Mr Anthony, who is visiting Australia this week for talks with Australian unions said that the Australian Government needed to stiffen sanctions if Fiji was to have any hope of a quick return to democracy.
'The international community should take some blame for not taking a stronger position when this happened before. If they don't get it right this time it will happen again,' he said.
'Unless there is a strong and immediate response from the international community we could see a situation develop like we had in 1987 where supporters of democracy in Fiji had to fight for 10 years before the democratic and racially legitimate 1997 Constitution was put in place."
Mr Anthony says George Speight is a sideshow and the real issue is that the interim administration in Fiji has given in to his demands.
'He should be dealt with by the law. The real issues in Fiji remain. That is the overthrow of the democratically elected Government and the break-down of the rule of law," said Mr Anthony.
Mr Anthony said that there are at least 5 members of the current Fijian interim administration who are George Speight supporters and were active in the Parliamentary compound during the hostage crisis.
Mr Anthony says the coup is not about race, but about cliques protecting their interests.
'It is the politicians who lost out at the elections and the business people who owe and evade tax. It's not a race struggle, it's a class issue. It's about big business and nationalists who lack appreciation of the 1997 constitution. They see it as an easier way to hold onto power rather than through the ballot box.'
Mr Anthony is also critical of the role of the army.
'The army has a political agenda. It has assisted in overthrowing the Government. It is guilty of the same crimes as Speight. The Australian Government should cut off all ties with the Fijian military.'
Timoci Naivaluwaqa from the Fijian National Union of Hotel and Catering Employees says the issue of indigenous rights has been dishonestly represented.
'They are protected in the 1997 constitution. Whenever there is a conflict between indigenous rights and other ethnic groups and they can't be resolved amicably, indigenous rights prevail under the 1997 constitution,' he said.
ACTU President Sharan Burrow says that the Australian Government could not continue to give tacit support to any Fijian administration that contained supporters of George Speight's terrorist activities.
Ms Burrow urged the Australian Government to stop working with interim administration and to throw its support behind deposed Fijian Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry by calling for the establishment of a Fijian Government of national unity made up of democratically elected members of the dissolved parliament.
"Mr Downer's 'smart sanctions' should become 'strong sanctions' unless the terrorists are expelled from the Fijian administration and a proper process to resolve the crisis is put in place," said Ms Burrow.
Ms Burrow said that Australian unions would begin building support for the reimposition of union bans against Fiji at a meeting of South Pacific unions in New Zealand later this month. A delegation of Australian unions is also considering an invitation from Mr Anthony to visit Fiji following the South Pacific union forum.
Ms Burrow said that union bans against Fiji cargo and communication could be reimposed as early as September unless the situation in Fiji improved dramatically.
The elected Labour Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry will speak at his first public meeting in Australia since gunmen took him and his cabinet captive on May 19.
He will be joined on the platform by Felix Anthony.
The ALP's Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Laurie Brereton, will introduce the speakers at the meeting which is scheduled for 2pm - 4pm, Saturday August 12 at the Marrickville Town Hall. Marrickville Town Hall is at the corner of Marrickville Rd and Petersham Rd, Marrickville.
Telstra has a major stake in the games, being the major sponsor and the sole provider of telecommunications facilities to the site. Weeks out from the games it still has no agreement with workers represented by the CEPU and the CPSU.
The CPSU and CEPU have been negotiating with management about ways to avert problems and to compensate employees.
They are looking for:
'The mixed messages to staff highlight this. Some staff are being threatened with discipline if they turn up late,' he says.
'Meanwhile memos to Olympic site staff say the volume of traffic expected during the Olympics period could turn what is normally a short trip into an expedition requiring a cut lunch and a change of clothes.'
'You'd think that Australia's most profitable company, and major Games sponsor would understand the special needs of employees during the Olympics. Most companies in Sydney have and are offering staff compensation and flexible arrangements for the games.'
CEPU Branch President (NSW Postal and Telecommunications Branch) Laurie Chalker says Telstra workers are fed up with the company's attitude.
'Telstra is the biggest sponsor, it's telling the world what a great company it is and treating its workers like rubbish. Employees have been told for months they can't go on holidays because of the Olympics,' he said.
The Telstra unions are working together and with the NSW Labor Council to ensure that all employees affected by the games in Sydney next month are looked after.
'If we don't get some movement from the company by the end of the week we will look at ways to bring Telstra management to their senses,' says Stephen Jones.
Under the Impulse scheme pilots and flight attendants are supplied to the airline by Air Crews Control, a company which claims not to employ any pilots or flight attendants.
Rather, Air Crews Control argues they have a number of shareholders and holders of units in a trust that work as flight attendants and pilots. Only the chief pilot is a direct employee to satisfy the CAA requirements.
Air Crews Control describes the flight attendants as working shareholders or working unit holders. They do not receive any income in respect of employment. Instead they receive distributions from the trust that are determined by the type of unit they hold.
It is believed that the "unit trust" provides Flight Attendants with an annual dividend of $25,000 including allowances. The dividend is paid monthly and after tax it is believed Impulse Flight Attendants receive about $420 a week. At the AIRC hearing Air Crews Control claimed to not provide any workers compensation.
Colin Coakley Secretary of the Domestic/Regional Division of the FAAA says the sham arrangement raises serious issues not just for Flight Attendants but for all workers.
'The arrangement is designed not only to deprive Flight Attendants of any working conditions but also any employment security,' he said.
'What happens if something goes wrong? It raises real issues of accountability when you have an airline that does not want to take responsibility for their pilots and flight attendants.'
Colin Coakley says he understands Impulse were attempting to bring cheap airfares into the Australian domestic market. However, he contrasts the Impulse approach with that of the other new entrant into the domestic air market.
Virgin Blue is to pay starting Flight Attendants $35,000 per year and Cabin Managers $42,000 under a union negotiated agreement.
'There still must be a balance between being a low cost operator and giving employees a fair deal.'
by Andrew Casey
The US franchise chain has as its managing director in Australia, Robert.M.LaPointe, who has been involved in bringing other franchises to this country - including KFC, Pizza Hut and CarLovers Carwash.
Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon has this week shutdown ten stores - employing more than 300 people - scattered throughout Victoria, Tasmania, NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.
The company has been involved in some controversial workplace practices - including bringing in private security guards to stop workers from talking to the union before they were to take a vote on a non-union enterprise agreement.
The restaurant chain has sent a letter to the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU), dated August 9, to inform the union that the closures were happening, that day, and all employees were terminated immediately.
'Of course it wasn't faxed. It arrived two days later by snail mail. We got no telephone call. It was a fig leaf to cover the disrespectful way they treated their workforce,' Tim Ferrari, the Assistant National Secretary of the LHMU said.
'At this stage there is no information about what entitlements the workers will receive as a result of their retrenchments. They have been told to wait nearly three weeks, till September 1.'
'This is unacceptable treatment of loyal workers. The boss of Lone Star, Robert.M.La Pointe, should get out his cheque book immediately,' Mr Ferrari said.
'Offers being made in some cases to transfer young workers - way across town - to another restaurant, instead of paying their entitlements, is a crook outcome for these young workers.'
'The company is trying to salve their conscience by giving their ex-employees a list of Job Network employment providers, hoping they will find them a job.'
'Many - if not all- of the former Lone Star workers won't be able to get help because they won't qualify for complete service under the current Job Network rules.'
'I am not surprised there has been no warning to the workers about the closures when you look at the history of Lone Star creating unfair non-union agreements whenever they set up a new site.'
'Before they open an outlet they roll young kids in - often school children who are looking for extra pocket money - and hand them a document to vote on.'
'They even called in private security goons to try to stop the Union talking to workers in Launceston, Tasmania, a couple of years ago.'
'When you're looking for a new job, unemployed , or just looking for extra pocket money, of course you'll do the right thing by your prospective boss and vote for the agreement.'
'It's like a muster, and must be frightening, especially if you are desperate for a job.'
'In Tasmania we had parents crying on the phone to our union officials about how poorly their children were treated when asked to vote to set up a non-union agreement.'
The sites that have been closed down are Launceston and Hobart in Tasmania; Newcastle in NSW; Townsville in Queensland; Geelong, Sunshine, Frankston and Brighton in Victoria; Woodford and Morley in WA.
Sixteen months into the life of the programme ACOSS found that Jobs Network provided a 'much weaker outcome than previous labour market programs that were sharply criticised by the Government as ineffective.'
Among the main deficiencies were:
ACOSS says providers cannot be blamed for the flaws in the basic structure of funding for the network. The main reasons for the poor result were:
ACOSS called on the Government to increase funding for Intensive Assistance, to ensure that all long-term unemployed people are guaranteed substantial help to secure employment and to establish an independent statutory body to regulate the employment services market.
They've been backed up by NSW Health Minister Craig Knowles who agrees HECS is impacting on nurse recruitment.
It is estimated there are currently 5000 nursing vacancies across Australia.
HECS for undergraduate nursing courses stands at around $3463 per year up from $2600 in 1997. Charges for post-graduate courses have also increased.
Following the Howard Government's assault on tertiary education in 1996-97 take up in post-basic nursing courses, which provide the health system with its specialist nurses, crashed from 5256 in1997 to 4267 in1999. Graduations from post-basic courses dropped from 5133 in 1996 to 4026 in 1998.
NSWNA Acting General Secretary, Brett Holmes, says the whole issue of fees and nursing courses needs to be reassessed or we could face serious problems in our health system before long.
'More hospitals around NSW are reporting difficulties in finding nurses, to fill vacancies. Aged care industry stakeholders acknowledge that the sector already has a serious nursing shortage,' he says.
'The NSW Government has taken positive steps to address the issue, but in the end it is up to the Federal Government to remove disincentives to nurse education.'
Holmes says it is society that benefits from a large and well educated workforce.
'University funding policies and course-fee arrangements should have the flexibility to respond to the nation's workforce needs. At the moment Australia needs nurses more than it needs a few dollars in course fees.'
by Dermot Browne
The document defines 'market-testing' as inviting private enterprises to tender for public sector business and states that 'in-house' bids from current public service staff cannot be considered.
It also stops departments from opting out of market-testing even if they find the exercise would bring only 'limited efficiency gains' or even where previous market testing has been unsuccessful.
CPSU National President, Mathew Reynolds, said the paper exposes Finance Minister John Fahey's ham-fisted approach to market testing. 'His message is 'just do it - no excuses will be accepted.'
The union points out that agencies are being told that even when preliminary research suggests there is 'no market for the activity' or the 'market is immature', that OASITO will 'work with industry to improve market capacity'.
'The invisible hand of market forces turns out to be OASITO. It's like Joseph Heller's book 'Catch 22,'' said Mr Reynolds.
