The resolution unanimously endorsed by the Council's general meeting, calls on the Premier and Minister responsible, John Della Bosca, to set up the inquiry to deal with issues relating to common law claims.
It would be chaired by an independent person and include representatives of government, employers and the trade union movement. No changes to the existing common law provisions would be made until the inquiry was completed.
Meanwhile, the government would establish a separate process to ensure that any changes to the statutory scheme did not leave injured workers worse off.
Labor Council secretary Michael Costa told Labor Council delegates the separation of the reform package would allow agreed changes to proceed, while continuing to investigate issues in dispute.
While he says there are some positive proposals in changes to the statutory scheme - the government was still a "long, long way off" reaching agreement on common law claims
Costa says that under the extended timeline there would be no legislative amendments until late this year, meaning the government would have time to develop key reforms to employer compliance and workplace safety as part of the package.
Labor Council is seeking a response to their proposal from the government early next week. In the meantime, workers remain on alert to make May 29 a statewide day of industrial action.
The Labor Council resolution:
"The Government proceed with drafting amendments (based on the Working Party Reports) to the Statutory Scheme, subject to clarification on certain aspects of the new proposed Dispute Resolution process.
The process for the development of the Guidelines, Thresholds and Formula is subject to a proper review and scrutiny by the Labor Council of New South Wales before being introduced as part of the reforms.
In addition, it be agreed that under the proposed Guidelines, thresholds & formula, injured workers should not be disadvantaged as per their current entitlements.
In relation to Common Law an Inquiry be conducted and Chaired by an independent person. The inquiry should include representatives from the Employers, Unions and Government.
The terms of Reference for this inquiry would be
� Examining more efficient ways to process Common Law claims
� Reducing unnecessary cost and inefficiencies in the System
� Maintaining access to the System for seriously injured workers
� How to reduce the incentive for pursuing unnecessary Common Law actions
There should not be any amendments to the Common Law provision until the conclusion of this inquiry.
That the package should include satisfactory outcomes of compliance issues and injury management.
That this position be communicated to the Minister and the Premier with a request that they respond as a matter of urgency.
The AIRC decision means that 450 staff still working in HIH - plus 130 who had been retrenched with no payment - will now have access to industry redundancy standards.
They had been facing retrenchment without any severance pay, because of the refusal of HIH management to negotiate an enterprise agreement. They will receive eight weeks notice and three weeks pay for each year of service
The Finance Sector Union successfully argued that the payments were justified on the grounds of fairness and in the public interest.
The claim was also supported by the company's provisional liquidators who need the staff to stay on and help clean up the HIH mess.
The Finance Sector Union says while senior executives of the company may have been able to secure for themselves generous payouts, the workers had no such luck.
That's because HIH refused to negotiate an enterprise agreement with its workforce, which would have included the provisions to guarantee basic severance payouts.
Those executives were exempted from today's decision because they had already looked after themselves. Representatives of the senior executives actually intervened in the case to be
So far about 100 works have been retrenched with no severance pay, while another 660 have been transferred to NRMA and QBE. After union intervention, those companies have agreed to recognize their continuity of employment.
FSU state secretary Geoff Derrick says today decision will help ensure the smooth processing of the outstanding claims.
"This is a fair decision because the workers who lose their jobs are victi9ms of this collapse just like the policy holders."
Abbott said on national radio this morning that he was considering a Royal Commission following a recommendation by Employment Advocate Jonathan Hamberger that there was a case for broader investigation.
"As soon as this flimsy collection of unsubstantiated gossip from Mr Hamberger was exposed in the media, Mr Abbott ran a mile," ACTU Secretary Greg Combet says.
"Today's backdown is a vote of no-confidence in the Employment Advocate by his new minister. It demonstrates that Mr Abbott is out of his depth. If there were grounds for investigation, Mr Abbott would have acted today.
"Mr Hamberger has effectively accused the state police of failing to act on these allegations. These are serious charges - Mr Abbott and his servant Mr Hamberger should provide evidence to support these claims.
"This farce is another example of a Government on the run. John Howard should be acting on the demands of all Australians to find out the real cause of the HIH collapse, which has hurt so many Australians.
"This is a failed attempt by John Howard and Tony Abbott to distract attention from their real problems caused by the GST's punishing impact on the building industry and Australians generally."
Mr Combet says the ACTU fully supported the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and in its ongoing campaigns for a better deal for building workers.
Musicians Union of Australia stat e secretary Shirley Smith says her members have been waiting nearly three years for government action to stop the exploitation of booking agents.
Cover bands playing the club circuit are among those worst effected by the lack of proper regulations and policing of the industry.
They are planning direct action with a lunch-time concert in Hyde Park - directly across from the DIR's Oxford Street offices - on Monday June 4 - where they will play cover songs to raise awareness about their plight..
The DIR commenced a review of the Entertainment Industry Act in March 2000 that was due for release for public comment last October.
But Smith says she's been told my departmental officers the review is still not completed and is not a priority of the Industrial relations Minister John Della Bosca.
She says this leaves her members exposed to gross exploitation from agents, including forcing them play un paid 'trial gigs' and pocketing more than 50 per cent of the takings.
"Musicians are under pressure from agents to form a company r partnership structure to avoid adopting the responsibility of superannuation, tax, public liability insurance, long service leave, carers', leave and annual holidays," Smith says.
"The main complaints are under-award wages, unpaid wages, with-holding of money (sometime for up to six months), double dipping and work on a trial basis for no pay," she says.
Smith fears that far from strengthening protections, the Carr Government has an agenda of deregulating agents altogether.
by Andrew Casey
" LHMU members have won an Australian first for contract and casual workers who are traditionally denied any redundancy moneys when their employer decides to shut up shop," Terry Breheny, LHMU Victorian Assistant Secretary said today.
" But in the view of most of our members this is just second prize. We know that the Arnott's Sellout is bad for our members, bad for manufacturing in this state, bad for Australia.
Sellout campaign
" The Arnott's Sellout community campaign will continue. It has struck a sensitive nerve in the Melbourne community.
" On Sunday our members will meet with a wide cross-section of the community at 2pm at the Dallas Brooks Hall to discuss where we go from here."
Campaign supporters have leafleted railway stations and supermarkets calling for continuing community support, particularly for the boycott of Arnott's biscuits.
" Federal and State governments should take note. They can't ignore the community will. They must promote jobs and industry opportunities which help Australian manufacturing to flourish and expand.
" Our union office has been flooded with calls of support. We've got people e-mailing us wanting to purchase our Arnott's Sellout T-shirts and stickers. Our website has been flooded by people wanting to show their anger at Arnott's.
Globalisation a debate for all
" The effect on ordinary working people of globalisation is not some rarefied intellectual debate and protests involving just young S11 and M1 protesters.
" When it comes to these Arnott's workers globalisation is something that hits them, and hurts them, personally because a US multinational, Campbells Soups, has no loyalty to Australia, its culture, its icons," Terry Breheny said.
"Campbells Soups makes decisions to downsize without one tear, just an eye on the bottom line."
The US multinational Campbell's Soups bought out the Australian-owned Arnott's chain in 1997.
Arnott's was founded in 1865 by a Scottish immigrant cook whose biscuits soon became Australian favourites. Descendants of the founder sold the Australian company to Campbell's Soups a little over four years ago.
The reason for shutting down the Burwood plant is not financial, last year Arnott's made $100 million profit, most of which went straight to Campbell's Soups. Arnott's admits that the Burwood plant is not unprofitable.
Arnott's is keen to sell the land on which the plant sits. There is much speculation that after it shuts down the company will press the local council to rezone the land, making it suitable for subdivision, giving Arnott's a very sizable profit on the sale.
Redundancy breakthrough
Arnott's announced a new redundancy deal this week which provides the workforce with thousands more dollars in their pockets when they leave and allows them to leave the plant and seek work elsewhere from September without penalty to their redundancy pay outs.
The LHMU also won a historic breakthrough on behalf of casual workers who were excluded from all redundancy rights.
Many of these casual workers had in previous years been compulsorily 'transferred' from the Arnotts payroll to Catalyst, a labour-hire company.
" Catalyst supplied the same people back to Arnott's to work as casuals on their biscuit manufacturing lines. Even though they had been working here continuously for years and years because of their changed status they were to be denied retrenchment dollars.
" Obviously that stank," Terry Breheny said.
" Now they will receive a whole range of severance pay based on years of service thanks to the LHMU campaign."
There is no legal requirement for Arnott's to pay their casual workers any redundancy, but they have chosen to do so, which indicates the campaign has been hurting Arnott's.
Let's remember
" I want to emphasise again, this union and its members think this 'win' is only the second prize," Terry Breheny said.
" We want good, continuing, well-paid jobs for Australians in this city. That's not just up to companies. It needs the help of Federal, State and local government."
Note: If you want to purchase a Sellout Arnott's T-shirt or sticker then ring Helen Alexander at the LHMU office 03 9235 7751.
Or you can send an e-mail ordering T-shirts and stickers to Helen Alexander at:
mailto:[email protected]
The members of the Finance Sector are planning a community-based campaign to back their claim for increased staffing resources and a halt to the closure of bank branches across the industry.
FSU state secretary Geoff Derrick says workers have indicated they would moderate their claim if it were to guarantee services to the community.
Derrick says the union will help educate the public about the huge profits banks are making at the expense at both the workforce and the community.
"The Australian community must reap some rewards from having one of the most profitable banks in the world," Derrick says.
Big Profits All Round
In recent weeks, all four major banks all announced strong interim earnings over the last few weeks, with National Australia Bank leading the way, recording a massive half-year profit of close to $2 billion.
Even St George/Bank SA reported record-breaking figures of a 27 per cent jump in net profit to $211 million. But these were not being matched with returns to the workers.
Westpac, is currently offering workers a 2.9 per cent pay increase. This is despite the following returns: 19 per cent increase in earnings per share, 13 per cent increase in operating profit and a 43 per cent increase in the CEO's salary.
Derrick says the Westpac offer to tellers amounts to just 39 cents per hour, while the bank is making an $8000 profit per minute.
Meanwhile NAB is offering workers just 2.7 per cent, compared with shareholders up 13.2 per cent, operating profits up a whopping 27 per cent and CEO's salary a generous 22 per cent.
And these healthy returns have occurred at a time when Westpac has shed 5523 jobs in the past two years, while NABV has spent $140 million on an IT upgrade that will make 2,700 jobs redundant.
"We need to rebalance the relationship between shareholders, the workforce and the community," Derrick says.
To read about FSU's People First Campaign click here
The eleventh hour move by the major employer organizations has turned what should have been a routine flow-on of the federal decision into a complex technical battle before the NSW Industrial Relations Commission.
While, none of the employers are opposing the flow-on of the wage increases awarded by the AIRC earlier this month, they've sought a change to one of the major principles in the State Wage Case - one that wasn't even raised in the national case.
"What they want to do is introduce a new Consent Award Principle, that would put new tests and barriers before unions and employers when they want to have an award made by the Commission," Labor Council's Chris Christodoulou says.
"This would mean that, even where a union and employer has reached agreement, the employer organization could intervene to argue the award is against the general economic interest of the state."
