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It's a idea the Mad Monk has been developing ever since he took up the workplace relations portfolio - an attempt to justify the ongoing erosion of industrial rights. The underlying logic appears to be that families are unregulated and work just fine - so why can't workplaces?
Up to now the interventions have been silly rather than dangerous. Here's how the thesis has developed.
* first he stated that work was more like "a family" than an employment relationship. The line was designed to undermine the idea that you needed strong legal protections as a workers. Instead you should just negotiate the relationship on a one-on-one basis.
* when asked what happens to dysfunctional families, he assured us we could always go to the Family Court - even though he's ripped away the powers of its IR equivalent the AIRC.
* then he develop this idea, with the workplace like a family neighbourhood. When things went wrong, we didn't need an umpire, we need a policeman. This, we think was to justify his decision to rip away the arbitration of the AIRC and send all industrial disputes into the Court system where workers can be sued for taking strike action.
But Abbott's silliness turned downright offensive this week when he told a conference organised by Workforce that: "A bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband - not withstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more harm than good... He might be a bad boss but at least he's employing someone while he is in fact a boss." This was an attempt to justifying trashing unfair dismissal rights, but it succeeded in hitting a much deeper nerve.
In his bluster Abbott had displayed his insensitivity, not just to workers but to every wife or child who'd been battered, either physically or psychologically by a bad man. It sparked a flurry of angry responses from every woman's group in the land, a back-down of sorts from Abbott and a few days of bad press until that other domestic story kicked him out of the news pages.
While most would regard this as just another verbal gaff by a man whose mouth is to politics what Steve Fosset's balloon is to transportation, we see it as indicative of a deeper problem. For a Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Abbott displays a basic understand of workplace dynamics. It is not a family - it is an economic relationship. The employers has the power; the workforce can unite to bargain a fair deal or beg individually. There is no love, no blood ties to ensure people are civilised to each other - just a system of rules that Abbott is fast ripping to shreds.
Then again, perhaps his analogy is useful in showing why we need some rules. Maybe we should think of unpaid entitlements as akin to a father deferring on child support;
lapses to health and safety are like domestic violence; redundancy is a form of desertion; tax evasion an illicit affair; phoenix companies are like the second marriage - without the need for alimony; while unfair dismissals are the workplace's own divorce proceedings.
The difference, of course is while the law deals with all the above domestic situations, while Abbott is moving to rip away protections for workers in all the above instances. For a Conservative family man, the workplace he is creating looks more like a hippy commune - no rules, no responsibilities, just free love and exploitation.
John Chandler, manager of JR Rigging, says he has proof of structural flaws in the recently-completely Cairns Convention Centre that pose an ongoing risk to the public but the commission doesn�t want to know.
Chandler is one of several employers interviewed by commission investigators who have commented on its bias but he is the first to back his allegations with a statutory declaration.
He said he was interviewed by two commission investigators in December, 2001, and made a series of criminal allegations against big building companies.
These included fraud, threatening behaviour, conspiracy and collusion, in an effort to supress legitimate concerns over construction standards.
However, he said, it was only when he mentioned unions that investigators became "extraordinarily interested".
Chandler told investigators how a union organiser had reported back industry gossip that a national building company was out to destroy him, sparking them to ask of the union official: "Was he threatening you? How was it said? Was that a threat?"
"By contrast, when I mentioned the threat made to me by (Anonymous Company) they did not seem concerned. Nor were they concerned when I mentioned other threats made to me by other parties," Chandler declares.
"My overall impression was that the investigators were much more concerned with hearing anything about the union than they were with large scale fraud and cover-ups by a major construction company."
Chandler says that when he tendered documentation, including an engineer's report, the female investigator told him his story was "huge". But, when he rang the commission four months later, on March 18, he was told it had would not be investigating his allegations.
Chandler said he was "stunned" to read Commissioner Cole's May statement that nobody was coming forward to offer evidence of wrong doing in the industry.
In an echo of allegations levelled against the CFMEU in Sydney, Chandler claims the actions of a national builder cost him his business after a dozen years in which he completed rigging assignments on hospitals, schools and shopping centres throughout Queensland.
His declaration highlights concerns that the Cole Royal Commission has jettisoned its terms of reference to become a "show trial" of the CFMEU and its members.
Frustration Grows
Meanwhile, NSW state secretary Andrew Ferguson says worker frustration over five weeks of partisan proceedings in Sydney are likely to result in industrial action when it returns next month.
"The Commission has made it obvious that we can't leave our defence to lawyers and a handful of union officials. Members are in constant contact seeking an avenue for their frustrations over the bias they read about every day," Ferguson told Workers Online.
"We gave this Commission every chance. We provided boxes and boxes of documented tax rorts, workers comp rip-offs and safety abuses. To this point there is no evidence of any of it being taken into account.
"The CFMEU has participated and put the lid on calls for protest stoppages. All the evidence suggests we should reassess that position."
His frustration is understandable.
Green MLC Lee Rhiannon today called the Commission a "highly political tool of a ruthless federal government". Observers of the past five weeks would find it difficult to fault her analysis.
The Commission, staffed by 135 fulltime workers, was established by Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott to investigate "innapropriate or illegal" activity across the building and construction industry.
The role of counsel assisting has been central to the direction it has taken. These lawyers, earning $3800 a day, are supposed to present evidence to enable the commission to fulfill its terms of reference.
Instead, they have limited their contributions to allegations of trade union impropriety. Many such claims have been read onto the record without any corroboration and in spite of specific denials from other witnesses.
In preparing for the Sydney sessions, the commission took statements from over 100 NSW witnesses for the purpose of leading evidence. Not one was taken from a CFMEU member.
Safety, tax rorts, workers comp rip-offs, phoenixing and the employment of illegal immigrants have barely got an airing. This, despite a written submission from the Australian Tax Office effectively backing CFMEU claims of rampant avoidance of tax and workers comp liabilities, along with widespread phoenixing.
Some estimates put the cost of tax and workers comp avoidance to state and federal treasuries at a billion dollars annually.
Ferguson has sat in the commission and watched his organisers having their characters denigrated on the basis of nothing more than unsubstantiated letters written six and seven years ago, then picked up the newspapers, especially the Sydney Morning Herald, to see the allegations in print.
He has watched one union witness after another being badgered by counsel and curtly interrogated by the commissioner then seen employers levelling the allegations, including those who have admitted wrong-doing, getting kid-glove treatment and their misdemeanours glossed over.
"One thing it is not," he says of the commission, "is an inquiry into the building industry. It has become a prosecution of one party, a show trial.
"Tax payers are paying $60 million for this charade. They expect better and so do we."
Illegals Arrested on Building Site
Meanwhile, 15 suspected illegal immigrants working on a Waitara building site were arrested today.
The employees of gyprock company, Modern Drywall, were taken into custody after a raid by officials from the Department of Immigration.
"Still, the Cole Commission refuses to investigate the problem of illegal immigration in the construction industry," Ferguson said.
"It's a massive issue and you have to wonder how much longer the commissioner can keep his head buried in the sand."
Inspired by Workplace Relations Minister Toby Abbott's comments that a bad boss is better than no boss at all, the Council is inviting unions to put the theory to the test.
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Examples of bad bosses will be published in Workers Online over the coming months, with a short-list of worst employment practices compiled at the end of the year.
The Tony will be announced at the final Labor Council meeting of the year.
Abbott last week told the Workforce conference: "A bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband - not withstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more harm than good... He might be a bad boss but at least he's employing someone while he is in fact a boss."
Labor Council secretary John Robertson says the Minister's comments were outrageous on two counts - an offence to workers and to people who had been forced to endure domestic violence.
"While the Minister has back-peddled on his statements he is yet to apologise," Robertson says. "Indeed, he should go further and resign as he is clearly unfit to run industrial relations in this country."
Robertson says unions are confronted daily with examples of practices by bosses that should not be tolerated and the contest was an opportunity to chronicle some of the most excessive examples.
The first nominee comes from the Australian Services Union, whose members at Morrisey Malcolm Direct Marketing have endured a reign of terror by Stephen Crockford.
The call centre is set up like a classroom, with a desk out the front where supervisors monitor staff - they site on dining room chairs and use domestic telephones to carry out their work.
Shifts are routinely cancelled once staff arrive at work and police are called if staff complain. Among his other Bad Boss credentials are a flat $10 pay rate, well below the award and no sick leave, annual leave loading or long service leave.
Read a full account of Crockford's work at : http://workers.labor.net.au/143/b_tradeunion_calls.html
Click here to nominate a Bad Boss: mailto:[email protected]
Adressing the NSW Safety Summit this week, NSW Industrial Relations Minister John Della Bosca announced WorkCover would establish a unit to consider criminal prosecutions under existing criminal law.
Earlier, Labor Council secretary John Robertson had called for a specialist manslughter unit to spark the cultural change required to reduce workplace injuries.
"If we are serious about changing the culture of the workplace, we need to start using the big stick," Robertson said in his speech.
On news of the Della Bosca announcement, Robertson said it was a welcome development that would settle the issue of the need for a spearate crime of industrial manslaughter once and for all.
Broad Dialoguie on Safety
The summit - comprising union representatives, employers and OHS experts - agreed to a 40%-over-ten-years reduction target for workplace deaths.
Eleven industries were represented at the summit, breaking into working groups to discuss industry specific OHS issues, draft resolutions, recommendations and set improvement targets.
The forestry industry set a no-deaths-by-2007 target and made a preliminary resolution to establish a forest industry safety council by 1 October 2002.
That council would develop a framework for collecting workplace injury data, establish OHS performance benchmarks, and would investigate linking government investment to OHS outcomes.
Manufacturing industry proposals included a focus on supply chain issues. The workgroup proposed that the adequacy of current legislative provisions to protect outworkers and itinerant workers be reviewed. They said the review should also examine the employer's responsibility to know what work is occurring where, who is carrying it out and under what conditions.
The construction industry working group said the role and value of safety representatives, officers and committees should be reviewed and expanded to improve OHS outcomes.
They said the Victorian model should be considered in the review process. Other construction industry recommendations included the government examining whether it should include OHS requirements in the issuing of building licenses and include OHS performance as a condition of continued licence.
Many working groups also agreed on the importance of effective promotion of industry specific OHS responsibilities; rewarding good performance through reduced premiums; establishing industry tailored standards and/or guidelines for building and equipment design; and suggested using the school system to teach children from an early age how to work safely.
Della Bosca said that he and WorkCover would produce a comprehensive response within three months to the working groups' recommendations.
Electrical Trade Union delegates today voted to approve strike action, authorising the union to call stoppages in the coming week.
Industrial action would close all major building sites around the city.
The application by the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) to the Industrial Relations Commission includes removing the right to:
- claim overtime rates on Saturdays
- take accumulated sick leave or rostered days off
- use a personal mobile phone while at work
- claim for lost or stolen tools.
"This proposal is anti-worker and anti-family," ETU state secretary Bernie Riordan says.
"Forcing workers who work long hours to cash in Rostered Days Off rather than spending time with their families will undermine their quality of life.
"The ban on mobile phones is heartless. It is totally reasonable to have a means to be contacted a family member who may be sick or need some other help.