'What if the departmental benchmarking can demonstrate that the work is already being carried out efficiently? No, not good enough! In OASITO's view, only by going to the market will the 'relative efficiency' of the agency be truly tested.
Even where a department can prove it has high levels of efficiency and the tender process is not needed, the document suggests that they will assessed against 'economies of scale'. This presumably means being measured against a contractor large enough to handle multiple contracts. This is more great news for large multinational consultancy firms, but a blow for efficiency, public sector employment and government accountability," added Mr Reynolds.
For background papers
www.cpsu.org/mkt_tstg/index.html
by Andrew Casey
"The company knows that life for its workforce is not going to be normal from before the Olympics actually starts, and even for a while after the Olympics and Para-Olympics razzamatazz is over, " Tim Ferrari, the LHMU's Assistant National Secretary said.
" For all the effort of our members Coca Cola will be assured of pulling in a lot more money - so they agreed to pay our members a special bonus which could put a few thousand dollars extra into the bank accounts of workers.
" All sides agree it is compensation for the extra work, being away from home and family, as well as the expense of living in Sydney through the Olympics period."
To service the huge thirst which will be created by the Olympics Coca Cola talked to the union about bringing in some of their workforce from interstate. So the union negotiated a special accommodation and transport package for this period.
About 160 workers will receive the benefit on top of their normal pay, overtime and superannuation entitlements, under an agreement ratified by the Industrial Relations Commission.
The workers - including forklift drivers, production workers, maintenance technicians and distributors - would receive $100 a day, after tax, if they came from interstate, and $30 a day extra for Sydney locals.
" The union thinks it is a reasonable arrangement for people working at the Olympics," the LHMU's Tim Ferrari said.
"There are people being brought in on some quite unsatisfactory arrangements where people are being given very little understanding of what's being expected of them or what they will actually earn."
The arrangement, which covers workers in Sydney between August 1 and November 10, also includes accommodation in two- to three-star hotel apartments.
Public transport will be free for the workers under SOCOG sponsorship arrangements, while cars will be provided to employees who require them to fulfil their roles.
Meanwhile...
Workers starting work at the Olympics starting before the 26 August are to receive a weekly rail pass valid from the 12 to 25 August.
Previously accreditation passes covering rail and shuttle buses were only to be available from 26 August.
Chris Christodoulou, Labor Council's Deputy Assistant Secretary (Organising) says this is good news for Olympic workers.
'It shows the effectiveness of Unions 2000,' he says.
'In particular, it ensures workers from regional areas won't be disadvantaged.'
Over 100 retail workers attended a protest meeting organized by the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) on Tuesday night against proposals to charge employees to park in the Warringah Mall car park.
The SDA says charging employees to park is a virtual pay cut of 2 weeks wages per year for the majority of employees and much more for many casual and part-time workers.
The proposed fee structure maintains free parking for 90% of customers.
Bryan Hynes, General Manager of Warringah Mall, declined to comment when contacted by the Manly Daily following Tuesday night's resolution calling on the shopping centre giant to immediately withdraw its application.
Greg Donnelly, NSW Branch Secretary of the SDA, says the mall owner's greedy grab has serious consequences for workers.
'It will have a devastating impact on the majority of working mothers and young women in the industry who rely upon traveling by car,' he says.
'Many retail workers will be forced to take increased health and safety risks when parking in surrounding residential streets.'
The 'Pay to Work' proposal was the second application in less than 12 months by the mall to introduce paid parking. The first was withdrawn after Warringah Council officers recommended free parking continue for tenants and their staff.
Workers have vowed to step up the campaign to sink what they say is an unnecessary and unjust proposal. The campaign is expected to spread in the coming week with the reopening of Westfield's Burwood complex.
The union members are worried that the Australian-owned company wants to get rid of union representation at its plant.
There is a 24 hour peaceful protest outside the premises. All unionists are welcome to drop in at any time to show support.
If you do decide to drop in please talk to Matt Warburton or Kathie Keys ( 9281 9511 0r 9281 9577) from the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union to see if there is anything needed by the peaceful protesters. Any coffee, tea, biscuits, and other assorted munchies will always be welcome.
The LHMU members and supporters will be holding a rally/barbecue/meeting on Tuesday 15 August at 12 noon outside the plant - 1 Gow St Padstow - to discuss any future actions.
This weekend Paint Industry Workers and other unionists will hand out leaflets outside retail outlets to inform Selleys customers of the company's actions in this dispute and leading up to the dispute.
Enterprise bargaining negotiations between the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU) and Selleys broke down this week when the company refused a claim for a 6 per cent wage increase.
" The union has represented the workers for more than 40 years. The members are Araldited onto this union. They are sticking as hard as the product they make," Mark Boyd, the Assistant Secretary of the LHMU said.
Selleys is the producer of popular consumer products for households, as well as the building and construction industry.
" We have been very close to settling this dispute. The company has rejected a number of settlement proposals which provided most of what they wanted from our negotiations," Mark Boyd said.
" The feeling among the membership is that the new general manager wants to provoke trouble, probably with a strategy behind it to de-unionise the factory.
" But the members want to stick to collective bargaining and want to stick to the union."
The average pay that a Selleys worker takes home is about $35,000.
The managing director and CEO, Mr Philip Weickhardt, has a salary package of $841,000.
Selleys is a division of Orica, an Australian chemical company, with annual sales of around $4 billion. Eighteen percent of these sales come from the Selleys division.
Pickets at Selley's Sydney plant in Padstow began on Wednesday after a vote by the morning and afternoon shifts of LHMU members.
This will be a similar arrangement reached last New Years Eve when there was an extra flagfall or surcharge. It would only apply to fares to and from Olympic venues, in and around the Sydney CBD and to and from Sydney Airport for the Olympic period.
TWU organizer Alice Deboos there is an award for taxi drivers but there is a compliance of less than 1%.
'At the moment the industry is operating at 80% capacity because wages are poor, it's dangerous and because of the GST. Drivers say its just not going to be worth it during the Olympics,' she said.
'We estimate capacity will drop to 60-70%. Taxi drivers are more likely to be assaulted or murdered than any other worker. As taxi drivers will be at the forefront during the games and we expect that to increase. They deserve more money.'
by Andrew Casey
Chubb Protective Services has recently adopted a cut-throat strategy to reduce costs and increase profits, by out-sourcing, 'licensing-out' and franchising their security work.
The company is part of the British multinational, Chubb Corporation, which last year reported a profit of more than $1 billion in its annual financial returns.
Chubb's personnel manager in Australia, Steve Gates, recently boasted to the industry newsletter HR Report that: "with outsourcing you (may) lose control and quality, but you have a higher margin."
But a sneaky attempt by Chubb to avoid paying redundancies to their Security Patrol Officers - who had been out-sourced - came to a dead halt this week. The company was forced to pay more than $12,000 to members of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU) in Canberra.
Australian Capital Territory LHMU members Peter Merritt and Joe Hudson have, between them, worked for Chubb for 22 years. Peter Merritt has worked in the job for approximately twelve years, and Joe Hudson for ten years
In April this year - without any consultation - Peter and Joe were told of a change in their status. The two Security Patrol Officers were told the jobs they had been doing for so long had been 'licenced' back to them.
Their ( now former) employer, Chubb, still held the master contract but Peter and Joe were no longer employees, instead they were sub-contractors.
Chubb Protective Services tried to have it both ways. They changed the nature of the relationship but argued that as the workers were still doing the same job they didn't have to pay any redundancy monies.
Commissioner Ron Jones of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission has now told Chubb they have to pay out the redundancy entitlements - as well as some holiday leave - based on the Security Employees (ACT) Award.
Commissioner Jones , in his decision, also noted that because of this desire to squeeze out an extra dollar from their employees the work situation, which had been based on a friendly and open manner, has now been reduced to mistrust and extremely stilted communication.
To mark this occasion there will be a picnic day, a sausage sizzle and speakers gathering at the Seaforth site on Sunday 20 August from 12 noon to 3pm organized by theTeachers Federation.
Teachers Fed delegate Lolita Barrett says the campaign to save the TAFE has kept going because of the wide support it has received.
'Teachers support the campaign to keep it in public hands. It's also supported by the community around the TAFE,' she says.
by Mary Yaager
According to Justice Trisih Kavanagh who launched the Second Edition of Violence At Work by Duncan Chappell and Vittorio Di Martino, violence is certainly on the increase in the workplace in Australia.
Justice Kavanagh said that it is important to keep a statistical record of the incidence of workplace violence in order to develop appropriate intervention strategies.
Dr Duncan Chappell, co-auther of the book, stated that the book provides a practical and helpful overview of the types of violence being experienced globally and how to respond to it. Dr Chappell said Australia is certainly not immune from this problem and workers here suffer similar experiences to their global colleagues, for example health care workers, taxi drivers ,teachers and emergency workers
Murder at work is the single most common cause of death in the workplace in the US Dr Chappell said.
Lets hope Australia never gets to this stage.
Anyone wishing to obtain a copy of the book should emailTHE International Labor Organisation Email [email protected].
As Chair of the International Committee of the United Trades & Labor Council of South Australia I am proud to support the S.11 protests against the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne later this year. The September 11 protest was initiated by community organizations as a follow up to what happened in Seattle, and Washington, when thousands of ordinary citizens involved themselves in protests against the negative effects of globalisation. The US labor unions played a crucial role in these protests.
I support all protests being non-violent and constructive in nature. Despite the uncaring, traumatic, and often violent destruction of peoples' lives by the forces of globalised capital, as the free trade bandwagon has rolled it's way around the world over the last twenty five years, I believe all protests against such corporate tyranny should be conducted in accordance with the principles of peaceful protest and civil disobedience inspired by such leaders as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.
As a supporter of social movement unionism I believe organising, recruitment, and retention strategies will come to nothing if the unions stand apart from the broadest possible coalition of social forces opposed to globalisation's anti-social effects.
As an ACTU delegate to the 17th World Congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Durban this year I do not oppose negotiating with the transnational corporations, and their agents, to try and get our message across, but I support doing so from within a broad coalition protesting against their actions.
A clear commitment to a non-violent constructive series of protests will help secure the maximum participation from ordinary citizens in these important community actions.
Stephen Spence,
Chair,
International Committee,
United Trades & Labor Council of S.A.
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You are in a position to get rare insights into the internal operations of unions: what are the common problems?
I think the problems follow a pretty similar pattern. We have got a group of union leaders - a majority - who are facing substantial union decline and that is incredibly stressful.