Christodoulou says the main thrust is to stop unions and employers reaching their own agreements for better wages and conditions of employment.
"The irony of course is that while employers talk about the virtues of direct bargaining at the work place, they now want the ability to ask the Commission to over-ride agreements made directly between unions and the employers."
Parties have filed submissions on the application and the matter will be heard in the Commission this week. A decision is expected within two weeks.
The AMWU's Amanda Perkins briefed the Labor Council on the plight of the refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre - operated by Australian Correctional Management.
Perkins says prior to the riots - which gained national media exposure - the refugees had instituted strike action over pay rates of just $10 for an eight hour day.
ACM offers work for a range of kitchen and cleaning duties to the detainees - most of whom have arrived in Australia with no money whatsoever.
The industrial action called for an increase in pay to $20 per day, plus a transparent rostering system so that all who wanted had the opportunity to get paid work.
Perkins says the issue is linked to the exorbitant costs charged at the centre's stores - where milk is $5 per litre, cigarettes $14 per pack and shampoo $14 per bottle.
"The riot we saw on our TV screens was a labour riot," Perkins says.
The Refugees Action Collective is planning a national day of action on Sydney June 3 to draw attention to the treatment of refugees. Sydney action will focus on the Villawood detention center.
The workers were sacked after being directed to attend a meeting where they were told that due to a downturn in the mobile telephony market, they were to be retrenched.
They were then told they had one hour to vacate the premises and security guards were deployed to ensure that no staff lingered after the time had elapsed.
The two unions involved the Community and Public Sector Union and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union have both condemned the sackings.
"This is a disgraceful episode on the part of the largest mobile telephone carrier in the world and deserves the condemnation of the labour movement," CEPU branch secretary Ian McCarthy says.
"The actions also highlight the need for the labour movement to press for the repeal of the AWA provisions in the Workplace relations Act in an incoming Labor Government."
Stop press
Late this afternoon the CPSU achieved an interim order against Vodafone barring them from making any more staff redundant before the matter is properly determined before the AIRC.
The workers and their union- the AMWU Print Division - are seeking the support of other unions, community groups and the public for their struggle.
The workers were sacked on May 15 by administrators of the company, with no notice, redundancy pay, annual leave or other entitlements. These workers have worked for Champion for many years, are renowned throughout the printing industry for the quality of their work; and were sacked through no fault of their own.
"Champion forms is made up of at least seven related companies which protect the owners and may leave workers with nothing," the AMWU's Mark West says.
"One company employed the workers, and has few assets on paper. Another company received payments for work done. A different company owns the property, while other companies, which are still operating, hold the assets and continue to profit. These companies have the same directors.
"This has got to stop. Artificial company structures that rob workers of their entitlements should be illegal. For many years Champion Forms profited from the work of its employees. The Directors should not be allowed to hide behind phoney company set-ups to avoid paying what they owe the workers. They should pay up-now."
While the workers at Champion were employed by shelf companies with almost not assets, the substantial financial and real estate assets were held by other companies within the same structure.
The AMWU is taking legal advice and will fight, using every means possible to protect the workers entitlements.
The workers are seeking support in the following ways :
o Drop in to the picket line at 7 - 21 Smith St Marrickville (on corner of Victoria Road) between the hours of 7am and 3pm
o Phone your local MP, politician or union and let them know you support the Champion workers and are sick of the legalised highway robbery unscrupulous employers are able to get away with
"Back our efforts to ensure that any funds from the sale of the Smith St property or other assets go to meeting workers' entitlements," West says.
The ACTU's Reasonable Hours claim seeks to establish flexible guidelines on excessive hours of work and unhealthy roster patterns. The guidelines would be tailored to suit the requirements of individual industries. Under the application, unions will seek to have factors such as an employee's safety, family responsibilities, workload and the number of hours worked over an extended period considered in determining reasonable hours of work.
ACTU President Sharan Burrow says it was time for unions, the government and employers to work together to find practical solutions that would bring balance to the lives of working families.
"This debate has been growing for many months. So far, the Government and employers have stayed silent. This is a bi-partisan issue that goes to the heart of how we want to grow and prosper as a nation, and all parties should contribute to the debate," says Burrow.
"The pressure to work longer, less predictable and often unpaid extra hours is stretching working families to the limit. As a community, we need to address the issue of unreasonable hours to restore some balance to our working lives.
"Australia needs safe, flexible solutions. Employers know that tired workers are unsafe and unproductive. European Union nations are leading the way by introducing sensible laws that relieve the pressure on working families."
Recent studies show that one in four of all Australian employees now work more than 50 hours a week, giving Australia the second-longest working hours in the OECD. The European Union has agreed to limit average weekly hours to 48, while France is cutting the limit to 35.
"Unlike France, we do not want a cap on working hours. This case seeks an imaginative and flexible framework for the workplaces of the 21st Century," Burrow says.
The course modules of study on political economy subjects are on in the evenings. These modules are the components of degree programs, but they are available on a stand-alone basis. It is possible for people to enrol on a one-off basis in units that are of interest to them and could help them in their work activities.
The Political Economy group have been teaching economics from a progressive perspective for over 25 years. This is especially important at a time when economic ideas have been adopted uncritically, with detrimental effects on people's livelihoods.
The units available in the second half of 2001 are:
The Political Economy of Industry Policy [ECOP 6111] Tuesdays 6-9 p.m.
Strategic Debates on Economic Change [ECOP 6103]; Mondays 6-9 p.m.
The Political Economy of Industry Policy [ECOP 6111]
Over the last two decades there has been a continuing debate about how industries and firms can be made viable and survive pressures from competition and takeovers, and what role governments play in this struggle for viability. Whether Australia deserves a strong manufacturing sector is an important part of these debates. This unit examines how these debates are linked to conflicting views of how capitalist economies work; to conflicting interests across manufacturing, finance and agricultural/mining industries; and to the structure and values of the Australian public service. There is an examination of the evolution of a bipartisan consensus from a protectionist stance to the support of 'microeconomic reform'. Case studies are explored, discussing recent experience with industry policy in Australia and its successes and failures.
Strategic Debates on Economic Change [ECOP 6103]
This unit explores the processes of economic change, and the
forces involved in bringing about such change. It introduces alternative
theoretical perspectives on socioeconomic change and considers the interests, relationships and constraints involved in socioeconomic change. Contemporary case studies in finance, the environment, tax, welfare and globalisation are used in an examination of the arguments. Students will consider a range of strategic debates, but will also make a detailed study in one such area.
Administrative details
* the fee for each unit of study is $900.
* classes run from the week beginning 23 July to the week ending 2 November.
� for more information, contact Evan Jones, 9351 6617; [email protected]
or see details at http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/pe/postgrad/MecSS.htm
Forced Labour in Burma
The ICFTU has called for international action against companies trading with Burma, found to be promoting slave and bonded labour by the ILO.
The ACTU has called a meeting of affiliated unions to plan an Australian leg of this campaign at the CFMEU offices, Wentworth Avenue, Sydney on May 30 at 5pm.
Workplace Democracy and the Future of the Labour Movement
A Conference to mark the centenary of the birth of Dr Lloyd Ross, labour intellectual and trade unionist, 1901-1987.
Holme Conference Centre, University of Sydney, June 1, 2001
Speakers include Mark Hearn, john Robertson, Arch Bevis, Greg Patmore and Rae Cooper.
To register contact 9357 3077 or email Greg Patmore - mailto:[email protected]
Chippo Poilitics Redferns politics pub Forums
this Sunday the 20th May at 2pm
The Glengarry hotel Lawson street Redfern
Why Womens Prisons?
the NSW Upper House all party committee recommended that no more women's prisons be built
Both Parties have ignored - WHY ??
Come and hear the chair of the Committee John Ryan Liberal MP, a couple of ex women prisoners as well as Noah from Justice Action
more info phone Trevor 0416 347 501
Do your new editorial principles mean that I am cannot write a letter to the editor complaining about my employer?
Your third principle states:
- only affiliates to criticize Labor Governments.
As a teacher working in the public eduction system in this state my employer is the Labor Government. Does this mean that I cannot criticise them? Can I not criticise them for their treatment of employees and our lousy working condition? Can I not criticise them for their failure to maintain and support our public education system?
Not only have they done nothing to restore the damage done by previous liberal governments they seem determined to destroy what is still one of the world's finest education systems.
Minister Aquilina who, in the hope of diverting attention from school closures in the inner city, used confidential information about a student to create a media beatup, has just returned from the UK where he has been learning from the Blair government how to further privatise our eduction system.
Meanwhile Premier Carr is happy to publicly support Trinity Grammar, when has he offered his support to any public school being crucified in the media?
If you are to gag me from criticising my employer I might as well go back to the Daily Telegraph.
Jennifer Killen
Ed's reply: No, they do not preclude the publication of your letter.
A lot of people have interpreted last week's editorial as representing a demunition of our independence. The opposite is true. The aim was to state publicly our editorial policy to give us strength in the face of certain elements that would see us become Pravda ....
Tony Abbott is rightly the focus of much union and wider community concern.
Others may therefore be interested in the following letter which I have sent to the Prime Minister.
The Hon John Howard MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
Dear Prime Minister
I refer you to an article by Emma Macdonald in the Canberra Times of 28 April 2001 entitled "Howard's bovver boy", on the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business, Mr Tony Abbott.
In this article, Ms Macdonald referred to Mr Abbott's family life, his two daughters, and to the fact that Mr Abbott had fathered a son who was given up for adoption.
There is no place in Australian politics for personal attacks, and politicians should be entitled to keep their personal and private lives from public exposure.
I am concerned, however, that Mr Abbott has key responsibility for the implementation of the Government's welfare reform program. There are many circumstances in which a man or a woman may face unplanned parenthood. They are often forced to rely, for a short or longer period, on financial assistance from the community in order to keep their new family together.
I am not aware of the full circumstances under which Mr Abbott avoid financial and other responsibility for the child that he had fathered. But I would be concerned if he held the view that giving a child up for adoption was the best option for any new parent, to the extent that existing financial assistance to new parents was eliminated or reduced.
Can you please assure me that there is no conflict between Mr Abbott's personal views and the wider community standard that assistance should be provided to mothers to enable them to keep their babies (and that fathers should take full responsibility for children that they father).
Yours sincerely
Noel Baxendell
14 May 2001
I wish to nominate the mayor of South Sydney John Fowler as tool of the week due to his condemnation of charities for feeding and giving blankets to the homless area in his municipality. While not doing anything to create affordable housing in the area himself he has implied that the homeless residence in his area are trouble makers and unsightly and has accused the charities of giving them incentives to sleep in the parks in Surry Hills because they give them food and blankets. This is a completely heartless position from the Mayor of a progressive area. Instead of taking positive steps over the issue he is simply attacking the few organisations that do anything for them. I happliy nominate the Mayor of South Sydney for the tool of the week.
James Shaw
Dear Editor,
Reading the letter from Comrade Mark Lutherborrow (WoL - 11/05/01) almost brought a tear to the eye! It is always a pleasurable experience to read of the pride a member has for their union. I was at May Day 2001 (and am not an FBEU member!). Emotions ran high for some of us when we heard that "a decision" had been made to call off the march. I too "marched from Hyde Park down Macquarie St past Parliament House and onto Circular Quay" where I attended a brief rally!