"Building industry workers see the upcoming enterprise negotiations as an opportunity to win back control over their lives; these proposals go in the opposite direction."
Meetings will be held with NECA next week, with strike action expected if these proposals are not withdrawn.
The CFMEU says building workers with young families are being forced to work longer hours because they have to make up the shortfall when their partners are out of the workforce after the birth of a child.
CFMEU organiser Duncan McLaren says this creates a double bind where fathers are forced to work overtime at the time when their families need them at home most.
"Men play a not insignificant role in the process that creates babies," McLaren says. "The time has come for blokes to take a stand for paid maternity leave.
"A new father's place is at their partner's side, not at work doing overtime."
Submissions to the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Prue Goward's issues paper 'Valuing Parenthood - Options for Paid Maternity Leave' close on July 12. To make a submission contact Alison Peters on mailto:[email protected]
News Ltd has singled out clerical workers for AWAs while continuing to negotiate collective agreements with industrially stronger elements of its workforce.
NSW unions reacted to the development by pledging cross union resistance to company attempts to isolate the predominantly female section of its workforce.
Labor Council secretary John Robertson is calling for a "united front" from News Ltd unions.
"The company is obviously seeking to exploit a group of workers it perceives as having no industrial muscle," Robertson says. "We need to get together and back these people in so News Ltd understands we will operate on the basis of 'touch one, touch all."
Michael Want, from the Australian Services Union, says the News Ltd AWAs are "clearly inferior" to award conditions, raising further questions about the role of the Government's Employment Advocate, increasingly known as the Employers' Advocate.
News wants to pay its clerical staff an all-in salary of less than $35,000, compensating for all benefits they might be entitled to "including but not limited to" overtime, shift penalties, weekend penalties, allowances, annual leave loading and public holiday benefits.
"We cannot understand how this AWA can pass the no disadvantage test," Want says. "It is, on first glance, clearly inferior to the award.
Labor Council is writing to Murdoch seeking an explanation for his attack on clerical workers and will take any response to a meeting of News Ltd unions.
The CFMEU and Labor opposition have both accused Employment Advocate Hamberger of breaching the Workplace Relations Act in his haste to rubber stamp Australian Workplace Agreements.
Hamberger has been operating a special scheme that freed him from matching selected AWAs against the no disadvantate test, in contravention of the Act's requirements.
Abbott's answer isn't to make Hamberger, repeatedly referred to in the Cole Royal Commission as the Employer's Advocate, face up to his legal responsibilities. Instead, he intends changing the law to remove the requirement that he "be sure" the test is passed.
The bill would give the Employment Advocate the green light to continue with the fast-track scheme, revealed in senate estimates, under which he accepts an assurance from the employer or a private consultant.
Already, Hamberger has passed AWAs that allow workers to be paid $10,000 a year less than those previously doing the same work.
"These laws are meant to protect the most vulnerable employees from being worse off under an AWA," Labor Workplace Relations spokesman Robert McClelland said.
"Instead of ensuring they are complied with, Abbott is watering them down. So much for the rule of law."
Fifty union activists hit the centre of Sydney's elite shopping district to picket the Gucci store in Martin Place as part of the world-wide community campaign to support workers employed by Gucci's parent company Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR).
The ACTU's Michael Crosby led the crowd in a round of chants and highlighted the need for international support for the PPR workers.
NSW Labor Council head John Robertson address the picket, highlighting that PPR's sales for 2001 were over $US 27 billion.
He told the story of a an employee of PPR in the US Northern Marina Islands who had her arm caught in a heat-sealing machine which had a faulty emergency stop button. By the time her co-workers were able to free her arm the machine had melted plastic at 350 C onto her right hand. However after the accident occurred the company didn't repair the machine nor did they stop using it.
Robertson went on to describe a pattern of denial of the rights of PPR workers globally. "This company are thugs, they refuse to accept their responsibilities to their employees and consumers of their products should be aware of these facts" Robertson said, "inside this store handbags, jewellery and clothing is sold for thousands of dollars, some items for tens of thousands of dollars yet they pay the people who produce these items as little as fifty cents a piece".
The action was part of a worldwide action against PPR over practices in India, Romania, Indonesia, Spain and the USA including low pay, poor safety, the use of child labour and preventing workers joining a union.
NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson says it's important that Australian consumers are aware of the human stories behind fashion labels.
"While unionists may not be synonymous with Gucci fashion, we are encouraging the public to think about Gucci's labour practices before making a purchase," Robertson says.
The survey, launched this week, draws on over 8000 academic and general staff in 17 universities nationally.It finds:
- Approximately 50% of Australian university staff taking part in the study is at risk of psychological illness due to stress and pressure in the workplace, compared with only 19% of the general population.
- More than 30% of academics reported working more than 55 hours a week
- A third of academics and a fifth of general staff reported dissatisfaction with their jobs.
- In all, only 19% of staff view senior university management as trustworthy. In contrast, 48% reported that senior staff was untrustworthy.
National Tertiary Education Union president Dr Carolyn Allport says the survey is graphic proof of the human cost of the funding crisis facing Australia's higher education sector.
"The health impacts of workplace stress range from sleeping disorders and headaches, to more serious problems such as hypertension and coronary heart disease," Allport says.
"Sydney is a big, expensive town and the workers employed by Tabcorp at their most profitable outlet - the Star City Casino - reckon they should be offered at least as much as what's been offered in Melbourne. If not more," Tim Ferrari, LHMU Assistant National Secretary, said.
Star City casino workers have been holding shift meetings over the last 48 hours to discuss what should happen now that talks have reached a stalemate between the LHMU Casino Union and Star City management over a new enterprise agreement.
Ferrari says that on the basis of feedback LHMU Casino Union members are likely to reject Star City's offer.
Star City Casino - with nearly 3000 workers - is now the biggest single employer in the Sydney CBD.
To accommodate all members the LHMU Casino Union has organised 20 different shift meetings throughout the day, starting at 4am and finishing just before midnight, to open the floor to members to discuss what are the best alternatives.
Union members are discussing a proposal industrial action. The last Enterprise Agreement between the LHMU Casino Union and Star City expired on June 1.
Tabcorp workers in Melbourne have received a 5% pa pay increase but its Star City staff have only been made an offer of 4.5% on June 1 and 4% on June , 2003.
Five-Star Victory in Adelaide
Meanwhile, room attendants at five star hotel, Stamford Plaza Adelaide, have taken their first ever industrial action and won.
The room attendants had the time allocated to clean guest rooms slashed from 30 minutes to 20 minutes by management at Stamford Plaza.This effectively cut their wages by 33%.
Management did this without consultagtion, as a cost cutting measure.
The room attendants were concerned that:
Workers decided to wear LHMU badges to work and fluorescent bandaids on their necks, to demonstrate their solidarity.
The following day they held a stop work meeting at the front entrance of the Stamford Plaza with flags, placards and leaflets, despite the wet and windy weather.
The workers have taken their concerns to the NSW Labor Council, which has a share in Chifley along with several industry superannuation funds.
The planners say that new management have changed their conditions of employment, with the current bonuses system reverting to a flat rate salary.
Addressing Labor Council, Chifley planner Sam Cannon said the changes would decrease his salary over the next 10 years and completely destroy his retirement hopes.
The Labor Council resolved to take the issue up with management.
The Australian Services Union members working near baggage conveyer belts had repeatedly asked Qantas management to weatherproof the areas so they would not be affected by cold winds.
The last straw came when they were told they would not be allowed to wear coats or scarves at work.
"This issue has been raised on numerous occasions by delegates and OH& S reps, unfortunately management have not felt that the staff well being is a priority," ASU spokesperson says.
"Workers have, in fact, been instructed to take off coats and jackets and endure the freezing temperatures."
The brief stop work action caused delays with domestic flights. .
The summit, to be held in September, was the result of a meeting between the two council secretaries in June and has now been endorsed by both peak councils.
A joint statement "notes with concern" spiralling regional job losses.
"We further note that there is a vital role for both the State and Federal Governments in providing the impetus and infrastructure for industry development in regional NSW. Both State and Federal Governments must provide a
long term vision, supported by a comprehensive and strategic industry policy for the manufacturing sector," the secretaries say.
While welcoming the Premier's support for investment in the Hunter region, they expressed concern at the "ad hoc nature" of State Government's industry policy. They accused state and federal governments of pushingpolicies underpinned by an uncritical commitment to free trade.
"Since the Federal Government has abandoned its responsibility, we now look to the NSW State Labor Government to provide leadership in the development of an Industry Policy through a long term vision particularly for the manufacturing sector in NSW."
The proposed jobs summitt would involve the Illawarra Regional Development Board and the Hunter Economic Corporation, along with community representatives and the respective Trades and Labour Councils.
NSW unions are moving to make New Zealanders aware that absentee voting will be easier than ever this year in a response to overtures from Richard Prebble who predicts his right wing Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) will clean-up the substantial overseas vote.
Under New Zealand's system of proportional representation a party vote, as opposed to an electorate vote for an individual candidate, is central to deciding the shape of the next Government.
Eligible Kiwis can enrol via the internet up to the day before polling and even those on the dormant roll have been informed that their party votes will probably count.
Labor Council is asking affiliates to make sure Kiwi members know their rights and exercise their ballots.
New Zealand Council of Trade Unions president Ross Wilson told Labor Council the current Labour-led administration, headed by Helen Clarke, had made an excellent start to rolling back years of right-wing legislation.
He highlighted improvements to the minimum wage, paid parental leave, a new Employment Relations Act, renationalisation of accident compensation, increased investment in industry training and a comprehensive economic development program, and said new health and safety, and holiday laws were on the drawing board.
The ILO has called on the Indonesian Government "to take the necessary steps to ensure that the allegations of union-busting tactics on the part of the employer, particularly as concerns the condition of re-employment upon resignation from the union, are thoroughly investigated and if they prove to be true, to take the appropriate measures to remedy an effects of the anti-union discrimination for the workers and the union concerned."
Unions here in Australia have given active support to the hotel workers in Jakarta during this long campaign.
Unions have hosted delegations of workers from the Jakarta Shangri-la hotel visiting union members in Melbourne and Sydney; the ACTU leadership have sent strongly worded protest notes to the Indonesian government and to the hotel owners; protest rallies have been organised outside the Indonesian embassy and consulates; an LHMU Hotel Union organiser has visited the strikers in Jakarta to show support and we have provided financial support for the workers involved in this long dispute.
The Shangri-La Jakarta Hotel is part of an Asia-Pacific hotel chain owned by one of the richest men in Asia, Mr Robert Kuok, who is regularly listed in the business magazine Forbes as one of the world's top 100 billionaires.
The fundamental issue at the heart of the conflict is clear: Indonesia's sham industrial relations tribunal authorized the firing of 600 union members in May 2001 following the closure of the hotel and the lockout of the entire unionised workforce.
On March 26 this year the State Administrative High Court in Jakarta ruled, in an appeal case brought by the hotel workers' union that the mass sackings were illegal, thereby overturning the industrial tribunal decision authorizing the hotel to fire union members.
But in June 2002 this court decision has still not been acted upon - as the employer twists and turns with excuses about why they will not act.