If I think about my own experience. People of my generation and earlier running unions. Every year we would bank on growth in union numbers; growth in union income. I didn't think so at the time, but it was a pretty comfortable environment to be in - where you just work out how you are going to spend that extra 5% a year that is coming into your coffers.
The position now is that many secretaries have to ask, how are we going to balance our budget at a time when our income is falling? These are really tough decisions to make.
Similarly for union officials right down the line, members are dissatisfied with what they are getting out of their union because the union hasn't got its hands on the levers of power any more. The Arbitration Commission has limited power.
So that sense of crisis is pretty widespread. There is, everywhere we go a struggle to get the skills to be able to operate in a new environment. That is common right across the board.
How well is the concept of organising understood?
I think it is patchy. I think most people have got some idea what we are talking about but it does surprise me how often people think of 'organising' as employing organising works trainees, and making sure people are out there selling union memberships.
There is certainly a core of officials who understand it extremely well. And they are the people who are really giving us the signs of success that we desperately need.
This issue of "What's the difference between organising and recruitment?" is a petty argument, but it masks a really important philosophical difference in the way in which you look at how we are going to reverse union decline.
Recruitment has all the elements of selling a union membership, - that we need to send out a team of people to sell a union insurance policy. That is just absolutely the wrong way of conceptualising what the Australian union movement has to do to survive.
We are not selling insurance and the more we characterise what we do as "join the union and we'll guarantee to look after you", the more we are setting ourselves up for failure. Increasingly as the power of Arbitration Commissions around the country decline, our power is going to come from the ability of workers to stick together and defend their interests against the interests of employers.
Do members understand what is meant by organising?
Our experience is that when you talk to workers directly and explain what has happened to the union movement and explained the changes in our external environment, they get it instantly. They have experienced our declining power themselves in workplaces. They understand absolutely what it is like for the boss to have all the power. So when we come along and give them the ability to have a voice about the way in which they are treated - they understand organising absolutely.
Where I don't think it is understood clearly is where we try and introduce an organising change by stealth, or on a piecemeal basis, and you've got members who have got a tradition of union service that dates back for 80 or 90 years, and all of a sudden the union is behaving in a different kind of way. That is where you are going to get problems arising with members saying "well hell, what is this union on about? They don't return my phone calls. I can't get an organiser to come out and fix this problem." In those situations they don't understand organising at all.
So in transforming unions it is important to take the membership with you?
I don't think it is important, I think it is critical.
Let me spell out why it is so critical. I think it is critical for union leaders because unions that decide internally - within the union staff - well, we are going to become an organising union - and they don't bring their members with them -they set themselves up for electoral defeat.
If we have been saying for 90 years we want to deliver to you a marvellous insurance policy, and we are going to look after you and protect you as a third party, and all of a sudden we do something completely different, and we don't bring them with us, well why aren't they going to throw us out and bring in somebody who is going to promise to deliver what has always been delivered in the past.
Why don't unions take the debate out to members?
In part it is because union leaders aren't completely convinced about the dimension of the change that is required. In part it is because some union leaders don't have an absolutely clear vision of where they want to take the union in the future. And in part, I think union leaders are worried that members are going to say: "Well, thanks for telling us what you aim to do, but we don't like that, and we are not going to vote for you."
Doesn't that also mean union leaders have to give up some of their power?
Look, in a narrow sense, that is true. But, whether they like it or not union officials are already losing power as a result of the changes in the external environment.
We lost a huge number of members last year. That represents a decline in power. There is no longer an Arbitration Commission, which is capable of issuing a determination in the middle of a dispute - at least on a national level and in many of the States. That is a loss of power.
The shift to organising, I think, really has the potential to mean that union secretaries have a lot more power: They get a growing union again - at least over the long term. What would you rather be the leader of: - a union that is just gradually declining year on year, or a union that has a huge number of activists; that has got members taking responsibility for their own defence.
I mean, that is the best kind of power. Yes, it is a different reward system. You are no longer seen as the great saviour on your white horse, charging to the rescue. And yes, that is something you will lose when you adopt a process of organising. But you are on the winning side again.
So, this change requires a certain amount of idealism?
With the tough buffeting that unions are taking at the moment it is a perfectly rational response for union officials of all kinds to just say, well I am going to go and do something else.
If you are convinced that the union movement has got no future, then please look around for another job. So absolutely, idealism is the key driver of a change in unionism. If we don't believe in this stuff, then give up.
But I am convinced that the vast majority of union officials I talk to - as soon as you outline it in those terms - there is that gut feeling that they are not prepared to allow this to happen. That they are not prepared to allow our long tradition of union activity to just grind to a halt. And that is where I think the seeds of our revival have come from. Of people being prepared to say, this is going to be really tough, but I'm going to play my part in this.
What about the next layer of union officials isn't there a certain amount of self interest in the way things are?
Of course there is a certain amount of self-interest and people don't like giving up the nice cars and the good salaries and the reward system of being the hero in the Arbitration Commission. And yes, union officials do resist this change to a greater or lesser degree. But God, the vast majority of union officials - if they are convinced that to give workers the power of collective representation they need to go down this path, they go down this path.
But isn't there a generation of union officials with skills that are more appropriate for the old system?
Yeah, absolutely, but that is what the Organising Centre is all about. That is why we are going through such an intensive process of training for a huge number of union officials around the country. It would be completely unfair for us to say; you have got to change everything you do, and get on with it if we didn't provide the training that people need to be able to do it.
But we are doing that and I think the training is by and large of an incredibly high quality. It is of a quality that union movements in New Zealand, the US and Canada and the UK want to tap into. It is the one thing that we really are world leaders in. So yes, that is available. It is a question of people tapping into it.
You could say that the service sector is the achilles heel of the union movement. What have we been doing wrong there?
I think it is fundamentally a resource question. Organising costs a lot. You need to have a ratio of one organiser for say, 300 potential members a year, if you are aiming to get those members signed up, and it is a question of do the unions with coverage in the service sector have the resources to be able to put into it.
Now, at the same time, some of those unions are coping with decline.
What we need is for unions with coverage in the service sector to really become very serious and very focussed on the effective financial management of their operations and make a very clear redirection of resources into their growth areas.
I think we are seeing that with a number of the key service sector unions - LHMU I think is a model in this area, where both at a national and a branch level they are tightly financially managed and they are really redirecting significant resources into areas of potential growth.
Other unions are starting to grapple with this. I think the ASU for example, is right in the middle of working out how do we put say, 30% of our resources into a growth strategy.
If they succeed in doing that, then the union movement will be serious about getting into some of these growth areas such as IT and call centres.
The SDA is an enormously successful union, but they have a huge growth area in the retail sector. Now the test for that union is, are they going to be able to build on their strength and get an increasing proportion of retail sector employment. Go say, from a quarter, or a third, of the retail sector into representing half the retail sector. That would have an enormous impact on the union movement's overall density figures if they managed to pull that off.
Is there ever a point where a union is organised? Does it ever stop?
No, no, no. There is never a point when a union is organised. You can always get more of an activist base. There are always surely growth areas into which a union can push. And I think one of the interesting things that came out of the ACTU Congress - in fact possibly one of the most significant decisions the Congress made, was to introduce some freeing up of the demarcation structure in Australia, so that unions have the ability to go to the ACTU executive and say that there is a section of the workforce that is not being organised at the moment, that has no plans to be organised, and we would like the right to move into that area.
That of course is going to be enormously difficult and contentious in the implementation, but what that does is firstly it puts pressure on people with existing coverage rights, but also it gives the possibility that other unions will be able to expand their area of coverage and put resources into organising a non-unionised workforce.
The thing that we have got to remember is that there are seven million unorganised workers out there, and we only represent 25.7% of the total workforce. That means that we only have a limited ability to make inroads into the seven million.
We can't afford to have any union shrugging its shoulders and saying, well, we have finished now, we got 100% membership in our area, there is nothing more we can do.
We have got to work out ways for every union in this country to play a role in going after some bits of the seven million.
So it will be either use it or lose it?
I think use it or lose it is a pretty confronting kind of slogan. That certainly is one way in which you can characterise the ACTU Congress's new policy. But I certainly think that what the policy does is it is going to start making unions think seriously about what is reasonable in terms of maintenance of existing coverage.
Peetz makes the distinction between territory-driven unionism and member-driven unionism. And the reality is now with union decline pushing us further and further down, we can't afford to have unions that are motivated purely by preserving their territory. That has become an irrelevant anachronism now.
What is important is how many members in a particular industry have you organised? And if there is no prospect in the foreseeable future that you will be putting resources into that area, then we just have to get other unions putting the resources in there.
Unions will have to look at their responsibilities to the larger movement?
There is a large proportion of those seven million un-organised workers who are not getting a fair deal. That is the key driver of change. We can't allow seven million Australian workers to be treated in the way they are being treated. Wherever there is no union, workers don't have a voice, and every time you go out into a sector and you talk to people who aren't in a union, and frankly have no prospect of being in a union, you get quite horrifying stories of the arbitrary exercise of management authority. Of managers just clicking their fingers and expecting Australians to jump. And that is repugnant to our tradition. It is repugnant to the way in which we think Australian society should work. And that is the thing that we should be upset about.
How important is union education and are we doing enough of it?
Look, education is absolutely at the centre of an organising approach. How can you have increased levels of activism if you don't give your activists the skills to be able to do their job? How can you ask somebody to do the work of the union, if you don't at the same time say, and we will give you the help that you need to do that job for us?
People are just not going to volunteer to do this work unless they are satisfied that they can do it properly. Even if it is the most basic kind of union activity, they want the confidence that they are not going to stuff it up.
Since government funding of delegate education ended unions have been sacking training staff. Training staff are seen as the lowest status employee in the union. The amount of money going into training is at an all time low, and a huge proportion of our delegates and activists have received no training.
How do we fix it up? What has got to happen is that we have got to find ways of getting employers to pay for delegate education. And that is why we are looking for unions to act as a spearhead for a campaign around PEL - a scheme we have borrowed from the Canadian movement. Canadian employers contribute a certain payment per hour, per union member in a workplace, that goes into a trust fund and that is what is used to train delegates and activists.
But it goes further than that. We have got to make training both affordable and accessible for union members. We have got to be serious about getting union leave provisions put into enterprise agreements and making that an important issue that we bargain around.
We have got to break union training down into digestible modules so that it can be delivered at times that is convenient to members rather than at times that's is convenient to the union officers. It has got to be capable of being delivered at night, on weekends, in lunchtimes, wherever. And it has got to be capable of being delivered over the net or in people's homes or wherever they are.
So in the whole area of union education things have got to be turned on their head. But it will only be turned on its head when we change the nature of our union organisations and we see training and the empowerment of activists as central rather than peripheral.
