions contained in the Act, child abuse constitutes anything that can be described as assault, sexual assault, acts of neglect and psychologically harmful behaviour and there is no requirement that students be considered at risk of any harm for a notification to be required.
The Independent Education Union has broadly supported the new laws but says no relief or adequate response to the Act's shortcomings have been forthcoming, despite the its frequent calls for a review of the legislation.
One NSW LHMU Security Union member has been able to pocket more than $6,300.
The Security Union members who have just won the big pay-out work at the Big Four NSW power stations in the Hunter and Lithgow regions.
Two months ago the LHMU forced the same company - Bark Security - to pay out tens of thousands of dollars to Queensland security members owed money for underpayments and superannuation.
Security Union members bite Bark back.
" Union members - acting together - can help clean up the security industry," Annie Owens, NSW LHMU Secretary, said.
"This second big win over Bark Security is an example of what we can do together.
" Because of constant breaches of the Award and regular disputes about how they treated their workers at the Bayswater, Liddell, Mt Piper and Wallerawang power stations the LHMU has been hounding this company," Annie Owens said.
" In Newcastle Commissioner Jim Redman of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission, on Tuesday, ordered Bark to pay $67,100 in entitlements to our members.
" The company obviously didn't like the way the union activists put the bite on them to win their legal entitlements, 'cause Bark Security has walked away from their contracts at these power stations - and Chubb and SNP have taken over the contracts.
" The union has ensured that all twenty-five union members at these power stations have retained their jobs with the new contractor."
The LHMU and the superannuation company Australian Retirement Fund are together continuing to pursue the company for all superannuation monies through the Australian Taxation Office.
by Liz Phillips
It has taken 30 years but in a scene similar to Backyard Blitz, there was only one hour left until the QCU Mackay office building was finished before over 100 Mackay union members, delegates and guests arrived to celebrate the opening of the first regional council building in Queensland in over 15 years.
The opening has signalled a turn of the tide for unionism in Australia.
Speaking at the opening ACTU President Sharan Burrow said the new Mackay office is an important symbol and statement for the rest of Australia.
"This building shows we are still in the game despite what John Howard and his government might think,"
"And we are not going anywhere," she said.
"This is really important for Australia and congratulations to the Queensland union movement for maintaining the fight in such a visible way"
"Union membership is stabilising, new industry area membership is growing and old traditional areas of decline are arresting," she said.
"If we can reverse the decline in country Australia we can do anything,"
"It's not easy, it takes guts, determination and a sense of history and above all, the need for all to have a fair go in the workplace,"
Australia's proud tradition of unionism has won vital battles for living conditions of ordinary Australians over so many decades and now has a steadily increasing membership.
If there was any question that we don't need unions, think again. There is an epidemic of overwork, with Australia working the second longest hours in the world and women still earn $166 less than their male counterparts,"
"There is still a lot of work to be done,"
Queensland Council of Unions General Secretary Grace Grace said every union member should be proud of the Mackay building.
"It is the enthusiasm of the members and delegates at the grass roots level that achieved this building,"
"Union membership in Mackay is going against the trend, around Australia regional councils are closing, not growing," she said.
"This building is terrific for the Mackay community and for building a strong union community," Ms Grace said.
Ms Grace said it also important for the QCU Executive to meet in Mackay to celebrate and mark the historical and contemporary significance of the new building.
Architect Tony Battams and Mulherin Building Contractors completed the $350,000 refurbishment with $200,000 raised by the Mackay regional council and community.
Guests at the opening included Industrial Relations Minister Gordon Nuttall, Member for Mackay Tim Mulherin, Member for Whitsunday Jan Jarratt, union stalwarts George Moody (QCU Mackay President for 26 years) and Jack Hill, QCU President & AMWU state secretary David Harrison and QCU Vice-President & QTU Secretary John Battams.
World Wide Link-Up for Call Centre Workers
Call centre workers and their union representatives are being invited to take part in a worldwide online forum on their working conditions.
The virtual conference, part of the international Confernce "World Wide Work" in Berchtesgaden in Germany, will run from May 22 to 25.
The conference intends to pioneer a new approach in international cooperation while continuing the WWDU tradition that began in the year 1986 in Stockholm.
The virtual conference about Working Conditions in Call Centers is organized by Call Center Agent Network. Participation at the virtual conference is free.
More information at our homepage: http://www.callcenteragent.net
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New Theatre 70th Anniversary Season
A series of staged readings of some of our most significant plays from last the 70 years
WE WISH TO LET YOU KNOW.....new theatre is celebrating its 70th Year of continuous operation in 2002.
As well as our normal programme for this year, there will be a series of play readings and works previously performed at new theatre - one from each of the previous seven decades of our existence. Each of the readings will be performed for one night only.
On the 15th May 2002 there will be a reading of An Inspector Calls by JB Priestly - A landmark drama of the 1940s.
This reading will be unique in the series in that the play will be acted as a live performance for radio, in the manner that such plays were broadcast in the 1940s. The text has been especially adapted for radio and we hope to recreate the excitement, ambience, and pleasure that made such events so popular with both the studio and listening audiences in that pre-television era.
We are mindful that radio is a vital medium for people with impaired vision. Sadly for us all, by comparison with the pre-television era there are very few drama broadcasts and most that are done are pre-recorded and imported.
We would be pleased if you would make it known to your members/listeners of this once-only upcoming performance so that they may avail themselves of a night at the theatre where they can not only step back in time but fully enjoy the performance.
DETAILS:
Date: Wednesday 15th May 2002
Time: 8pm ( audience to be seated by 7.50pm )
Where: new theatre, 542 King St Newtown
Cost: $5 at the door - no bookings
Regards
New Theatre
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Public Seminar - Rebuilding Our Unions
Howards Attacks and how to Fight Them
- John Buchanan, academic
- miachael bull, Victorian CFMEU
Workers, Unions and the ALP : Whose Party is It?
- Peter McClelland, President NSW CFMEU (on defending 60/40 rule)
- Debate on disffiliation issue
Saturday, May 11th
Parramatta Town Hall
1 tp 4.40 pm
Organised by Socilaist Alliance
ph 0418450812 or 0412751508
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Palestine Film Night
Today is the great day of remembrance. We are not looking back to dig up the evidence of a past crime, for the Nakba is an extended present that promises to continue in the future. We do not need anything to help us remember the human tragedy we have been living for the past 54 years: we continue to live in the here and now. We continue to resist its consequences, here and now, on the land of our homeland, the only homeland we have.
On the occassion of the 54th year of al-Nakba, the day the Palestinians consider as the first day of their "Catastrophe", the day of the establishment of the State of Israel on the lands, homes and lives of the Palestinian people, the PHRC is holding a film night with money raised to be donated to the Joint Humanitarian Appeal.
When: May 17th, starting at 6pm - 9pm
Where: Tom Mann Theatre
136 Chalmers St, Surry Hills Sydney
Cost: $10
Films being screened are Behind the Wall, Out of Focus and Jerusalem: Occupation Set in Stone.
The Palestine Human Rights Campaign
for further information, contact the PHRC on (02) 8080 8125
or email [email protected]
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Commemorate 100 Years of Votes for Women
Date of the event: 13 June 2002
EMILY's List Australia invites you to Commemorate 100 Years of Votes for non indigenous women and 40 years of votes for indigenous women.
Join the wild women of this century ( Johanna Griggs, Joan Kirner, Jenny Macklin, Jenny George, Susan Halliday, Geraldine Doogue, Anne Summers and Penny Wong) in a frank and funny look at what we have done with our vote at 6.30pm on Thursday June 13th, 2002 at the Metro Theatre, 624 George St, Sydney.
Cost is $60/$40 concession (plus booking fee) and includes show, light meal and drinks at bar prices.
To book phone 02 9287 2000 or online at http://www.metrotheatre.com.au
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WEDNESDAY POLITICS AT BERKELOUW
THE SOCIALIST OBJECTIVE:
Objectionable object or light on the hill?
Wednesday May 22
Speakers include Senator George Campbell, Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing Industry; Troy Bramston, former President, NSW Young Labor: Paul Smith, Secretary NSW Fabians; chaired by Tanya Plibersek MP, ALP Member for Sydney.
$10/$5
NSW Fabian Society Forum at 6.30PM
Berkelouw Books, 70 Norton Street, Leichhardt
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MEDIA ACTIVISM AND THE INTERNET
New Media: New Politics
Wednesday June 12 at 6.30 PM
Seminar to launch Future Active by Graham Meikle exploring the ways that key activiists are using the internet to affect social and political change. Speakers include Graham Meikle and McKenzie Wark, author of Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace.
$15/$10
Berkelouw Books, 70 Norton Street, Leichhardt
Pluto Institute
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BEYOND CORPORATE GLOBALISM:
Is Another World Possible?
Wednesday July 17 at 6.30 PM
Seminar launch of Protest and Globalisation: Prospects for Transnational Solidarity.
Discussion with the book's contributors: Patricia Ranald, Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network; Ruth Philips, Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Sydney; Marc Williams, Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales; Devleena Ghosh, Senior Lecturer in Social Enquiry, University of Technology, Sydney and James Goodman, Editor of Protest and Globalisation.
$10/$5
Berkelouw Books, 70 Norton Street, Leichhardt
Pluto Institute
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KEY THINKERS SERIES AT SYDNEY UNIVERSITY
This series introduces you to the people who have revolutionised our ways of thinking. Each lecture will place these important figures in their social and intellectual contexts and summarise the central issues dealt with in their work.
The lectures will be given by local scholars with a particular
interest and expertise in their thinker of choice.
Venue: Old Geology Lecture Theatre, University of Sydney
(opposite the Holme Building, just next to the footbridge across
Parramatta Road).
Time: Wednesday evenings, 6.30-8.00 pm
Entry is free, and there is no need to RSVP.
Lectures in May
Wednesday 15 May
M.A.K. Halliday
by Jim Martin
'I became interested in Michael Halliday's work as an undergraduate student in Canada; what inspired me most was his social perspective on the ways in which language makes
the meanings we use to live. Over time I came to appreciate more deeply the range of interdisciplinary applications enabled by these ideas and how they materialise his concept of linguistics as an ideologically committed form of social action.'
J R Martin is Professor in Linguistics (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney.
Wednesday 22 May
Julia Kristeva byJohn Lechte
Julia Kristeva is best known for her development of the concept of the semiotic, as well as for her famous studies of abjection, love and melancholia. More recently, she has
completed work on the nature of revolt and the feminine genius, with studies of Arendt, Melanie Klein and the French writer, Colette.
John Lechte is Associate Professor in Sociology at Macquarie
University and is a former student of Julia Kristeva
(1978-1982
Unions Hi-jack My Birthday Sunday 5th May
How ridiculous Mr Lewis! May Day can't be Hi-jacked, but it can be abandoned. The 1st of May is May Day for millions of workers across the globe. I'm a worker and a union member will protest every year on May Day for my rights in solidarity with the rest of progressive global community of unionists. In a world where corporateled globalisation spreads like a cancer in our comunities, at the expense of jobs, the environment and social services, we need a global response. Unions and progressive organisations have a chance, on their special day of international solidarity to say what we are for, not just what we are against.
The real tradgedy is that when millions of unionists around the globe are marching in solidaity to uphold union rights, and fight against racism and corporate greed our NSW unions choose to stay away, although many members came out. I'd like to draw atttention to the distinct lack of police violence in Melbourne on M1 when thousands of unionists took to the streets along side students and progressive community organisations. It really is safety in numbers.
I'd also like to make readers aware that Peter Lewis did not actually attend any of the events on May Day. Not the peaceful mass blockade of Australasian Correctional Management (who I would like to remind readers have broken no less then five UN conventions). And, no, he did not see the peaceful blockade being charged without warning by 20 mounted police. Neither did Lewis attend the Unity Rally in Martin Place where speakers and performers from The Wildernes Society, MUA, FSU, Refugee community, Palestininan community, the Trade Union Solidarity Chior and more, raised the issues of corporate globalisation and the complicity of our so-called 'democratic' government. And no, he did not attend the march which visted the offices of John Howard, the Isreali Consulate, the ASX and State Parliament.
It seems Peter Lewis has been re-hashing silly stories from the Daily Telegraph and using the usual formula - focus on violence clearly caused by police, just say that the protesters did it and then proceed to totally forget about the real issues that over 1000 brave young people including hundreds of union members were raising on May Day in solidarity with millions around the world.