I am loath to appear critical of Comrade Mark, however I felt I should respond to his letter on the basis that he states the march "was saved by 100 members of the FBEU". May Day as well as other significant working class celebrations and campaigns will never be saved by any single influence. Whilst I admire the actions of FBEU members on the day I fear the encroaching symptoms of undiagnosed "working class hero syndrome" are emerging in the mind of Comrade Mark.
I enjoy May Day as a day to celebrate my pride in my culture (union), my class (working) and my achievements (largely collective in nature). Thank you Comrade Mark for reminding me about capitalist tyranny and my responsibility to honour fallen comrades - thank you also for marching on May Day.
Sharny Chalmers
by Peter Lewis
Mark Latham |
You have called your book The Enabling State, what is the basic concept?
It is really a new form of collectivism. The old "stand and deliver" approach by government relied on the expansion of government resources, but now there are very clear limits on how much government can spend. A lot of the new politics is about boundary crossing - about forming partnerships in collaboration across institutions that traditionally wouldn't work together.
The Enabling State is about enabling individuals and communities to be more self-reliant; for government to mobilise additional collective resources across all parts of society - households; communities; corporations - as well as the traditional public sector role. Government is the bridge builder if you like, a partnership-former. And whether we are talking about health mutuals or community schools, or new innovative models for delivering disability services, or this concept of social entrepreneurship, The Enabling State is trying to enable people to do more things collectively.
So does the role of a public servant in that sort State changes, because rather than building another structure, they are actually forming a relationship?
Instead of prescribing and controlling, the role for the public servant is to give other people, other organisations, the freedom to achieve for themselves. Instead of schools being run by the Department of Education model, the community school idea is to mobilise additional parental and community commitments to the school on the basis that it is run locally by a Board of Management instead the central department.
Peter Botsman in the book talks about social cooperatives and health mutuals. In a similar way the book uses examples from Britain, and also Noel Pearson's material from Cape York. We talk about social entrepreneurship - people who work in the social sector but are looking to form partnerships with businesses.
Traditionally, there has been a wide separation between social work and the corporate sector. Social entrepreneurs try to bring the two sectors together, to re-connect poor communities with the real economy, as well as continuing to build self-esteem and this thing called 'social capital' through good social work. It is a good example of boundary crossing. This is the challenge for public servants now - to cross the boundary between public and private; to cross the boundary between government and community; to cross the boundary between corporations and the social sector.
What's a practical example of how this could work in the real world?.
The book uses some case studies and I am keen to write up some more. But take the example of a suburb like Claymore - a public housing estate in my electorate in south-west Sydney. Six years ago Claymore was known as the worst suburb in New South Wales. This was an area where one of the streets, Proctor Way, had sixty police incidents a month - two a day. I'm talking about really bad social breakdown.
The Department of Housing basically tried everything. Other government departments had thrown a lot of money at Claymore with no success. And what happened was that the Department of Housing left the area. It evacuated after two bad townhouse fires and five people died. The Department turned the management of the area over to a guy called Brian Murnane from Argyle Community Housing.
One of the interesting things about poor communities is that there is always an inclination to fight back. There is always a spark of energy; a spark of leadership; a new idea - and very often government departments miss the little things that are happening at a community level. But Brian Murnane acted as a community broker and relationship-former and he was able to identify these sparks of energy and effort and give people the confidence to try new things - to build up their self-esteem and to get people, often for the first time in their lives, achieving things and feeling good about it. So whether it was a community barbecue; a clean up day; a magnificent community garden; a neighbourhood watch scheme; a low interest loan scheme like micro-credit; a business enterprise to do the maintenance and cleaning in Claymore or new training programs - a pattern of projects emerged which widened the circle of achievement and self-esteem.
Murnane started small, a small-scale community, building up a bigger set of achievements, to the point where now Claymore is a normal functioning community. People trust each other and work with their neighbours on common projects, instead of thinking that, "it's my neighbour who is breaking into my house". They feel safe walking down to the shops at night.
One of the disconnections of the political system from poor communities is the way in which we debate welfare reform. Some people say that we need more government intervention in these areas. The free marketeers say that we need more deregulation and market forces. Talk to the people in the communities - they want to normalise the neighbourhood. They want a normal, trusting, cooperative environment - a good social environment. The first priority is social.
Murnane in his social brokerage work has normalised the neighbourhood. It is something a government department couldn't have achieved and something that the free market couldn't have achieved. And now we have the right base - the right social base - the right relationships between people, by which government training and employment effort can achieve better results.
A lot of studies, and I think common sense, says that if people feel bad about themselves, they are not trusting each other, they are living in isolation, then they are not going to make very good use of the government programs. They will be reluctant to even participate. The first challenge is to get people through the front door of a new government service.
In Claymore the social environment is now right, thereby allowing government to do its best work. This is an example of The Enabling State. A social entrepreneur like Brian Murnane has done his best work - social brokerage and normalising the neighbourhood. Now government can come in acting as a junior partner to the community. Once the social environment is right, the relationships are sound; the government then comes in with its resources as a junior partner.
I know from my own experience, the inclination in politics is to take a 'Big Bang' approach. Governments build new community centres; create new services; doing visible things that help in the political process. Well, the Big Bang approach doesn't work. It is built on unsound social foundations. It normally results in the frustration of wasted services and wasted money.
It is almost an opposite of the Whitlam agenda isn't it?
To some extent, yes.
How can you reconcile those two?
It is not a decrease in government funding effort. It is not a running down of government services. It is a recognition that those services need to be built on strong social foundations. It is a reversal of process if you like. A different way of thinking about the role of government. Forget about the big plans, the big departmental programs to re-make a place like Claymore. The answers lie in the people themselves. Changing the way the housing looks; or building new community buildings; changing the material or physical things - has got to be the secondary consideration. The first task is to normalise the neighbourhood by getting people working cooperatively together.
On our side of politics it puts the "social" back into socialism. It puts the "social" back into social justice. It is an important lesson.
My own experience in politics is that machine politicians don't visit public housing estates - they are not in marginal seats. The media certainly don't live or work there. Academics - they are not to be seen in poor neighbourhoods. There is a disconnection between the political elite and the way in which poor areas function. It is very important to learn from social practitioners - to learn from these projects - and what they tell us about public policy. At the end of the day, what matters is what works.
My conclusion is that we have got a lot more to learn from the poor than they have to learn from us. One of the constant themes in this book, The Enabling State, is the need to learn from social practitioners; to learn by doing. Forget about the big theories of sociology; the old ideological battles. Throw away the political script. Learn about the things that work in practice and create the big public policy conclusions.
Gough's agenda is still relevant. I mean, if he hadn't put the services into western Sydney we would be much weaker. But services tend to function best for people in jobs - people who already have a bit of security and self-esteem.
The problems of poverty are a lot more concentrated than they were in the seventies. They are geographically concentrated and they are concentrated around social problems: distrust, alienation, isolation. Unless you fix the social dimension, the Whitlam agenda cannot achieve its best results. It will lapse into what some people call "middle class welfare".
So you there are looking at the blurring of the lines between a working class and an under class, and politics have tended to group those two classes as the one group?
They are very separate now. This is a big challenge for the trade union movement. Most unionists are in jobs. The dispossessed in our society are living in places like Mount Druitt, Minto and Macquarie Fields - public housing estates with unemployment rates of 50 percent and welfare dependency rates of 80 percent. You can look at the social atlas of Sydney and see twelve bright red dots on the map. These are the places where long term unemployment and social problems are geographically concentrated.
Trade union organisers, political organisations, media personalities and machine politicians - they don't have much contact with these areas. If you like, the poor have become institution-free. They are not connected to organisations and lobby groups. It is a huge challenge on our side of politics to recognise this concentration of poverty and build new institutional links to these communities.
The idea of community building is premised on a participation by the community, yet a lot of the polling these days shows your typical person is aspirational, fairly self-focussed. What is the role of politics in turning that around?
This is the problem of "downwards envy", where the middle group in society is looking down the social ladder at those who are supposedly receiving privileged treatment. They don't look up to the top of the ladder, they are looking down at Aboriginal communities and unemployed people, newly arrived migrants - looking down the ladder and thinking, "well, I am envious of the entitlements and rights issued by government."
This is very much the Hanson agenda. How do we counter it? The key is to make welfare work. Nothing beats getting results in poor areas. Because not only does it solve poverty, it lets the middle class group see and understand the sound use of taxpayers' dollars. It is getting results. It is important to throw away the old ideological textbooks and back the things that work in practice.
Claymore, having got results - results that I thought were impossible as the local member of parliament five years ago - results that the Department of Housing had pretty well given up on - there is a big lesson there about how we can make welfare work. And once it works, people will be more inclined to contribute their tax dollars.
What about their time and their activity?
In building partnerships. I mean, part of the work of social entrepreneurs is to form links. Form links with the local businesses; form links with charities like St Vincent de Paul; form links with Campbelltown Council and local community groups.
Brian Murnane is now looking to partnerships with the business community to redevelop the local shopping centre. Partnership building is the only way to bring other people into these areas. In the past, the community workers never really came from the community. They were bussed in from outside areas. Murnane, by contrast, set up his office where the townhouses had burnt down. He wasn't remote and distant like the Department of Housing. He was on the spot. He was a local.
Community building is essential, but the bigger part of it is to form partnerships with outside organisations and bring them into the circle of success and achievement. Social entrepreneurs have a habit of doing that. They are able to build bridges across class and geographic boundaries. Most of all, they have a good way of making welfare work - and that is the best way of building public confidence.
Do you see a role for the new technologies and the Internet in what we are talking about?
I think the first task is to normalise the neighbourhood. To get the social environment right. We have got to identify the community effort, the inclination to fight back, the leaders who can inspire self-esteem and success. The next step is to reconnect these communities with the real economy. The skills agenda is all-important. Internet cafes and IT skills are going to be an essential part.
There is an innovative project in Melbourne, where they are wiring up one of those multi-storey public housing developments and giving everyone an Internet connection, and then some training on how to use the Net. Now, you might get a handful of entrepreneurial people starting up enterprises - out of the blue, in unexpected places. This is a feature of the new technology. So, yes, IT links and training are essential.
And what about the timing of this book in the context of the electoral cycle? Are you purposefully trying to get a message out before the Federal election?
A lot of the book is about learning from social practitioners - from the Noel Pearsons and the Andrew Mawsons to the Brian Munanes and Vicky Meadows in my electorate. The Labor Party can never stop learning from social practitioners. So, it is not really connected to the election cycle, it is part of the ongoing learning process. If the Labor Party wasn't talking about new solutions to poverty, then we wouldn't be fulfilling our historic role.
A book like this can point us in new policy directions - that is important. For us, this is a job in perpetuity. It never stops for elections or anything else. It is the most important thing we do. The timing of the book is simply a product of learning the lessons; getting the authors and contributors together; committing the material to paper; doing the editing; and now the release and the launch by Noel Pearson tonight.
How far down the track towards the sort of orientation you are talking about, do you think Labor is at the moment, federally?