The Indonesian hotel workers continue to hold regular rallies and demonstrations at the hotel and other venues.
They are determined to fight for their rights, for the reinstatement of the dismissed workers, and for recognition of their union. They continue to be attacked by scurrilous, at times violent methods.
As the ILO was meeting in Geneva, union members received anonymous letters implying that the union was seeking to destroy Indonesia's economy and sabotage the tourism sector.
The union immediately called a press conference to deny the coordinated smear campaign, emphasizing the peaceful and democratic nature of their principled struggle for democratic rights.
The tenacious fight for union rights at the Jakarta Shangri-La has won widespread international respect and admiration for the workers, who continue to fight against powerful opponents.
The conflict has become the most visible and best-publicized industrial dispute in Indonesia, with important implications for the country and the region.
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Australian union activists can act now, and again show their support of the Shangri-La hotel workers.
Demand the re-instatement of these workers by clicking here. and filling out this protest form to Mr Robert Kuok, the owner of the Shangri-La hotel chain.
Read more about the Shangri-La hotel dispute
You can read more articles about this dispute and get a sense of the history of this dispute by clicking here.
Il-seup Kim, President of the Daewoo autoworkers union and his vice president, Sunggap Kim, were freed having served only six months of five year prison terms.
The news came only days after a Global Unions-backed action day took place on June 27, picketing Korean embassies worldwide to demand the release of the numerous trade unionists currently languishing behind bars.
"Two free, only forty-nine to go," said ICFTU Trade Union Rights representative Janek Kuczkiewicz, who led the 27 June trade union delegation to meet Hong Suk In, First Secretary of the Korean Embassy in Brussels.
"This is an important step, but the fact that 75 trade unionists are still wanted by the Korean authorities starkly illustrates the need for us to keep up the pressure," he added.
Wednesday Politics at Berkelouw
Organised by the Pluto Institute and the NSW Fabian Society.
Berkelouw Bookshop
70 Norton Street, Leichhardt
Wednesday, 17 July 2002
6.30 - 8.00 pm
Beyond Corporate Globalism: Is Another World Possible?
Launch of the new book from Pluto Press, Protest and Globalisation: Prospects for Transnational Solidarity
Patricia Ranald
Public Interest Advocacy Centre and Australian Fair Trade & Investment Network.
Ruth Phillips
Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Sydney
Marc Williams
Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of NSW
James Goodwin (Chair)
Lecturer in Social Inquiry, University of Technology Sydney.
Wednesday, 7 August 2002
6.30 - 8.00 pm
Local Heroes: Australian Crusades from the Environmental Frontline
Seminar to launch the book that tells the story of ordinary people who become environmental heroes in taking on large corporations and governments to make their communities safer.
In the process of seeking justice, these citizens learned how to become passionate activists for disenfranchised communities and to articulate a vision for a cleaner planet.
The Ecopella Choir conducted by Miguel Heatwole will give a specail performance at the opening.
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NSW Teachers Federation Rally to Save Public Schools
Monday 8 July 2002, 1.00 pm
Department of Education Building, Farrer Place, Sydney
Hunters Hill High School, Erskineville Public School, Redfern Public School fight on!
Prevent the closures and protest the sale of Maroubra High School to a private school.
For more information contact the NSW Teachers Federation on 02 9217 2100 or visit http://www.nswtf.org.au
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Free Burma Fundraiser
Saturday, July 6 2002
CFMEU, 12 Railway Street, Lidcombe
Live Burmese Music and DJs from Macquarie University. BBQ and dancing late into the night. All proceeds from the night go to Burmese Refugee Children. Cost $5.00.
For more information contact Phil Davey on 0414 867 188 or Maung Maung Than on 0411 337 816.
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Crisis in Corporate Governance - Ansett, HIH, One.Tel
Sydney Politics in the Pub
26 July 2002, 6.00 pm
Gaelic Club, 64 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills
Hear Stephen Mayne, Publisher of www.crikey.com.au, discuss the crisis in Corporate Governance.
See http://www.politicsinthepub.org for more details.
The midair collision over Europe this week will have a range of contributing factors.
However, privatisation of airline industry infrastructure must be a major environmental factor. It appears, on the face of it, that understaffing of air traffic control might be a primary cause of the midair collision over Europe this week.
In any case, why were only two air traffic controllers on duty monitoring two screens at the time? Would this have occurred in a system where the first priority is operational support without the strategic distractions of the profit imperatives of a private company? The company should have to explain to European authorities why there were only two controllers on duty.
And what are the lessons for the privatisation of airline and other infrastructure in this country - infrastructure built up with taxpayer funds and then flogged off to industry insiders or foreign interests?
Jim McDonald
Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations
University of Southern Queensland
You don't have to be a radical environmentalist to be concerned over the damage being caused to some forests and rivers in Australia. In Echuca-Moama, the government is planning to build a second bridge over the Murray - VICROADS and the NSW RTA have both opted for the crossing to be in town - to minimise environmental damage.
The NSW Roads Minister Carl Scully ([email protected] ) has come out in favour of a western bypass that will cut through the Wharparilla Flora Reserve on the Murray River with a 50 metre wide clearing of redgum and native grass. It will also potentially impact on Koori sacred sites.
Scully's decision is political - Peter Black the local Member is holding a slim margin and about 100 locals have hijacked the decision. It's a long way from Sydney, so Scully doesn't appear to care about the woeful environmental decision he is supporting.
Those who want to stop them "buggering the bush" - which can only lead to more salination in the Murray and kill lots of animals - will understand that we need everyone possible to fax (02 9228 4633) or email ([email protected]) him a note saying "don't bugger the bush - don't support a western option for the Echuca Moama Murray River crossing that goes through Wharparilla Flora Reserve".
To be effective you must put your name and address on the email or fax so that he can reply to you. You could also copy Bob Carr ([email protected] ).
People power is the only way we can stop them and if you want to help please pass this message on to others
Thanks
Allen Perry, Co-ordinator, Friends Of Wharparilla Flora Reserve, 03 5482 2128
Dear Sir
Who in their right mind would give away 3,000 islands? The answer to that is simple: no-one.
But the Prime Minister of Australia, who is showing increased signs of having passed his "Use By" date (well and truly before his 64th birthday), has proposed doing just that in his now obsessional determination to justify his deceitful re-election tactics last year.
Geography not being one of my stronger points, I am in fact astonished to learn that these islands are a part of Australia. But to excise them in his continuing desperate bid to discourage illegal immigrants would surely be the act of a madman.
The first thought that came to mind was that islands ... any islands ... are potential tourist resorts. And it would obviously cost the tourist from overseas less to offload at Darwin and be ferried to whichever of these islands some entrepreneur has chosen to develop, than to visit the Great Barrier Reef and other resorts via Brisbane.
But my second thought was quite awesome. As the world's population continues to rise, the grossly under populated Lucky Country must appear an increasingly tempting target for serious invasion. And how convenient it would be for the invading country to use these islands as stepping stones to enter Australia via its least defendable coastline.
Additionally I don't believe that selling off all our major airports to private ownership would actually prove a wise strategic move in the event of some future invasion.
Mr Howard: will you please give your obsession a rest and come up with some legislation that has more than a snowflake's chance in hell of getting through the Senate?
Julian Hancock
Dear Sir or Madam,
Many workers who tied their interests to corporate America lost their money and their jobs. Tony Abott, Mark Latham please take note, facts speak louder than words.
Workers Online Issue 124 / 15 feb. 2002 " Both Employment Minister, Tony Abbott, and Labor Party front bencher, Mark Latham, are outspoken advocates of tying workers interests to those of their employers through stock holdings."
Below are some very relevant items from Sundays UK press, 30 June 2002.
Yours sincerely,
Mr I G Ferguson
Down and out
Enron: 99.9% share price fall (Jan 2001-Jun 2002)
Filed for bankruptcy after 'adjusting' accounts
Adelphia Communications: 99.1% share price fall (Jan 2001-Jun2002)
Filing for bankruptcy after off-balance-sheet loans to directors
Peregrine Systems: 95.8% share price fall (Jan 2001-Jun 2002)
SEC investigating accounting practices
Qwest Communications: 95.6% share price fall (Jan 2001-Jun 2002)
Chief executive officer resigned
WorldCom: 93.8% share price fall (Jan 2001-Jun 2002)
Chief financial officer fired after $3.8bn fraud
'Corporate America has been lying for years'
The victims: Disillusioned small investors are giving up onequities and turning to cash. (30 June 2002)
If I was to sign up with Pig Bond - Telstra's most luxurious plan, I'd be up for about $35 per month with a 450 Meg D/L Limit and 20c per meg after that - just for starters.
Now if I was to sign up with useOz.com (which I have), on their 12 months for $199 with 6 months extra for free, and I was to say D/L on a good day, 80 Meg, per day every day for an entire month, it would have cost me about $8 per month ISP charges, and $6 in local calls for 2400 meg of down load.
However if I had of been with Telstra and it's skumbag rip off rates, I would have paid $35 for ISP charges, $6 in local calls, and after burning up Telstras pathetic measly money grabbing 450 Meg D/L limit, it would cost me an additional $390 for the remaining 1950 Megs.
I am not being getting paid to plug useOz.com, but comparing an 80 meg down load per session, 4 hours per day for 30 days with useOz.com coming to about $14, compared to Telstras skumbag bare faced rip off coming to about $431...
If this is one of the ways I can big time publically spit in Telstras face, then I will do it.
Not only has Telstra permanently lost all customer loyalty here (a long long time ago actually), they have also made a total and unreserved enemy for life in me. And while I am on this tack, for the Telstra haters, go check out TelstraExposed.com. At the very least you will find out you are not the only one and you will find out why.
Shane Hanson
by Peter Lewis
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The future of Telstra is one of the real stand differences between the ALP and the Liberal, what Labor values have you applied in developing your plan?
The primary Labor values that are appropriate here are that telecommunications are essential services. In order for people to be able to participate fully in our society they've got to access to some reasonable telecommunication services. That requires a major role for government and in this case public ownership. So the core Labor value that's appropriate here is the role of government to ensure that all Australians have got access to decent telecommunications services.
What's the rational behind the solution you've come up with?
Well, I've actually floated a variety of possible options, one of which has got quite a lot of media attention, most of the others have been ignored, as is usually the case with the Australian media. I have not expressed any particular preference for any of those options.
They essentially cover two fields, one is the separation of Telstra's wholesale or network activities from it's retail activities, which could be simply by separating Telstra internally so that you've got two separate divisions that have to deal with each other at arms length. This is how British Telecom runs and it's how Telia in Sweden runs. You could take it a further step and actually separate Telstra into two companies. One that runs the network a bit like the roads system, and the other that delivers the service in competition with Optus, AAPT and everbody else, a bit like Road Transport companies using the government roads system. That's one set of options.
The second set of options looks at Telstra's gradual expansion into non-telephony areas like the media and entertainment, and proposes that that needs to be restrained for competition reasons. This would ensure that we don't have a single company, which the government wants to be a private company, totally dominating not only telecommunications, but also the media and information economy. Telstra already is the dominant player in Foxtel, it tried to buy the Nine Network a couple of years ago, it still has that ambition lurking on the back shelf, and it could go out and buy virtually all the Australian media and barely notice the difference because it's so big and it's so lightly geared.