Peter Lewis says
"If they want to bring about meaningful change in a Democracy, they should rethink their tactics." I'd like to remind people that some extremely meaningful changes have been won through non-voilent direct action and civil dissobedience. To name a few the eight hour day, voting for women, the MUA dispute and countless other union picket lines. Very few (actually ZERO) meaningful changes have been made in society by re-hashing trollop from the Daily Telegraph. I think that it is apauling that the editorial of a usually good quality progressive publication Workers On-line lacks the spine to cover the issues of corporate globalisation on May Day and be any better than the worst and most anti-worker publication in Sydney - The Daily Telegraph.
What are you doing Mr Lewis?
Amanda LeMay
AMWU Member
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Whose Hijacl?
On May Day (May 1), the ABC's Sally Loane interviewed NSW Labour Council Secretary John Robertson. When asked about M1, he objected strongly to M1 activists "taking over" May Day, declaring it was a day for "workers struggles" not a day for "other issues." Robertson's comments were echoed in the May 3 editorial of Workers Online, entitled "the hijacking of May Day."
"These were not 'May Day protestors' as portrayed in the media," claimed Peter Lewis, but "a couple of hundred political extremists... thumbing their noses to the history of the Australian working class."
Who has really hijacked May Day?
On May 1 1886, a massive strike wave erupted in the US in support of an 8-hour day. Australian building workers were the first to win this demand in 1856. The capitalists struck back against the striking workers using police to attack demonstrations. In Chicago a bomb explosion was used as a pretext to open fire on workers, killing five. Seven organisers of a mass meeting of striking workers, known as the 'Haymarket martyrs', were sentenced to death by hanging.
The 8-hour campaign in the US gave rise to a decision by representatives of revolutionary socialist parties, at a conference in Paris in 1889, to declare May 1 an international day of strikes and street demonstrations in support of an 8-hour day.
The Sunday afternoon annual May Day parades are a far cry from the origins of May Day. They rarely focus on advancing the present day struggles of the working class, but rather commemorate past struggles.
Lewis claims that M1 protesters made "life hell for ordinary workers - be they the bank workers forced to get to work at 5am or the police officers facing physical danger from juvenile tactics." I personally spoke with one bank worker who had been given the day off by Westpac as a result of the blockade. Standing across the road observing, he was horrified by the violent police attack on peaceful protesters. "The only people who are angry with you are the owners of the building," he said. "The workers are all on your side."
As for the police, none of those I observed wrestling with protesters, or knocking down a 90 year old man, seemed to be in any physical danger. On the contrary the orders of their boss, Dick Adams and his boss - Police Minister and former Labour Council Secretary Mick Costa - put large numbers of protesters and observers in immediate physical danger.
The truth is the movement against corporate led globalisation has given new expression to the radical tradition of May Day, taking back a day that belongs to us. The brave actions of those who blockaded the Sydney headquarters of corporate giant Australasian Correctional Management - the company contracted to run Australia's refugee detention centres - were rightly given prominence in the international media alongside mass May Day mobilisations from Buenos Aires to Paris, Havana to Rome.
Why? Not because they "induced media attention on the threat of violence," but because they tapped in to the best traditions of the Australian working class and workers the world over. They tapped into a sentiment of international solidarity:; solidarity with refugees behind razor wire in Australia;, solidarity with Palestinians struggling to force out their military occupiers; and solidarity with the masses of the Third World made to toil for the profits of the corporate globalisers.
In Melbourne, eight thousand unionists, mostly from the militant Victorian CFMEU and AMWU, demonstrated alongside M1 activists blockading the Department of Immigration. Unionists in smaller numbers joined M1 protests in seven other cities. They were there because do not share Lewis' and Robertson's cynicism and acrimony towards M1 activists, but because they too are prepared to demonstrate that another world is possible.
Nick Everett
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Facist(sic) Banter
In response to your article "The hijacking of May Day" I am writing to express my disgust and outrage at your ill informed right wing facist banter. As a concerned unionist, an ardent campaigner for the rights of refugees and a participant in the M1 demonstrations I would advise you to check your facts before leveling accusations at participants of the M1 protests. The majority of the people at M1 were not political extremists but were rather political activists(including a number of union officials) who were willing to put their bodies on the line to demonstrate their disgust at the governments outrageous treatment of Asylum seakers. ]
The aim of the demonstration was to stop anyone from entering Australian Correctional Management for two hours to draw public awareness to the refugee issue. The protest only turned violent when the police began pushing protesters against a glass barrier. A number of young women were screaming out in pain, because they were trapped against a glass panel. Several times people asked the police to stop pushing and allow the women to break free.
The police did not relent which forced the crowd to surge forward down a driveway to force the release of these women. At that point many people were draged to the ground by the police and the momentum of the crowd. To further add to the chaos police on horses began to ride at the group from the top of the driveway which again trapped people who were trying to escape against the glass barriers. At this point I was dragged to the ground by four police officers and thrown against a wall before being taken into custody for three hours.
Why did I participate in such a demonstration? Because I believe with all my heart that children and adults do not deserve to be locked up for seeking refuge from oppresive regimes. I believe that every person regardless of race, colour, age, ethnicity, gender or religion deserve the same opportunites to participate in Australian society that I have. If collective action outside the ACM has even the slightest chance of raising awareness to the suffering of children in detention, then I will be there again and be proud to be labeled a political extremist! I hope that for people like you the safety of your desk and your computer affords you enough protection to safe gaurd you against the growing tide of political extremism which will ultimately result in justice for refugees!
Yours Sincerly
Mia Kriznic
Organiser
AMWU
********************
,
Divide and Rule
As a union member I am outraged by your editorial attacking the M1 demonstration in Sydney. You make several untrue accusations and which serve only to play into the politics of divide and rule promoted by Howard his ilk.
The only violence that occurred on the day was an unprovoked attack by the police on demonstartors towards the end of the blockade of ACM. This was corroberated by a widely circulated statement by independent legal observers. Why did the police wait until the end of the blockade to launch their assault?
Your accusation that they "were training for intafada" is too silly to comment on. It smacks of the same beligerant attitude shown by the Israeli military to unarmed Palestinian demonstrators
In Victoria the Trades Hall Council unions joined the demonstrations and there was no violence. Arguably it was the decision of NSW unions not to join in that left these brave young people open to assault.
Your suggestion that workers somehow need to reclaim "May Day" is truely laughable. This and last year's M1 were a breath of fresh air compared to the moribund processions usually organised.
Perhaps your editorial's real motive is to reclaim May Day for your old mate and fellow ALP member the civil liberties trashing Police Minister Michael "Dr Evil" Costa and his rampaging thugs.
Ben Reid
NTEU
University of Newcastle
**********************
Reactionary
I'm writing to complain about your reactionary editorial against May Day protestors. As a worker and trade unionist I found the tone of the article to be shockingly factional and divisive.
Why are you attacking the protestors when it is the Liberal government attacking workers and refugees? Next time be a bit more left wing and open minded.
Regarding Tom Collins letter, May Day Debacle. Perhaps Pinochet's Chile would have been more to your liking. The police there were provided with all the equipment you described and I hear that they dealt with protestors in a very efficient and business like manner.
Thankyou.
Joshua Wood
***************
Sectarian Bile
What Are You Doing Peter Lewis?
Last weeks editorial must really be one of the most offensive and hypocritical Peter Lewis has ever written. Sure the mainstream media painted the M1 protest as violent and counter productive but then which political protest has ever been portrayed as anything else by the mainstream media.
I certainly didn't think it was a good idea to see horses and their riders brought down by protesters, but then I didn't like the two cavalry charges into the picket line formed around the American multinational prison company either. An 800 kilo horse charging into a picket line can do an awful lot of damage, twelve of them can do even more.
In 1998 Richard Court sent the WA Riot Squad down to break bones on the Freemantle docks. The MUA with support from community groups, trade unions and others without a constituency resisted the police attempts to move them on. Force was met with force and the trade union movement celebrated its victory.
Workers On Line created after this event hailed it as the greatest victory for Australian workers in living memory.
Organised labor in this country is going backwards:
Trade union density is down to 22% of workers.
3.3 million full-time jobs disappeared in Australia 1986-1997
Median incomes fell by 12%, while executive salaries went up by 56%
The average working week is now 44.5 hours and almost a third of people working more than 48 hours said that work related tiredness was affecting their sex lives!
Only this week Tony Abbott announced he is negotiating with the Australian Democrats to shift Labor laws into the domain of corporations law. Surely now we must realize that the trade union movement needs to change the way in which it is relating to Australian workers.
Failure to organise unemployed workers, casual workers and the millions of unpaid workers brainwashed by the spin doctors of 'volunteerism' , is a fundamental mistake of the trade union movement in the 21st century.
It is in every ones interests to see a vibrant and democratic trade union movement in this country but until we dump the sectarian bile and animosity of people like Lewis we are pushing ourselves further and further away from this outcome. Organised Labor needs to rebuild itself into the networks of activists throughout the country these are the organisation that are growing and filling the void that the trade union left behind in its drift from representing labors interests to managing them.
Simon Flynn
United Firefighters Union
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Bad Journalism
Just a quick note regarding the "Workers Online" editorial of 03/05/02.
Pretty much all of it was both factually incorrect and politically divisive. I want to comment on two aspects it.
1. The mass media coverage of the event was what you would expect - some reasonable, some sensationalist. As a participant on the ACM blockade what i saw was basically a police stuff up. Poor co-ordination, some hyped up coppers, and the rest is history. To focus on marbles, rather than asking why were horses depolyed on a nonviolent direct action, is the question i would expect the labour movement to be asking.
Instead Ii log on to LaborNet and get a version of events lifted from talk back radio. The editor doesn't even have the excuse that other information was not available. Some of the mass media took a much more reasoned approach to the demonstration - which means Peter Lewis actually chose to run the most conservative line he could find.
2. To call the event a hijack of Mayday is ignores two things: the sizable numbers of rank and file unionists who did attend; and the desire of many in the anti-corporate globalisation movement to link up with unions where possible.
It is truly regrettable to see Workers Online not only parrot bad journalism, but simulaneously alienate a growing constituency of active people who want to work with (or already work inside) the established labour movement.
I'll be there next year, hopefully with more of my comrades from work. Come on down with us Peter Lewis - at least that way you can write from experience.
In solidarity.
Jim Casey.
FBEU member.
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Faithful Regurgitation
In its response to the M1 protests, Workers Online has set itself apart from progressive media by seeking to vilify and ridicule the 1200 people who came out in Sydney on May Day for both the ACM protest and the Unity Rally and March.
Far from broadening the appeal of unions, Workers Online risks alienating a number of important community and activist groups who participated in M1, not to mention a number of NSW trade unions who participated in M1 events.
And amid his faithful regurgitation of the worst of mainstream media reportage, the editor has displayed a profound misunderstanding of the growing movement against corporate-led globalisation and the politics of direct action.
Recent protests which have adopted the tactics of civil disobedience, far from being "so counterproductive", have helped to bring into the mainstream many issues which would otherwise have remained buried. From Seattle to Melbourne to Genoa to recent protests at Woomera, the actions of thousands of "anti-capitalists" have been a most effective catalyst for widespread debate and discussion regarding the effects of economic globalisation.
For example in the weekend reporting of M1, while a Workers Online article entitled "The Highjacking of May Day" attacked "political extremists" thumbing their noses at the history of the Australian working class, a Sydney Morning Herald article entitled "Our Conscience on the Streets" wrote that "It would be facile to dismiss Wednesday's protests as either a student jape or just another outing for rent-a-crowd... the fact that people are taking to the streets in large numbers is surely a welcome sign. A healthy society needs a new generation who take nothing for granted and insist on questioning some of our most comfortable beliefs about ourselves and 'the system'".
The blockade of Australian Correctional Management was not, as the editor has claimed, an "orgy of self-indulgence" but a serious action undertaken as a response to the brutal and inhuman treatment of asylum seekers locked in concentration camps around Australia and the Pacific. As such it received good coverage in international media such as BBC and CNN.
More broadly, the M1 protests around the country are organised in solidarity with the literally millions of other people and unions around the world who protest and march on May 1.
The charge of "highjacking" by Workers Online we consider to be a ridiculous one especially, as in stark contrast to many other places around the world, there are no organised union actions in Sydney to celebrate May Day beyond the official evening toast.
There is a need, however, to address the issue raised regarding the claim of "police officers facing physical danger" and the so-called violence of protesters.