We have a tendency to stand by "government first" solutions. If you tap the average Labor member of parliament on the knee to check their reflexes, their reflex would be government first. Is there a social or economic problem? Government is seen as the most immediate answer.
We have got to change that way of thinking. We have got to change the sequence by which we tackle social problems. Government needs to act in a junior capacity to community effort. The core lesson of this book is to look to community-led solutions first and foremost. Then build government programs on top of these social foundations, otherwise it is virtually impossible to solve our most entrenched social and economic problems.
I am looking to change the reflex action of the Party with this book. Hopefully in the future, when our Ministers are tapped on the knee, they will be more inclined to look to community-led solutions.
What would be a single policy initiative that could be announced in the lead up to the Federal election, that would indicate that they are starting to get it?
Well, we need to fit in with the ethos of people like Brian Munane. Brian recently came down to talk to the Social Policy Committee of the Caucus. It was quite a fascinating experience because he outlined the great success in Claymore, and that was very impressive. And then he said to the gathering, "We want to take over the half-derelict local shopping centre. We want to run enterprises and cooperatives and training programs. We want to reconnect with the real economy." And he said: "I don't want a government grant to do that, I want low interest loans. I want venture capital."
I thought to myself, this guy is talking revolution. He's the first person I've ever heard from the social sector who said that he didn't want a grant, he didn't want a handout, he wants venture capital, he wants to pay the money back once he has achieved results. Results in a commercial sense. Murnane is prepared to cross-over between the social and business sectors.
I would like to see the establishment of a social venture capital program, whereby government is supporting these projects, but not through grant monies. Grants operate under what economists call 'decreasing returns' - you expect to never see the money again. Labor should back people like Brian Murnane. We should back social entrepreneurs. Supporting them with venture capital would not only mobilise stronger support from the business sector, it would also give the taxpayer hope for a better return on scarce public resources. It would build middle class support for welfare by backing the people who are getting results in practice.
There is a lot to be gained from this sort of policy. And again, it is about boundary crossing. The new politics is about crossing boundaries. Social venture capital. Venture capital - we know what that is - for sound social purposes - solving problems in our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is way of crossing boundaries and getting more powerful solutions than if government and the business sectors acted in isolation.
� It's about two and a half years now since you left the Front Bench and got into a position where you could talk out on policy. You have been writing in the Telegraph, you have been writing in the Financial Review. Do you think the political debate has shifted in the last couple of years?
Our agenda has shifted onto education, which is the theme I advanced in our first term in Opposition. I am a 100% rusted-on supporter in the Knowledge Nation agenda. I've always thought it is the best way for Labor to proceed, rather than doling out subsidies to companies under the banner of so called industry policy.
So, yes, I think our direction is sound. But we also need to re-focus on poverty; we need to learn lessons from social entrepreneurs; and start to get solutions to our most entrenched social problems. There is always more policy work for our side of politics. The social issues are changing rapidly in this era of non-stop change, and our social policies have got to be adapting as well. I think our agenda is heading in the right direction, and this book will hopefully add to that.
So would a Beazley Government be the sort of Government you would like to be a Minister in?
Well, let's win the election first and see what happens. I have used the last two and a half years productively to put out a lot of policy. Someone was saying to me the other day, more policies that the rest of the parliament combined. So that has been good for me. I've put out an education manifesto, ideas to be used in government. This book now is a collection of ideas about social policy. I've got some more work to do on welfare reform. You know, these are all things that will be valuable when we get back into government; hopefully, at the next election.
'The Enabling State' is published by Pluto Press. An extract from the book will be printed next week
Noel Hester |
Over 30 per cent of Australian workers now work more than 48 hours per week, a level that OHS research indicates has a serious impact on health. The European Community has a directive that caps hours at 48 hours per week. In France the Government has moved to reduce the working week to 35 hours.
This week the ACTU lodged a case to establish an award standard on reasonable hours. Unions want factors such as employee safety, family responsibilities, workload and the total amount of hours worked over an extended period considered in determining if the hours an employee works are reasonable.
The application also seeks to establish an entitlement to additional leave for employees required to work large amounts of overtime over an extended period.
ACTU Assistant Secretary Richard Marles says while governments in most developed countries recognise the damage excessive working hours can do to the social and economic fabric, the Howard Government stands idly by and conspicuously silent.
'Far from being the land of the long weekend we have more people in Australia working longer hours than they do in Japan. It's time we took concrete steps as a community to ease the pressure that is stretching working families to breaking point,' he says.
'The Australian workplace is experiencing a working hours epidemic which is at the heart of our case. Our award system needs to be updated so that it comprehends this phenomenon.'
Community lines up behind unions
The union push for a standard of reasonableness on working hours has attracted large and diverse community support. The conservative Australian Medical Association has backed the claim as has the influential Ita Buttrose, editor of the Australian Women's Weekly, who called on the Howard Government to support the ACTU case. The volunteering sector has been prominent in voicing concerns about working hours. Even sporting and tourism bodies have recognised the problem.
Not so the Howard Government which refuses to contemplate the sort of legislative measures other nations are adopting to reduce the growing pressure on employees to work unreasonable hours. This is despite research by Tony Abbott's own department which confirms the increasing and unpredictable working hours imposed on Australians.
Recent studies show that one in four Australian employees work more than 50 hours a week, giving us the second longest working hours in the OECD.
A Snapshot of the Australian Workplace
- A 1997 report by John Buchanan and Sue Bearfield of the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training (ACIRRT) at the University of Sydney commissioned by the Brotherhood of St Laurence indicated that only 36.5% of the workforce work a standard week and this figure is on the decline.
- Since 1966 the number of part timers has risen as a percentage of the workforce from 10% to 24.8% (ABS labour force surveys).
- The number of people working more than 49 hours per week as a percentage of the workforce has increased from less than 20% in 1978 to 32% in 1997 (ABS labour force surveys). This figure is the second highest in the developed world.
- The Australia Institute, an independent think tank, says overwork is overtaking unemployment as the number one labour market problem. Their research shows that the total hours of overwork (more than 40 hours per week) grew by 277 million in the two years to the end of fiscal year 2000. In that time total hours of unemployment fell by 271 million. In 1999-2000 the number of hours of over work reached 1.034 billion. The Australia Institute says this is equivalent to around 500,000 full-time jobs, close to the number of Australians looking for work.
- There are a number of scientific studies showing that overwork has bad physical and psychological health effects. By 2020 the World Health Organisation expects clinical depression, an illness frequently associated with overwork, to become the number-two cause of disability and death after heart disease, pushing cancer to third.
by Tim Connor
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On May 12, 1998, Nike's CEO and founder Mr. Phillip Knight spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC and made what were, in his words, "some fairly significant announcements" regarding Nike's policies on working conditions in its supplier factories.
The announcements received favorable treatment from the press, with a New York Times editorial suggesting that Nike's new reforms "set a standard that other companies should match."
Nike's critics were more cautious, expressing concern that Knight's promises represented an attempt to sideline their demands for decent wages and rigorous factory monitoring and replace them with a significantly weaker reform agenda.
This report represents a comprehensive examination of Nike's labor performance in the three years since that speech was made. That performance is first assessed against the commitments Knight announced and is then compared with the human rights standards and independent monitoring practices labor rights organizations have demanded of the company.
Knight's May 12 Promises: What Have They Meant for Workers?
Knight made six commitments:
1st Promise: All Nike shoe factories will meet the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) standards in indoor air quality.
Nike was the subject of considerable scandal in 1997 when it was revealed that workers in one of its contract factories were being exposed to toxic fumes at up to 177 times the Vietnamese legal limit. Although Nike claims that its factories now meet OSHA standards, it gives factory managers advance notice of testing, giving them considerable scope to change chemical use to minimize emissions on the day the test is conducted. Nike is also not yet willing to regularly make the results of those tests available to the interested public. Rights groups have challenged Nike to put in place a transparent system of monitoring factory safety standards involving unannounced monitoring visits by trained industrial hygienists.
2nd Promise: The minimum age for Nike factory workers will be raised to 18 for footwear factories and 16 for apparel factories.
Nike was severely embarrassed on the child labor issue in 1996 when a major story in Life magazine featured a photograph of a very young Pakistani boy sewing a Nike soccer ball. Evidence continues to emerge of young persons under the age of 16 employed in Nike contract factories. In the absence of economic development in their communities, however, excluding children from factories may force them into even more dangerous and degrading work. Global Exchange believes that payment of a living wage to adult workers would be by far the most effective means of benefiting children in areas in which Nike's goods are made.
3rd Promise: Nike will include non-government organizations in its factory monitoring, with summaries of that monitoring released to the public.
As far as rights groups are concerned, this was the most important of Knight's promises. Three years after it was made, Nike has contracted one non-profit organization to conduct one audit of one factory and is able to list a number of other NGOs with which it has held discussions which it claims will improve its monitoring program. What the company is still unable to say is which NGOs, if any, will be allowed to regularly monitor factory conditions and when summary statements of that monitoring will be released.
4th Promise: Nike will expand its worker education program, making free high school equivalency courses available to all workers in Nike footwear factories.
The education program has expanded, but wages paid in Nike factories are so low that the great majority of workers cannot afford to give up overtime income in order to take one of the courses. Payment of a living wage would give Nike workers with an interest in achieving a high school education the time and the means to do so.
5th Promise: Nike will expand its micro-enterprise loan program to benefit four thousand families in Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand.
It is much cheaper for Nike to give micro-loans to several thousand individuals outside Nike factories than to ensure that the 530,000 workers producing the company's product are paid a wage that would allow them to live with dignity. Nike's first responsibility is to the workers in its production chain. The company should commit to a living wage before it seeks public relations kudos by funding charitable programs like this.
6th Promise: Funding university research and open forums on responsible business practices, including programs at four universities in the 1998-99 academic year.
The company has refused reputable academics access to Nike factories to conduct research, and that research it has funded seems geared to providing private information to Nike rather than stimulating academic debate and increasing knowledge. If Nike is genuinely interested in investing in credible academic research into responsible business practices, the company should establish an independent committee made up of reputable and independent academics to determine which research should be funded.
Sins of Omission: What Labor Rights Groups Wish Knight Had Promised
The demands which rights groups have made of Nike but which Nike has deliberately ignored can also be grouped into six categories:
1st Demand: Protect workers who speak honestly about factory conditions.
Nike's track record in protecting workers who blow the whistle on sweatshop conditions is very poor. The company has turned its back on individual workers who have been victimized for speaking to journalists, and has cut and run from other factories after labor abuses have been publicized. Until this changes, Nike workers will have good reason to keep silent about factory conditions for fear that speaking honestly may result in them and their fellow workers losing their jobs.
2nd Demand: Regular, Transparent, Independent and Confidential Procedures for Monitoring Factories and Investigating Worker Complaints.
Activists have repeatedly asked Nike to allow rights groups to educate workers about their rights and to ensure workers can make confidential complaints to independent monitors when those rights are infringed.