I believe that would a disaster for the Australian media and for competition in a critical sector of the Australian economy to have a single company completely dominate everything, and to have the monopoly in telecommunications gradually move over into the media, and I think it needs to be resisted very strongly. Therefore, one of the other possibilities in this debate is to get Telstra to withdraw from Foxtel, or sell out of it's internet activities and use the proceeds to buy back some it's involvement in the network or it's other core activities.
The most extreme option of this kind has been floated by Professor John Quiggin, who suggests that Telstra should sell it's mobile business, it's Pay TV business, it's internet business and the proceeds that will accrue to the government from that could be used to buy back the private shares in Telstra, so you would end up with a 100% government owned Telstra, that would pretty much restrict it to it's traditional network and telephony business. So in other words, it would look like Telecom 20 odd years ago.
There are also other possible scenarios like splitting Telstra into regional telecommunication companies, somewhat similar to what the United States and Canada operate, or facilitating competition from other networks, building, rolling out new networks. There's a range of possibilities, and I have very deliberately avoided expressing a preference for any of them, because what I've tried to do is provoke serious broad public debate about the future, built on the premise that we have serious problems, and built on the premise that privatising Telstra will simply make those problems worse, not better.
One of the key stakeholders, given that it is partly privatised, are the shareholders. How much influence does the share price over the entity that currently is Telstra inevitably have on any policy that you come up with?
Well, one of the critical issues that we have to address is ensuring that the interests of the shareholders are protected. They have legal protection under the constitution and also the corporations law, and obviously that requirement has to be honoured. But more broadly, for a whole range of reasons, both of principle and political practicality, it is critical that any major reform strategy that Labor seeks to adopt does not significantly disadvantage the Telstra shareholders. So that's one of the very important issues that are in the mix, but there are a whole lot of other issues. What we have got to do is to try and build a reform strategy that takes into account all of these factors.
Your paper has sparked concern within the Telstra unions, particularly the idea that the infrastructure is the least profitable part of Telstra and to separate this from more lucrative sections would affect job security.
Well, the fixed line network, which is the core of Telstra's business, and is the core of our telecommunications system in this country, is essentially as profitable as it's allowed to be. Currently it's a monopoly. The government claims that if you separated Telstra and you had the government owning the fixed line infrastructure, the network, that this would leave taxpayers with a dud asset. This is simply untrue, there is no basis for making those claims. It is reasonable to anticipate that the network is going to be at the core of Australia's telecommunications systems for some time to come.
It's also ironic that the government is trying to claim that this particular strategy would both be a disaster for Telstra's minority shareholders and a disaster for the taxpayer who ended up owning the network. Now, they can't have it both ways, if they're saying that separating Telstra and having the government own the network would take out all the good bits and give them to the private shareholders and leave the government with the less profitable bit, then they can hardly claim that that's a disaster for private shareholders.
In partly privatising Telstra, the Howard government has created one of Australia's largest companies, how is it performing as a corporate citizen?
I can't really comment about Telstra's performance on things like donations to charity and those matters. Talking to the unions I think it's industrial relations performance is pretty ordinary, it certainly plays a very aggressive role in it's industrial relations, and has been an aggressive promoter of AWAs and has actively discriminated in favour of people agreeing to take AWAs and against people choosing to remain under collective agreements. The person who is responsible for that is now an Industrial Relations Commissioner. So, certainly from industrial relations point of view, if you talk to people in the union, it's difficult to describe Telstra as a good corporate citizen.
In terms of it's dealings with both consumers and with other competitors who are getting access to it's network, I think Telstra plays the game very hard and I think it relentlessly pursues it's interests and it uses its size and muscle to basically prevail wherever it can. Now, I'm not unduly critical of Telstra for doing that, in the sense that if we the legislators of the nation set a set of rules, and there is a major player who plays by those rules and they play the game hard, and play it to their own advantage, well it's our job to, if we think it's necessary, to change the rules.
Given the current share price in Telstra, as well as I guess, comments from your colleague Mark Latham, what are your views on the broader idea of employee share ownership?
The employee share ownership schemes we've had in the past have been basically tax avoidance schemes reflecting an economy and a society that is gradually disappearing. They reflected the world where people stayed within the one large employer for many years and made some sense in that sort of world, but most people now do not live in that kind of world, do not inhabit that kind of employment relationship. I believe that employee share ownership schemes were almost invariably driven by tax avoidance desires on the part of employers, and were not necessary in order to give employees a share of company profits. So there is no reason why companies can't provide bonus schemes based on the company's performance for they're employees, and some companies do.
Mark has floated some new possible ways of approaching these proposals, and I'm looking forward to engaging in the debate: I have an open mind on such proposals, but as I've indicated, I start from a fairly sceptical position.
The ACCC is currently grappling with the future of pay TV in Australia, just going back to your broader ideas on Telstra, is there a similar paradigm that could be acquired here?
There are certainly some cross over issues, and of course Telstra is directly involved in both, and there is a clear linkage. The ACCC's activities do actually deal with competition issues in both media and telecommunications. So one of the big concerns about the Optus/Foxtel deal is that it may present Telstra with an unfair competitive advantage against it's competitors in telecommunications by providing it with a situation where it can bundle it's product in a way that it's competitors can't. In other words they could include the Pay TV as part of a bundle and people pay a single bill, and get cross subsidies within the products and discounts and so forth. So there clearly is a linkage between the two sectors and I have a concern about Telstra's ambitions in media, it is so big and so powerful that it has the capacity to establish a monopoly position in the media.
One possible scenario, if you put together the government's stated policy with the stated ambitions of the players, is that we could end up in this country where there are basically two totally dominant commercial media players. In one corner, Telstra and all of the PBL Nine Network interests including the interests in Foxtel, and maybe John Fairfax thrown in for good measure, and maybe a number of radio stations they can pick up for petty cash. In the other, News Limited with maybe Channel 7 and however many radio stations. All you'd be left with in the commercial media sector, of any size and magnitude, would be Channel 10 out on its own as a pretty tiny competitor relative to those two giants.
If the government privatises Telstra and gets it's cross media ownership laws through, then that scenario is possible and we could end up in a situation in this country, where we've literally only got two media organisations dominating over 90% of our commercial media. That would be a disaster for free speech, for public debate and for the health of our democracy, and that's why the question of Telstra's privatisation is a much bigger question than just about services in regional Australia. Services in regional Australia are a fundamental issue, there's no question they would go backward if Telstra is sold, just as the banks have deserted regional Australia, but that's not the only issue. The prospect of creating a giant private monopoly that totally dominates the information economy is a real one and that's where government policy is heading.
In framing communications policy, how influential are those media interests like the Packers and the Murdochs? Does their media influence play on your mind when you are planning policy?
Well, certainly it doesn't, from my point of view, but I can't really comment about others and history suggests that those players have been quite influential. We can only speculate about what the basis of that influence may have been, but there's no question that they are formidable players in the public debate on these issues. They put their position strongly and effectively and I always take the approach of judging issues by their merit. We need to keep in mind that often there are conflicting positions across the media landscape here, so what may suit one major player will not necessarily suit another. So it's not quite as simple as the sometimes imagined conspiracy with Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch lining up against everybody else. The situation is usually a good deal more complex than that. I do everything I can to judge these issues on their merits. I'm not frightened of taking on the big players, I've been relentlessly critical of Telstra on a number of fronts, I've just been highly critical of Channel 9's sports coverage, and I've got quite a lot of media coverage about that. I think there are things that need to be criticised and there are people in the community who are unhappy, and there are issues that need to be pursued. So I'm certainly not going to back away from dealing with issues on their merits and representing consumers, just because there's somebody in the road who happens to be pretty powerful.
On the broader issue of party reform, can you understand the reactions from within the union movement, to the move to reduce union influence within the ALP?
I can understand the reactions, I think the issue has been inflated beyond it's importance. I think there's been some unfortunate comments from some people after the election, which seemed to imply that somehow the trade union movement was to blame for Labor losing the election, which I think is completely absurd. I think the fundamental issue here is not 60/40 or 50/50, the fundamental issue here is, what is the Labor Party going to do to attract and retain more genuine members? To give it's members a serious say in it's internal processes including the right to vote directly in elections for the key party positions and the right to participate much more fully in party life and activity and ensure that things like branch stacking are relegated to the history books.
Those are the key issues. I'm relaxed about 50/50, I frankly think that the issue from 60/40 to 50/50 will make not much difference, there are some branches that have 50/50 already so I do not see it as a fundamental change, but I see it as a reasonable change, if it is done in the context of major reform on other areas like the party membership. So I don't particularly reject it, but what I do reject is the suggestion that in some way this is a reaction to perceived failings on the part of the trade union movement. The union movement is of fundamental importance to the Labor Party. It is the Labor party's backbone and without it we would be completely adrift and substantially politically worse off. There will always be disagreements, and differences of view and tensions between the unions and the ALP, because ultimately we're answering to slightly different constituencies, and that problem has increased because of the decline in overall union membership. But these things can be managed, can be dealt with and any major political party that seeks to govern, that seeks to win a majority of the vote is always going to have those kinds of tensions and difficulties within it's own backyard, because it's covering a very large and diverse range of people.
Given that there will be some push to reduce union influence on the party floor, what trade off do you see the party being able to offer the union movement? Is it just a case of taking away something, or are there things that the ALP can offer the unions in recompense?
Well, I really wouldn't be approaching the issue of party reform from that angle, from the angle of trade off and quid pro quos, I think that that sort of approach is the kind of thing that has tended to get us into difficulty in the past, has tended to create inefficient party structures. For example, back in the eighties we made some changes to the national executive which ended up creating a national executive of about 30 people, but involved all sorts of little deals and quid pro quos, and it was totally unrepresentative, the structure was cumbersome and thankfully about six or so years later, we realised that that was crook and introduced the new streamlined system of 20 people on the national executive all elected directly by proportional representation by the national conference.
I wouldn't approach theses issues from that sort of perspective. I'd look at the total package' and I'd ask: what should a modern, progressive, effective, inclusive Labor Party look like? What are the key ingredients that should make up a party organisation that is effective, inclusive and has substantial numbers of members and genuine trade union affiliation and operates in a politically worthwhile way? That would be my starting point, not the notion of trading between different rules.
Finally, on the reporting of politics, how do you rate that performance of the Canberra gallery in recent times?
I think that the Australian media in general, but the press gallery in particular, have a lot to answer for. There is an ever increasing dynamic in Australian politics that reporting is governed by entertainment and titillation, not by information. Now that element is always going to be there, but it's just getting worse and worse, so that we now have a situation where it's harder and harder to get public debate about genuine issues or to get serious coverage about genuine issues that do matter to people. It's very easy to get on the front page if you abuse somebody, or if you somehow have some sort of sexual innuendo hanging over your head.