It should be made clear that both the ACM and Unity Rally actions were legal assemblies, with police being notified according to Section 23 of the Summary Offences Act 1988. M1 organisers liaised with police in the lead-up and assurances were given that the ACM protest would be cleared by 11:30am. The intention to picket the building was made clear by M1 and both the M1 Alliance and the Police informed tenants of the timing and nature of the protest.
But while some commercial media obsess over a horse slipping over on marbles, there are more important issues to be considered. Why was it that there were 400 police present at a legal protest of around 800 people at ACM, and why did police smash up and charge the crowd only 45 minutes before it was due to disperse?
The M1 Legal Observers Project will be making a detailed complaint to the NSW Ombudsman regarding the actions of police outside ACM. The preliminary findings are that the horse charge by over a dozen mounted police was without warning and resulted in a high level of injuries. Additionally, there were several reports of 'mandibular' holds, which is an illegal technique used by some police officers. It is illegal as it can result in unconsciousness with the associated risk of fatality.
As acts of "violence" go, weighed up against an unprovoked charge by a dozen mounted police, the subsequent (albeit unwise) use of marbled in response pales by comparison.
The point to be made is that as countless union members over the years who have stood on picket lines have been made aware, you don't rely on the police force to keep the peace, and you don't rely on the mainstream media to cover your issue objectively. We would have expected the editor of Workers Online who is also Labor Council's Media Officer to have been slightly more sophisticated in his take on M1.
But most importantly, if Workers Online is willing to aggressively distance itself from the M1 protests, then it will have to set itself apart from a growing international movement which has brought literally millions of people onto the streets since the Seattle protests in 1999.
Significantly, if NSW unions are to follow the "lead" of the editor, they will have to set themselves apart from other sections of the Australian union movement notably
Victorian Trades Hall Council, which has moved official trade union May Day celebrations to May 1 and sought to engage M1 protesters rather than side with the Right and the most rabid sections of the mainstream media.
The M1 Alliance believes that in an increasingly corporatised world, it is the committed grass roots action of thousands of people workplace union delegates, student and community activists, environmentalists, refugee advocates those at the battle fronts of corporate globalisation, which is actually the most important element
in a democracy.
We would argue that the best way to broaden the appeal of unions is not to adopt a fascination with media friendly sound-bites and gimmicks, but an unashamed commitment to fighting for better wages and conditions, and a willingness to take an active stand on important social issues.
While we take issue with the editor of Workers Online, we realise that his opinions are not shared by all those in the union movement.
The M1 Alliance congratulates the Unity Rally speakers at M1 in Sydney, especially those from the MUA and the FSU, and thank the NTEU for their formal endorsement. We congratulate the Victorian Trades Hall Council, and the AMWU and CFMEU members who went on strike in Melbourne for May Day. This is the sort of action which we feel is the best way to highlight the relevance of unions and their vital role of keeping in check the excesses of economic globalisation.
As stated in our open letter last week, the M1 Alliance wishes to make clear our willingness to work with NSW unions and looks forward to building a bigger and better M1 next year.
M1 Alliance
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Ed's Reply:
OK, the editorial hit a nerve - I'm truly honoured to have a full page of the august Green Left Weekly dedicated to it. And full marks for reproducing the editorial, spirited debate is what it's all about.
I'm not going to respond to all the brickbats, but will make the following brief points.
(i) As I've stressed to people I've spoken to in the last week, this was not a personal attack on the individuals involved in M1, but their tactics which were dumb, dumb. dumb. Anger and violence always equals bad press. If you want a good run by cheeky, humorous and controlled. Mainstream your message.
(ii) There may be a conspiracy by the media and police to paint M1 as aggressors; but by placing yourselves in the situation of blockading buildings and running menacing pre-publicity about training from the Intifada, you are asking for it. You are inducing media interest through the threat of violence and then complaining when that's what the media reports.
(iii) For all the criticism in these letters, I've been overwhelmed with support for the editorial from those within the union movement. What this says to me is that there is a clash of cultures going on. One Group 'declaring' they will make May Day 'their' day is jarring to those who have worked within the clunky institutions of the movement and try to make them work.
(iv) The union door is not closed to M1 - ideas like the Sydney Social Forum are a great way of building bridges and understanding of two very different cultures. But don't just proclaim yourselves the defenders of workers. The union movement represent two million workers some conservative, many progressive, a few revolutionary. Understand our constituency and work with us, don't just blunder in and expect every worker to smash the state.
PL
I just read with interest the article entitled 'The Police State Road' by Rowan Cahill in the May 3 issue of 'Workers Online'.
After watching the Sydney television news programs last night showing armed police officers with dogs on NSW trains, I can't help wondering, at a state level, if NSW, under the Liberal-in-disguise Bob Carr, is any better.
I know that last sentence is harsh but I, like so many other Labor voters, feel disenfranchised at both state and federal levels as the Labor tries to outdo the Liberal Party in being 'Liberal'.
I am not sure if too many Labor politicians know what a worker is anymore.
Regards,
Ron Dale.
Dear People,
After many years as a union member and AWU rep I have come to the conclusion that, not the government but the insurance companys are really running this country. They are laws unto themselves and we the working backbone of this nation do not stand a chance against them.
I have a case before the superanuation commission and it started in early 2000. They are powerless against the insurance company, and I am so bewilederd in all this that I am about to give up. This country has lost its union representation at the grass roots level and now we are paying for it. Regards Ex member
Terry Beckett
Disapointed in your choice for union song comp. I thought the (winner) song should appeal to all age groups and all walks of life. So rap just doesnt do it for me and a lot of others i know on the wrong side of thirty. Words were good though!!!
Yours in unity,
Tania Williams
Abbott's vigorous opposition to a piddling $10 a week pay rise for the lowest-paid workers in the country while at the same time getting a $120 a week pay rise shows just how much contempt this man has for the ordinary Australian worker.
David Boote
by Peter Lewis
|
Last year's WorkCover dispute led to a degree of cynicism within the union movement about the ALP. Can you understand that feeling?
I understand it. But what I have been concentrating on is looking at the challenges that are there for the union movement and the Labor Party, coming down the track. I think Jeff Shaw put back in order a fair system of arbitral industrial relations that could serve unions well for a long time. He provided a vital fulcrum against the federal model, and indeed I think he captured the initiative back from the federal approach under the Howard/Reith and now the Howard/Abbott model. It has forced them to slow down their agenda.
What we are going to need to do is work hard to develop a Labor approach to things like labour hire, issues like outworkers - clothing outworkers in particular - to the new areas where we are finding changes in the regulation of the economy and changes in the way the economy works itself. It is putting people outside the protection that they might have been able to get before from traditional trade union membership or through industrial tribunals. Issues like labour hire are matters which I think we can work very cooperatively with unions to produce some really beneficial results.
Let us take that model that we have already got working well - a way of settling disputes, and look at really progressing things, and responding in a very different way to those sorts of challenges. I'm looking forward to that and we are starting bit by bit to work through those, so there is a big agenda of positive things that we can do.
But on WorkCover - do you think there are ways that it could have been handled differently from both sides?
I think there are always things that you could do differently if you had the chance. On the other hand, I think you have to go forward. You just have to say, well that is where we have gotten to in a particular debate and let's go forward and make things as beneficial as possible and make the best of the situation and that is the way I think everybody has to approach it.
In recent times the news has been dominated by the collapse of the insurers in other industries. Are we now in a position that we can say that the NSW workers' compensation scheme is safe from those sort of problems?
I think a couple of features of our scheme, the workers compensations scheme, protect us from some of the issues that have beset public liability, home owners warranty and other general classes of insurance that have been affected by economic changes as well as some cultural changes. I think workers comp is now largely protected from that. I think the product of a good scheme is eternal vigilance and I think we are going to have to work cooperatively with the trade unions in particular, the WorkCover Authority and employers to make sure the scheme delivers to injured workers, but also remains as affordable as we can make it.
What would you say some of the positives of the package for the union movement have been?
Well the first thing I think that is pretty important is that the NSW Workers Compensation jurisdiction as it is now constituted, is the only jurisdiction, which pays unions the cost of representing their members. There is no other jurisdiction that does that anywhere else in the world.
That is pretty incidental. It wasn't something that I thought of as that important in the debate, but I think in the long term that is an important recognition of the role of unions and union officials in representing workers. It seems to me in hindsight to be a logical extension of trying to consolidate union activity in workers compensation and health and safety. That is one thing that I think is a very big positive for the union movement.
I think secondly, from a union perspective, are issues like injury management and other aspects of WorkCover Assist. Unions are actively involved in risk reduction for their members, and I think they are able to go back to many of the traditional roles that unions play in safety issues. Not so much a guardian, that's for WorkCover to worry about, but more a spreader of the message for individual workers and workers collectively about safety in the workplace. And obviously, given our industrial relations set-up, working cooperatively with employers to achieve those outcomes.
In terms of the upcoming State election, what differences in terms of workers rights do you see emerging between the two parties in the campaign?
There are some really significant issues that are going to be dominating the industrial agenda between the parties over the next couple of years. It is always a bit of a crystal ball gazing exercise to work out what is likely to be the defining industrial issue. But I think the good thing about what we have done, is restoring the Commission to the status it had. What we have been able to do is put the conservative parties in a position where they don't want to attack us on industrial relations anymore. We have been able to grab the centre of politics. It has not been easy and there has been a big struggle because there has been an assault against workers by the Federal Government in particular, by unions in particular. It probably reached its height in the MUA dispute. But we have, I think led the charge here in NSW in regaining the centre ground.
So now we are looking at issues like labour hire - that is the change in the way the economy is working, and leaving some people traditionally out of those relationships that would have allowed them to be protected - clothing outworkers, the outcomes of the Quinlan Inquiry into the Truck Industry, which was really about the way in which employment conditions of workers can affect safety outcomes.
All those sorts of issues I think are big challenges. I don't see the Opposition - the Liberal Party - embracing our side on many of those issues. But I think they will want to run dead, because I think we have managed to capture the centre ground, and I don't think they will try to make those things an issue. I wouldn't trust them if they were ever to be elected that they wouldn't reverse as many of those things as they possibly could, but I think that we have managed to neutralise the issue.
John Brogden seems to be trying to portray a bit more of a blue collar and he has come out with a few initiatives, principally that he won't privatise the power industry, which look like he is trying to take a bit of the ground from under Labor's feet. Do you think he will be a tougher proposition that Chickarovski would have been?
I have always thought that Mrs Chickarovski was underrated as a political leader. I have seen some unfair things happen in politics and she has really been treated unfairly by her own party. She was thrown into the circumstance of leadership in a completely intolerable way. I suppose she took the opportunity that was presented, so she is as responsible as anyone for that, and I think that Labor and Bob Carr performed very well in that election. We had already staked out the territory. It was clear that we were going to do well. I think that because Peter Collins had established himself over a long period of time, he probably would have done a bit better in that election than she did, but it was really because she had that credibility problem. And from then on, because of the circumstances created by her own Party, she struggled to establish credibility, as opposed to our Leader, Bob Car. Now John Brogden is there, they have not made the same mistake twice, they have given him a bit more time.
I think it is important to see some of the elements they are trying to look at. I think we have been very careful about issues like public/private partnerships. We are proceeding with a great deal of caution through that. There is a lot of risk for the public sector in that exercise. There is some benefit - but there are not nearly as many benefits as people might argue. There is no point in getting too excited about things. It is just a mechanism that can improve some service delivery issues, and timetabling. It is not fiscal fools gold, and I think that one of the weaknesses that you see in the Brogden program is that he has embraced it in a very kind of "catch all" way, as if it is some sort of magic formula that is going to deliver great outcomes, and simply if you look at the track record, it won't. It has got some value. It can do some good things, but it has got to be kept in context. So I think that is a bit of an indicator of him not having thought through the implications of all of his policies.
In terms of unions and their specific issues, there are a number that are currently before you and the government. I just want to run through a few of them and check their progress. Labour hire regulation you have mentioned it a few times. There is a proposal up to regulate labour hire. Is that something you would like to see completed before the election?
I would like to see a line drawn through the labour hire issues before the election, but certainly no later than before the end of next year. There is a bit more consulting to do about the way in which you would re-regulate. We got into this one dimensional argument for twenty years about regulation as opposed to deregulation and a lot of us started to say that really what the labour movement should be talking about is new forms of regulation; new forms of finding incentives; and motivations for people to do the right thing. So I think in labour hire we probably are taking on a pretty big challenge. I give myself a nine month timetable. And certainly a lot of the recommendations of the George Inquiry will be implemented before the election.