How will the transformation of the union movement to an organising culture affect its relationship with the ALP?
I think things with the ALP are going to change, because if we have a completely different kind of union movement where activists are at the core of things; where member issues are driven from below; where union officials at every level are far more facilitators and coachers of collective action, rather than the great wise decision maker, that is going to mean that the ALP is going to be dealing with a substantially different kind of institution to the one that it has always dealt with in the past.
The ALP, when it deals with the union movement, will be dealing with a much smaller percentage of the workforce. I can't see us getting up to 50% of union membership in my lifetime again. But the 30% or the 35% that I hope we can get up to is going to be a proportion of the workforce that is extremely active - that is extremely self-confident in expressing its voice. The ALP will have to cope with that.
by Julie Venamore
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Helle Poulson Dobroyd has an abiding philosophy that takes her to places that don't most people would avoid 'like the plague' when planning a trip overseas. That philosophy is that there is a basic human right of health for everyone. The Lamp caught up with her between Mozambique and Sri Lanka.
Ever since her first overseas mission to Thailand, Helle has been well and truly hooked, 'It got under my skin, nothing was ever the same'. Talking with Helle is quite a heady experience as she talks about her passion for her work in third world countries, some with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and some without. Her great love is working in the area of HIV and this has taken her to Kyrghyzstan in central Asia and Malawi in Africa.
In Kyrghyzstan Helle worked with sex workers. Although syphilis had tripled over the 90s, the country had not seen a lot of input from other countries so it was not 'AIDS jaded' and the workers were thankful and thirsty for knowledge. MSF was the first organisation that paid attention to sex workers in this country and the project was successful. 'We looked at the best way to target these women with safe sex messages. It was fantastic work, I had a great group of women to work with.'
AIDS has devastated the tiny country of Malawi. Life expectancy is 57 years, but it is expected to fall to 36 years by 2005 because of the AIDS epidemic. Helle worked with children orphaned by HIV. Of a population of 13 million, 600,000 children were orphans. 'It is a former British colony colonised by Scottish Presbyterians and is somewhat conservative and prudish.
This contributes to the major problem they have here. The government has not taken up the HIV problem in an aggressive way, unlike countries like Thailand and Uganda. It is believed that only bad people have HIV but with an incidence of 1 in 3 with HIV, there is an obvious problem with double standards.'
The job was to set up a counselling service for the guardians of the orphans. She re-members one woman who had 13 siblings to take care of, so she was more interested in how she was going to feed these children rather than how to stop getting the di-sease. 'This is rapidly becoming a country without adults. There were these twins named Danny and Johnny and they were the head of a family. They had three younger brothers and lived under the table in the local market. Danny and Johnny were six years old.'
AIDS is not treated in Malawi. 'There are no fancy drugs. All I had to work with was a few Panadol, a few antibiotics, some anti-fungal creams and that's it. We made the most of natural products and had some success with the sap of the frangipani tree for herpes zoster. It seemed to heal the herpes really quickly and also prevented the post-hepatic neuralgia.'
Helle has always been a feminist but came back from Africa an avowed feminist. She believes that HIV is a feminist issue because women are more at risk of contracting HIV than men. Women are powerless to do anything about their partner's sexual behaviour in Malawi. Malawi manhood was defined by their sexual behaviour so as soon as the men got a little money, off they went to the beer hall, the beer girls and the prostitutes.
If a woman was widowed then she automatically became the property of her brother-in-law and he could do as he wished. Perhaps he would take her in as another wife, if she was good looking, or he may take her property and kick the women and children out onto the street, if she was ugly.'
Most at risk of contracting HIV were the young women who were constantly compromised by men. Because of AIDS, men preferred sex with virgins. In a place where poverty and the promise of food or even a pencil or a book could buy sex, young women often fall victim to school teachers.
Helle's nursing career began as a psych nurse at Callan Park and her Australian experience has been pre-dominantly community mental health at Darlinghurst in Sydney and working with HIV. Her first mission was to Thailand where she worked with Cam-bodian refugees. 'There was a very high suicide rate because they had come through the Pol Pot regime, had seen their families slaughtered and had absolutely nothing.'
She later worked as a community psychiatric nurse with Aboriginal communities for a few months in central Australia. 'I really enjoyed that a lot. I think bush nurses are fantastic. When I was out there, these nurses thought my life's work had been glamorous, but the work of the bush nurse is very understated. I would love to do what they do but simply don't have the skills because I'm not general-trained.'
General training may have helped her a little in Mozambique, but with her work in the cholera camps from Christmas to June this year, Helle rapidly became an expert. She was stationed in Maputo where it was particularly bad because the floods had destroyed what little sanitation existed. On arrival, there were over 1000 admissions a week to the cholera centre.
'People were just coming in and dropping, they were so massively dehydrated.' Because cholera is resistant to antibiotics, the treatment has simply rehydration, and the Mozam-bique treatment was 'the infusion' rather than oral fluids. Cannulation was very much hit and miss to the extent where arms had been amputated. Veins were difficult to find but determination by the local nurses to get the infusion going created havoc.
'I remember one 25-year-old woman. They couldn't find a vein and were at both arms until 3 in the morning. She tolerated the incessant needle jabs without complaint, but then, no one ever complained.'
With Helle's experiences in third world countries, she has developed very strong views about Australia's track record with international aid.
'We should be a lot more generous in what we give to other countries, especially to those in our sphere of influence such as the Pacific. I was horrified to come home from Kyrghyzstan to see Timorese people chaining themselves to gates so they wouldn't be sent back. So meanspirited of the Australian Govern-ment - a government that procrastinated ad nauseum about having a presence in East Timor; finally took action and sent a peacekeeping force and then what. Howard et al reaped the publicity. They huffed and they puffed, they patted themselves on the back and and then the proclamation,'Well it's over now so you can go back to where you came from.'
And when it comes to indigenous people in this country, we just haven't got it right according to Helle. 'The bush nurses I talked about earlier, they see worse things than I've seen yet they are working within a system that shouldn't be like that. When it comes to health, sanitation, hygiene etc, these nurses are working under third world conditions. It's appalling. When I was working in Alice Springs, the bureaucrats stopped the funding for a low-cost program teaching nutrition to aboriginal mothers. The program did so much good and it cost peanuts. The health status of Australia's aboriginal people is a scandal, and just look at what our 'altruistic' government does to them.
Before Helle rushed out the door to get ready for yet another mission, this time in Sri Lanka, I asked her about working for MSF. 'One of the things I really like about them is that their funding largely depends on private donors so they are not beholden to any government. That's terrific because that allows you to be a worker and witness. MSF encourages you to be an advocate for the people, you can speak out, if you wish, against any atrocities or any infringements against human rights.'
And finally, well of course she would urge any nurse contemplating similar adventures to make the move. 'It's a great experience for any nurse. It broadens your experience in so many ways, technically because you get to do things you don't do in Australia but you also get some wonderful instant rewards. Like the child with cholera who arrives unconscious and three days later is giggling and smiling.' 'I really am hooked, aren't I?'
by Andrew Scott
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In my book Running on Empty: 'Modernising' the British and Australian labour parties, recently published by Pluto Press, I say that the clash between 'modernisers' and 'traditionalists' in the Labor Party is part of a wider debate between the advocates of inexorable, scientific 'progress' and those who question whether this so-called 'progress' represents in reality an advance in the human condition at all.
The term 'progressive' is often counterposed to 'conservative', but, as Raymond Williams has said, 'it is certainly significant that nearly all political tendencies now wish to be described as 'progressive' ... [which] is more frequently now a persuasive rather than a descriptive term'.
Since he said that, the conventional indicators of 'progress' have come under increasingly substantial criticism.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been exposed as a narrow, flawed and misleading measure.
The real electoral backlash at the 1996 election against the 'modernisation' of the Australian Labor Party, followed by the rise of support for Pauline Hanson to the point where her Party gained one million votes at the last national election, is in large measure a protest against the notion that the particular kind of economic 'rationalist' change which has been imposed over recent decades does, in fact, represent real social progress.
So what do I mean by a 'progressive' economic policy?
I mean one which brings social as well as economic progress, and, crucially, one which tackles inequalities at home and abroad as well as boosting overall output: a policy for wealth redistribution as well as wealth generation.
We keep hearing today that the 'new economy' is displacing the 'old economy'.
Some Labor spokespeople are saying we must pursue new industries and forget about old ones.
But the dichotomies are not really so clear-cut.
The oversimplified contrast between "new" and "old" jobs, for instance, causes the substantial overlaps between the new information technology industries and what has conventionally been called "the manufacturing sector" to be lost sight of.
It misrepresents the nature of the choices ahead for the Australian labour movement.
Much of the newness, much of the technological change which has been occurring in modern economies is in fact within the manufacturing industry.
As well as being careful with our choice of words we need to be accurate about keeping things in proper historical perspective.
Some Australian Labor identities deal with ideas they don't like - like "the present strong focus in Labor policy on public funding for education" by just dismissing them as "old politics".
This is symptomatic of a wider pattern in so-called Third Way thinking, which has prompted British commentator Nick Cohen to express alarm at the readiness of one think tank associated with Tony Blair's New Labour to pronounce the end of just about everything.
"In just four years , it has declared 'the end of politics', 'the end of unemployment', 'the end of social democracy', [and] 'the end of 200 years of industrial society'".
It hands out "death sentences like Judge Jeffreys with a migraine" , he says.
So what is an accurate historical perspective on past, present, and future Labor policy.
In recent times, Labor frontbenchers have indicated a number of policy directions.
They have correctly committed the Party to an increased immigration intake as part of a forward-looking population policy.
They have also emphasised in their speeches the need to boost public expenditure on education, to reverse the scandalous slide in public and private support for research and development under the Howard government, and to invest more in skills.
We need to boost public expenditure on education because if we do not there will continue to be not enough up-to-date books in University libraries or access to the new technologies, the up-to-date computers and software programs, for the very many who cannot afford them at home.
But as well as now needing to attach dollar commitments to the 'Knowledge Nation' rhetoric to give it some real policy substance and credibility Labor ought to know from its own experience of government in the 1980s and early 1990s that investment in skills by itself is not enough.
The endless emphasis on skills and training in the 1980s and 1990s manifestly did not stop high unemployment. Displaced workers definitely do need appropriately designed and sensitive programs of reskilling but even more they need infrastructure development and public sector job creation aimed at expanding community facilities and services in their regions.
The ALP's reluctance to accept this stems in part from the fact that it has largely opted out of the tax debate since 1996-7, presenting no comprehensive fairer alternative solution to Australia's revenue shortfall even though it is obvious that we could do something clever and popular to create a more progressive tax system if we made the political effort.