I think the Australian media, in it's reporting of national issues, is deteriorating badly, and that we have now got a reporting process, particularly by the gallery, that treats Australian politics as if it were world championship wrestling, and its simply is looking for the theatrics. I think a lot of our contemporary journalists are nothing more than theatre critics, who are really just interested in reporting the 'oohs' and the 'aahs' and the name calling and all those kinds of things, and by doing so, they encourage that kind of activity, they pump it up.
The more and more that people are rewarded with front page coverage and saturation media for misbehaving or for saying outrageous things, the more and more they'll do it. The end result is you get a degradation of Australian public life and you get a degradation of political debate, and the notion that ordinary people want that is completely fallacious. When people ring up talkback radio, by and large they're ringing up about issues, they're ringing up to complain about crime, they're ringing up to complain about the state of their local school, they're ringing about having to wait six hours to be seen in casualty at their local hospital. It's completely out of control, where even the so called serious newspapers are devoting huge amount of resources and coverage to ultimately peripheral things, that are portrayed purely as entertainment and titillation and are completely irrelevant to governing the country and to making people's lives better.
by Jim Marr
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Stephen Crockford rules his non-descript, suburban office, next to the Parramatta Railway Station, with an iron fist, but not for much longer if ASU Services Union members have their way.
Crockford is the main man at Morrisey Malcolm Direct Marketing. He's the boss, the manager, or as some insist, the Ayatollah, of this small slice of Call Centre land.
Crockford first came to ASU notice more than two years ago when a single mother complained that he would call workers in during their four-hour shifts, tell them their efforts weren't up to scratch, and send them packing without pay.
Buoyed by advice that he had to pay for the contracted shift, on May 10, 2000, this woman stood up for herself, demanding payment for her shift. Without hesitation, Crockford laid his anti-worker credentials on the line, ringing the coppers and having her removed from the property.
There was some toing and froing with the ASU over that debacle before Crockford munched a dose of humble pie and coughed up thousands of dollars to ease the disgruntled worker's route back to the job market.
Suddenly, he's back on the ASU radar, bolder than ever, and backed to the hilt, this time, by the charming people from Employers First.
About half his 30-strong workforce have joined the union but they are having a devil of a job getting progress on wages, security of employment and a myriad of other issues. They have, however, drawn first blood on the issue of health and safety.
Employers First brushed demands for ergonomic seating, headsets and safety equipment at the centre which solicits funds for Wheelchair Sports Australia, by promising, on June 5, to have an "independent" health and safety audit done within a week.
When there had been no movement after three weeks, the ASU called in Workcover which gave Morrissey Malcolm a month to fix these issues or face fines.
Wages, entitlements and job security, however, remain in dispute.
Most workers do four shifts a week but neither the company, nor Employers First, are prepared to concede permanent status. Nor will they move on all-in payments of $10 an hour.
At Argyle St domain, Crockford sits out front, watching and occassionally barking at workers lined up at rows of old-fashioned school desks. Past complaints have resulted in a written request that he "immediately cease inimidating, yelling (at) and threatening your employees".
His efforts at Morrissey Malcolm have seen Crockford nominated for the inaugural Tony Award, named in memory of Tony Abbott's immortal claim that a bad boss was better than no boss at all.
Sources within the ASU say they expect strong competition from employers of CFMEU members, especially those who have been judged responsible for some of the industry's workplace deaths.
But the ASU is confident its candidate can match most competition. They point to the letter Rockford has Morrissey Malcolm employees sign before they start hauling in their $10 an hour.
"As a casual employee, I hereby acknowledge," it reads, "that the $10 an hour paid to me is a payment in lieu of any entitlement to sick leave, annual leave loading, payment for public holidays and long service leave"
Even the bonus scheme he operates, reinforces perceptions that Rockford might not be overly-generous in the remuneration department. Employees who exceed quota, stand to rake in $2 bonuses which, at Parramatta prices, would just about cover a takeaway coffee. After all, we're not talking $2 an hour, here.
Imagine it, an unknown from the burbs, carrying off the inaugural Tony. We could be treated to a classic acceptance speech ... I could never have done this by myself. I would like to thank Tony Abbott for his support, encouragement and recognition, Employers First who always believed in my methods and, of course, the WA-based directors of Morrissey Malcolm who couldn't be here tonight ...
Jeez, you know what? This bloke just might be in with a shout.
by Mark McGrath
The new NZCTU site |
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Last week ACTU coming onboard. Now LaborNET goes international with the launch of a new site for the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU).
Like the ACTU, this site employs best practice design and content publishing, with all the latest news and events of the NZCTU being automatically highlighted to a content-rich home page that's easy to navigate.
This site was developed by Social Change Online; the same organisation that developed the ACTU and all the other 25 sites on LaborNET.
The key feature of all these sites is dynamic content that keeps their audience informed and up to date. Every communication action that a LaborNET based organsiation makes can be published to their website in minutes, because all of these sites are using Social Change Online's content managment system (AIMS), which allows easy web management with no technical skill required. This breaks the web publishing bottleneck that many unions tend to be bedevilled by.
Providng an easy publishing pathway between printed documentation and a website enables LaborNET based organisations to effectively conduct much of their communication online in paralllel with their existing methods. This gives them greater organsising and campaign capacity.
But it isn't just about pumping out information from the top down; the NZCTU site has a set of online applications that enable users to:
The Find Your Union worker-union matchmaking facility deserves special mention. This appears to be the first online directory of unions in this part of the world that intelligently matches up workers with their appropriate union based on their occupation and the industry they work in (no mean feat!). A very nice and very powerful recruiting tool.
So for the NZCTU site, this means that it will now be able to conduct its role as New Zealand's peak union body with much greater effectiveness by opening up online communication pathways between themselves, their affiliates and the public.
Probably the most important aspect of all regarding this site is it's potential to build an online community for the union movement in New Zealand. The NZCTU, in collaboration with Social Change Online intend to develop the NZCTU site into a portal site for the union movement in New Zealand. Much like what LaborNET is for the union movement in Australia.
The backbone of this online community building will be the provision of news aggregation and syndication. Each affiliated union will soon be able to publish their own news direct to the NNZCTU site, and as each affiliated union comes online, they will be able to "pull" this aggregated news content down to their own site in the form of latest headlines from a NZCTU newsfeed.
The experience of LaborNET in Australia indicates that the strategy of aggregating and syndicating out news content will give the union movement in New Zealand a larger audience and stronger penetration in the media, which can only be good for the movement.
NZCTU Communications Director Lyndy McIntyre says around a year ago the NZCTU realized that its web site wasn't working and started looking round for a solution.
"The NZCTU website was a campaign magazine, focused on union members and getting active in joint-union campaigns," McIntyre says.
"We wanted to retain the campaigning focus, but we also wanted to be the voice of the trade union movement for Aotearoa/New Zealand. We wanted and needed to be much bigger.
"We wanted to provide a site where New Zealand workers could log on and get a sense of what the trade union movement is about. We wanted that site to provide a way for workers to find their union and take the first steps to joining up online.
"We also wanted to satisfy the increasing demand for a library of union news, submissions, media releases and regular publications and direct access to our 33 affiliated unions.
"We wanted a site similar to LaborNet which had the ingredients we wanted. We wanted to be different from individual unions in New Zealand, providing a wider view and reflecting the diversity of union members and their issues.
"LaborNet brought us together with Social Change Online and that has really worked, because we wanted a lot on our site, but we needed it to be easy to manage the content.
"The AIMS content management system Social Change Online provided has achieved that for us. Now we've gone live with www.union.org.nz we're looking to the next step of providing our affiliated unions with access to Aotearoa/New Zealand Workers Online."
John Monks |
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The latest development is that Deputy PM, John Prescott, has been thrown out of a union he has belonged to for 47 years.
This week's New Statesman has run an article warning that the flying insults between Labour and unions are getting dangerously close to creating the final break in the historic ties.
The Blair Government's Europe Minister, Peter Hain, penned the New Statesman article and called on both sides to draw back and stop trading insults.
However Hain doesn't hold back from attacking what he calls a minority of far left union leaders, such as Bob Crow of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, trying to sabotage the relationship.
It was the RMT who triggered off the latest fighting by withdrawing funding from 13 Labour MPs - who were members of the RMT - because they were not prepared to commit to a new union loyalty oath.
Some union activists have floated the idea of some type of loyalty oath in Australian circles.
They are angry that our own Labor MPs seem to too quickly lose their union loyalties when they get themselves elected into parliament - and want a new method to tie individual Labor MPs firmly to their roots..
However, almost since the re-election of the Blair Government the Labour Party has been in a fight with its union base - especially over public sector funding - with a little respite from this battle, in recent months.
New test of union credentials of Blair Government
A real test of the Labour Government's relationship with the trade union movement will come in the wake of a European Court of Human Rights decision handed down this week ruling that UK laws violate trade unionists' right to freedom of assembly.
The Government is under pressure to act quickly to show its bona fides.
In a case first brought before the Strasbourg tribunal ten years ago the court ruled the civil rights of a former Daily Mail journalist and 10 Southampton dockers were violated when they were denied pay rises for refusing to sign individual contracts giving up collective bargaining.
The seven judges found the government had permitted the discrimination in breach of article 11 of the European convention on human rights, guaranteeing the right to join a union.
John Monks, TUC general secretary, criticised Labour for failing to act until now: "It is outrageous that UK law continues to allow workers to be penalised for trying to make use of their union membership through representation.
"We now call on the government to change the law so that workers are able to have their voice heard through their union without suffering worse working conditions."
Cap on trade union donations to political parties
Meanwhile the Labour Party is seen to be trying to pick another fight with unions by floating the idea of state funding of political parties - and a cap on donations by trade unions..
The UK electoral commission has just started an inquiry into state funding with the chairman of the commission, Sam Younger, floating the idea that donations, including those from unions, should be capped at about $25,000.
The Labour Party's biggest union affiliate - Amicus - bluntly warned against going down this path.
The union's general secretary, Ken Jackson, normally seen as being close to the Blair Government, said that any move to cap union funding would disenfranchise union members and reduce the number of people involved in party politics.
Loyalist unions such as Amicus fear their remaining influence with Labour policy makers would be obliterated if parties come to depend on state funds.
Not all Left unions support the RMT stance.
The general secretary of the Communications Workers Union , Billy Hayes, recently described people who advocate breaking the link between the trade unions and the Labour Party as suffering from "historical amnesia."
Billy Hayes was speaking at a Left-organised meeting on the Future of the Labour Movement where most speakers seemed to advocate staying within the Labour tent - despite misgivings.
" Breaking the link between the Labour Party and trade union movement will break the Labour movement, we'd be doing the Tories jobs for them. There is more going for us by staying in the Labour Party," Mick Rix the general secretary of the engine-drivers union, ASLEF, said at the meeting.
And those on the Left worried about state-funding of political parties such as Jeannie Drake from the telecoms union warning that " breaking the link with the Labour Party plays into the hands of those who want state funding of parties."
The RMT's loyalty oath
The RMT wants their MPs to agree to a loyalty oath that could commit them to campaign on four key issues if they want to continue receiving funding for their local constituency parties.
The four key issues are:
� full rail renationalisation
� opposition to the part privatisation of the London Underground,
� a campaign for seafarers' jobs, and
� a quest for strengthened employment rights
John Prescott - who joined the Seaman's' Union at age 17, a precursor to the RMt - stepped down from the union accusing Bob Crow of attempting to subvert democracy and dictate to MPs.