What about the call for a code of conduct for the call centre industry? What is the NSW Government's agenda on that?
I suppose I am only one part of the agenda on that but we have been listening fairly closely to what the union movement has been calling for. We will be working towards a pretty satisfactory resolution from the unions point of view, pretty quickly.
We are also in the middle of a five year review of the Industrial Relations Act. Can you give us any indication of the sort of issues that will come out at the end of that process?
Interestingly enough, I think that review underlines the fact that it was a pretty good reform, because the five year review hasn't thrown up any calls by any sector or any of the participants for any radical change. There are a lot of smaller issues - some black letter legal issues - which I think can be addressed, I think probably with consensus. And there are a couple of issues that have been thrown up, such as the way in which unfair dismissals work. The approaches to the Commission itself, some of which have been put to the Commission. The Registrar and the President will obviously be responding to these, and there are some issues that are really more in the Attorney General's area, but on the whole I think the review really throws up the fact that the system is fundamentally working.
The unfair dismissals one is an interesting one because the unions are actually putting to you the proposition that you should make reinstatement the first priority, rather than cash payment. What was your response when you got that?
I am very attracted to that view. I should think that if we go back through the principles of this area of the law, in NSW the system of reinstatement being the objective of action for unfair dismissal has served our jurisdiction, the labour movement and the workforce of NSW very well for 100 years. I am very attracted to that proposition, and I think the union movement would want that to be worked through as far as possible by consensus, and I think we will be working hard to achieve that.
Generally, do you share the frustrations of some in the union movement about the process of government and how difficult and long it sometimes takes to get a good idea up?
That is a very good question, and yes, I suppose the honest answer to that is that government is just one of those many institutions which has become more complex. We have all seen the Charlie Chaplin 'Modern Times' view of the modern world, but I think that it is important to recognise that it is a frustrating activity. It reminds me of the Max Weber quote, which basically says if you can't hack the idea of gradual reform and chipping away at making the place better, well the other place you can go is back to the churches and build good that way. And I think that should be a way of looking at it. That you can't do better than working it through the system. In the end it is not perfect, but it is better than no one doing anything. Sufficient for the victory of evil that the good people do nothing.
What could unions do better to help you get their issues up?
I'm always reluctant to say what unions could do better. I think a lot of senior union people still feel a bit reluctant about literally talking to the Minister directly. I like to think that I am available to people to canvas issues. Secondly, I think it is probably true that once you have been a Minister for a while or a senior public servant for a while, it is not always easy to see what is happening in changes in the workplace. The opposite is sometimes true as well, the challenges or forces that operate in government. It might be easier if some unions became more conscious of some of those things. But on the whole, I think we get a pretty good go out of the unions. I think that they are pretty generous with their advice and information, and I have found that when we deal with specific issues we normally get a result. Occasionally there remains a disagreement. I suppose that is inevitable too.
In December 2000, last time you spoke to Workers Online, you said your priorities as IR Minister would be to take the initiative in the workplace to put the labour agenda back in the centre. How successful do you think you have been on this front?
Well, I think we have been reasonably successful in some ways. We have provided incentives and direct assistance to unions to be in the workplace on safety issues and injury management issues and other areas. I think there is little better you can do, than help energise and resource unions to do that work.
We have also tried to make sure that some of these critical workplace issues such as the transport industry issues; the outworker issues - which are not easy ones. We have had to do a lot of persuading work and a lot of hard political work, and I think we have managed to get some of those issues going. Once again, there are always things which you could do better. There are always things on which I would like to have done more. But I think it is not a bad result so far and there is more to come.
What gets you fired up about industrial relations? What is the fire in the belly stuff that you are working on?
I think the outworker issue is something that really fires me up. I think safety in the workplace is another big issue. I think still far too many people have been injured and killed in the workplace. It is a huge area that inspires me to work harder. I would like to see some real progress on some of the family flexibility issues.
I would like to think though that back to the simplest area - the whole idea of the tribunal approach we've got; the whole idea of the award system; the role of the old common rule award system. It means we have set minimums. Set notions of decency in the economy. I also get fired up when I find people are deliberately going and avoiding those areas of decency.
Compliance is another big area in respect to both industrial relations and workers compensation I think it is important that we make sure that the 98 percent of employers that are protecting the rights of workers are not disadvantaged in the marketplace by employers that are prepared to push the margin and deprive workers of rights and entitlements and so on.
Finally, what difference do you think unions can make in a result next February?
A big difference. I think it is important that between now and February, we establish the reasons for unions to support Labor, and I think there are reasons there why the unions would want to see a Carr government re-elected. In the end it is up to us, in the Labor government, and we would like the cooperation of senior union people to make sure that union members generally understand some of the things that we can do, and some of the things that we have already done that make it worthwhile to be re-elected.
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Five years ago retired seaman, Bill Langlois, led the official Anzac Day march through Sydney's CBD. He was proud. Five days ago he stood on the steps to CSL's St Leonards head office and again remembered lost comrades. This time he was angry.
Langlois has a chest full of medals from his wartime service, escorting Russian convoys and ferrying supplies to Australian troops. The one on the left is for bravery.
"I don't put them on for myself," he explains. "I wear them for my mates.
"This one? My mates did all the work but I was the one who got the gong. We still have memories us all old fellas and these help keep the memories alive."
The years have changed Langlois. By his own assessment he has gone from Bollocky Bill the Sailor to Testicle William the Seafearing Gentlemen but he still knows an insult when he sees one.
And rarely has Langlois witnessed a bigger insult than the two-fingered gesture towards the memory of his mates delivered by a Howard Government determined to sell Australian martime jobs to the lowest bidder.
"When we went to sea we went to war," he explained.
"Hell, at the start they had to have a five-day strike up in Brisbane so they could get a gun on the back so the Japanese didn't just knock us off like fish in a barrell."
Langlois was referring to the supply ships that ran up to Papua New Guinea and into Asia as Australian troops were pinned down on the Kakoda Trail and US marines constructed wharves for their involvement in the east.
Alwyn Allport knows as much about that theatre as most. The former assistant secretary of the Seamen's Union Sydney branch caught his first ship, the Matthew Flinders, out of Coffs Harbour as a 14-year-old bushie.
The deck boy had no idea that two months later he would find himself on the end of a four inch gun as the Matthew Flinders sailed for Port Moresby, then Noumea.
When Allport tried to join the Royal Australian Navy in 1943 he was given short shrift. Running supplies to troops involved in the defence of PNG or the Battle of the Coral Sea was considered more important.
Frustrated, he answered an ad seeking seamen to crew US small ships, supplying troops confronting the Japanese. Back after nine months, he joined an Aussie ship carrying bombs into Darwin, then a tug serviceing the US army.
He remembers the Iron Chieftan being sunk off Nowra Head, within sight of Sydney, and 20 crew going down with her; the Nimbin being blown up in virtually the same place, courtesy of a German raider that had laid mines around New Zealand and Australia.
Those incidents accounted for just a fraction of the 800 Australian merchant seamen killed during the Second World War. Their workforce suffered a higher ratio of fatalaties than either the Navy or Air Force.
Langlois and Allport want Australians to remember the sacrifices of their comrades and think about the importance of a domestically-owned merchant fleet to the country's future.
It was a point made by Major-General Peter Cosgrove when he spoke publicly about the role of the merchant navy in supporting Australia's peace-keeping efforts in East Timor.
But the Howard Government didn't need reminding. It had the facts at its fingertips and chose to ignore them.
In 1999 the Shipping Reform Working Group, appointed by the Government and containing all the usual employer and industry suspects, reported to Transport Minister John Anderson.
It recommended Government support for Australian shipping on economic and defence grounds.
Annual investment of $136 million in protecting Australian shipping from cheap labour, flag of convenience raiders, it argued, could benefit the country by $1.270 billion, in dollar terms alone.
"The demise of the Australian shipping industry will impact on Australia's defence capabilities," the report argued.
"The ADF places value on the availability of Australian seafarers capable of operating these vessels."
We can bring you these quotes because the report was leaked after Government refused to release its contents.
Instead, Howard and Anderson have presided over the demolition of Australian shipping. The number of Australian-flagged and crewed ships has been slashed by more than a half since they took office.
Security concerns, heightened by confirmation that Osama bin Laden's flag of convenience line ran the bombs into Mombassa, Kenya, responsible for the demolition of two US embassies in East Africa, run a distant second to their overwhelming desire to break the MUA and slash wages and conditions.
Allport has a more colourful way of putting it.
"Howard doesn't give a f...," he says. "He doesn't care about the security issue because he has his nose up Bush's arse for globalisation and rationalisation.
"It's all about competition."
A claim given substance by news of comparative wage rates for the CSL Yarra, tied up in Port Pirie, as seamen battle for their jobs in the face of a Goverernment-endorsed corporate manouevre.
Under CSL's plan the Yarra will stay on the Australian coast, paying Ukranian seamen $19,000 a year, rather than the $52,000 it had contracted to pay Australians. It has pulled a similar stunt with the CSL Pacific.
"If Howard and Anderson are genuine in their commitment to that sort of competition let's see some leadership," Allport demands. "Will they cut their wages by almost two-thirds to make Australia more competitive?"
by Jim Marr
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"Out they go and the sun starts to come up ... this long line of men following this pipe band, all in their pit clothes, a cloud of dust rising from the road. Seeing the red rays of the rising sun through the bush ... shimmering. If you lived to be a thousand, you'd never forget it ...
"I was terrified. In fact I was screaming with terror. The two of us turned back and it was harder to get out than it was to get in - there was only one place where the gravel had washed out under this split fence. Trying to get through this gap in the fence with the police just standing - bash, bash, bash. Well, we got out, rushed across the road and jumped up from the sunken road up onto the paddock. There's no trees and you had to run up to the back of the hill to get away from the shooting. As we were running up, Les Thomas goes down. He's clutching my wrist, he's screaming out.
"I've been hit."
Jim Comerford, barely a kid at the time, recalls the events of December 16, 1929, when miner Norman Brown was shot dead by police at Rothbury in the Hunter Valley.
The words come off the pages of At The Coalface but are the result of a painstaking exercise in oral history conducted by longtime union activists Paddy Gorman, Fred Moore and Ray Harrison.
Their book details 12 lives and the stories, in the men's and women's own words, are, by turn, passionate, moving, funny, sad and enlightening.
Gorman cares about oral history and urges other unions to get out and contact their old-timers before their experiences are lost forever.
"If we don't do it the history of our workplaces and communites will be lost," he warns.
"These people have important stories to tell."
At The Coalface comes to life, in its original spoken form, when ABC Radio National runs highlights of the miner's stories in its Hindsight program this Sunday at 2.05 pm. The hour-long show will be repeated on Thursday and, again, in the early hours of Friday morning.
Social History and Features Unit chief Jane Connors is excited by the project.
"The program is totally inspired by the book but we got Freddy Moore to go back and re-do the interviews for broadcast quality," she explained.
Moore, a life member of the Miners Federation, South Coast Labor Council and half a dozen other organisations, including the Illawarra Aboriginal Community, doubles up by playing the soundtrack.
It is to Moore and Harrison, life-long South Coast miners, that Gorman attributes the depth of At The Coalface.
"We didn't just want romantic accounts, we wanted mining life, warts and all," he says.
"They trusted Freddy and Ray and opened up in ways they mightn't have with others, including myself. They talk about their triumphs and they talk about their losses and mistakes as well.
"If we are going to have credibility, in the end, we have to have the truth."
Moore, 79, Harrison, 79, and Gorman have been working on their project since 1986. They have interviewed more than 70 men and women who lived and worked on the South Coast, the Hunter and the Central West.
They expect to publish a second volume of At The Coalface next year.
The Miners
On Radio National's Hindsight this week, a program about coal mining in NSW in the early years of the twentieth century, as told by the retired miners. Through the true stories of the 'black' men, we hear about a life of backbreaking work, danger, fatalities, uncertain employment and meagre pay. But we also learn about the unbreakable industrial and community solidarity in the mining towns of the Hunter and the Illawarra.
This program has been directly inspired by the oral history book 'At the Coalface', which was published by the Mining and Energy Division of the CFMEU in 1998.
Interviews for this week's Hindsight were conducted by Fred Moore (who also performs traditional tunes on the mouth organ) and narration is by ABC Rugby League commentator and former coal miner Craig Hamilton - ABC Media Release.