Partial "rollbacks" of the iniquitous GST will not in themselves be enough to move us anywhere near a fair and equitable taxation system, one which is also adequate to fund the social expenditures now required.
Labor has also unfortunately failed to unchain its mind from the imprisoning assumptions of neo-liberal economics, such as opposition to deficit financing.
ALP leaders have committed themselves to running future large budget surpluses, despite the fact that, as the American economist Professor Robert Eisner has demonstrated, the apparent size of a government Budget deficit for a given financial year is, in its real economic effect, reduced greatly in size (and often turns out to be a surplus) once adjusted for the effect of inflation.
This means that we are likely to have a Labor government which will be reluctant to either tax or spend.
Eisner believes that the economic dragons nations should be attempting to slay are not mythically measured budget deficits. The real economic troubles we face are those of poverty, income inequality, and a failure to invest in human capital and public infrastructure.
Perhaps we do not so much need to move 'Towards a New Economy', as this session is titled, but rather we need to adopt new, broader and more accurate measures of our existing and in many cases long-standing economic activity.
And that means looking beyond official data to get an accurate picture of activities not included in market transactions, such as housework, research, and the volunteer services provided by nonprofit institutions like museums, schools, and churches.
We also need to face up to the fact that the public sector has been run down too far.
The ALP should strongly affirm that Australia can no longer afford to have such a lean public sector at a time when economic stimulus is needed in order to boost jobs (including for the hidden and mature age unemployed) as well as in order to rebuild community infrastructure and to reduce inequalities.
What people must realise in discussing government expenditure is that every cut has a consequence. Every time public outlays are reduced to appease world financial markets, real social injury results in the towns and suburbs and regions of this country. Public sector spending is the main means of narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
Furthermore, a key factor in the rise of unemployment is that the absolute number of jobs has been falling in the public sector. Direct job creation, particularly in regions of very high unemployment, should therefore now be back on Labor's policy agenda.
Proponents of the so-called "Third Way" have been quiet about the fact that the Blair government in Britain has been steadily losing support from core supporters since its electoral triumph in 1997, as Ken Livingstone's election as Mayor of London has just shown. This serious fall in support is because Blair has failed to fulfil those core supporters' hopes for different policies that will substantially tackle the dilapidation of public services and entrenched regional and income inequalities.
'Third Way' advocates also tend to be silent about the fact that some social democratic governments in European countries are pursuing much more progressive political agendas than Blair and Clinton, adding to the comparative historic achievements of the Left in those nations which we should still strive to catch up to.
Any incoming ALP government should examine more closely the different attempts by the left of centre political parties in other western nations to deal with the end of the economic "golden age" since the early 1970s and the widespread resurgence of neo-liberal ideologies since the late 1970s; and should identify more fully and learn from the fundamental differences between the experiences of social democratic parties in individual Western European nations during this period of crisis.
There has been widespread dismay at the backward shift to the destructive 1980s style economic policies in the ALP's upper echelons since the 1998 election gains, particularly given that those gains were won on the basis of a shift away from the economic policies of the 80s.
The ALP's reversion has included the aggressive promotion of so-called "free" trade.
The ALP trade spokesperson has even criticised the Howard government for not promoting so-called "free" trade enough.
Labor zealots for further unilateral tariff reduction are obsessed with proving their purity by outdoing the rest of the real world.
They consistently fail to see or adjust their position to the realities that the US and Europe simply are not reciprocating by really reducing trade barriers, and that they are not going to.
The Australian people on the other hand can see these realities and they want a more pragmatic and commonsense approach to international trade accordingly.
Is the push by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), led by Doug Cameron, for 'fair' rather than so-called 'free' trade a progressive economic policy?
If we regard attempts to eradicate exploitation of child labour as necessary for real progress in this world, then the answer must surely be yes.
Doug Cameron has said that he "will take a very strong position to Labor Party conference".
He says that:
I don't see this as about going back, I see this as about Australia engaging with the rest of the world. You see President Clinton, his Trade Officer, Barshevsky, the Canadians, the Europeans, all are now looking at the question of core labour standards in trade...[This is a] question of trade not being simply an economic outcome...trade has to deal with the issue of labour, slave labour, in Burma, the issue of child labour in areas such as Turkey, in Pakistan, these are areas that the rest of the world is saying has to be addressed...this is an issue of human rights...[in] Brazil, three and a half million children...have got no access to education, because they are in workplaces, doing work for employers and trying to make profits for them...there are some core labour standards. The core labour standards are the right to belong to a union, the right to collectively bargain and that should be a human right everywhere...I'm not saying we rule out trade with anyone. I'm saying that what we should, as a nation, say that we want those nations that we are trading with to protect their environment, look after the social values and the standards of their workers...And if they are not prepared to take that, I think it means that we will come under more and more pressure to reduce our wages and living conditions here...I'm very concerned about APEC [the APEC timetable on free trade by the year 2010, in other words, about nine and a half years from now].. I'm very concerned that the manufacturing industry will be opened up to a hundred and fifty million workers in China, who have got no basic rights. I want to make sure we've got apprenticeships, I want to make sure we've got an engineering industry in this country.
Australian critics of the "fair trade" push have attacked it as a smokescreen for "protectionism" and as merely motivated by self-interest of workers in developed countries rather than real concern for workers in developing countries.
This is exactly the same rhetoric which has always been used against trade unions trying to enhance minimum wages and conditions: they have long been attacked as self-interested and pricing the unemployed out of work.
If trade unions had ever believed this they would never have won minimum wages and working conditions domestically. If we believe it now we will never move towards achieving minimum labour standards internationally.
The so-called "free" traders see themselves as being the true progressives in the trade debate.
Yet one official document recently circulated by them in the ALP titled "A Progressive Trade Policy" did not even mention the goal of eradicating child labour. It has been left to the AMWU to bring this and other crucial issues, like environment and labour standards in general, to the forefront of the trade policy debate.
Those who criticise a fairer and more balanced approach to trade are simply not concerned about inequalities or doing anything to overcome them.
Further, they fail to see the desire for accountability, and the affirmation and reassertion of democracy, which has been part of the protests at the elite world economic forums held in Seattle, Davos, and Washington within the last year - and in a few weeks time to be held here in Melbourne.
The evidence is abundantly clear from public opinion polls that most Australians do not support privatisation, so-called "free" trade, or the job losses and community disintegration caused by radical economic restructuring.
The ALP should be reflecting this public opinion in its policies.
But the fixated "free" traders think they know better than the people. Anyone who opposes their particular point of view is, by definition, a 'populist'.
In my view, we cannot have progress without democracy; a progressive economic policy must be one supported by, not based on a denial of, the people's will.
Labor's economic dries appear more concerned with defending the view that Labor was always right in the 80s and 90s on economic policy than with mapping out a truly progressive economic policy for the people the ALP is meant to represent for the new millenium.
They have inserted into the new draft platform for 2000 - a document which is supposed to be a blueprint for the new millennium - not once but twice, a new, backward-looking and jarring paragraph that reads as follows:
"The direction Labor pursued in the 1980s and 1990s of...internationalising the economy and reducing protection cannot and should not be reversed".
What should be in our platform instead is a positive emphasis on the economic policies which the Australian labour movement needs to pursue now to meet the challenges of the new millennium:
A recognition for instance that:
Another country which has achieved very low unemployment without the exploitative wage-cutting approach in the United States, is the Netherlands.
Both are models which should inform Labor's policy approach.
The task of tackling inequality is one which the ALP now needs to focus on fully.
The research which recently appeared in the Australian newspaper confirms how Australia has become dramatically more unequal as a result of the economic and policy changes of the 1980s and 1990s. Predictably however the sponsors of the research could not bring themselves to actually support any policy changes which might stop this trend continuing.
A Labor government will need to stop this trend continuing and to do so it will need to reclaim all available policy instruments.
This means contesting the mythology that globalisation and new technology have cut off most progressive democratic political options including the continued comprehensive provision of welfare on a basis of need.
Dean Baker, Gerald A. Epstein and Robert Pollin are the editors of a collection titled Globalisation and Progressive Economic Policy published in paperback last year by Cambridge University Press. The contributors to this book challenge mainstream thinking about the nature of globalisation, emphasising that capitalist market processes, left to operate freely, tend to generate injustice, insecurity, instability, and inefficiency.
Taking account of the realities of globalisation, they propose alternatives to neo-liberal orthodoxy: policy measures that counter the destructive features of markets and promote equality.
These are the kind of policy measures, this is the kind of new approach which it will be politically essential for the next Labor government to undertake.
Critics of the Left's more measured approach to 'globalisation' say we are rejecting an "internationalist" policy.
Internationalism does not mean surrendering to global capital.
Internationalism is in fact a philosophy which the Left has long embraced, from the dispatch of volunteers from around the world to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War; through our solidarity with the British miners' strike in the 1980s, when many of today's fair-weather friends of Blair's New Labour had no interest in, only derision for our comrades in the British labour movement; to today's burgeoning world-wide activities against the negative effects of "globalisation".
The true meaning of internationalism for those on the left of centre is achieving international solidarity between the workers of the world.
Much of what is presented as inevitable globalisation is really enshrining pro-capitalist, neo-liberal policies on a world scale, it is about globalising corporate power.
As social democrats we should be concerned instead with internationalising workers' power, workers' rights and people's democratic power.
In his book Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? : Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century, published last year, Arthur MacEwan asks whether it is true that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal ideology of free trade, deregulation of markets, and government abandonment of social programs?
Must we accept, in the name of globalisation, the relentless pressure to reduce wages and cut social spending?
Can poor countries pursue no other route to development but opening their economies to global forces?
He sets out to explore these questions.
In doing so, he subjects central tenets of modern economics to trenchant criticism. He argues that current policies are delivering neither sustained economic growth nor many of the other fundamentals of people's wellbeing.
He also argues that it is possible to construct a democratic economic strategy that produces growth and equity, while protecting the environment and securing local communities.
The ALP needs to construct, develop and implement such an approach here if it is to possess a genuinely progressive economic policy:
A policy for social progress and justice;
A social democratic philosophy which stands as a stark alternative to free-market liberalism so that voters in Australia can have some real choices again between the two major parties.
Only by offering this clear alternative can Labor hope to solidly rebuild its core vote.
A Progressive Economic Policy for Labor in Government is a speech given by Andrew Scott to the Unchain My Mind forum : New social-democratic ideas for Labor in government jointly organised by Pluto Press Australia and the Australian Fabian Society, Thursday, 27 July.