" As a long-standing MP and trade unionist it is unacceptable that my trade union, the RMT, should dictate how a member of parliament should vote," Prescott told The Guardian newspaper.
He said the requirement of the new RMT leadership for a loyalty test was designed to do just that.
" I am convinced that this kind of policy will undermine the historic and important relationship between the trade unions and the Labour Party and will be detrimental to trade union members.
" I am a trade union man, I will always be that way. Whether I have a membership card or not I'll still be doing what I think is right, what brought me into politics, to work on behalf of working people."
Robin Cook - the House of Commons Labour leader - and also a member of the RMT, told Parliament he too has refused any money from his union on the basis of this oath of loyalty.
While thirteen Labour MPs will now have funding withdrawn a new group of about 14 Labour MPs are to receive constituency support from the RMT after they agreed to campaign for the union's four key issues.
Bob Crow denied that the RMT was trying to buy votes through union funding.
"All we're saying is we want MPs to campaign in general on those issues. When it comes to a vote that's up to the MP how he or she votes."
by Neale Towart
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Versions of these views keep being put forward, and clearly there is truth in them. Francois Fortier tries a political economic approach to the issues in Virtuality Check.
As someone with an undistinguished background in political economy it's good to see someone grappling with the concepts and issues from this perspective. As Fortier puts it, "floating somewhere between this virtual heaven and hell, the truth about the infosphere remains hard to pin down...Technologies are neither the na�ve product of disinterested science nor the deterministic bearers of social processes. They are shaped by social relations, while in turn they open up opportunities for social change."
The NSW ALP, not a body noted for its openness in decision making, but certainly a body noted for its drive to win "whatever it takes" has implicitly endorsed this view with its adoption of a motion on open standards software at the recent conference (see Michael Gadiel's article at http://workers.labor.net.au/137/news5_it.html)
Information and communications technologies were developed by and for the military and corporate sectors, but this does not preclude progressive movements from using the technology for their own purposes. We make our own history, but not always in conditions of out choosing as Karl Marx, someone who knew a lot more about political economy than me, once said (something like that anyway).
Just looking round the Internet makes this so obvious as to be banal, so why people argue about it I don't know. A myriad of groups wanting social change (for good or ill) use the Net to get the message across.
What Fortier is asking is "whether ICTs are plausible democratic vectors" in relation to production and reproduction of labour power and the social order.
He wants to "decipher the political economic assumptions and implications of analytical choices made about ICTs." He looks at how ICTs are being developed, and how they affect social relations through their impact on various forms of information. This information includes the form of capital goods and processes (industrial patents), manufacturing processes and artificial genomes. It also helps the circulation of products (brands, trademarks) and currencies. Here we get to the nub of the big players on the Net. Media and entertainment companies see it as a key place for profit so are constantly scrambling become gatekeepers and owners. In academic publishing the access of students and researchers has potentially been diminished rather than increased by the duopolies of Reed Elsevier and Thomson International who have taken over so many academic journals and offer them to university libraries on take one take all basis at inflated prices and for limited time access. No more photocopying for a few cents per page when they can rip heaps out of institutions for the wondrous electronic access, and put the prices up. All this for journals that have material provided for free by scientists and researchers paid from the public purse. The usual applies, public wears the cost of the workers research, corporations harvest the profits from the ale of there work. Was it ever thus. Scientists are starting to affect the other part of the political economy Fortier writes about. Late last year they began organising a boycott of journals controlled by the big two publishing houses (see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s345514.htm for a discussion of this). We now seem to need a licence to read, handed out (at a price) by those who would be gatekeepers.
The other question that impacts on strategy for those who seek to use the Net for social change is the point made by David Noble and explicated by Fortier as the fact that capital still controls most of the production process, including the production of web automation, search engines etc. Fortier maintains that the valid strategy is "digital resistance to the controlling forms and use of ICTs in production, trade, the media, and surveillance. Numerous examples exist", according to Fortier, "of appropriation for the purposes of resistance, such as browsers and websites that offer navigation with complete anonymity, thus preventing profiling and surveillance. ICTS are also sources of reproduction of knowledge, and are used by many social movements, so there is a role for alternative ICTs. Research by oppositional movements should push into this area and can address information and communication needs amongst those who seek a more civil society. "[A]lternative strategies must focus not only on technologies...but also...on the processes that determine the control of both the development and the content of information systems...We must refuse to substitute technology for politics. The goal must be not a human-centred technology but a human centred society." It must be struggled for.
It comes down to a situation that the left presses have long faced, at least since World War II when the commercialisation of the mass media and the dominance of advertising in newspapers saw the fairly rapid decline in circulation of left wing papers. Commercial ISPs dominate the Net, and this will continue, but alternative providers play a crucial role in circulating information and ideas. The problem remains, as Michael Albert, founder of ZNET says in his book, "The Trajectory of Change," "face to face interaction with people who don't agree with us already, or who even disagree strongly with us, is at the heart of movement building." So often this small circle that gathers around a publication or website starts debating and abusing one another, rather than looking at the population as a whole. As he also says in his article "Dealing With Differences" Rather than waste time assaulting one another, we face, instead, the whole population. We bring them our different messages, and we see what happens."
Fortier's book is a strong analysis and sound grounding in the political economy of ICTs. He calls the approach he favours historic inherence. Technology is a field of social struggle shaped by many groups. It is not a set of instruments that come preformed with inherent pro capitalist characteristics. If this were so then there would be no scope for alternative groups to shape them in a progressive manner. The question is how certain groups form and appropriate ICTs. So far its clear much ICT development and use has served to repress the poor and to increase capital accumulation and progressives should expose this. ICTs serve social control. They do not determine social processes however, so the room for manoeuvre remains to shape alternatives. The new book from Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (Pluto Press) is a good account of how many alternative groups such as the Zapatistas and McSpotlight are actually doing that.
Fran�ois Fortier. Virtuality Check: Power Relations and Alternative Strategies In The Information Society (London: Verso, 2001)
To save yourself some bucks (as Verso imports are very expensive) use the Internet to go to a copy of Fortier's thesis on which this book is based. You will find it at http://www.interasia.org/background/fortier.html
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The Robens Committee was appointed in 1970 in the UK to "review the provisions made for the safety and health of persons in the course of their employment...and to consider whether any changes are needed in:
(1) the scope or nature of the major relevant enactments, or
(2) the nature and extent of voluntary action concerned with these matters, and
to consider whether any further steps are required to safeguard members of the public from hazards, other than general environmental pollution, arising in connection with activities in industrial and commercial premises and construction sites".
The committee acknowledged the huge complexity of the task it was given.
The timing of the report was also important. Throughout the western world what conservatives later came to see as an "excess of democracy" was causing governments and business to look nervously upon the social activism of unions, environment, feminist and anti-racist groups.
Legislators had to find ways to appease activists and also to keep business happy. A crisis of legitimation, as Habermas would have said.
The Committee concluded that a more self-regulating system was needed. Less of the detailed regulation, which had developed over the previous 50 years was seen as the way to go. Joint self-regulation by employers and employees was recommended. Voluntary standards and codes of practice should be used to promote safety. A national authority for the UK was another recommendation. Statutory inspection to assist and advise in workplaces was another recommendation that we all are now familiar with.
Robens was concerned at the rising level of death and injury, and in the US a major report at around the same time was also pointing at this issue. According to Biggins the Flixborough disaster in the UK and the Farmington mining disaster in the US at this time focused attention on the issue as never before.
Workers in Australia responded by setting up the first workers health centres. Women's health centres also began to be established then. These revealed that demand for more information was rising from particular groups. The old models were to be swept away.
One of the major subjects that heightened activity on this was asbestos. The first agreements between employers and unions in Australia were struck in 1982-83. These took into account the main approaches recommended by Robens. That is a preventative approach, dissemination of information and education, and a consultative approach with worker participation and OHS representatives and committees.
The first full time OHS union officials in Australia were appointed in 1979 and the ACTU and the Victorian Trades Hall Council established a joint OHS Unit in 1981. The ground breaking manual by John Mathews was published in 1985 (updated in 1993).
The Accord between the ACTU and the ALP included a commitment to non-wage benefits, including OHS. This menat funding for training of union officials, disseminating information and establishment of OHS officers in state labour councils.
The ACTU adopted a firmly preventative policy in 1979. it was based on the principle that:
Improvements in workers' health and safety can predominantly be achieved by collective action to improve conditions, rather than by personal changes in lifestyle; hence health and safety is a legitimate trade union issue. Improvements in workers' health and safety should be won through reducing hazards at source, and modifying the workplace to fit the needs of people, rather than modifying people's behaviour, or adapting them to fit the demands of a hazardous workplace.
This firmly pushes union involvement in the design of all jobs, a big demand on unions and their members, and a big change in the mindset of employers and workers.
Corporate minds were drawn to the issue by the increasing costs of workers' compensation. Government also were pushed into trying to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Another crucial move for the unions was the linking of OHS procedures with the 1970s push for industrial democracy. The first Australian state to move on OHS laws was South Australia, and it was also the state to introduce more industrial democracy. Don Dunstan, premier at the time pointed to the fact that worker participation had lifted profits, saved jobs, cut absenteeism and reduced industrial accidents.
Biggins also points out that the Robens report and the introduction of legislation based on it was undertaken at a time that government was trying to achieve wage restraint. The Accord were framed under similar circumstances and the federal OHS laws based on the earlier British model.
Gunningham considers that the Australian laws were poor cousins to the British laws. They did not put enough obligations on employers. They did not require written policies by employers and there was not enough in the laws to ensure enforcement. These are problems that hark back to initial attempts to have any workplace safety rules in the early 1800s.
This is part of Gunningham's whole critique of the Robens approach. He argues that consultation, more effective self-regulation and voluntary measures do not form the foundation of an effective safety strategy. He says there is a need for more vigorous enforcement sanctions capable of deterring recalcitrant employers from breaking the law, and a broader role (incorporating enforceable rights) for worker representatives.
Mathews broadly concurred with this in his manual for unionists. Enforcement is the crucial issue. He says that the factory inspectorate was a great social innovation in 19th century England (showing that we still haven't changed all that much as if this issue is fully addressed then we would have less problems for workers) and these have never been well funded. In the US authorities from the 1970s frequently used criminal charges, but with the winding back of protection for US workers since the Reagan era have made it even harder for workers there. In 1991 the Victorian Minister for Labour announced that he was considering plans to lay criminal charges, including manslaughter, against negligent company executives. Kennett arrived soon after so that stopped. Now we see the Bracks government being unable to get such legislation through in 2001. I could have written a similar article in 1902 as today!!
Mathews mentions that Brent Fisse, then from Sydney University, envisaged court-
imposed requirements on companies convicted of breaches to come up with approved technical solutions within a time limit, and proof of their implementation; or requirements that companies place full-page advertisements in newspapers setting out the specifics of their offence and the steps they have taken to remedy the problem; or being forced to create new parcels of shares which are to be allocated at company expense to community organizations who can use them to intervene in the company's management and its annual general meetings.