Instead, Nike has made it the responsibility of each factory to educate workers about Nike's code of conduct and to establish a complaint mechanism. This deliberately ignores the interest factory owners have in keeping workers ignorant of their rights. All independent research indicates that the overwhelming majority of Nike workers do not understand their rights under Nike's code and do not believe factory owners can be trusted to resolve worker grievances.
Rights groups have also called for a factory monitoring program which is independent and rigorous. In response Nike has set up an elaborate array of different schemes for monitoring and factory assessment. While this variety of programs looks impressive in a public relations sense, Nike has deliberately set up each of these programs so that they fail two or more of the key tests of effective monitoring: independence, transparency, regularity and a relationship of trust with workers.
The quarterly program of S.A.F.E. (Safety, Health, Attitude, People, Environment) assessments, conducted by Nike staff, is obviously the least independent. There is no evidence that Nike staff actually interview workers as part of these assessments let alone attempts to establish a relationship of trust with them.
Nike's program of annual factory monitoring by PricewaterhouseCoopers also lacks independence. PwC was selected by Nike, reports to Nike and conducts a monitoring program designed by Nike. To the extent that independent observation of PwC's monitoring practice has been allowed, it indicates that PwC auditors fail to establish a relationship of trust with workers and that the quality of their monitoring can be extremely poor. Dara O'Rourke (an assistant professor at MIT) recently observed several PwC factory audits first hand and concluded that they had "significant and seemingly systematic biases" in favor of factory owners and against the interests of workers (O'Rourke 2000).
While there are elements of the Fair Labor Association's (FLA) proposed monitoring program that represent important improvements on Nike's current very poor system, the Association's ability to ensure that workers' rights are respected will be significantly undermined both by the questionable independence of its external monitors and by the long delays between factory monitoring visits--which will on average occur in each factory only once every ten years. The Global Alliance for Workers and Communities is an attempt by Nike to shift focus away from the human rights agenda promoted by the company's critics. The Alliance deliberately avoids investigating key human rights issues and its research methodology does not allow time for researchers to create a relationship of trust with workers.
Nike has vigorously opposed the Workers' Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring program that is independent, transparent and makes it a priority to build relationships of trust with workers. In contrast, Nike's monitoring and factory assessment programs are not independent, lack full transparency and have so far made very little effort to win workers' trust so that they can speak honestly about factory conditions without fear of reprisal.
3rd Demand: Decent Wages
Nike has rejected demands that it ensures that Nike workers are paid a living wage--that is, a full time wage that would provide a small family with an adequate diet and housing and other basic necessities. Instead, the company has used statistics selectively and in a misleading fashion to give the false impression that wages currently paid to Nike workers are fair and adequate. Meanwhile those workers struggle to survive on wages that are barely enough to cover their individual needs, let alone those of their children.
4th Demand: Reasonable Working Hours
Independent research indicates that in many factories Nike workers are still being coerced into working up to 70 hours per week and are being humiliated in front of other workers or threatened with dismissal if they refuse. Nike workers also frequently report that it is extremely difficult to obtain sick leave and that the annual leave to which they are legally entitled is often refused, reduced or replaced with cash without the worker having any choice in the matter.
5th Demand: Safe and Healthy Workplaces
Nike has made important progress in reducing the use of toxic chemicals in sportshoe production. Unfortunately, on the few occasions in recent years that genuinely independent health and safety experts have been allowed access to Nike contract factories, they have found serious hazards including still dangerously high levels of exposure to toxic chemicals, inadequate personal protective equipment, and lack of appropriate guards to protect workers from dangerous machinery. There is also considerable evidence of workers suffering stress from spending large amounts of time in high pressure and frequently abusive work environments.
6th Demand: Respect for Workers' Right to Freedom of Association
So far Nike's promise to protect this right has been largely empty. A considerable proportion of Nike's goods are made in countries like China where independent unions are illegal. Nike has refused to call on the Chinese government to allow workers to organize and has actively opposed calls for trade pressure to be put on the Chinese government to encourage it to improve its record in this area.
Nike has abjectly failed to prevent the suppression of unions in a number of its contract factories, including the PT Nikomas Gemilang and PT ADF factories in Indonesia, the Sewon and Wei Li Textile factories in China, the Formosa factory in El Salvador, the Natural Garment factory in Cambodia, the Savina factory in Bulgaria and factories owned by the Saha Union group and the Bangkok Rubber group as well as the Nice Apparel, De-Luxe, Lian Thai and Par Garment factories in Thailand.
On those few occasions when Nike has taken any steps to advance this right in specific factories, it has done so grudgingly and after considerable public pressure. While elements of Nike's eventual response to the current dispute in the Kuk Dong factory in Mexico have been positive, Nike's actions on the issue been characterized by unnecessary delays, lack of follow through and failure to actively promote the urgent need for a free and fair union election.
Conclusion
Thus far Nike has treated sweatshop allegations as an issue of public relations rather than human rights. The promises made by Phillip Knight in his May 1998 speech were an attempt by the company to switch the media focus to issues it was willing to address while avoiding the key problems of subsistence wages, forced overtime and suppression of workers' right to freedom of association.
The projects Knight announced have been of little benefit to Nike workers. Some have helped only a tiny minority, or else have no relevance to Nike factories at all. The most significant promise, to allow NGOs to monitor its factories and release summary statements of that monitoring, has simply not been fulfilled.
Health and safety is the one area where some improvement has occurred. But even here the company is not willing to put in place a transparent monitoring system involving unannounced factory visits. On the few occasions when independent safety experts have been allowed to visit Nike factories, they invariably have found very serious hazards.
The inaction of the last three years shows that rights groups are justified in treating the company with suspicion and demanding that factory monitoring be both genuinely independent from Nike's control and publicly reported in full. While Nike touts itself as an "industry leader" in corporate responsibility, Nike workers are still forced to work excessive hours in high pressure work environments, are not paid enough to meet the most basic needs of their children, and are subject to harassment, dismissal and violent intimidation if they try to form unions or tell journalists about labor abuses in their factories. The time has come for the company to adopt the reforms which rights groups have advocated. It is indefensible that activists, consumers and most importantly Nike factory workers are still waiting for Nike to do it.
Jagath with Shangri-La Hotel Workers |
Jagath Bandara is a Sydney hotel union organiser who has just returned from Jakarta, Indonesia, where he took part in solidarity demonstrations with Shangri-La Jakarta hotel workers who have been involved in a bitter struggle with their employer since the end of last year when they were locked out of their workplaces.
Here Jagath tells of his visit to Indonesia and what he learned from sisters and brothers in the hotel industry in Indonesia.
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" On the 30th of April, around 7.30pm, I arrived in Indonesia at the Jakarta Air port. Frankly I was worried, cautious and nervous because I just didn't know what will happen when I arrive.
I was very aware the fact that I was going to a very troubled society, a land in turmoil ever since the Suharto-regime was toppled. A land where workers have only just started to flex their muscles as free democratic unions were not really allowed under Suharto.
But as soon as I got out from the customs at the air port I relaxed a little bit. There were 4 people wearing IUF T-shirts ( the IUF is the union international for hotel workers) and they sidled up to me and asked me very politely, very mannered :"Excuse me, are you Mr Jagath Bandara from Australia"
When I said "yes" they quickly accompanied me to their old car and put my luggage in to the boot and off we went into town.
The Solidarity Caf�
Half an hour later, around 8.00 pm, I was visiting the visited the Shangri-La Solidarity cafe which was located very close to the hotel from where these workers had been ejected last year over a dispute about pension monies.
The Shangri-La hotel workers set up this cafe soon after the dispute started to raise money for the striking workers and to build solidarity links to the community.
All over the cafe they've got 'decorations' mainly union slogans, messages of solidarity and big banners telling the world about their problems
The local Indonesian media have given the caf� heaps of free and often sympathetic publicity and noting that Jakarta people who visit the Solidarity Cafe can expect to get a five star hotel meal without the rip-off tourist prices as they'll pay only the local's price.
I had some delicious traditional Indonesian "nasi goreng" meals at the caf� cooked by the striking kitchen staff from the hotel.
The caf� was a big success. It was open around the clock. I noticed there were some quite well dressed people among the patrons. The workers told me some of the well-dressed patrons were actually house guests at the Shangri-La hotel who had come across the road to have a good, cheap meal .
A May Day rally to remember
The next day I woke up around 6.00am. Around 7.00 am a comrade from the Shangri-La picked me up to visit the Shangri-La hotel union's office.
The union office is just two to three houses away from the Shangri-La hotel itself. Security guards employed by the hotel can keep a close eye on the goings-on at the union office.
The topic of conversation today was a protest at a Labour Court hearings into the five month-long dispute. The members discussed how they should behave if there was any provocation, any attacks from the police or management supporters. They even appointed a few people to protect me if any management thugs, who regularly turn up at demos, decide to target the foreigner.
There were are about 300 workers at the union office meeting. They all welcomed me warmly. I felt they appreciated even this small act of international solidarity that my visit represented.
From the union office we all got into busses to go to the Central Jakarta Courts. At the the Court there were more bus loads of workers. They had came there from Bandung, a city 180 kms away from Jakarta.
There were hotel workers at this demo from the Sheraton Bandung, the Hyatt Regency, the Grand Hyatt, the Regent, the Holiday Inn, the Pamata hotel as well as cleaners and shop assistants from the Indonesia
They had all come to show support to the Shangri-La workers. There were more than 2000 workers here chanting slogans to a perfect rhythm, singing, handing out flyers about their struggle to the public.
Every hotel was represented by their union banners and flags to show who was there providing support to the struggle of the Shangri-La striking workers.
May 1 is not a public holiday in Indonesia but despite the hotels management resistance these workers voted with their feet and chose to not to go to work but to get out onto the streets and demonstrate their support for their comrades' struggles at the Shangri-La.
Each hotel has its own local union with an elected Secretary, President, Treasurer and a steering Committee which meets at least once a month to plan their activities. In every hotel workplace the workers have their own union office on premises. They run their activities from this office inside the hotel.
Leading up to May Day each hotel union local ran campaigns to educate the members in the work place about the issues involved and got them ready to commit to the Shangri-La solidarity rally.
In some hotels, where they have reasonable management, the union agreed to, and even organised, a skeleton staff to ensure the hotel operated without any disruption to the guests.
Many of these shop-floor union activists are quite knowledge about the goings-on in Australia. Several of them asked me about the Pauline Hanson.
These workers knew quite a bit about our unions and they wanted us to work closely with them to help them to improve basic working condition for Indonesian workers.
After the court hearing
Well the court hearing was adjourned. Once again. These industrial wrangles move very, very slowly in Indonesia.
The protesters decided to show they were angry with the slow pace of the authorities by marching to the National Monument in Jakarta where all rallies are traditionally held - and where the large May Day rally was held this year.
From here the assembled unionists - more than 10000 - agreed to march off. Most went on a march to Parliament House to press their demands on Indonesian MPs for legislation to promote union rights.
But a significant number joined us and marched up the street to the nearby Shangri-La hotel to show support and join the 2000 hotel workers who had been involved all day in the Shangri-La solidarity rallies.
Thugs and military at Shangri-La
When we arrived the main gates of the Shangri-La there already was there a huge military presence.
They were kitted out, fully armed and standing and walking around in a very provocative manner.