Andrew Scott is the author of 'Running on Empty'. He is a lecturer at School of Social Sciences and Planning, RMIT University. Email:[email protected]
by ITF
Voting in Valencia at a meeting of the Fair Practices Committee of the International Transport Workers' Federation, they agreed to accept a comprehensive package of pay and conditions hammered out earlier this month with the ship employers' organisation IMEC.
At the same meeting delegates stepped up pressure on the Chinese shipping giant COSCO over unfair cargo handling practices, when they agreed to support a new global campaign by ITF-affiliated dock workers. They also designated Bolivia and Equatorial Guinea as two new flags of convenience because of their poor port control records and the high proportions of foreign vessels in their registries.
The first ever internationally-negotiated pay agreement between unions and ship employers phases in a pay rise for seafarers to a US$1,400 benchmark by 2004, and guarantees an annual rise of US$50 to that date.It also lays down minimum standards for working conditions and contains a clause that will allow seafarers to respect industrial action by fellow workers, including dockers. For the first time seafarers worldwide will be free to choose not to cross picket lines.
The terms of the agreement state that IMEC's 30-40 members - who employ some 60,000 seafarers from 43 countries will be obliged to bring to task any of their members who break the terms of the deal.
While welcoming this hard-won consensus with ship employers, ITF delegates at the meeting kept their sights on the ongoing campaign against flags of convenience and abuses against workers at sea. Voting in the two new flags of convenience they noted, for example, how Bolivia advertised its willingness to take "any vessel". In the Paris MOU area, in 1998, all three of its inspected ships were detained. In 1999, of eight ships inspected, seven were detained.
Delegates also approved the blacklisting of six new shipping companies, adopted plans to set up a cruise ship campaign office in Miami, and threw their weight behind a call from dockers' representatives to fight cargo handling practices by COSCO.
One of the biggest ship owners in the world, COSCO stands accused of instructing its seafarers to undertake dangerous loading and unloading work which would normally be done by trained dock workers. With repeated protests to COSCO meeting no response, the ITF is now calling on its 400,000 affiliated dock worker members to start a campaign specifically targeting COSCO ships. All the ITF's 120 inspectors in ports worldwide will be on the look-out for vessels owned or managed by COSCO, monitoring their operations and reporting back to the ITF Secretariat.
Other resolutions at the Valencia meeting included backing for the idea of a Seafarers' Charter guaranteeing minimum services to seafarers fromt their unions, and a pledge to continue supporting the struggle of trade unions in Fiji to restore democracy in their country.
by Demos Foundation
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In particular, it is claimed that Generation X - the cohort brought up in the 1970s and 1980s - cares primarily about itself. Surveys show, for example, that more young people than ever before report an interest in becoming wealthy and owning their own businesses.
The rise of individualism, the values of the 1960s, television, economic change and a host of other factors are blamed for fostering an atomised world in which people feel less social connection and less interest in common issues or collective solutions.
When set against the available data, this relatively simplistic story appears difficult to substantiate, for several reasons.
First, reported interest in political issues is not falling. The latest Eurobarometer survey of European public opinion concludes that 'the often-reported decline in political interest is not apparent from these...results.' Less than a third of the public in 15 European countries say that they never talk about politics.
In America, although more report being bored by events in Washington DC, the number reporting interest in national and local affairs remained constant or even rose slightly during the early 1990s.
In Britain, recent research similarly concludes that young people are not fundamentally uninterested in political issues.
Nor do people necessarily favour individualised solutions to social problems more than they used to.
Although less than two in five Americans think that more government programmes will solve America's social ills, many European societies continue to advocate collective solutions. For example, in Britain New Labour's 1997 victory was preceded by a significant shift in people's identification with policies which work for the whole society, rather than helping individuals get richer.
Secondly, within the broad range of social and political activities, some forms of engagement are increasing. For example, during the 1980s people's participation in unconventional political action rose slightly.
In general, surveys show an enduring correlation between interest in politics and education. As educational levels have increased, so has reported political interest.
In particular, people are increasingly engaging with social issues through their consumption. For example, about a third of the British population say that environmental considerations influence their purchasing patterns.
Ethical brands are a small but growing force in some products - fairly traded coffee such as Caf� Direct now has 3 per cent of the UK market. Ethically invested financial services are also growing strongly.
A recent survey of representative samples in twenty five countries found that social responsibility was the most influential factor in public impressions of individual companies, and one in five consumers reported actively rewarding or punishing a company for its perceived social performance.
The politics of globalisation increasingly focus attention and political action on the behaviour of corporations, and the potential of citizen action, combined with media campaigning, to bring about political change. This shift is consistent with the growing influence of consumption patterns in shaping people's sense of identity and self-image, and with the declining salience of traditional class divisions in many countries.
Thirdly, volunteering and giving to charities has also remained steady in most industrialised countries.
In sum, the landscape at the start of the twenty first century is not apolitical. The long term changes are complex, and relate partly to the capacity of established political organisations to respond to and accommodate new patterns of political engagement. These patterns include the growing range and diversity of political concerns, and the proliferation of channels through which political values and opinions can be expressed. It is to these issues of traditional political engagement to which we now turn.
Affiliation to parties is falling
Within this landscape, the first major shift common to most countries is the decline of attachment to individual parties. The most comprehensive survey of 19 industrialised countries shows that identification with a party fell, on average, among 17 countries between the 1960s and 1990s. The average annual fall is usually less than 1 per cent, but over thirty years this amounts to a significant shift. Perhaps most significantly, party identification is down among the young, the better educated and the politically sophisticated.
However, two key drivers of change stand out.
The decline of single ideologies and broadening of the issues base
There is consistent evidence that the number of issues which people are concerned with has increased. Most people are still concerned about core economic issues. For example, job security has remained a consistent concern for three quarters of the American population over the last twenty years.
But other areas have simultaneously become more important. For example, concern for the environment, women's rights and animal welfare have shown consistent increases.
These newer issues often focus on issues of lifestyle and quality of life, and reflect the well-documented shift towards a new set of 'core values'. As general levels of affluence have risen, the priorities of economic survival, security and insurance against basic forms of risk have been supplemented, and often supplanted, by a broader range of concerns.
Across the western world the proportion of the population giving considerable emphasis to such issues has increased by 20-30 per cent since 1970.
As the number of salient issues has increased, it has become harder for people to 'buy into' a single slate of policies. Individuals increasingly hold an eclectic range of views that a single party finds hard to encompass or accommodate.
This diversification has arguably been compounded by an increasing fuzziness in what parties stand for over time. The all-encompassing ideologies which dominated twentieth century politics have broken down during the last three decades.
In the industrialised world, the economic and social policies of the so-called left and right have merged in increasingly fluid ways. For example, in many countries, protectionist policies and calls for macro-economic demand management are no longer automatically associated with the left, while social authoritarianism is no longer the preserve of the traditional right.
These changes have both driven and been accelerated by a growing emphasis on candidate-focused politics. Accompanied by economic restructuring in many countries, changing individual values and the erosion of ideological frameworks have weakened the traditional class basis of organised politics.
A decline in associational organisations
A second, sometimes related, development is the decline of organisations that linked people both to parties themselves, and to traditional forms of political engagement.
For example, across the industrialised world Trade Union membership has slightly declined. In the US, the proportion of non-agricultural workers belonging to a trade union is below 15 per cent, less than half the level reported in the 1950s.
Other forms of social organisation associated with parties were also important in some countries, for example Conservative Clubs in Britain. Such local social clubs have tended to decline, whether or not they are formally linked to parties. In other countries declining church membership has loosened affiliation to Christian parties.
Elections are more volatile
The first effect of these changes is to increase electoral volatility. Spectacular volatility has been evident in elections such as the 1993 Canadian election, in which the conservatives fell from a clear majority to just two MPs. Overall, volatility has increased in 15 of 18 nations.
More people are also splitting their votes at different levels of the political system, preferring to put different parties into power at local, regional and national levels. As part of the same broad shift, more voters defer their decision about who to vote for until election campaigns are well under way.
Declining membership in parties
A related trend is the decline of membership and activism in many parties.
Party membership in all European countries except Germany is lower than in the 1960s.
It is arguable that such a decline in membership does not matter greatly for parties, for several reasons. First, most parties have greater media resources and are able to reach greater audiences without necessarily maintaining a mass membership base.
Second, funding has not generally declined, with the state, wealthy individual donors, companies and trade unions compensating for the loss of individual subscriptions.
Third, there is some evidence that those activists who remain within parties are more active than in the past. However, two specific challenges stand out.
First, systems of party organisation must be able to nurture new generations of political leaders.
As formal institutions lose deference and trust among their publics, political leadership positions need a broader, more diverse base on which to draw. The decline of party membership has the potential to signify less intensive competition for leadership election, and a narrower range of skills and experience among candidates.
Second, national politics and parties still rely on effective local organisation for activism, between and during election campaigns. A recent review of turnout in the UK European elections found that effective local organisation was critical to stemming or reversing the decline in turnout observed.
The decline of party membership, and especially of active party members, threatens the strength of local political cultures and the relevance of local party organisations to the broad mass of public concern at local level.
Turnout at elections is declining
The second broad shift in the landscape of political engagement is declining turnout.
Where the better educated and more politically aware are losing their allegiance to parties fastest, it tends to be poorer and least enfranchised groups it is the poorer who are opting out of voting altogether.
Declining civic engagement
Voting rarely makes sense from the viewpoint of individual rationality: one vote almost never makes a difference. In this sense, turning out to vote is always partly a question of attachment to a general sense of civic duty.
Surveys consistently show that more than 9 out of 10 people think that it is important to vote. However, it may be that the progressive decline in feelings of 'social connectedness' (as one commentator, Robert Putnam, dubs it) is having an impact on turnout levels. The relatively mobile and the unmarried are less likely to vote.
In the US, at least, there is also evidence that membership of locally based civic organisations is declining. Civic engagement is strongly correlated with levels of broad political engagement.
Complexity of voting
Another possible explanation is that the process of voting has become more complex.
A more plausible explanation is that voters are put off by the complexity of issues they are being asked to vote on. Without such clear ideological preferences or party differences, making up one's mind is increasingly difficult.
Simply asking people to vote more frequently also decreases voting - Switzerland, which has the most frequent referendums, and the USA, which has many electoral tiers and opportunities to vote on particular issues, have experienced the most rapid declines.
Decline in activism
Finally, there is some evidence that the decline in activism already noted has had a negative impact on turnout. For example, people who have had contact with a canvasser are more likely to vote, but the proportion who report such contact has greatly declined in Britain over the last few decades. In particular, while media campaigns reach people for national elections, local elections still rely on activism.
As digital technologies and the Internet fragment media audiences, the ability of parties to reach mass audiences through more recent campaigning methods may also begin to decline.