Utopians such as myself would see that only a shift of the power to control production to the men and women at the workplace would produce a fundamental improvement in health and safety. The law could do a great deal more, without reaching the utopian ideal. The joint approaches of regulation and enforcement of statutory regulation, and worker participation on an equal legal footing with employers on developing better and safer ways of working do substantially improve OHS, and unions have to continue to struggle to get and maintain these standards, with the ideal of worker control being the ultimate goal.
See:
D. Biggins (1993) The Social Context of Legislative reform part 2: Twentieth Century Australian reforms. (The Journal of Occupational health and Safety in Australia and New Zealand. Vol. 9; no. 3, June.
John Mathews. (1993) Health and Safety at Work: a trade union safety representative's handbook. (Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press)
Lord Robens. (1972) Safety and Health at Work: report of the Committee 1970-72. (London: HMSO)
Neil Gunningham (1984). Safeguarding the Worker: Job hazards and the role of the law. (North Ryde, NSW: Law Book Co)
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There's something poetic...in an Orwellian sort of way...about this language of love and cooperation.
LET ME BRING LOVE
Let me bring love, right across our great nation,
Let me bring peace, workplace cooperation.
Let me bring love, where once all was lost,
Love me like you know you should love your boss.
I'll treasure and meet individual needs,
Our interests are bound in our mutual deeds.
Lets all work together, we're part of one team,
Let's all pull together, although it does seem
That one of two of you have wandered astray,
And have talked about unions! - well you'll rue the day
You cavorted with men by such evil possessed!
You'll burn in hell and!...oh dear, I've digressed.
Let me bring love, you'll adore me so much,
I'll spread peace and kindness with one loving touch.
You'll know with my love we'll forever bond,
Let me just rub on my long magic wand.
If you stay true to me you'll feel naught but joy,
Just as long as you don't act like those naughty boys
Who spoke to a union, as soon as I find
Them I'll crush them like ants! like the rest of their kind!
I'll find every one and I'll squeeze out their blood!
Their children will burn and then drown in wild floods!
I'll...ahem...bring love to this land. True workplace harmony
Will flow from this love like a heart's symphony.
The boss and the worker will lay down as one,
We'll be so productive, we'll have so much fun,
As we gaze longingly into each other's eyes,
I'll play gentle tunes as we all rhapsodise,
About the pure grace of our perfect communion.
Apart from those misled souls who joined a union.
Those low-life blood-sucking leeches and scum,
Who would tear apart the fabric of this country if we let them infect people with their vile hatred it's intolerable that we have to put up with these traitors in our midst, you know they're worse than terrorists! They eat their children and they'll eat yours and mine too if we let them breed. Destroy each and every one of them! Burn them! I say burn them! God, I hate them! Hanging's too good for them we must make an example of...
ahem
Let me bring love, you can trust me to be
An angel of peace, and tranquility.
Let me bring love, I swear it's all true:
It's a pure non-core promise I'm making to you.
Let me bring peace, workplace cooperation.
Let me bring love, where once all was lost,
Love me like you know you should love your boss.
I'll treasure and meet individual needs,
Our interests are bound in our mutual deeds.
Lets all work together, we're part of one team,
Let's all pull together, although it does seem
That one of two of you have wandered astray,
And have talked about unions! - well you'll rue the day
You cavorted with men by such evil possessed!
You'll burn in hell and!...oh dear, I've digressed.
Let me bring love, you'll adore me so much,
I'll spread peace and kindness with one loving touch.
You'll know with my love we'll forever bond,
Let me just rub on my long magic wand.
If you stay true to me you'll feel naught but joy,
Just as long as you don't act like those naughty boys
Who spoke to a union, as soon as I find
Them I'll crush them like ants! like the rest of their kind!
I'll find every one and I'll squeeze out their blood!
Their children will burn and then drown in wild floods!
I'll...ahem...bring love to this land. True workplace harmony
Will flow from this love like a heart's symphony.
The boss and the worker will lay down as one,
We'll be so productive, we'll have so much fun,
As we gaze longingly into each other's eyes,
I'll play gentle tunes as we all rhapsodise,
About the pure grace of our perfect communion.
Apart from those misled souls who joined a union.
Those low-life blood-sucking leeches and scum,
Who would tear apart the fabric of this country if we let them infect people with their vile hatred it's intolerable that we have to put up with these traitors in our midst, you know they're worse than terrorists! They eat their children and they'll eat yours and mine too if we let them breed. Destroy each and every one of them! Burn them! I say burn them! God, I hate them! Hanging's too good for them we must make an example of...
ahem
Let me bring love, you can trust me to be
An angel of peace, and tranquility.
Let me bring love, I swear it's all true:
It's a pure non-core promise I'm making to you.
by Tara de Boehmler
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Has inflated rental costs got you leafing through the share housing classifieds? Do you secretly long for the uncomplicated communal utopias enshrined in hippy folklore? Do you plan to audition for the third series of Big Brother?
In the hippy era there was a book that you could read before deciding whether communal living was for you. Clem Gorman's People Together: A Guide To Communal Living summarized a few important tips about forming a successful communal household, what to keep in mind when relating to each other and contained a handy chapter on relating to society.
These days Lukas Moodysson's new movie Together carries many of the same messages by depicting what happens when a group of society drop-outs choose communal living for some very different reasons and even less understanding of where each other is coming from.
One of the residents of the Together household invites his sister and her two young children to come and join the commune, after her alcoholic husband physically abuses her.
The entrance of the woman and her children into the household sends the other housemates reeling.
Before, the idea of community was just something they spoke about. But now they are faced with the reality that some sacrifices may need to be made to accommodate this young family.
Seeing the household through the children's eyes quickly reveals some of the darker undercurrents within the housemates' personalities.
Their motivations, methods of manipulation and less than desirable character traits are unsympathetically exposed and their reasons for rejecting bourgeois society for this dysfunctional little unit begin to look more ridiculous by the minute.
Unfortunately the movie falls down in its pigeonholing of different personality types through the use of one dimensional extremes. It also fails to recognise much that was good about the hippy era's passion for communal living.
This is a movie that should be seen by activists who fail to act, community leaders who refuse to play a role in their community and anyone who talks hot air then disappears when crunch time comes.
But if you are looking for a misty-eyed trip down memory lane, Together will do little to recapture the genuine feelings of camaraderie and community that really did exist in much of hippydom.
2 out of 5 (the art of falling apart together)
by The Chaser
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"Our polling revealed strong support for our efforts to stop illegal immigrants from Asia and the Middle East from coming to Australia", said Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock, "but it also suggested that people don't really like the Englishmen and New Zealanders who are coming here either. We have to try and pretend that our border control policies aren't racially motivated, so we've decided to remove their islands from Australia's migration zone too."
The government's plan to cut back the migration exclusion zone was blocked in Federal Parliament this week by the Democrats and Labor because of concerns that endorsing the policy might make them more popular in the electorate.
Under the plan, places like Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef would no longer be regarded as part of Australia. Some financial planners have backed the plan, and intend to incorporate companies on Ashmore Reef in an effort to avoid Australian tax laws.
It's this mentality that unions have always fought - the notion that you should be thankful to have a job and you should stop complaining if the conditions put on you are unreasonable.
Abbott's ham-fisted rhetoric is consistent with his party's labour market deregulation project: you don't need rules against bad bosses because then you might not have as many bosses.
For workers it's the ultimate Catch-22; yes, we all need to work - but is there a point when we are compelled to draw the line for our own sense of dignity?
Should call centre workers at Morrisey Malcom continue to tolerate bullying from their boss in a class-room environment because a bad boss is better than none at all?
Should electricians accept an edict from contractors that they can no longer take RDOs and spend time with their families because a bad boss is better than none at all?
Should workers at Non-Ferral continue driving fork-lifts carrying molten metal over potholes because a bad boss is better than none at all?
The answer is simple - there is a point where bosses go too far; there has always been a point. It is the point where workers get organised and act collectively.
The irony of the Cole Royal Commission is that many of the bosses lining up to condemn the perceived 'stand-over' tactics of union organisers are themselves bad bosses.
Overwhelmingly those making the accusations are cheating workers and the taxpayers, operating businesses that go in and out of liquidation to maximise returns and are not prepared to cooperate with workers on safety.
Like Tony Abbott, Commissioner Cole only wants to tell half the story, the story about the reaction of workers to the bad things bosses do. Without details of the initial provocation, his inquiry will never be anything but one-sided.
To balance the ledger, Workers Online reckons there should be a parallel inquiry into Bad Bosses, the excesses, the injustices, the rorts, the scams; all of which contribute to the indignity of working people.
The terms of reference would be "to gather evidence to determine whether bad bosses are making life misery for Australian workers and determine whether their practices are so outrageous that laws are required to control their excessive behaviour".
Because we haven't got a $60 million budget, the scope of our inquiry will be a little smaller, but we offer these humble web pages to any union with a story to tell about a Bad Boss.
Peter Lewis
Editor
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The cynical announcement by Telstra that they will allocate $187 million to upgrade rural telecommunications services is nothing more than a cheap stunt to give the impression that the carrier was doing something positive prior to further privatisation says the telecommunications union CEPU.
The publicity stunt was simply a re-announcement of monies that the carrier had already allocated and is woefully inadequate to make any real difference to rural performance which had suffered at the hands of the Coalition.
Privatisation works like this.
Take a world class telecommunications carrier whose performance is so good those developing countries want to know how they get service like that into their remote areas. You see they can not go to the USA for help because the telecommunications network is in private hands and that in the land of the free enterprise if you can't pay for the service, you don't get it.
Now sack a swag of staff and start contracting out as much work as possible (even if it is cheaper to do the work in house) so that the financial markets prick up their ears at the sound of your number crunching.
Throw a tranche of shares into the market like burley and watch the waters bubble and froth.
A problem now starts to emerge in that all that cost cutting is now starting to bite and the rural punters are beginning to agitate about delays in service and escalating costs. Regional MPs start pestering the Communications Minister about what to tell their constituents who smell a rat. Surely privatisation was going to produce a stampede of private telecommunications companies who would kill to get their products out to the bush and give Telstra a bit of ginger.
Perhaps it's time to hold an inquiry so that we can prove that those phone delays in the country are just an issue of perception. Surely Telstra can produce some statistics to show that service has actually improved and that sure in a number of isolated cases they were delays but we can't help that can we?
With the inquiry out of the way and the rural folk scratching their head and wondering,....... "was it just their imagination after all?", its time for the Government to turn their attention to a few Independent MP's who might swing their vote if the price is right. After all the Nats will do as they're told.
Time to knock a few thousand more jobs out of the company to show the financial markets how butch you are and hope like buggery that the rural voters don't get too riled and send those irritating Nats around again to bother the Minister who is busily baiting hooks.
Now is the time to launch the real bait over the side of the boat and see how the fish are biting.
Gadzooks! They've gorged on burley from the first float and their not so eager to bite this time. The catch is down and the investors are starting to smell something fishy as the share price starts to slide to the bottom faster than Tom Cruise's last movie.