The workers firmly sat down on the ground in front of the hotel and began singing and chanting union slogans and songs.
At one stage I notice one man in civvies prowling around, holding a gun. The gun was deliberately and clearly visible. One of the striking hotel workers told me that they knew him well. He was one of the para- military thugs employed by the Shangri-La management.
At the rally I met one of the workers. He is 55 years old and he has two young children. Even though he has financially in real difficulties because of this long unending dispute he said that he would never give up.
Comrade Oddie, a spokesperson for the Shangri-La workers told me that this struggle is important to all the hotel workers in Indonesia.
He pleaded with me to tell Australian unionists to continue to support them because he said if they lose then Shangri-La workers, employed by this hotel chain throughout the Asia-Pacific, would lose as well.
The rally outside the hotel wound up around 6.30 pm when we moved to the nearby union office. There I gave the union the donations I had collected from their fellow hotel workers in Australia and other unionists.
They asked me to thank the Australian union movement and also said they are ready and willing to support Australian workers as well.
These unionists are very energetic. They have a lot to offer Indonesia.
Because of a culture of corruption among politicians and senior bureaucrats they have a harder and riskier struggle. They are actually risking their lives every time they go out to achieve basic human rights, their right to bargain collectively, their right to have a free, representative union recognised.
If you want to send personal messages of solidarity to the workers at the Shangri-La hotel here is a good e-mail contact point at the IUF offices in Indonesia.
If you want more history of the Shangri-La dispute then please click here.
by Sarah Roberts
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On 26 February this year, Dr Ted Steele was summarily dismissed from his position of Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong. Dr Steele had attracted the ire of the University of Wollongong because of his public remarks relating to marking procedures at the University: Dr Steele had raised allegations about the process of assigning students' marks in his Department. The Vice-Chancellor demanded that he unequivocally withdraw his allegations, and when Dr Steele did not do so, he was sacked.
The Vice-Chancellor's response was to sack Steele without notice. No formal warnings had been given. No disciplinary procedures had been instituted. The letter of dismissal was delivered by hand to Steele at home at 5.15pm on 26 February, along with a letter from the Head of Human Resources asking him to make arrangements to collect his material from the University as soon as possible.
The reason for the NTEU's concern is that the action taken by the Vice-Chancellor was in direct breach of the union's Agreement with the University. The conditions of employment for staff at the University of Wollongong set out in that Agreement include procedures to be followed if there is an allegation of serious misconduct. These serious misconduct procedures are set out in Clause 61, and require the laying of charges, the convening of a committee and give the employee the opportunity to respond to the allegations.
The Enterprise Agreement was made after lengthy and at times difficult negotiation with the University. By ignoring these agreed procedures for the dealing with serious misconduct allegations, the Vice-Chancellor breached the agreement, and showed contempt for the negotiation process and the rights of staff.
All workers should be concerned about this case. If the Vice-Chancellor's actions are not challenged and overturned, employers believe they can get away with arbitrarily breaching enterprise agreements.
Furthermore, the case raises important issues of public interest. The clause that was breached by the Vice-Chancellor had been expressly developed to protect academics from arbitrary dismissal. Essentially, the clause ensured that staff engaging in academic debate, public or private, are protected by due process, regardless of the nature or the content of their comments. Similar clauses appear in all University agreements.
The academic freedom protected by these provisions is a right and, indeed, a responsibility of academic staff. It covers the academic's right and obligation to engage in public debate and freely express opinions about the institutions in which they work without fear of recrimination.
This right reflects the historical role of universities as `critic and conscience' of society. It is reinforced by the fact that universities are publicly funded and hence accountable to the community - the community must have confidence in the transparency and the integrity of universities' operations.
The public is also entitled to know that public comment by academic staff is free from the threat of intimidation or dismissal, especially where unpopular or controversial opinions are being expressed.
Academic freedom does not extend to knowingly disseminating research and knowledge that is not based in truth. However, the misconduct procedures exist, in part, to provide an impartial forum in which the truth may be tested. This function makes them crucial.
In this context, the procedures for establishing whether or not serious misconduct has occurred are the most important defence of academic freedom we have. Without them, any academic who threatens the reputation of the university is subject to disciplinary action, before the truth or otherwise of his or her statements are tested. Without access to agreed disciplinary procedures, staff must live in fear of arbitrary disciplinary action, or dismissal.
Ted Steele's dismissal is only the latest, and the most dramatic, in a number of recent attempts by universities to undermine academic freedom. It is resonating around the world: in a recent article in New Scientist (published in the UK and distributed world-wide), Professor Ian Lowe argued that the case raised fundamental concerns about standards in Australian universities and the rights of staff to speak out. In Professor Lowe's words, `the reputation of the university system and the willingness of other countries to accept Australian graduates is at stake.'
By taking the action of sacking Steele, the University of Wollongong has probably done more damage to its reputation than anything he had said or done.
It is essential that workers and unions do not tolerate such breaches of enterprise agreements and arbitrary sackings, and that this message is conveyed to employers in no uncertain terms.
The NTEU has lodged a prosecution of the University of Wollongong in the Federal Court in defence of the Wollongong Enterprise Agreement, and continues to encourage workers to join in the campaign.
To help in the campaign, please sign the on-line petition at http://www.datalink.net.au/nteu/ or follow the links from http://www.nteu.org.au/, or write to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong, Professor Gerard Sutton - and publicise the issues at your workplace.
by Stuart Macintyre
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In New South Wales Labor ran candidates for all ten seats in the Federal Convention. Not one was elected. In South Australia Labor accepted four positions on the ticket with Kingston's liberals and all four were unsuccessful. Tasmania had no labour party but a Democratic League endorsed a group of candidates on the Labor platform, with no better result.
Only in Victoria, where William Trenwith accepted a place on the all-party ticket of the Age was there a successful labour candidate but Trenwith had broken with the Labor Party there in the previous year. The complete failure of the endorsed Labor candidates can be partly explained by the method of election on a state-wide basis, the low turnout and in New South Wales by the competition from a republican ticket as well as Cardinal Moran, whose candidacy introduced damaging sectarian animosities.
All the same, it was a chastening result. In the most recent colonial elections held in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, Labor had won a total of 122,000 votes (and in Queensland a further 28,000); their candidates for the Convention obtained barely half that number. John La Nauze has estimated that at this time Labor held 40 out of 360 seats in the lower houses of the colonial parliaments; in the Convention they would have a dubious one out of 50 delegates.
Shut out of its deliberations, they regarded it as an unrepresentative assembly of wealth and privilege. The lavish hospitality offered to delegates at Adelaide in the autumn of 1897, and then Sydney in the spring after some of them had travelled to London for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, particularly angered Bob Guthrie, a Labor parliamentarian in South Australia and a former seamen.
'It was a declaration of war against the working class', he thundered, for a constitution to be 'framed amid the fragrant smoke of the finest Havana cigars and the smell of the most savoury turkeys and ducks, and launched on its maiden trip in a sea of champagne'.
Backlash against Socialists
The adverse result in the Convention elections in New South Wales brought recriminations against the party's 'crude, ill-considered, bumptious manifesto', which turned into a backlash against the socialists.
Labor's Convention election manifesto was indeed crude - 'If you wish your children to grow up cursing you for your cowardice and apathy in neglecting to strike a blow for liberty and justice, vote for the Fat Man' - but it was scarcely socialist in its direct appeal to racial prejudice: 'If you want a piebald Australia, vote for the Conservatives'. Even so, the leaders of the Australian Workers' Union joined with leading parliamentarians to purge the party platform of socialist overtones.
In Victoria, on the other hand, the tide flowed in the other direction. Trenwith's apostasy increased the determination of the recently reformed United Labor Party to end its alliance with the Liberals. Hitherto the two parties had a common commitment to protectionism, but federation would remove the fiscal issue to federal politics and break up the longstanding Lib-Lab partnership. In late 1897 a new socialist weekly journal was established in Melbourne, Tocsin, to sound the alarm against the work of the Convention and the undemocratic constitution it was preparing.
Constitution Vote
That constitution was put to the people in New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria in June 1898. The Labor Party campaigned for a No vote in the three mainland states, and in Tasmania the Democratic League performed the same role. Criticism centred on the class bias of the functions allocated to the Commonwealth, the composition and powers of the Senate, the apparent power vested in the governor-general by codifying the conventions of a constitutional monarchy, and the difficulty of changing the constitution.
There was a clear Yes vote in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria, and historians have usually treated the result there as a foregone conclusion. The contest in Victoria was perhaps keener than is generally appreciated. The leaders of the Labor party and the Trades Hall Council campaigned vigorously against the bill alongside H. B. Higgins, the advanced liberal who had returned from the Convention convinced of its defects. There were signs early in the campaign that Higgins' colleague Isaac Isaacs shared his concerns.
More ominously still, the Age newspaper entertained them. Deakin had to use all of his influence to bring David Syme round to recommend a Yes vote. For a time at least, a Lib-Lab alliance appeared likely to reform in opposition to federation. In the event Victorians voted in favour of the bill by 100,520 votes to 22,099, but that turnout was well under the norm for parliamentary elections and a minimum of 60,000 Yes votes had been set as a condition of acceptance. If the Age had continued its opposition to the proposal, then that requirement might have been more difficult to satisfy.
In New South Wales it was this stipulation that defeated the federalists. New South Wales voted in favour of the bill by 71,595 to 66,228, but the requirement of 80,000 Yes votes was not satisfied and the proposal to join the Commonwealth was defeated. The outcome is usually attributed to the equivocations of the premier, George Reid, and certainly Barton and Deakin blamed him. But Reid merely voiced his misgivings and without the advocates of a No vote his heavy hints would have caused little damage. Bede Nairn argues convincingly that 'The Labor campaign was certainly a large factor in the Bill's defeat in New South Wales'. He goes further, however, in his argument that both Reid and the Labor Party were the saviours of federation. We may accept Nairn's contention that Reid encouraged the defeat of the 1898 referendum in order to negotiate concessions from the smaller, outlying states that strengthened the House of Representatives over the Senate and gave New South Wales the federal capital.
With these and other concessions, Reid was ready to go to a second referendum, but without a majority in the Assembly and in the face of an intransigent Council, he was dependent upon Labor support. It was Chris Watson, the first Labor prime minister, who kept Reid in office, ensured the passage of his enabling legislation through the lower house and arranged for Labor nominees to secure its acceptance by the upper house. Labor duly campaigned against the revised Federal Bill in the ensuing referendum and saw it easily carried. This was indeed an act of chivalry.
Meanwhile Queensland and eventually Western Australia were drawn into the imminent federal union. Here the labour movement displayed a greater ambivalence. Some sections, especially in Queensland, shared the misgivings about the shortcomings of the Commonwealth Constitution. When the premier of that colony brought in enabling legislation for a referendum on the Federal bill, Labor proposed an amendment that every white adult male should exercise the vote. Billy Higgs, who had shifted from Sydney with the reputation of an ardent republican nationalist, broke ranks to save the plebiscite. He and others were persuaded by the prospect that a Commonwealth government would be less conservative than their own, which would certainly not be difficult, and similar considerations operated in the West. In both these colonies, also, the outlying regions contained a high proportion of immigrants, drawn from other colonies by mineral discoveries, who chafed at their neglect by the provincial �lites of Brisbane and Perth. 'Separation for federation' was a popular slogan on the goldfields.