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This industrial tactic has become so popular that children in the grimy polluted industrial cities of north-east China, are playing a popular new game Kill the Boss - where they re-enact the death of a factory boss pretending to stab and throttle each other.
At a State-owned tool factory managers this year found themselves locked in their offices, goaded and starved and fearing they were the next to die at the hands of worker militants.
This time the workers running an industrial campaign strung up not their bosses, but a banner across the factory gate.
Workers tell bosses to sell their houses and limousines
Outside the bosses' offices they protested the privatisation plans with their banner demanding: Sell your houses and limousines, give us the means to live - where have all the State assets gone!!
The killings, the goading, the starving of bosses and the protests are not the result of a revival of the Red Guards.
Mao Ze Dong has not been resurrected. There is no State-support for these angry, sometimes violent outbreaks.
But there is evidence that at least some of this anger is organised and directed by the sprouting of what can only be characterised as a Chinese-version of the old Wobbly movement.
There have been several reports of freelance labour organisers jumping the rails, catching trains from working-class town to working-class town offering to help disgruntled workers organise themselves into independent unions.
In central China, once the cradle of Maoist heavy industry, these Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters, are meeting receptive ears with mass protests, which almost always include a demand to be able to organise free autonomous workers organisations.
While these independent workers struggles flare up, glow, have a grass-fire like effect firing up working people with the hope of change - the often heavy-handed tactics used by the local police quickly douses the power that the workers feel.
None of these flare ups have yet been able to cross the threshold to organise and maintain, for a long period, a permanent autonomous, independent trade union.
Official trade unions give bosses May Day medals
But the kids' popular game of Kill the Boss and the parents actual murdering of their factory bosses - it seems - has not yet worked to warn the leadership of the official trade unions that there is trouble ahead.
In a breath-taking example of how out of touch are the fat-headed cadres in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, four entrepreneurs were handed May Day 'Labour Medals' this year and, again on May Day, 17 businessmen were named 'model workers'.
"This is a breakthrough," said Li Qisheng, vice-chairman of All China Federation of Trade Unions said on May Day in commenting about the 'worker awards' to the boss-class.
"Those entrepreneurs, who operate legally, and work honestly, are also contributors to socialist construction. The awards have to keep pace with time and tide."
While the State-run union leaderships praise the new rich as the party's new role models the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters are able to hide out among the angry workers who are looking for leadership and a way to effectively strike back at the corrupt boss class who are now stripping State assets to line their own pockets - hiding behind the slogans of 'reform'.
Army told to put down underground labour movement
What the Communist Party cadres are now worried about is that while the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters have, to date, only been able to start grass-fires, these first spluttering flames may eventually take hold and become a real bushfire burning down the whole Beijing apparatus.
In March this year CNN quoted ' a source close to security' that the Beijing leadership was worried that an underground labour organisation had been established and was spreading.
The CNN story said the Chinese leadership had issued strict orders to target the underground organisers, with the para-military People's Armed Police told to break up disputes as they crop up.
These freelance labour organisers are rapidly gaining support with stories spreading word-of-mouth about their heroic activities.
You can almost imagine a Chinese Woody Guthrie using these stories as a source of popular legend-making folksongs.
Where did the Chinese Wobblies come from?
No one really has a fix on who these Wobblies are - though there a few theories.
The main theory is that the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters are 'rogue elements' who participated in workers struggles during the 1989 Democracy Movement, or were from what was once seen as the reform-wing of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
The reformers had given support to the workers and students during the 1989 Democracy Movement.
But the reform wing of the ACFTU was quickly purged after the Democracy Movement collapsed.
Popular understanding of the 1989 Democracy Movement, in the Western world, has it as a student-only affair with all the deaths occurring in Tiananmen Square.
In fact on June 4 1989 the army and the cadres in the streets and suburbs of Beijing murdered more people than those who were killed in the Square.
Those deaths were largely workers - not students - who supported the democracy struggle.
At this time, alongside the students, there were a number of attempts to organise independent autonomous workers federations in the factories of China with workers' demanding "shop-floor democracy" .
Website dedicated to history of the independent workers' movement
This site asks union supporters around the world to adopt a policy stance - over the next few weeks - remembering the role of workers in the June 4, 1989 events.
More than a decade later it is these former workers, and student activists, in the Democracy Movement, - as well as rogue elements formerly at the ACFTU - who are seen as being the most likely source for this homegrown Wobbly movement.
Most of the sketchy reports in the West talk of these freelance labour organisers as not being young people straight out of universities.
They are reported as being well-educated activists, in their late 30s and 40s, with contacts in Beijing and other big cities, and some experience in organising protests - and then experience in disappearing before the police arrive to arrest them.
But there have been enough different reports of these people to lend credence to the stories of their existence.
Clock turned back on workers rights
And the myth-building has started telling of the way they travel by train from town to town - going to wherever they hear of workers' disputes and offering a helping hand.
In the first five months of this year a massive wave of industrial unrest has spread through large swathes of China.
This year there has been hardly a week go by without reports of labour unrest - demonstrations demanding pensions; a railway line blocked by angry, unpaid workers or attempts to bring collective legal action against employers forcing overtime or demanding body searches of workers as they come and go from the factory.
The fact that even the tightly controlled State media is reporting some of these disputes indicates how widespread, even common, are the protests and strikes which are technically illegal.
Han Dongfang, an exiled labour organiser who spent time in jail for organising independent unions during the Democracy Movement period, says the working class anger shown in the disputes this year has led to what has probably been the largest protests over labour issues since 1949 - the year the Communists took power.
While some of the biggest disputes have been in the 'rustbelt' provinces where the industrial monoliths are being shut down and hundreds and thousands of workers are being put out of work.
Union officials spat on and beaten
In these places the officials of the old State-unions are being spat on and beaten up because for years they have taken the workers money - and now they are not being seen to do anything to represent the workers' interests.
Often these union officials are suspected of being partners in the corruption - pocketing bribes, or sharing in the profits of State-asset stripping.
But a lot of the industrial turmoil in the coastal provinces, in the new investment factories, is fed by the arrival of arrogant foreign capital who are rapidly turning back the clock on worker rights in this huge nation.
In these factories workers are being forced to work longer and longer hours, in increasingly unsafe workplaces and for measly wages - without the protection of any real unions.
The exploitation is especially pronounced at companies owned by Asian capital - especially Korean and Taiwanese factories producing toys and cheap goods for the consumer markets of the USA, Europe and Australia.
Chinese Wobblies may win workers new union rights
It is into this environment that the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters have moved, and quickly set up home.
There have been a few examples of these freelance labour organisers succeeding in linking myriad disputes to get one group of workers to provide solidarity and support to another group fighting the apparatus of the State.
But to date these examples are few and far between.
The Chinese workers are fighting - and the Wobblies are providing support for these fights.
The Wobblies-with-Chinese characters may yet succeed in firmly linking a number of disputes to create the basis of a free, independent and democratic union structure.
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My whole political life has been a dance with Leon Trotsky.
Often I have stumbled. Sometimes I have slipped. But always I have returned to Trotsky's embrace.
I find constant inspiration from the example and the writings of the man who led the Russian revolution and who was murdered because he fought to keep alive the ideas of genuine socialism.
And so it is that with the rise of the extreme right in Europe I have found myself re-reading some of Trotsky's most outstanding political documents - his articles on fascism in Germany.
"Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" is a collection of Trotsky's writings between 1930 and 1932 about the threat Hitler posed and the way the working class could unite to defeat him.
The power of Trotsky's analysis is so overwhelming that I have to remind myself that he is describing Nazism before Hitler comes to power, not after.
Trotsky understood that there were three main classes in advanced capitalist societies - the big bourgeoisie, the middle class and the working class. Because it is a small minority in society the bourgeoisie cannot rule on its
own. So it rules through the middle classes or what the Left often describes as the petty bourgeoisie.
This class is made up of disparate groups like small artisans and shopkeepers, other small businesses, petty officials, technical personnel, senior journalists, the intelligentsia and the peasantry. It is caught between big business and organized labour. It is the class of fear - the fear of capital driving it into the working class.
It is the class of fascism.
The bourgeoisie unleashes their Nazis in times of economic or political crisis to crush the working class and its political organisations. To do that fascism must have an army.
The military wing of fascism is drawn from demoralized workers and the unemployed, the down and out and small time criminals.
This means fascism has two faces - the respectable middleclass who are its political wing, and the underclass who make up its fighting wing.
In normal times the bourgeoisie rules through the social democratic wing of the middle class - the labor parties and trade union bureaucracy which lead millions of workers in support of the capitalist system. This is not a question of who wins power in parliamentary elections. Social democracy, even in opposition, is the rock in normal times on which the bourgeoisie rules precisely because it poses no challenge to the capitalist system and takes millions down this dead end of history.
Trotsky understood that fascism and social democracy are politically antagonistic. This is because the role of fascism is to solve the crisis of capitalism by destroying the independent organisations of the working class,
irrespective of whether they are led by radical communists or conservative labor party types. It is those working class organisations which stand in the way of the implementation of the measures necessary in the eyes of the bourgeoisie to restore profit rates.
For this reason, and despite the fact that fascism and social democracy are both agents of the bourgeoisie, Trotsky recognized the real danger fascism posed to the working class. He railed against the complacency and stupidity of the Stalinists and their description of the Labor Party in Germany as "social fascism".
Trotsky argued that an understanding of the role of fascism as the destroyer of all workers' organisations at the behest of the German bourgeoisie meant that the major working class organisations - social democrat and communist - had to form a united front to defend themselves against the fascists.
Apart from providing a real defence against the barbarity of fascism a united front would also expose to the mass of workers the pro-capitalist nature of the social democratic leadership and strengthen the communists' claims to leadership of the working class. This was a prerequisite to
revolution - in the end the only bulwark against fascism.
By 1932 in Germany there were 8 million unemployed and one in three people in the cities depended on the dole. Real wages were one-third lower than in 1928.
Agricultural prices fell and the peasantry faced ruin. Hopelessness spread through the middle classes and sections of the working class and the Nazi Party vote exploded.
Hopelessness alone does not explain fascism's growth in times of crisis. As Trotsky makes clear the Nazis can only arise as a mass movement when there is no party regarded by ordinary workers as their revolutionary leader.
In Germany there were two mass working class parties - the Social Democrats (the Labor Party) and the Communist Party.
The German Communist Party was thoroughly stalinised. It followed whatever absurd political line emanated from Moscow at the time. And the most absurd of all was the view that the Social Democrats were social fascists.
Although the Communists won millions of votes in 1930 and 1932 the Party, because of its historically criminal tactics, did not win the confidence of the vast majority of workers, who remained with the Social Democrats.
Trotsky criticised time and again the tactics of the Moscow leadership and their hangers on in Germany. The danger to workers was great. The Communists, he argued, must openly propose a united front of all workers' organisations - communist and social democratic - against the fascists.
The Stalinists rejected his analysis. Instead of unity against the enemy, the Communists created criminal divisions among German workers and by doing so helped Hitler come to power.
The Social Democrats did nothing. In the face of the Nazi threat they clung to absurd notions of constitutionality as the way to beat Hitler.
Trotsky's united front strategy was the only way for the German working class to defeat the Nazis before they assumed power. But his was a lone voice. The Stalinists, the fascists and the social democrats vilified him.
The economic crisis in Germany meant that by 1932 many of the German bourgeoisie saw Hitler as the only man who could drive wages down and restore profit rates. They supported him.
Hitler played the democratic game for anti-democratic but pro-profit purposes. In January 1933 he came to power constitutionally. Within days his paramilitary forces became part of the armed forces of the state. They began their attack on working class organisations.
Within months the Social Democratic Party and Communist Party were banned, their presses closed down and the trade unions abolished.
Hitler's first concentration camps filled with the cream of the German working class.
By 1936 German wages were half the level of 1933. German profit rates rose. However unlike other major capitalist countries German capitalism had no room for expansion through colonies or new markets. As Trotsky foresaw war in Europe was inevitable.
Trotskys' predictions in "Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" about the Nazis were horrifyingly vindicated.
Humanity has paid the price ever since for the Left's failure to understand fascism and mobilise the working class against it.
As fascism in Europe implants itself once again in society, playing at democracy and biding its time, we on the Left must learn the lessons of history.