The decline in turnout is arguably a more serious problem for parties of the centre left than for others. As we have noted, declines have been greatest among the young and poorer sections of society, traditionally more important constituencies for the left, especially in the context of ageing demographic profiles.
Declining trust
The third broad area of concern is focused on evidence that politicians and political institutions are trusted less. Of thirteen countries for which data are available, twelve show decline in levels of confidence expressed in politicians. The World Values survey in the early 1990s found that in 8 advanced industrial societies, only 22 per cent of the public expressed confidence in political parties as institutions.
These declines of trust in political institutions are matched in most countries by declining confidence in the most important public institutions, such as the civil service and legal system.
There are, however, some indications that this trend may be levelling off or even reversing.
Like affiliation and turnout, the causes of these shifts are subject to considerable debate. They do not reflect a rejection of democracy per se. More people than ever say that democracy is the best way to run a country - none more so than the American public, who have particularly low confidence in their politicians.
Government irrelevance and failure
The most comprehensive recent analysis suggests that the problem lies primarily in the relevance and performance of politicians and government. This analysis points out that confidence in political institutions often rose during the 1950s and 1960s, period during which economic and social conditions generally improved rapidly. As growth slowed and unemployment rose, confidence also waned. At the same time, average government spending rose from 25 per cent of GDP in 1960 to 47 per cent in 1997.
The authors also point out that smaller countries which have done better in economic and social terms over the last 15 years achieved higher trust. Although economic growth rates in the United States were higher than in Europe, the benefits were largely confined to the wealthiest fifth of the population.
Alongside this analysis runs the suggestion that the power of governments to influence economic and cultural conditions has declined with the increase in global trade and communications. For example, imports and exports in OECD countries increased by an average of 12 per cent of GDP during the 1980s. Finally, the authors suggest that confidence is partly dependent on levels of corruption.
Overall, the argument is that people are right to reduce their confidence in our political institutions, during a period in which their capacity to deliver increased wealth and security, and to effect change in a fast-changing external environment, has fallen.
This analysis is convincing, and may go some way to explain the increase in confidence over the last few years of economic growth. However, it is probably not a full explanation. Over the last fifty years we have witnessed a change in patterns of trust held by the public in most experts, not just politicians.
The immediate post war generations were more trusting of leaders and experts in general than those who grew up between the wars. Those born since the 1960s have experienced steadily declining confidence. Part of the story, alongside the impact of growth and institutional effectiveness, seems to be the loss of deference among the public for institutions and leaders of most kinds.
The importance of these changes for parties is difficult to assess. On one level, we are surely witnessing the growth of a culture in which trust must be earned, and in which automatic deference to hierarchy is less common.
Among corporations, consumer relations and marketing strategies increasingly focus on winning customers by earning trust through positive experience, and then sustaining it through repeated demonstration that products and services are customised to the individual, as well as representing value for money.
This set of changes also points to the need for public institutions to respond more radically to the demands placed on them by a changing environment, and more sceptical, demanding citizens.
One general implication is that parties and politicians have an important stake in the strength and health of a broader civic culture which extends beyond purely partisan loyalty and activism.
The existence of a public sphere, in which citizens both express confidence and have opportunities to engage, is in many ways a prerequisite for the effective function of party organisations.
Conclusions: questions for parties
The overall conclusion must be that in most, if not all, of the industrialised democracies, the system of representation and party organisation offered is one which fits less and less well with the structure of political concern among citizens, despite the fact that this concern, in general, remains high.
Mass political parties have been an integral part of the infrastructure of industrial democracies during the 20th century.
By and large, their organisational form and political identity have been closely dovetailed with the dominant organisational forms and characteristics of that period - parliamentary democracies, stable ideological blocs organised broadly around the interests of capital and labour, widespread membership with a much smaller minority of activists, and hierarchical forms of organisation.
At local level, parties have occupied a key place in the ecology of civil society, helping to link local political groupings and concerns, and providing a channel of communication between local and national arenas.
As the economic, social and technological underpinnings of these systems are gradually transformed, we should expect the basis of party organisation to change, and in many systems it already has.
Television and national media campaigning has become more important, while local activism has become more focused and targeted. Partisan attachment has become more contingent, and in many parties less dependent on political and family tradition.
The key question is not whether parties have a future, but how they can adapt to the emergence of a new social and media infrastructure, and how well they can group and rank an increasingly diverse range of citizen and political concerns.
This is an edited version of a Demos briefing paper by Tom Bentley, Ben Jupp and Daniel Stedman Jones. The complete paper can be found at http://www.demos.co.uk/ For more details, email [email protected].
by The Chaser
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Ms Nile blamed smokers in Parliament House, the long hours demanded of politicians and her recent successes in the Christian Democrats' "war on masturbation" as contributing to her decision to quit. According to Nile, a recent Department of Education study suggests that awkward moments of teenage self-exploration are now as likely to be expressed through Bible study, sublimated tendencies to violence and the use of self-flagellation as through the use of "the poor man's Palm Pilot".
A senior member of the Department today described the report as "definitive, though not in any sense real ... we just cooked it up to stop her calling us every damn day".
"Now that we have succeeded in stamping out the sin of Onan, we can, at last, have some well-earned rest," Mrs Nile told a packed news conference full of journalists and well-wishers.
Mrs Nile said she felt that her time in Parliament had achieved many successes for decent caring Christians. She named the increases in gay bashings and the continued need for intravenous drug users to use dirty needles in children's parks rather than shooting galleries as the two greatest achievements of her time in Parliament.
"Every time I think of those faggots making fun of my husband during their filthy parade I am calmed by the knowledge that if they don't get a good bashing then at least they will be punished in hell," said Nile.
by Tony Moore
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"....the most evil film I've ever seen" ? Melbourne Herald 1976
"The fastest film from Australia" Rolling Stone ? 1976
"The most talked about film at Cannes" ? High Times ? 1976
Strewth Magazine is presenting the 70s Australian drug cult classic Pure Shit in a one off screening as a fundraising for the magazine, at the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Wednesday 23rd August, 7pm.
Deemed evil by the tabloids and "too hard for the wowsers to handle" (Nation Review) and nearly banned by the Censor, Pure Shit is a black comedy trip into the Melbourne's drug subculture of the 70s. The film features a huge cast of characters including Helen Garner, HG Nelson and Max Gillies as a doctor.
At the time Pure Shit stood out for its dirty realism alongside pretty costumed escapism like Picnic At Hanging rock.
Pure Shit follows a group of junkies on their endless quest for the next hit. It is flashback time as every 70s cool speak cliche gets trotted out complete with bad clothes and woeful hairdos. The road movie style action which was deliberately directed as a comedy then ? viewed today is hysterical. The use of Australian slang proved so difficult for the overseas market that a sub?titled version had to be made available.
The film which listed no screen credits for either cast or crew was directed by Bert Delling and shot on 16mm with a budget of $28,000. Delling worked closely with junkies so that all the scenes in the film represent real life experiences.
Pure Shit is not just 'fits and flares', but has a political message being partly funded by the Buoyancy Foundation an organisation to help drug takers. Its aim was to make a film to counteract government? produced anti?drug films which failed to communicated the realities or communicate to those involved.
For more information contact:
Morag White - Publicist -0411 879 016
Or Tony Moore- (02) 9519 3299
Pure Shit
Wednesday 23rd August, 7pm
Chauvel Cinema - Paddington
$15 film/party
Bookings: Chauvel - 9361 5398
by Peter Lewis
SYDNEY: September 23, 1993. It's the night the city's been waiting for and I'm one third of the anti-Olympic movement. Now it's our moment of truth. We've done our best to stop the Bid, gingering up dissenters, seeking allies and taking the piss out of that horrible theme song - "The spirit of the dream, the spirit we all share". It's been a tough grind, the then Fahey government and the Sydney media smearing the brown matter over our collective chops, as we elevate Samaranch to deity and beg him for his favour via our expressive young emissary Tanya Blencoe.
That night we've put a documentary to air on public radio. We present a water-tight case against the folly - on economic, social and environmental lines. But like so much that is true, there's no-one's listening. The program rates about a five - listeners that is. Meanwhile Sydney converges on the Harbour waiting for the IOC to deliver salvation and make us whole.
Round Chippendale there's none of the pizzaz. The Whitlams play to a couple of dozen pissed hangers on at the Lansdowne Hotel. They're a struggling three piece - only one of whom has lived to see the big event. Freedman sings his anti-Olympic anthem for the first time - 'you gotta love this city for its body not its brains'. But the ending is different from the one you hear today. I leave the bar and head downtown to feel the sense of communal loss as we inevitably fail to those shifty Chinese.
Down at the Rocks it's pumping; thousands of real Aussies - "Sydney to win, fuck Beijing" they chant. Hooning across the median strip and almost taking me out. I raise the finger but my anger is misplaced. It's packed in down here, all vantage points to the giant video screens taken, as the ugly little man comes on the screen murmurs a few platitudes and like a B-grade star on Logies night reaches for the envelope.
'And the Winner is .... SID-O-NEE'
I don't actually hear the announcement, I've been pushed too far around the cove. What I do hear is this eerie silence, then an explosion of noise, cheers, car horns and the obligatory fireworks all melding into this one big racket. Which is a pretty apt way to celebrate something like the Olympics. As I crumble into a foetal position I make this vow: to play no part in this circus, to get out of town, to shove the spirit right where it belongs. And like my manic and sometimes irrational hatred of McDonalds, the monorail and Super League I've stuck to my guns.
Over the intervening years I'm gathered resources and planned my escape. Like many of you, I thrilled at the demise of leapin' Johnnie Fahey and the wry slapstick of his reincarnation as federal Finance Minister. I marvelled at the trials and tribulations of Mad Micky Knight and the way he speaks ... softer ...and ... slower ... the bigger ... the porky ... he has ... to tell. From the marching bands to the ticketing fiasco Knight's flame has burned until there's nothing left but a very moist wick. Wonder if he'll be heading to Athens with the rest of SOCOG?
As for the IOC their emergence as gold medal junketeers has been sport at bits most breathtaking; holidaying with Phil Coles then learning about the real spirit of the 'Olympic family' with Kev and Sophie, has been a heartwarming experience. If the Aussie athletes are nearly as committed to self-fulfilment as our homegrown officials and it will be a gold, gold, gold fortnight in September.
And then there's Sydney, a city who's entire economy has been based on building sporting venues over the past decade. Can't help thinking what would have been the returns if the same resources had been invested into, say, high-tech start-ups. After the two weeks of madness we'll have some of the world's largest mausoleums to remind us of our over-enthusiasm for international events. People are whinging sure, but more about the traffic and the difficulty in getting tickets, than the fact that we are investing all this energy in a series of contests to see which surgically enhanced athlete can run faster, jump highest, swim , ah, synchronised-est.