So now we're starting to get the picture. Almost half the show is sold and the Government starts to run the line that you can't be half private and half public. It's like being half pissed; all good sense starts to abandon you faster than Johdi left Jamie (only for a lot less money).
Time to go for broke so now we pitch a few pennies at the rural punters, perhaps when they see a few Telstra trucks zooming around their country lanes they'll relax long enough so that we can sell the remaining lump of Telstra.
Problem! With the share price at rock bottom we're gunna have to offer a bit more than a set of steak knives to sweeten the deal. Hey! How about a free mobile phone with every share parcel. Sweet!
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**************
The professional (I use the term loosely) football codes in this country are continually trying to source their talent pool from younger and younger potentates.
The end result is footballers washed up in their mid twenties.
This seemingly admirable youth development policy is incredibly short sited and is hardly fair on the kids concerned. What they ask of 18 year olds is verging on the ridiculous, and watching player agents circle like sharks at junior sporting carnivals is rather sad.
I think it is a bit rich to expect the nastiest of men, motivated by the nastiest of reasons, to work for the benefit of the most vulnerable of sports people.
Country football is littered with the cast-offs from the elite leagues. By and large most of these players have been treated appallingly, especially by the AFL, where the draft is little more than a glorified slave auction.
Mark Philippoussis turned out to be dud at the Wimbledon fiasco, which is a shame, the golden Greek had the Dutchman by the balls and let him off the hook. Failing to convert 11 break points didn't help.
Mark pulled a sickie during the Davis Cup a few years back and was roundly canned by the Australian Media. In the meantime Pat Rafter played while he was crook and put in a shocker. Rafter comes from Mount Isa, so you would think he has an understanding about the efficacy of stumping up to the boss with a medical certificate. Then again, when it comes to Australian tennis, Rafter always has been something of a company man, unlike Lleyton Hewitt, who - like so many other middle class brats - is only really in it for himself.
Lleyton's dummy spit brought back memories of that great commentator on the gentleman's game, John McEnroe.
Music industry sources in Adelaide informed this column of Johnny the M's big comeback at Memorial Drive a few years back.
The night before his semi final appearance he appeared at the source's nightclub with a blonde partner who was not Tatum O'Neil. Pissed on scotch, he joined the source in the nightclub office for 'a doobie of hydroponically grown purple light skunk'. McEnroe walked straight out onto the techno-pumping dance floor. He emerged from the dance floor later appearing 'dazed, confused, bewildered and lost'. He staggered blindly 20 feet to the bar where he took off his baseball cap and threw up in it.
According to club policy he was then kicked out
The following day he lost the semi-final in straight sets.
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World Beating Scam
Corporate America suffered its biggest scandal with revelations that WorldCom, the telecommunications company founded by a devout Mississippi Christian, had lied about making $US3.85 billion in profits over 15 months. WorldCom, already crippled by nearly $US30 billion of debt, is now expected to go bust. The accounting problems at WorldCom were discovered during an internal investigation at the firm which led to the sacking of its chief financial officer. WorldCom founder, the cowboy-booted Bernie Ebbers, was ousted in May - but not before he gave himself a $US366 million personal loan from WorldCom's bank account. The company has now begun laying off 17,000 workers worldwide - with all 80,000 staff expected to be out of work soon. (Source: SMH)
WorldCom Shocks World Markets
The revelations sent shockwaves around the corporate world with most markets dipping and telecommunications and banking stock hit particularly hard. Investors, already unnerved by dubious accounting practices that led to last year's collapse of Enron, sent global equity markets into free-fall after the US telecom giant revealed an exaggerated cash flow for the past five financial quarters. In Australia., WorldCom's demise, is expected to harm the businesses of Telstra, SingTel and Telecom New Zealand in the short term, as all three have shareholder relationships with the troubled US carrier. The debacle has also brought renewed scrutiny of News Corp's accounting practices. Disgraced Andersen audited the media firm's books up until two months ago, when it was dumped in favour of Ernst & Young. Meanwhile, Ozemail, who WorldCom brought outright, is expected to end up on the market again with former owners including Malcolm Turnbull said to be eyeing a buy-back at a vastly reduced cost. (Various Sources)
The End of the World?
Economists, commentators and politicians are all interpreting the WorldCom collapse as a turning point for global capital. SMH's Ross Gittens writes that America's string of corporate scandals spells the end of the pretence that top executives do it all for the benefit of the company's owners. Gittens argues that the notion of Shareholder Value to justify everything from takeovers, downsizing, executive pay rises and issuing of share options, will be the first casualty of the collapse. Meanwhile, Treasurer Peter Costello says he will outline in August measures to improve auditor ethics and disclosure of information by companies to shareholders and investment markets. As for US President George Bush, he's vowed to jail corrupt executives who threaten "our entire free enterprise system". Mr Bush intends to travel to New York on July 9 to deliver the same message where it counts: on Wall Street. (Various Sources)
Super Funds in the Red
Closer to home, the faith that capitalism will automatically multiply retirement savings has taken its own battering with superannuation going backwards for the first time since 1981. The typical fund is down about 4.5 per cent for the year, largely thanks to a dismal year for world sharemarkets, says InTech Financial Services. Growth funds have been worst hit, losing an average of about 9 per cent, and even the conservative funds are ahead by only about 0.9 per cent - less than could be earned from cash savings. The September 11 terrorist attacks, the Enron collapse, and now the scandal over accounting fraud by the telecommunications giant WorldCom have all contributed to the losses on this year's statements, due out over the next week.
(Source: SMH)
ACCC Seeks Jail for Collusion
Executives found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour could end up behind bars if the competition watchdog gets it way. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission put its case for jailing executives in its submission to a review of the Trade Practices Act chaired by former High Court judge Sir Daryl Dawson. The ACCC wants big business executives who seriously breach the act's competition provisions jailed for up to seven years, a punishment already in place in the United States, Britain, Canada and Japan. The act currently imposes a maximum fine of $10 million for companies found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, but does not allow the ACCC to refer matters to criminal courts. (Source: NineMSN)
Integrity Tests for Finance Directors
Directors and senior managers of some financial institutions will face integrity tests for the first time under a bill introduced to Federal Parliament. The bill introduces a fit and proper test for directors and senior managers of financial institutions authorised to take deposits and authorised non-operating holding companies. It also aims to improve the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's (APRA)ability to monitor the financial sector through improved administration. Insurance companies will have to advise APRA of any prudential standard breach, including developments detrimental to their financial position. (Source: NineMSN)
Company Directors Should Quit Boards
Company directors holding several board posts will face pressure from shareholders to quit some of their directorships during the annual general meeting season later this year. The Australian Shareholders Association has released a guide for company directors which warns directors from spreading themselves too thinly across a range of companies The shareholder lobby group believes the maximum number of a person's directorships or equivalent positions should be limited to five, with a chairman's role counting as three directorships. And the ASA argues that if a director sits on the board of two or more poorly performing companies, they should not seek any further appointments. (Source: Nine MSN)
Anderson: CEOs Both Over and Under Paid
Departing BHP Billiton chief executive Paul Anderson believes Australian chief executive officers are overpaid in Australian - but "woefully underpaid" compared to their overseas counterparts. Anderson, who is returning to his native United States after running BHP for the last three-and-a-half years, says CEO salaries depend on perspective. "I think CEOs in Australia are overpaid but they are woefully underpaid relative to the rest of the world," he said. He's told ABC TV's Business Breakfast program that unless Australian CEOs are paid at a comparable level to their overseas counterparts, companies will struggle to attract management talent. He's also taken a swipe at some union leaders, who he claims call strikes simply to advance their political ambitions. (Source: ABC)
Enron Bankers Charged
As for that other spectacular US collapse, the US Justice Department has charged three former British bankers with wire fraud in an alleged $US7.3 million scheme involving Enron. The three former employees of National Westminster Bank, Gary Mulgrew, Giles Darby and David John Bermingham, were charged in a criminal complaint filed in Houston. All three men were employed by the finance group of Greenwich NatWest, a division of NatWest with offices in Greenwich, Conn., and London. At the time, NatWest was considered a "Tier 1" bank by Enron, which meant it was among a small group of banks that did the most business with Enron and were given preferential treatment by the company. The Government's complaint also alleges that the three men recommended that an interest in an Enron-related partnership held by NatWest should be sold for $US1 million even as they schemed with Enron executives to purchase that interest for $250,000. (Source: The Australian)
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International leaders have been infamously randy for generations. British and European monarchs were putting it about centuries before JFK and Bill Clinton were ever heard of. But Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot? Gulp, that's a bit close to home.
Seems that when Cheryl led the Democrats and Evans was a Labor Cabinet Minister they were not only respectively married but consumating cross party alliances in a very personal manner.
It all came to light while Kernot was promoting her book, Speaking For Myself Again, which railed against her treatment after joining the Labor Party but, somewhat unwisely, omitted a central element in her conversion.
Questions are now being asked about a leaked email which claims Evans admitted to lying to Parliament over the affair.
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Allegations of worker-boss adultery and sex by a western Sydney rubbish dump rocked the Cole Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry until Sammy Manna thought better of them and issued a humbling mea culpa.
Manna went back onto the stand and told the Commissioner he had fabricated stories of illicit sex with an employer who had claimed that he, in his capacity as a union organiser, had threatened her and her children. Manna, apparently, was so incensed by what he regarded as outrageous libels that he invented the sex claims by way of retribution. Having thought about the potential damage to the woman's reputation and family, he recanted and now faces the prospect of being prosecuted for perjury, an offence carrying a five-year jail term.
The CFMEU, while understanding Manna's frustation at the unsubstantiated allegations he faced, has rejected his original response, insisting he will have to meet any resulting legal costs from his own pocket.
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Sports people and entertainment types get caught up in domestic problems more than most as John McEnroe probably remembered just after former wife Tatum O'Neal returned one of his volleys with a stinging forehand passing shot that caused most observers to mutter - game, set, match Miss O'Neal.
Reinforcing the fact that people in glass houses should never, ever, write books, McEnroe served it up to his former wife in his appropriately-titled memoir, You Cannot Be Serious.
Deadly serious, O'Neal returned with interest, revealing McEnroe had been on steroids, as well as recreational drugs, during his tantrum-soaked days as enfant terrible of the tennis world.
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Then, presumably to make sure there was no hanky panky afoot in the war-ravaged valleys of Afghanistan, the US launched a pre-emptive strike against a wedding party in the Kandahar region.
Witnesses claimed 40 people, including 25 from one family, had been killed and "some 100" others wounded. Many of the wounded were later interviewed at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, the 40 Afghan revellers were killed as the US mounted a major diplomatic offensive against the new World Criminal Court which it argued might prosecute troops engaged in peace keeping missions.
Analysts called the Bush bluff, pointing out the court was a lot more likely to investigate US troops carrying out aggressive actions, such as those in Afghanistan, than those serving as peacekeepers under UN auspices.
Still, according to prevailing journalistic wisdoms, that's all much less interesting and important than what happens in the bedrooms of politicians, celebrities and people they meet along the way.
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All of which brings us to the big issue - anyone with evidence of George Bush picadillos, involving humans of either gender, or even small furry animals, should mail them to someone who is interested.
Normal service resumes next week, promise!
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