Leon Trotsky "Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" Bookmarks 1989
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Globalisation. Sorry to use the word. Particularly in relation something close to everyone stomach - food. But recent articles are asking does trans nationality matter? '
The Ausbuy website points out that the level of foreign ownership in the Australian food industry is high. For example:
Abattoirs 80%, Baby Food 100%, Baked Beans 80%, Beef Processing 75%, Beer 50%, Biscuits 90%, Bread (Major) 50%, Breakfast cereals 65%, Cheese 50%, Frozen vegetables 85%, Meat Pies 40%, Pet Food 85%
Does this matter? Dick Smith, he backer of Ausbuy, claims he doesn't object to foreign companies, but he does say he is fighting back against the use by foreign companies of the Australian made label. He says that Australian owned is also very important. Smith copped plenty of flak for his stance from the Australian Food and Grocery Council, News Ltd journalist Denis Shanahan, Stuart Littlemore and Tim Fischer. Smith set up his own label to counterattack against Kraft, for example, using Aussie icons.
Bill Pritchard and Jonathan Pickering address the issue of whether this should be a concern for us and whether it is a threat to Australian culture in two complementary articles in the latest issue of the Journal of Australian Political Economy (no.48, 2001).
Pickering begins with the beetroot in his look at the mixed harvest of globalisation for Australian culture.
The McOz was hailed by some as the Australianisation of McDonalds, after it has been the cause of the demise of the Australian milkbar hamburger. McDonalds had to withdraw the burger not long after its introduction because of a shortage of beetroot, but it has returned triumphant.
The Aussiness of this burger goes to the point that Dick Smith raises. McDonalds remains a transnational food company, but is it somehow "Australian" because it creates an Aussie version of its muck, or because it sources its products locally. It has also released a Kiwiburger in NZ. Pickering argues that globalisation is not a wholly bad or good thing for Australia or Australian culture, and also crucially points out that "Australian culture" is not necessarily a good thing either. Globalisation can be a problem of limiting political and social space but can also mean, as many of the much maligned anti-globalisation movement point out, the focus for a true internationalism. Noam Chomsky pointed out that the World Social Forum in a sense provides the focus for a new International, this time not controlled by Stalinist apparatchiks.
The role of corporations in all this is another matter. Pritchard refers to the work of political economists such as Bryan and Rafferty, who have pointed out that capital is not national or international, but rather "weaves its way through various institutional (state and non-state) structures, become implicated and immersed within its contradictions." Policy makers these days tend to try and wash their hands of involvement in this kind of economic issue, saying it's a matter for the market. Pritchard emphasizes that TNCs are social actors who have large financial power over people and resources.
Pritchard attempts to get at the newly developing structure of TNCs by describing the framework of 'alliance capitalism". Nike has been seen as the archetype of this, with the lead company acting as a co-ordinating agent between sub-contractors and contractors. The type of trade that exemplifies this structure of transnational business is called related party international transactions (RPITS) or more generally known as a form of transfer pricing.. RPITS give TNCs the scope to shape and control the terms of their international trading relationships, in particular, their internal price or royalty structures. RPITS also can give rise to the opportunity for tax minimization. In the food industry in Australia, Nestl� and Simplot are the major examples Pritchard uses to highlight key issues in the globalisation and national culture debates.
Nestl� are a very well known, ostensibly Swiss based company, who own such well known brands as Yoplait and Peters. Nestl� use the RPITS to minimise tax in an aggressive and have been subject to much scrutiny by the tax office, so far unsuccessfully. They claim an arms length approach is taken in the operation of its Australian interests, but Pritchard shows how the ATO tried to get at invoices that came through a Nestl� subsidiary in the Bahamas. After initially successfully challenging the company, the decision that Nestl� had unpaid tax liabilities of $20m, the decision was set aside by the Federal Court. A wholly locally based company would have been unable to benefit from these arrangements. Simplot is the owner of such brands as Edgell Birdseye and Herbert Adams. They provide the potatoes for the afore mentioned McDonalds, sourced from contracted potato growers in Tasmania. They are a US based company and the Australian subsidiary has never paid a dividend to the US parent and has posted an operating loss in Australia and never paid tax here.
The crucial thing for Nestl� and Simplot is the brand assets. These have all been transferred offshore to Switzerland and to the US. Royalty payments on these brands are also thus relocated to the offshore bases. These trademark royalties for Simplot moved $a30m and $a54m to Simplot's parent company in 1998 and 1999. This was a lot of cash for the Australian operation but it all went to the US office, thus putting financial pressure not noticed before on Australian operations, which, as we have seen, were running at a loss. The ATO has been trying to look at these related party royalty transactions as a way looking at TNC accounts, but the face many obstacles.
The Australian company San Remo is an example of the way the "Australianness" of a food company does not guarantee the interests of Australian people either. The ATO has been taking on San Remo about the way they have used RPITs to reduce their Australian tax liabilities. Using the Tax Act the ATO was able to investigate and amend company tax assessments if they thought transfer pricing had occurred. The ATO thought that San Remo had been importing pasta at artificially high prices. The ATO amended their assessment at what they deemed to be arm's length prices.
Pritchard notes that the San Remo case how companies deliberately construct transnationality as a corporate strategy for competitive advantage. San Remo directors had incorporated a Swiss company to act as purchasing agent in the mid 1980s for the purpose, as the ATO saw it, of making possible these transfer pricing arrangements and using the Swiss tax haven status.
We see from all these cases how corporations have been using transnationality to improve their competitive advantage, and at the same time using the branding power of the companies they purchase or have established at a national level to market their products.
Dick Smith has taken aim in a savvy way to at transnational takeovers, but Pritchard, whilst not criticising Smith's business strategy, points out that from a national economic interest point of view, Australian ownership does not guarantee the business acting in an ethical way.
Pritchard outlines the policy implications of these transnational tax strategies. Many of our largest companies and wealthiest individuals have been moving to paying no tax at all. These companies and individuals often like to parade their Aussie credentials, whilst at the same time acting in a transnational way to avoid tax obligations.
Pritchard points to the need for increased financial and legislative clout to be given to the regulatory agencies such as the ATO, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Intellectual Property Australia and the Australian Customs Service. Cost cutting has hit these and many other public sector regulators hard and professional staff have left and have gone to professional accounting firms, the ones who advice on corporate structures to avoid tax. A great need is there to improve these strategically critical national institutions within our increasingly open economy.
See Journal of Australian Political Economy; no. 48, December 2001. Available from PO Box 76, Wentworth Building, University of Sydney 2006.
(Jonathan Pickering's article won the Wentworth Medal at the University of Sydney in 2001 for the best essay on a specified topic)
Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty. The Global Economy in Australia. (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999)
by David Peetz
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At Workers Online, we went back to Irving Berlin to find inspiration for a theme that truly befitted the grandeur of this uniquely visionary foreign minister.
(To here Berlin's tune, go to http://www.parlorsongs.com/issues/1998-11/nov98feature.asp or http://www.fjhmusic.com/audio/b1101.ram )
ALEXANDER'S BRAGTIME BAND
Come on and hear, come on and hear
Alexander's Brag-time Band
Come on and hear, come on and hear,
The foreign minister so grand
He can play a bugle call like you never heared before
So natural he's gonna make ya go to war
So simple to knock off Saddam...like Vietnam
Come on along, come on along, let him take you by the hand
Up to the man, up to the man who's the leader of his band
And then you get to hear Jean-Marie Le Pen played in bad times
Come on and hear (come on and hear), come on and hear (come on and hear)
Alexander's Brag-time Band!
by The Chaser
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"I was planning something a little bit bigger", Ms Stott Despoja admitted to The Glass House, "but now it's looking like it will be quite small. In fact it's getting smaller by the day."
Ms Stott Despoja's engagement is the most noteworthy announcement of her leadership and has caused a sensation in political circles. Labor leader Simon Crean congratulated Stott Despoja, but Prime Minister Howard criticised the Democrats leader for "making another questionable preference deal."
But it is understood that fianc� Ian Smith is already concerned about the future of the relationship after Cheryl Kernot endorsed the match as "another dream team."
The Senator acknowledges that the prospect of marriage is a significant change. "Democrats leaders don't usually say 'till death do us part' for one thing," admitted Stott Despoja. "That's one thing I learned from Cheryl." At this stage Ms Stott Despoja has refused to make any commitments beyond the term of the next parliament.
Stott Despoja admits there is a lot of organising to do for the engagement. "I'm more used to being on a guest list than drawing one up" she said yesterday. It is understood that the Senator has invited her closest advisors to the engagement party, although neither Rove, Paul McDermott nor The Panel have confirmed their availability yet. No more than three of Stott Despoja's Democrat colleagues from the Senate will attend the engagement party however as the remaining five (including Deputy Aden Ridgeway) no longer support her leadership. Stott Despoja has also confirmed she intends to have a white wedding "so that I don't have to invite Aden."
The possible wedding has led to speculation about the Democrats leader becoming a mother, but Stott Despoja has denied suggestions she and Mr Smith became engaged "to keep the bastards honest."
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As a regular visitor to Currawong, the Labor Council's holiday cottages on Sydney's Northern Beaches, I have on several occasions had the chance to have a chat with Curawong's resident artist, Sophie Haythornthwaite. Sophie is the daughter of David and Margaret , Currawong's managers. I took the opportunity to discuss with Sophie some of the issues which she faces in her chosen profession. I found a lot of parallels with wider workplace issues and gained a better insight into what motivates and inspires an artist given the difficulty of surviving in the madness of this dog eat dog world of unencumbered rationalist capitalism.
I wondered what motivated Sophie to paint portraits, landscapes and still life in a day and age where most people are struggling to get decent wages and working conditions, pay their bills, afford their mortgages, a decent education and reasonable health. Why not just take a photo? Was I looking at privilege personified? Far from it.
Q: How did you first decide that you wanted to follow this unconventional path?
A: I had always wanted to be a painter, but I realised that the type of training I wanted was not available in Australia. I did my research and found that there are only a few schools in the world that teach the old master techniques in the way they were taught 500 years ago. I set my heart on a particular school in Italy and after 5 long hard years of slog ( waitressing, cooking in cafes, babysitting, cleaning, ironing and working at youth hostels) I finally got the funds together. I almost didn't get there at all as a caf� I was working for owed me a large amount of wages and were refusing to pay. Enter LHMU to save the day! I ended up getting a scholarship at the school and also eventually taught there myself. I still make all my own paints and canvases as I was taught there.... I ship special materials in from Italy!
Q: Now that you are a fully trained professional, do you still see the need for a union?
A: Absolutely!!!! Recently I had an unscrupulous gallery cut a large piece off one of my paintings without consulting me, in order to please a client! They removed my signature as well. The client did not end up buying the picture, and when I questioned their actions they basically told me to get lost! The same gallery had withheld cheques, neglected to tell me when works sold, and had taken up to 65% commission on my work. Because I am self employed I have to be even more careful about who I deal with. Thankfully most of my galleries are very ethical unlike this one! My position is also vulnerable because I am not covered for sick leave, holidays, or workers compensation.... I can't get a home loan either because my income is irregular! It's a very shaky existence!
Q: Bearing all this in mind, why did you choose to specialise in what would seem to be a very unprofitable form of art... traditional portraiture?
A: It seems a long shot I know, but portraiture is actually very popular in Europe and America where there is a long tradition of family and corporate portraiture. I was hoping it would take off in Australia also. Luckily this hunch has proved correct... I have been painting commissions constantly since my return from Italy. People commission works of their children, their parents, themselves.... It keeps me busy! I have had several exhibitions of still life and landscape paintings which have sold very well also...It would seem that in a modern world where the main art trend is abstraction and conceptualism, the average person still prefers realism!
Q: The killer question... why not just take a photo?
A: Lots of people ask that! A painted portrait is different because it is painted over several sittings and so captures many aspects of the person's looks and personality, it captures someone at a certain time of their life, not just a fleeting moment. Because of the paint techniques, things like the texture of skin and hair and the sparkle in eyes or a slight smile can all be captured... the final effect is very lifelike, more so than a photo. A case in point is a portrait I did of my cousin. The picture is in his mother's house and his dog sits in front of it all the time and barks and whines at it! I value the dog's opinion more than most contemporary critics!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: As well as several portrait commissions coming up, I am painting for a four person still-life show in late May at Charles Hewitt Gallery in Paddington , and then a solo show of portraits, landcapes and still lifes at the Hughenden Hotel in July. All welcome!
Sophie can be contacted on (02) 99731960
Or mailto:sophie_hay@ hotmail.com
Upcoming exhibitions
Charles Hewitt Gallery 300 Glenmore Rd, Paddington 23 May- 17 June 2002
Hughenden Hotel 14 Queen St , Woolahra 1-31 July 2002
Currawong holiday cottages
There are 9 cottages at Currawong with each built for a family of 4. There is also Midholme, the large heritage homestead available with preference for weekly bookings. Please call David or Margaret on (02) 99744141.