Enough. For these reasons, and oh so many more, I'm gone, six weeks before the craziness hits, wishing you who stay all the luck you'll need to make it through. While away, I hope to see a bit of what Sydney will miss in the midst of the madness, a bit of perspectives about Australia and its place in the world. By targeting Europe, I'm looking at one of the few alternatives to American money - of which the Games is but a symptom. Who knows what I'll find? But by the time the last medal is rewarded, I hope to have cleansed myself of the nagging feeling that if the Five Rings are the pinnacle of human achievement, then there must be something sadly amiss with all of is. If the Olympics are one model of the global village, I'm banking on finding an alternative.
by Peter Moss
A season in three acts. A team struggling to recapture its identity after the retirement of its most prominent face. And a hero.
Act 1: Hope
For AFL in general, 2000 saw the worst start to a season ever, thanks to silly programming and major teething problems at the new Colonial Stadium. But Swans fans sailed around with shit-eating grins as the team, tipped to struggle sans Plugger, won well in Rounds 1-3 of the 22-game home and away season, beating St Kilda, West Coast and Melbourne.
Act 2: Despair
Could anything be more sickening than ex-Swan and prize dork Anthony Rocca kicking the winning goal for Collingwood in the last minute of play at the SCG in Round 4? We thought not - until the men in the red-and-white subjected us to a fiendishly clever twist on the Chinese water torture over the few weeks. A single drop of water hits the skull of the sensorially-deprived captive at precise 30 minute intervals. It is the inevitability, the absolute lack of variation, which produces insanity within hours or days. The Swans version saw the same inevitable result - a narrow defeat - reached by a different route each week, as Richmond, North and Brisbane each won nail-biters at the SCG. Then an old-fashioned thumping from the Carlton Bluebloods and a disgraceful whipping from the Junkyard Bulldogs pounded home the truth: the Swans were just not good enough, not this year.
Act 3: Redemption
Cometh the hour, cometh Paul Kelly. Built and tempered like a bi-pedal kelpie with a heart bigger than Uluru, the Swans' Captain Courage was expected to miss the entire season with a broken kneecap - his second horrific knee injury. But, come the last-gasp game against Fremantle in the West, who was that wiry cattledog dragging one withered leg warming up in the Swans warmup? Kelly's unannounced return jolted the club into self-respect and victories against Hawthorn, West Coast, St Kilda, Collingwood, North and Richmond. Not quite enough to fall into a finals spot, but enough to sustain the faithful through the extended off-season.
The Workers Online Swans Awards 2000
Best Player
Michael O'Loughlin
Best Goal
Robbie Ah Mat
Best Rookie
Jude Bolton
Best Recruit
Andrew Schauble
Best Win
North by 54
Best Performance
Losing to Essendon by 13
Worst Performance
Loss to Bulldogs
Funniest Moment
Coach Rocket Eade smashes another phone after an errant Schwass handpass v. North.
Peter Moss is a Director of Lodestar Communications.
Trades Hall
Neale Towart's Labour Review
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A Novel Enhancement and a Divided Court: Award Simplification and the High Court
Employing a Contractor or Contracting to Employ?
Employee not Contractor
Class of Persons That May Be Declared Employees
Planes, Plant and Maintenance
Work and Family
Union for Managers
OHS Obligations Apply to Labour Hire Company
Rebuilding Australia
A Novel Enhancement and a Divided Court: Award Simplification and the High Court
Penny Csendrits The majority of the High Court ruled award simplification constitutionally valid. Justice Kirby strongly dissented:
"``The decision of this Court, in my opinion, breaks nearly a century of previously unbroken constitutional authority. It upholds, under the conciliation and arbitration power, direct alteration by the Parliament of an existing award made by the process of conciliation and arbitration in the settlement of an interstate industrial dispute. It allows the Parliament to change the internal balances and compromises within an award, which, in this instance, has the effect of benefiting one side in the industrial relationship. Were Parliament allowed to do so, such a change could as easily have the effect of benefiting the other side. The altered award is no longer the outcome of the constitutionally permissible process. It is now simply the product of federal legislation. The size or justice of the change is not the proper concern of this Court. But the novel enhancement of the legislative power of the Parliament is. This decision involves a radical enlargement of the federal legislative power under sec 51(xxxv) of the Constitution. That enlargement will not go unnoticed.''"
(Australian Industrial Law News; newsletter 6, June 2000)
Employing a Contractor or Contracting to Employ?
Susan J. Zeitz
The Sammartino case (as reported in Labour Review no. 42 in Workers Online no. 58, 16 June 2000) involved the development of law relating to the distinction between contracts of service (employees) and contracts for service (independent contractors). Mr Sammartino sought relief from a dismissal claimed to be harsh unjust and unreasonable, where Mayne Nickless claimed he was an independent contractor, not an employee. He appealed against the decision of Cmr Foggo to the full bench which found in his favour. The decision of the Federal Court in Konrad v Victoria Police [1999] FCA 988; (1999) 46 AILR 4-126 has altered the way the Commission approaches these cases.
(Australian Industrial Law News; newsletter 6, June 2000)
Employee not Contractor
The full bench decision in Bibic v First Interstate Security, AIRC (Polites and Watson SDPP, Smith C.) Print S7290, 22/6/2000 (unfair dismissal) has found that a security guard was an employee, not an independent contractor, after an initial decision against the guard. The Commission applied the control test by asking "whether the control exists over the nature and extent of work to be done rather than the question of how the work is done in the physical sense". Other indicators of the employment relationship included a supervisor directing Bibic on site, an obligation to work for Interstate, provision for a uniform, inability of the guard to delegate shifts or to determine his own roster, payment by Interstate of his workers' compensation and superannuation.
(Employment Law Update; newsletter 157, 27 July 2000) Class of Persons That May Be Declared Employees
A decision of the Full Bench of the Supreme Court of Queensland has kept open the possibility that a group of contract couriers working for the same employer may be deemed to be employees. The Court held that, for the purposes of sec 275 of the Industrial Relations Act 1999 (Qld), a class of persons may be defined by reference to the person or persons for whom the work is performed under contracts for services. The Court thus rejected an appeal by Australian Document Exchange Pty Ltd which argued that a class must be defined by the nature of the work performed under a contract for services.
(Australian Industrial Law News; newsletter 5, May 2000)
Planes, Plant and Maintenance
Kevin Jones
Maintenance tasks have increasingly become the responsibility of plant operators, or maintenance has been fully outsourced.
Using plant operators as maintenance workers has substantial OHS implications. Maintenance workers have generally come from a skilled engineering background and acquired skills through apprenticeships. Plant operators have knowledge of machine operations, but not necessarily of the intricacies of the functioning of the machines. Maintenance is not jus fixing machines but fixing them safely.
Contracting out maintenance may seem attractive to employers on this basis, but establishing and maintaining in house skills and knowledge is far easier and more efficient than contracting it out.
(OHS Alert; vol.1, no. 6, June 2000)
Work and Family
Andrea Rayment
The decision in Schou v State of Victoria by the Victorian Civil and Administrative tribunal seems to extend the rights of employees with family responsibilities.
Employers faced with requests for alternative work arrangements to accommodate an employee's family needs must be prepared to take reasonable steps to assess and implement requests. Technology is providing the alternative and affordable means of accessing the workplace from home. These technologies need to be considered by employers when faced with requests by employees.
In 1996 Ms Schou's supervisors had agreed that the best way to cope with the demands placed on her by an ill child and her hours of work as a Hansard sub-editor was to install an modem at home so that she could easily do some work from there.
Despite the supervisors and information technology staff agreeing to this, the Dept did not implement the request. With strains at home, Ms Schou resigned. Her argument to the tribunal was that the dept's failure to implement the request constituted indirect discrimination. She was awarded $161,307.40 for economic loss.
Two earlier decisions in different tribunal's have considered the employers obligations in similar cases and found that they must be more flexible in work and family cases.
(Employment Law Update; newsletter 157, 27 July 2000)
Union for Managers
The Managers and Financial Executives Association (MFEA) has recently been registered as an industrial organization under the Workplace relations Act. This will allow the creation of a federal award for managers and provide access to federal unfair dismissal laws. Currently the MFEA had 800 members including 200 students. Typical salaries of members range between $46,000 and $58,000.
(Employment Law Update; newsletter 157, 27 July 2000)
OHS Obligations Apply to Labour Hire Company
A labour hire company has been fined $50,000 after a worker it had placed with Warman International Ltd amputated three fingers whilst operating a circular saw. The worker had been briefly shown how to use the saw by another employee but had received no training by the labour hire company or Warman. This confirms a decision involving Drake Personnel (see Labour Review no. 26 in Workers Online no 32, 24 September 1999)
(Employment Law Update; newsletter 157, 27 July 2000)
Rebuilding Australia
AMWU
The paper suggests that the future of jobs and nation building depends on investing in education and innovation, rebuilding Australian manufacturing and ensuring Australia does not have a huge knowledge deficit in the first decade of the new millennium. The paper is developed around the themes of:
Captained by Mark 'Cyclops' Paterson, the organizations of the megarich, the hyperrich and the wannaberich, joined together to put out 'a rare joint statement' attacking Labor's IR plan and put on the table their class warmongering readiness to fight it right through to the next Federal election.
The Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and the National Farmers Federation say 'they are extremely concerned about attempts by some unions to overturn some of the more constructive reforms of labour relations legislation in recent years.'
'Constructive reforms', of course, is boss code for 'the laws to smash trade unions.'
Cyclops and his cohorts apparently aren't very happy about industry bargaining, collectivism (the horror, the horror!!) and the idea that AWAs will be following Peter Reith into the dustbin marked history under an ALP Government.
Cyclops United want to play the game all by themselves, making up their own rules. Watch any loser footy team (St Kilda, the Cowboys) - they all look good on the training track playing each other.
But as the famous French football commentator (and very deep thinker) Jean-Paul Sartre once said: 'In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.'
Cyclops can't handle the thought of having to play ball with an active, organized workforce playing in a union team, making management accountable and forcing them to raise their game.
Business surveys often reveal the low esteem Australian management is held in by their overseas counterparts. It's not hard to see why reading Paterson's waffle.
Business blokes are meant to be good with figures but Cyclops seems to have a bit of trouble counting 1,2,3. He seems to think there are three parties in IR when any switched on worker can tell him there are only two.
Maybe this inability to count explains how the fat cats keep adding zeros to their salaries. Maybe they think they're adding nothing.
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