Federal Labor Established
Already there were preparations for Labor to enter Commonwealth politics. In September 1899, while the Queensland voters were still at the polls and before Western Australians were given the opportunity to vote on federation, a meeting of the intercolonial labour parties was called. It met at the Sydney Trades Hall on 24 January 1900, recommended establishment a Federal Labor Party and settled a platform on which candidates could stand for the federal parliament. The choice of candidates and direction of the election campaign that was conducted in the early months of 1901 were determined by the five state labour parties (Tasmania still did not have one), each operating under its own name according to its particular political orientation. Most, but not all, of the leading figures in the colonial labour parties ran for the Commonwealth parliament; they had clearly decided it would be the principal arena.
Before the, however, there was a reminder that they were outsiders at the feast. The Inauguration of the Commonwealth in Sydney on 1 January was the occasion of elaborate ceremony. The imperial pageantry, the presence of warships from the Royal Navy in the Harbour, the great march of troops from England, Scotland and India - all emphasised the nature of the occasion. The procession from the Domain to Centennial Park was organised in reverse order of precedence: the most lowly came first, the Governor-General last. So at the head of the parade came the trade unions: thirty mounted shearers in bush clothes, followed by ten silver miners from Broken Hill with hammers and drills, ten coal miners from Newcastle and Bulli with lamps and picks, ten wharf labourers with cargo hooks, ten glass blowers, ten plasters and so on through the trades. This was indeed an imperial triumph of the Roman kind, with the victors displaying their barbarian captives.
Labor and Parliament
Most contemporary observers were astonished at the result achieved by the Labor Party in the first federal elections. The election campaign was dominated by the contest between the government party led by Barton, which was generally known as Protectionist, and the opposition Freetraders led by George Reid. The Protectionists won 32 seats in the House of Representatives, the Freetraders 27 and Labor 16. In the Senate there were 17 Freetraders, 11 Protectionists and eight Labor members. In both houses, therefore, Labor held the balance of power.
In every subsequent federal election until 1913, furthermore, Labor increased its numbers in the House of Representatives. For a time Federal Labor was content to keep the Protectionists in office as the less conservative of the older parties, on the basis of support in return for concessions. When those concessions were insufficient, as proved the case with the government's industrial arbitration bill in 1904, then they crossed the floor. Deakin's resignation was designed to teach Labor a lesson. By making these neophytes assume the responsibilities of government, he would show them that it was they who were dependent on him. 'To say we were astonished at finding ourselves in office', Billy Hughes confessed, 'describes our feeling very mildly'. But Deakin's subsequent and precipitate removal of Hughes and his colleagues from office increased their determination to supplant him. Under Watson Labor did revert to support in return for concessions from Deakin's Liberal Protectionists, but in 1907 he gave way to Fisher and Labor won a majority in its own right by 1910.
National Politics Realigned
By this time Labor's success had forced a realignment of national politics. The Australian Labor Party, with its tight organisational form of conference, caucus and pledge, achieved a disciplined coherence the older political parties were unable to match. It was a federal party, composed of state branches that for some time would remain the locus of decision-making. As yet there was no Federal Executive but there was a Federal Conference and an effective mechanism for determining the Federal platform of the Party.
Through its affiliated unions and local branches the Labor Party was an effective campaigning organisation. The older Protectionists and Freetraders came together nationally in 1909 as a single non-Labor parliamentary party to resist their powerful rival, but outside the Commonwealth parliament they remained far less coherent.
Encouraged by its early success, Labor hoped for some time that it could rework the form of the Commonwealth along the lines it had proposed during the 1890s. Some of its goals were accomplished. The Franchise Act of 1902 did give all white men and women over the age of 21 the right to vote. The Immigration Restriction Act secured the White Australia policy. Other concerns turned out to be groundless. The plank in the 1900 Platform calling for citizen-initiated referenda had been premised on the groundless expectation that Labor would have little influence in the federal parliament, and was soon dropped. So too was the demand for a unicameral parliament since it became apparent that the Senate operated on party lines and strengthened the Labor Caucus - though motions for abolition of the Senate were brought to Federal Conferences and that of 1915 revived the object of removing state upper houses. Republicanism was soon a dead letter. That left the persistent and unanticipated desire to expand the powers of the Commonwealth, especially over industrial relations, prices, wages and monopolies, in which repeated referenda failed. There was a gradual accretion of power to the Commonwealth but centralism remained a chimera that was finally discarded after a final Whitlamite flourish.
Federation's Consequences
Federation had far-reaching consequences for the Australian working class. By creating a national market, it bound the wage-earners into a common labour market. Through Deakin's New Protection, a federal mechanism was established for maintaining national living standards by tariff protection, industrial arbitration and the judicial determination of a fair and reasonable wage. Industrial militants contested this regimen, socialists such as Brian Fitzpatrick lamented its debilitating effects, but the Labor Party and the most powerful unions embraced the national sentiment.
The labour movement had contested federation not out of a lack of national ardour but because its nationalism was radical and democratic. Once the Commonwealth was established, that nationalism flourished. Among the objects the Australian Labor Party achieved was the formation of a citizen army. Leading federal politicians were vociferous in support of compulsory military training; a Labor prime minister welcomed the delivery from Britain of the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy. Such fervent patriotism led in 1914 to Andrew Fisher's promise of the last man and the last shilling, to Gallipoli, the Western Front, rampant militarism, the conscription crisis and a Split that kept Labor out of office for fifteen years. It was indeed the curtain's fall on wide-eyed expectation.
Professor Stuart Macintyre, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. This is an edited extract from Professor Macintyre's contribution to a new collection of essays, Working Life and Federation, 1890-1914, edited by Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore and published by Pluto Press in May 2001. The full article with footnotes can be found in the book.
by The Chaser
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The young addict said he'd been shooting up heroin every day for nearly three years, and probably would have continued had his parents not intervened to warn him of the dangers.
"I thought I was completely hooked," said the youth. "I'd tried just about every treatment imaginable to get off drugs - naltrexone, methadone programs, cold turkey, even netball. But in the end all it took was a brief chat with my folks."
The youth's parents said they got the idea to talk to their son after watching a government-funded commercial on television.
"The ad told us to discuss drug abuse with our children," said one of the responsible parents. "So we called our son into the living room, sat him down and suggested that he stop using heroin. He said 'ok', and that was it. Problem solved."
"We were only able to do so after we read a government pamphlett which alerted us to the fact that heroin was 'bad'."
The parents said their other son had also stopped using heroin after his fatal overdose two weeks ago.
"If only we'd had one of our little talks with him too," reflected the parents. "Maybe he'd still be with us today."
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I want to get something straight from the beginning. I'm not one of those blokes who walks into a movie, takes a ridiculous amount of highbrow notes and then spends hours down the pub boring my mates senseless with details of political undercurrents and characterisation.
This said, any committed supporter of the principles that underlie collectivism and in particular organised labour, won't help but notice that there are some stark lessons to be learned from Baz Luhrmann's overhyped all singing, all dancing extravaganza Moulin Rouge.
Set in Paris at the turn of the 20th Century, the story focuses on a glamorous nightclub/cabaret palace entitled strangely enough the Moulin Rouge. We first meet Christian (Ewan McGregor) a young English writer who has moved to Paris to experience the bohemian lifestyle. He quickly falls in with a rag tag mob of actors who introduce him to the seemingly magical world of the Moulin Rouge. And it's here where the fun begins. It's here that we meet the lovely courtesan Satine (played by the publicity shy Nicole Kidman).
After mistaking Christian for a wealthy Duke interested in financing a play that will turn the Moulin Rouge into a fully- fledged theatre, Satine falls in love with the young writer. Unfortunately, it's not happily ever after. You see in the Paris underworld, money is everything, and falling in love is not an option. Now trapped between the obsessed Duke (Richard Roxburgh) who could guarantee both her future and that of the Moulin Rouge, and her first true love, Ms Satine is in a bit of a bind. Add in her rapidly failing health, and the lover's fight is a tragedy in waiting.
The makers and distributors of Moulin Rouge are selling the film as a 'visual feast', a slice of Baz Luhrmann's genius and a radical advance in filmmaking. Well, musically driven films have never really been this scribe's cup of tea, and although I must admit Luhrmann's appropriation of modern pop classics for a 19th Century setting is intriguing, it's the unintended portrayal of manipulation that got my blood racing.
You see, beneath the glamour and glitz, Moulin Rouge is an exercise in the politics of power, and a timely reminder why a strong and organised union movement will always be in society's best interest. Ironically, these lessons centre on Nicole Kidman's character of Satine. Whoever would have thought that everyone's favourite quasi-scientologist would be doing her bit for social awareness down under?
Satine earns her living as a courtesan, which is basically a nice way of saying prostitute. Apart from dancing in the Moulin Rouge the girls are expected to lavish their favours upon the gentleman who visit the Rouge in search of cheap thrills and good times. This tidy little business is presided over by one Harry Zidler, part ringmaster, part con-man and shining example of how not to treat your employees.
On the surface Mr Zidler is presented as a idealist, a person who works with his employees to create something unique, a bohemian vision that all can enjoy. But underneath this facade, he shows his true colours- profits at any cost. Sound familiar?
When Satine is exposed as being extremely ill, indeed dying, Harold's true intentions are revealed. While outwardly upset, Zidler is more concerned that Satine's illness will get in the way of his deal with the wealthy Duke to expand the Moulin Rouge. All of a sudden the iron fist is removed from the velvet glove. Satine will perform, give up Christian and marry the duke- it's the right thing to do for the company you see. I realise Paris in 1899 is a far cry from Australia 2001, but how often do we hear stories of workers who simply feel they have no choice?
Unfortunately, in this case Satine really doesn't have an option. Like her workmates, she is trapped in relative poverty and constantly told there is no chance of a better life. By fragmenting the Moulin Rouge with jealousy and lies Zidler has his workforce trapped in a corner- no unity, no problems thank you very much.
And of course, we shouldn't forget Duke's role in all this. This obnoxious character instantly reminded me of the worst type of corporate shareholder, constantly demanding more and more from his investments in order to satisfy an insatiable greed. Bankrolling the play that will make the Moulin Rouge a household name, the Duke implements a 'my way or the highway policy'. The performance will end how he wants it, or else; And if the cast and writers don't like it? Well, like any self respecting Patricks executive, intimidation and thuggery are the chosen tools of coercion.
Although the Moulin Rouge is a complex piece of fantasy from another time and another place, it reinforces a reality that still exists today. Profits before people, emotional and economic coercion, and a callous disregard for the ideals of social justice- unfortunately some things don't change.
Moulin Rouge is a powerful piece of filmmaking on many levels. Even surrounded by the chatter of my fellow jaded hacks I could not ignore this lesson in manipulation flashing before me on the big screen. And people wonder why we still need a union movement- it boggles the mind.
Eric Lee |
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A very long time ago (in Internet time, that is), websites were designed and maintained by people known as "webmasters". These were the people who had the skills that organizations needed if they wanted a presence on the world wide web. They learned arcane languages like HTML and created literally millions of web pages.