If the leaks and softening up statements are anything to go by it will be a painful process for anyone who doesn't wear kahki.
With border protection, the Pacific Solution and the War on Terror to fund, it will be those most vulnerable in society who are asked to pay the price.
Already community sector workers have been told by the Treasurer that there isn't the money to fund their modest wage rise; now there are indications that the test for disability pensions will be tightened so that even the blind must meet a 'mutual obligation' to the community.
Of course, this is the price we pay for John Howard's cynical re-elation campaign to turn Australia into a gated community. His agenda for the nation is now defined by that desperate sleight of hand.
The irony is that for Howard, commitment to the national security only really counts at election time. Just look at events of the past seven days.
His workplace relations minister begrudges a modest pay rise for the lowly paid, trotting out the hoary old chestnut that better pay costs jobs.
His attorney general bowls up 'anti-terror' laws directed at the Australian people - that even his own parliamentary colleagues condemn as an outrageous affront to civil liberties.
And his transport minister turns a blind eye as the Australian merchant navy is transferred to third world Flags of Convenience, leaving our Navy without a supply fleet in times of crisis. Did someone mention national security?
It's a sorry crew, in power after cynically playing on the fears and prejudices of its people. As the budget will expose, this is an Administration out of ideas who have abrogated leadership for crisis management.
And still Federal Labor fails to differentiate itself from Howard, fearful that any hint of compassion or principle will fuel another wedge campaign. All they can offer is gambling chips for all.
Peter Lewis
Editor
Michel Hryce |
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Good Morning Young Laborites
I'm honoured to be a guest speaker at your conference today.
I trust these two days have and will be fruitful for you and allow you to determine what sort of Labor Party you want into the future but more importantly give you time to think about and articulate what sort of society you want for Australia, now and when you take your place as leaders of Australia.
Of course, you will have the opportunity to present these ideas to us old and older laborites at State and Federal conferences in the not too distant future in 2002.
What type of society does the Labor Party want for Australia and how will our leadership persuade our nation to its vision.
I joined the Labor Party in the early 1980's after a three year working stint in Europe. You know, I think I was too old to be a member of young labor then (and I think it was really young Labor blokes in those days).
When I joined the party, many were leaving it to join the Greens over the Party's stance on uranium mining. Many laborites were inspired by Peter Garrett's charisma and Midnight Oil's music and lyrics, which caught the hearts and minds of many Australian political activists and delivered them to the Greens.
In the 2001 Federal elections we witnessed another exodus of both Labor party members and Labor voters to the Greens. This time it was a protest against Labor's nervousness in fighting Howard's stance on refugees/our Tampa boat people.
Labor lost its Third Federal election!
Why?
I personally think we lost the last election for a number of reasons.
1. We did not get a "Labor" message to Australian voters;
2. Our leaders failed to grab the hearts and minds of Australian voters;
3. We ran some unelectable candidates; and
4. Most importantly there was no perceivable difference between Labor and the Liberal Coalition parties.
Until the Labor Party shows Australians that it is different to the Liberal coalition mob we will not win a federal election.
What does make our party, the Labor party different to the Liberal coalition?
Our history and our reason for existence.
As you know, the Australian Labor Party is Australia's oldest surviving political party, formed in the 19th century in the wake of the great strikes of the 1890's. The trade unions then sponsored a national body which became the Labor Party.
The Australian Labor Party is one of a small group of political parties in the world which are genuine Labor Parties, where the trade unions are affiliated directly to the party. Trade unions do not merely support our party but they form part of our structure through their affiliations.
This is what distinguishes us from the Liberal party which was formed initially in 1931 arising from a series of business parties and finally as the Liberal Party in 1944.
Labor - labor rights!
Liberal - business rights!
So what is the Party doing about trying to inspire a labor vote?
It has decided it must distance itself from trade unions, from the industrial arm of the party, from labor, the labor movement.
Why? Because we have achieved all we needed to do to secure labor rights?
No.
Because, so it goes, we lost the federal election because we are too close to the trade unions!
Pleeeease
Do any of you really think Australian voters woke up last year on election day and all said in one voice, "I'm not going to vote for Labor this year because its too close to the union movement. And because I do not agree with the 60/40 rule."
Pleeeease again
How many labor party members (the miserable 200,000 nationwide) do you think even understood the 60/40 voting rule in the party, last year when they voted let alone anyone else.
But in reviewing the party structure the trade unions are perceived as the problem.
This is a furphy, this is dangerous and this is wrong.
How many more seats would labor have lost at the last federal election if the industrial arm of the party had not worked tirelessly on the election campaign?
I ask you?
If Australian Labor follows Blair with the mantra of new labor without the labor movement we will have to determine a new reason to exist otherwise we will be a party for "no-one in particular" functioning solely for reasons of political expediency - a party with no core.
I would support this if I thought that the Australian Labor movement had succeeded in creating a genuine market democracy and cured the ills of the corporate system.
But it has not. There is still work to do.
The Australian Labor Party has a proud history of inclusiveness, embracing a broad range of social, cultural and economic issues.
At the last election we threw this proud history away for a punt (a bad one at that) on political expediency.
Since the last federal election I perceive the party as becoming more doctrinal and insular - we were proud - we were not these things - it says so on the ALP internet site.
OK so what is or should be important to our Party and our Australian society?
1. First and foremost it is our duty to dethrone corporate aristocracy and expose the myth of the devine right of capitalism. Not overthrow it - change it - make it accountable.
Whilst corporations focus solely on making profits for shareholders (and their CEO's) to the exclusion of everyone else's interests we have plenty of work to do before we move to the third way.
We need to consider how to design more equitable alternatives for the corporate system, new property rights, new forms of citizenship in corporate governance, new ways of looking at corporate performance.
Marjory Kelly an American journalist, an expert on Corporate ethics argues, "why shouldn't the rising incomes of employees be a reasonable measure of a company's success."
And most importantly Labor must influence the global corporate aristocracy. We must question the right to determine world trade treaties behind closed doors, which effectively override individual countries democratically formed laws and social justice policies.
2. We must be perceived as and be a party and a society of tolerance, fairness, embracing of the diverse character of our nation. How?
q We must include our indigenous people and their issues, we must reconcile with our Aborigines.
q We must embrace our political views across the spectrum - left/right factionalism should not be a clear demarcation line with swords drawn at 10 paces. Left/right must be an engine for debate to determine the party's direction.
If the NSW Labor Council can move to eradicate and minimalise factional warring so can Young Labor. As the left wing Vice President of Labor Council I am confident that my Council includes me, my union and other left wing affiliates in our critical decision making processes and campaigns.
Two campaigns spring to mind that reflect the NSW union movement working together.
1. The unionisation of the Olympics which enhanced the Sydney Olympic Games.
2. The Workers Compensation campaign - less successful and unfortunately against our political arm of the party.
Why is factional savagery a waste of time?
We are a small Party in a small country with many outside enemies and much work to do. Not only that - why would anyone waste their precious spare time involved in a political party that merely fights internal battles. Of course potential activists will find an issue based group to divest their energies to achieve their goals.
More importantly factional savagery means you miss out on a lot of fun.
q As a party we must also address the gender imbalance in our Parliamentary ranks.
Mr Carr look no further than the industrial arm of the party to do this. Look to our Women Labor leaders to fill those safe seats. Pick me, pick my women colleagues. perhaps one of Carr's advisors could offer him a copy of the NSW Labor Council Directory to identify women leaders, there are more than five, Mr Carr - as luck may have it you also might find we don't need those workshops - we have the skills and are eminently electable now.
3. We must make our party 'sexy' - not full of sex but appealing - I do not think any political party in Australia has appeal - a political party that Australian voters want to support and endorse. To transform ourselves into an "appealing" party we need to adopt a direction and get it out there.
4. and finally (you'll be pleased) .. We need to smash this insidious current of racism in our country. Our Party and our country were known for a fair go for all, a tough but fair society. It is our responsibility to reclaim this ethos.
On Friday night I got a ride with an Australian Pakistan taxi driver. A gentle, thoughtful man, 20 years in this country. His two girls were born here. He has decided this year to return to Pakistan because in his and his children's lives they are ever increasingly the subject of racial slurs and taunts and he thinks, however difficult it will be for his family in Pakistan, his Australian girls will at least be free from this abuse. I cannot tell you how much it saddens me that we will loose this wonderful Australian citizen and his family to Pakistan.
On the world stage Australia is loosing it's "appeal" due to our handling of refugees, our detention camps and our perceived bigotry and racism. In February 2002 in the States prior to Howard's visit to see Bush in Washington for economic talks, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article denouncing Howard and Australian politics on Tampa and mandatory sentencing.
We must fix this now.
OK Young labor - those are my thoughts for you I hope they are of value, get busy working out the Labor Party direction, give us older Laborites the answers but also have lots of fun doing it.
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This follows in the wake of Brad Wira using the old squirrel grip for Footscray last year.
If you don't know what a squirrel grip is, well, it's the reason squirrels run away when approached.
While most of the football world has been down on 'chewy' Filandia I think the great positive is that he has given the Port Melbourne Football club some much needed publicity.
It's one of the great problems in sport today that, once you get away from the elite levels of Cricket, the NRL and the AFL, media coverage in this country is generally abysmal. This becomes a self-perpetuating machine as, without the exposure, other sports and other levels of sport find it hard to attract interest, especially sponsorship interest. So, strapped for cash and all but invisible it becomes easy for the media to dismiss these sports as irrelevant.
Until someone bites someone on the cods, or Wayne Carey decides to turn up for training at North Wagga.
The sad irony of this is that without the 'grass roots' underpinning the elite levels of any code a sport can find itself in trouble.
We are starting to see this in Rugby League, and it will get worse before it gets better.
The other problem is that grass roots sport is one of the great instances of community, and once it starts to slide you can bet the quinella will be the community itself begins to also experience problems.
Port Melbourne footy club is a good example of this.
The Port Melbourne football club banned members of the Victorian police service from being players or members at the club following the Police response to the 1927 Waterfront Dispute.
It's a good example of a sporting club being used to define what a community is about.
For Port Melbourne it wasn't about cops beating the shit out of striking trade unionists.
But why tell that story when you've got a good bit of titillation instead. Especially when Port Melbourne is now overrun by a bunch of clueless middle-class yuppies who have the same approach to community that a rabbit has to headlights.
If you treat people like 13 year olds they'll act like 13 year olds.
The media has a lot to answer for in this country.
Phil Doyle - throwing the dummy and slicing through the gap.
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Since last postcard the Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA program has been developing well. The Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA offices in Cambodia and Lao PDR combined in organizing a great Cambodia study tour for our Lao partners, the Lao Women's Union (LWU).
There are great challenges setting up a vocational training program from scratch for the women's union. Besides the issues mentioned in Postcard 1, key questions are how to effectively target the poorest people, how to assist trainees in actually finding jobs from their training, and how to avoid re-inventing the wheel!!!
To assist them in this task the Cambodian study tour was placed early in the project, so the LWU could benefit from the lessons in all these issues from our 15 years of developing similar programs in Cambodia.
The first difficulty was the need for 3 languages in every meeting. Only one of the 6 Lao group members spoke English and Khmer is not very close to Lao - so it was a bit tricky. The Cambodian organisations we visited did a great job in preparing reports to help this problem. In Lao, we had worked through the key questions that we wanted answered and emailed them to the Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA Cambodia office before we left. These were translated and sent to all partners in Cambodia we were to visit. It worked well as the key information required was presented clearly. Given the pace of the schedule this was very important. We visited 6 of Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA's partners in 3 provinces in 5 days including 4 vocational training centres, fish farming and industry training. The Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA Cambodia office did a fantastic job in hosting the visit.
Both project managers and trainers took part in the tour. Trainers of two subjects within the program here in Lao took part - hairdressing and tailoring. The trainers were places alongside Cambodian trainers to share experiences for an additional week and the managers met also with their counterparts in many centres.
For Mrs Bounthon, the tailoring teacher, it was her first time out of Lao and first time in an aeroplane!! What did the study tour mean for her?
"It was extremely useful for me - I don't have a lot of classroom teaching experience but I have been a tailor for many tears. For me it was very good to share experience with other teachers, to see first hand different teaching methods, to get new ideas for structuring my 4 month course, and to better manage students and the use of materials".
For Mrs Vanh Pheng, Project Manager at the Vientiane Municipal Women's Union, it was a valuable experience:
"For me I was keen to get greater understanding of training centre management issues, share experiences with women in Cambodia and see what the Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA program had done over such a long time. The result was much more than this - for the real inspiration for me as we start our program here in Lao, is the way people can win against poverty. There is great effort in the Cambodia program in targeting the very poor and we met both these trainees and some who had set up small businesses in the market after their training was finished. Besides this, I also gained good experience in timetabling training, integrating other issues like literacy and HIV into training courses and how to follow up the result of training to see how successful students are afterwards."
All in all a very good exchange of information and practical teaching resources.
Besides the work - in good Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA study tour tradition, we had an all-singing all-dancing tour as well!!! As usual also, the Australian contingent was outdone terribly in the cultural exchange department - relying on Waltzing Matilda and the Ballad of 1891 against a wide range of beautiful Lao and Cambodian songs. I won't even describe the difference in national dance displays!!!
We also visited the genocide sites from the Khmer Rouge time, around Phnom Penh - a new subject for some of the younger members of the Lao delegation.
Since our return a few weeks ago we have been working on the first 12 month plan of training and how to incorporate lessons from Cambodia, finalizing the renovation plan for the Vocational Centre planned for Vientiane and interviewing for project staff locally. What does the project mean by poor? In one of the poorest countries in South East it means targeting those earning the equivalent of less than $Aus 4/week in rural areas and $5 a week in the city!!
Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA's Lao vocational project 2001-2004 is supported by AusAID and matching donations from Australian unions and individual supporters.
You can support this work in Laos by becoming a donor.
(link to www.apheda.org.au/donor.htm)
For more information about Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA go to:
www.apheda.org.au
or contact Alison Tate on:
(02) 9264 9343 or on [email protected]
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Westpac Profit Hits Nine Figures
Westpac has denied its half-yearly profit of more than $1 billion has come about through the neglect of its customers and staff. has expressed his delight at the profit result. Westpac has posted a $1.02 billion half-year profit to March, a 10 per cent improvement on last year's half-year of $924 million - delivering an interim dividend of 34 cents to shareholders. Westpac chief executive David Morgan it is a clean solid result and he denies it has come at the expense of customer service. "Our customers are doing more business with us than ever before. Their satisfaction ratings are up," he says.
ANZ Promises Shorter Queues
Elsewhere in the banking sector, ANZ Banking Group Ltd has expanded its customer charter, making ten promises to customers as part of what it says is a further effort to restore customer faith in banking services. The customer charter, effective immediately, establishes benchmarks for the provision of service to personal and small business customers. This includes new promises on simple accounts, fees and charges, quick, convenient branch banking including a target to serve customers within five minutes of arrival and a national review of branch opening hours. As well, it includes promises on fast, efficient phone service including standards for maximum waiting times when calling to speak to a customer service representative. The Finance Sector Union is interested in learning how the new policy sits with recent cuts to staffing numbers.
Explosive result Driven By Staff Cuts
Explosives manufacturer Oric ahas posted an $80.4 million profit for the six months to the end of March, a result which beyond market expectations. CEO Malcolm Broomhead is enjoying the boucquets after sacking 10 per cent of the company's workforce. Broomhead claims the cost-cutting program produced savings of $25 million. Orica is the world's largest manufacturer of explosives for the mining industry, and there is strong demand in Australia for its products, mainly from coal-mining companies. The company's other main market is the United States, which has returned to profitability in the six months to March.
Austar Vaule Drops as CEO Pay Rises
As regional teleco Austar's value plummets, the personal value of its CEO John Porter is heading in the opposite direction. Porter was paid a tidy $1.16 million for running the bush pay TV outfit in 2001, a handsome 35 per cent increase on the $856,000 he received for his services in 2000. Not a bad reward for the year that Austar lost $682 million, sacked a third of its staff, failed to sign up more pay TV customers and defaulted on its loan repayments (although it has since sorted its funding out). Porter's base salary only increased by a paltry $80,000 to $540,000. The real windfall came in the form of tax equalisation payments, which went from $67,000 in 2000 to a whopping $452,000 in 2001. A company spokesman defended the $270,000 in bonuses, which were paid last April, claiming they related to the 2000 calendar year.
Bosses Thrive With Non-Cash Bonuses
Perks for corporate bosses go beyond pay to cars, entertainment expenses, airline clubs, golf club and gym memberships, private travel and mobile phones, to name just a few. The most used perk available to employees were discounts off company goods and services. In some cases, the company paid for their education. The Australian Institute of Management's latest national salary survey found that executives and managers did not get that much more lucre last year. But the non-wage bonuses still ensured few were crying poor. the perks. The survey found that 55.3 per cent of senior executives were offered cars, 10.7 per cent a second one, 43.6 per cent airline club memberships, 7.9 per cent memberships at the gym, social club or golf club, and 4.8 per cent private travel.
And the Winner Is .....
US company E*Trade Group Inc paid chief executive Christos Cotsakos $US77 million ($A143 million) in 2001, more than four times what any Wall Street CEO earned. Mr Cotsakos' compensation included $US29 million in restricted stock, forgiveness of a $US15 million loan, and another $US15 million for taxes after the loan was reclassified as compensation, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is despite E*Trade losing $US253 million since 1997, including a $US241 million loss in 2001 as online trading slumped in the wake of stockmarket declines. Mr Cotsakos' pay - about 35 times what he earned in 2000 - comes as the company's board negotiates his new contract, to replace one expiring in May. The company, which is facing declining business and consolidation in the online brokerage industry, said it gave him part of the raise to help retain him.
Buffet Slams Option Excesses
Also in the US, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett has argued executive compensation through options is both "shameful" and "immoral"
The annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting - dubbed the "Woodstock for capitalists." - was told that attempts to hide the use of options as compensation should be opposed by shareholders. Buffett who receives receive annual compensation of $US100,000 ($185,000) from Berkshire, chastised fellow leaders of US companies for greed and compensation that puts executives' interests ahead of shareholders'. Buffett said chief executives were trying to convince lawmakers to change the way options from compensation were expensed on balance sheets. "It's shameful that this group that is getting well fed under the system wants more," he said.
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A comedy version of How The West Was Won plays to a near-empty house in the WA legislative assembly. An odd assortment of hacks, from the Liberal and One Nation stables, are less than gruntled when they discover the Labor Government has pushed through controversial industrial relations measures while they were glued to, wait for it, Temptation Island.
The Labour Relations Bill 2002 passed its second reading just as Channel 7's Temptation Island, featuring the attempted seduction of couples by attractive singles, hit the airwaves.
Opposition leader, Colin Barnett, admits the Libs were caught out but One Nation come out swinging, alleging the sole opposition member in the chamber, their Paddy Embry, had been distracted at the crucial moment by Housing and Works Minister, Tom Stephens.
A One Nation spokesman says Embry looked like a "stunned mullet" when he realised what had occurred.
Clearly besotted by the Temptation Island concept, One Nation accuses the Government of "deviant skullduggery".
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Be afraid, be very afraid, Freddy Kruger, or maybe it's Michael Kroger, is stalking the hallways of the ABC looking for journos to slash about their critical faculties.
Kruger/Kroger launches a party political attack on ABC journalistic integrity that drips with irony. Not just because the Liberal Party powerbroker is the most overtly political appointment, amongst a raft of them, on the current ABC board but because he chooses to go ballistic in support of talk radio supremo Alan Jones.
It's probably still irony when Kruger/Kroger chooses to use his position to try to influence what goes to air but surely it's farce when he makes the treatment of Jones his platform for a lecture on journalistic standards. Wonder if he ever heard of the Cash For Comment saga?
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There's a world of difference between genius and intelligence as a new book on Albert Einstein reveals. The Einstein File details how American security agencies, including the FBI, spied on the scientist until his death in 1955, worried about his support for civil rights and pacifism.
FBI concoctions included fears that Einstein was working on a death ray, quite radical for a pacifist, and was involved in a communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood.
The revelations heighten the stupidity, not to mention danger, of intelligence services operating without adequate constraint in an emotional atmosphere. Quite relevant, given draconian US and Australian plans to counter terrorism in a week in which George Bush decides to add Cuba to the "axis of evil" he has foreshadowed military action against.
Under-secretary of State, John Bolton, rejects a 1998 US Government report that finds Cuba has only a "limited capacity" to threaten Americans. By way of evidence, he says Fidel Castro has visited Libya, Syria and Iraq.
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Isn't it true that reality mirrors life that mirrors reality. This week's Big Brother has seen the house mates deal with a host of invading intruders. Will they upset the harmonious dynamics that have developed over past weeks? Or will they just not fit in and be ejected as soon as possible by viewers over the coming weeks? If only our housemates could determine who comes into their house and when they come.
And has anyone else noticed the similarity between the last couple of weeks of Australian Survivor and the ongoing machinations behind preparations for state ALP conference?
Mark Latham this week unleashed another of his 'big ideas'. This alone should have been enough to have Laborites ducking for cover. If you've braved the weighty 'Civilising Global Capital', ploughed through the newspaper columns and endured his education agenda and survived his attack on asylum seekers, you would have known what to expect. Latham is the ALP's self-appointed moderniser whose starting premise is that collectivism is old hat; instead we need a new vision. His problem is that all too often the vision ends up reading like a treatise for the Tories.
This week it was 'the ownership agenda' which Latham argues has the potential to fill what he perceives as a vacuum in the labour movement. In short, he advocates for the government subsidizing the purchase of shares of low-income families, much like the first-home buyer scheme created by Menzies and - as revealed this week - resurrected by Howard to allow pauper and millionaire alike to receive a leg-up into the property market. While Menzies may have championed his first homebuyers scheme as a 'bulwark against the Bolshevicks, Latham's idea of a first shareholder scheme is something altogether different. Home ownership is by its nature a conservative investment - one buys an asset, improves the value over time by a combination of market forces and hard work and then realisees the asset at a later date. Share ownership is altogether more speculative
To Latham share ownership is "a modern expression of social justice, with its commitment to equal life chances. It gives new life and electoral appeal to the traditional values of the Labor movement: opportunity, security and responsibility. It needs to be part of our social contract with the Australian people.' The idea is nothing new, right-wing economists in the United States have long advocated for this type of idea.
To his critics, Latham is advocating state-sanctioned gambling. If it's not enough to have the working people punting on the horses and the pokies to fill the public coffers, now they want us to punt on the markets. Perhaps when things get tough they can live under their chare certificates. The big winners from the Latham plan will be the brokers - and the existing shareholders whose share values will surely increase as new speculators enter the market.
As One.Tel, Ansett, HIH and Enron have shown, there's no sure bet on the stock exchange. There is nothing in the proposal to channel funds into the blue chips either - what if the shares are bought in dot-commer? For lower income earners, who cannot afford a large share portfolio in which the risks are spread, this is particularly problematic. Converting share ownership into regular dividends may have looked easy to achieve in the 'nineties, but this is a more difficult decade, with major corporate collapses, like those of HIH and OneTel, and growing fears of a major economic recession emanating from the US economy. In the context of corporate collapses, workers and retirees stand to lose their lifetime savings. Indeed, the workers at Enron, not only lost their jobs but their life savings, rolled as they were into the Enron share price.
But my biggest problem with Latham agenda, is its underlying principle to individuate society as if we all start with nothing and exist to accumulate. Of course, until a few years ago, each citizen was born with a stake in a range of enterprises from the Commonwealth bank to Qantas to Telstra. That was before federal governments of all political colours got the privatization ball rolling and public infrastructure moved into private hands.
For those interested in increasing community equity, a far better target would be increasing government support for superannuation payments, coupled with regulations making it a little bit easier for workers to control the investment decisions of their funds. Delivering greater support for pension savings would deliver real security for workers who know they no longer have a job for life. Taking it a step further a giving individuals greater rights to determine where those savings are invested would deliver real control.
It goes back to Workers Online's original contention that Latham junked in his paper: a Labor model should not be based on greed because it will weaken Labor's long-term mission. Developing national savings strategies based on collective involvement and collective benefit is one thing. Pitching for votes by offering the punters a few gambling chips at the door, is something altogether more short-sighted.
Far from being Labor's new Light on the Hill, Latham's share ownership agenda is a dousing of the flame, a desertion of the ideas of working together as a society rather than as individual players for our mutual benefit. If we give up on this we may as well all join the Liberals. Mark could do us all a favour by leading the way
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