For a time, it was thought that they would be replaced by software. Many software companies thought that if they created a user-friendly program that could write web pages as easily as one writes a word processed document, there would be no need for webmasters. Those of us who knew something about this scoffed at the idea. No software could ever be as creative as a human being. And we were right.
Nevertheless, webmasters are an endangered species. And the danger is coming not from new software tools but from something that trade unions already know a lot about: teamwork.
Some of the most exciting things happening today on the Internet are being done by teams -- often very large teams -- working together and using sophisticated tools to build massive websites which have become quite popular. These developments are significant for trade unions because they point the way forward for our own use of the net.
Let me give an example of what I mean. Some time ago, a group of people decided it would be nice to have a comprehensive directory of what's on the web (like Yahoo), but is put together by volunteer experts, each one working in his or her field of knowledge (rather than by Yahoo's paid employees).
They created something called the Open Directory Project which you can find today on the web at http://www.dmoz.org. There are nearly 30,000 volunteer editors working on this project today, and collectively they have created an index of over 2,000,000 websites in over 300,000 categories. The directory has doubled in size in the last year; it is now the largest human-edited directory of the net. Their site is becoming enormously popular and the Project itself has been hailed as the largest open source software project ever, even larger than the much-typed Linux open source operating system.
Those 30,000 people are each adding from their own knowledge directly to the website, building it up into a fantastic resource, and they are doing so for free.
Another extraordinary example is Slashdot. (The site is at http://www.slashdot.org.) This site was launched some three years ago and has become one of the great success stories on the web, serving up some 30,000,000 pages a month. It gets so many visitors daily that when a site gets mentioned on its front page, the amount of traffic that then hits the named site will usually bring the web server down. This has become known as being "slashdotted".
And Slashdot too is entirely the creation of thousands of readers who discuss a wide range of technical issues most of which would be unintelligible to normal folk. They post new articles, read the articles posted, comment on them, and rate them. But they do not determine which articles appear on the front page of the site. That is now done a staff of reporters that sift through submissions and write their own content. Editorial control is still in the hands of the people that set it up. Unions would obviously also want to exert control over the content of their sites, even content created by their own members, in a similar way.
Slashdot and the Open Directory Project are both enormously successful examples of teamwork. And this is something that the trade union movement has always been rather good at too. Working together is the very basis of a union -- so why shouldn't our websites reflect our ethos of teamwork, sharing, and cooperation?
Which brings me back to that dying species, the webmaster. The one place in cyberspace where you still find the classical webmaster is on trade union websites. I know of unions with hundreds of thousands of members and whose website is entirely in the hands of a single individual. That individual may be the hardest working person on earth (and they often are) but why not make use of the union's greatest resource -- its membership.
I look forward to the day when trade union websites will be as vibrant and alive as Slashdot and the Open Directory Project -- when the information that needs to be shared among members of a union is shared using the same tools that have so energized the Internet itself.
The tools used to construct an online community like Slashdot are publicly available. Any union that wanted to could build a website using some of the same technology.
Of course that would mean giving members a more direct control over what the union says, what it stands for, and what it does than ever before.
This article appeared in the May 2001 issue of the magazine of the Education International, a world-wide trade union organisation of education personnel, whose 24 million members represent all sectors of education from pre-school to university 304 national trade unions and associations in 155 countries and territories.
by Peter Lewis
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The evidence is piling up: reduced crowds, plummeting TV figures and a king tide of media stories focusing on the character defects of the players rather than their sporting achievements. Hoppa's digit is but a symbol for the new face of League - where working class kids are turned into overnight millionaires and left to deal with the fleeting pressures of small-time fame.
Meanwhile, News Ltd continues to bank-roll the clubs whose disloyalty allowed the company to ruin the game. Meanwhile, those who wanted no part of the Murdoch vision have either been bullied into forced mergers or told there is no place left for them in the code.
There is every chance that league as we know it will not be around in a decade's time. With News Ltd also a major stakeholder in the far more successful sister code of Rugby Union, there is a strong business case emerging for winding the game up. Why pour money into promoting meaningless games between Brisbane and Auckland, when you have a stake in a rival product that delivers the same match-up with far more passion and grassroots support.
Gazing into my crystal ball, I see another merger on the horizon - but in this one the Super League players will be the junior partners. Already big names in League are switching to the Rah-Rahs for - can you believe it? - the more lucrative contracts. Wouldn't it be easier for all concerned if the Super 12 and Tri-Nations became THE national football competitions?
But just because League is in a state of terminal decline - doesn't necessarily mean that the Foundation clubs - whose exclusion from the Super League vision had a lot to do with its failure - need necessarily die with their code. The dominance of rugby union could provide a catalyst for the old League brands to come back to life
A first step would be for some bright entrepreneur to inject some cash back into the Sydney club scene. Bring back the Souths, the Newtowns, the Bears, the Tigers and the Magpies and fill up the suburban grounds. The big difference would be they would be playing Union not League. The reemergence of these teams would in turn bring the fans that could put some life into Sydney's struggling club rugby scene. These clubs would become the feeders for an even higher profile Super 12 competition, but the focus of local footy would go back to the grass-roots. And most real fans would tell you that's the only hope footy's got.
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions |
Money makes the World go round
The CFMEU, AMWU, AWU, APESMA, CEPU, MUA and the New Zealand Engineers Union have united to campaign against the proposed merger of BHP and Billiton.
As a part of the campaign the CFMEU is hosting a campaign website located at http://cfmeu.asn.au/mining-energy/bhp/ which provides information to BHP shareholders on why they should vote against the proposed merger.
Whilst we are on the theme of shareholders Triple J did a series 2 weeks ago called "Shareholder Nation" which investigated why Australia has the highest rate of share ownership in the world and how that impacts our society and culture.
A site was set up at http://triplej.abc.net.au/morning/shareholdernation/ it features information on all the subjects discussed and archives of the online discussions with M1 Supremo Sean Healy, Shareholder Activist Stephen Mayne, and Superannuation Guru Susan Ryan.
Workers of the World Unite
The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions - African Regional Organisation (ICFTU-AFRO) ... quite a mouthful ... has set up a new website for their Congress which will be taking place in Nairobi next week. Located at http://www.icftuafro.org/ the site has info on Congress documents, papers, submissions etc. and some general information on the ICFTU-AFRO.
While your there you may as well have a look at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions - Asia Pacific Regional Organisation (ICFTU-APRO) site at http://www.icftu-apro.org/. The ICFTU-APRO is the regional ICFTU organization that covers Australia, in fact ACTU President Sharan Burrow is the Regional President.
Now for something completely different
I found this site on Chaser http://www.chaser.com.au and I'm not sure if it's funny or offensive but it may me laugh, so I thought I would share the joy. The "Trailer Park" page http://www.geocities.com/unclejoesclinic/ , I don't know what else I can say about it but you have to see it to believe it.
Some people may have seen in the papers earlier this week stories about the search for the "Monkey Man" in New Delhi ... well thanks to CNN surfers can now stay on top of this story by checking out updates on the "Monkey Man" terrorizing down-town New Delhi http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/05/17/india.monkeyman/index.html.
If you have any sites you want Paul to review or wish to be added to the LaborNET links section let Paul know mailto:[email protected]
The Financial Services Minister has handled the collapse of the insurance company with all the finesse of the front-row forward he once was at the bottom of a collapsed scrum: head in the mud, legs akimbo and the only sign of life being the steam rising from his brickie's cleavage.
Hockey's problem from the start of this sorry affair was that he wasn't on top of the issue. He attempted to deflect blame - to the industry, to the States, anything to avoid forcing another raid on the budget coffers. By Tuesday he was feeling the media blow-torch over his inability to sense the largest corporate collapse in decades before it had happened; questions about whether HIH's lavish support of the Liberal Party may have played some part in this omission and the issue of why he had been sitting on reforms to make the insurance industry more accountable. And of course the biggest question of all: where would the buck be stopping? And why was the insurance industry getting away scott free?
On Tuesday night, he fronted Mike Munro and before you could say 'it's not my fault' the beads of sweat began appearing around the boofy bloke's chops. By the time Kerry had him in his sites on ABC the bodily fluids were literally dripping off him. Hint #1 - if you are carrying a couple of extra pounds and are about to go under the TV lights, avoid the woolen suit that is two sizes too small. Hint #2 - Avoid promising inquiries if you don't know your boss will back it. Going live to air, you could see Hockey realizing he'd made a botch of it, even as the words left his mouth, code for 'Roll on Royal Commission into Prominent Liberal Contributor' aka 'Kick Me Kim!'
But the one on one encounters were nothing compared to the ignominy of having to stand behind Howard, as he tried to clean up the mess Young Joe had left. As the PM droned, Joe stood one step behind, searching for a hole to fall into. At first he tried nodding in agreement with his boss. As the conference drew he took to staring at the floor, around the room, anywhere to take his mind away from the here and now. Another observation: his arms seemed to long for his suit, giving the impression of the awkward school boy up before the principal. Like we said at the top of the piece, it was almost as though Joe was the naughty child and Howard the embarrassed parent.
We actually knew Joe back in his university days, where the Libs' ideological opposition to student unions did not stop the Big Guy making a successful tilt at power. Joe set up the Campus Party, and ran a campaign based around the use of free beer kegs in the colleges to extract sufficient votes from the sons and daughters of the landed gentry to walk into the student council's top job. There, Joe invented himself into a clean-skin - not affiliated to any political party and the man for the 'average student'.
Joe gained some notoriety through his unconventional use of the Presidential chair and led the charge against the Hawke Government's introduction of student fees. Some of those who marched behind Joe in those heady days and then heard him summon in "a new era of student activism", may have been surprised to see him turn up in a government that has embraced a full-fee agenda and presided over a decrease in the number of Australians receiving a tertiary education.
Nevertheless, Joe had a meteoric rise into politics - winning North Sydney from whatever sad independent took over from Ted Mack, spending the first term of the Howard Government drawing up plans to ensure aircraft did not fly over the MP's electorate, before being catapulted into the second Howard Ministry. As Minister for Financial Services in a laissez faire government, Joe has had the difficult task of trying to regulate the very entities that bankroll his party.
When filling in as Acting Treasurer, he made a celebrated botch of the GST transition - including being able to calculate the levy on a can of Coca Cola - forcing his mate Costello to cut short a holiday and rescue him from the media wolves. He's also spent the past 12 months stalling any move to increase requirements on company directors to prevent them stripping their firms of assets and then leaving their workers without entitlements. So it's hardly been an auspicious start to a political career. If politicians were cars, you'd have to say Joe would be more likely to be competing in the Demolition Derby at Liverpool Speedway than the Grand Prix in Melbourne.
A final Joe story, that also carries a warning. Hockey is overheard on an interstate flight - up in the business section of course - with his mate, the mad Monk. Hockey orders champagne. Abbott turns to him and counsels: "steady on Joe, we won't be kings forever". Big Joe fills up his glass and scoffs triumphantly - "but tonight we are!. Drink up Big Boy, there may not be many more nights to go.
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