by Rob Durbridge

The crisis besetting the Federal Government looks like a rising Queensland flood, while Abbott and Co watch and wait for the Government to drown.

It’s a crisis with multiple causes, linked by the failure of a leadership without a sense of identity or direction.

The undoubted achievements of the Government are submerged by short term opportunism, capitulation to the powerful at the expense of progressive support and an inability to communicate effectively.

However, this is all its own doing as the Abbott Opposition does not command much popular support either; from them there are no big ideas for reform, just more neo-liberal slogans and anti-union plans.

The one positive in this is that despite everything, Labor and the Greens could still win a majority next year.

It’s a long shot but,building on the blocks of the Carbon Price and its progressive compensation package, the NBN, and the Equal Pay commitment to community workers, a platform of social, environmental and economic reforms could still defeat the Coalition’s plans for greater inequality and disadvantage.

Instead of making concessions to corporations who will never repay the favour, take the concessions away from them so they pay their way like the good citizens they claim to be.

If the ALP wants the electorate to start listening, start saying things the majority wants to hear; public nation-building projects to stimulate growth, create jobs and protect the environment protection like fast rail, renewable energy sources and a publicly-owned and modernized energy sector.

Instead of becoming fixated on the budget surplus, how about building quality public services like education and health with the taxation base to do it? The increasing fragility of the prospects for growth may well demand further economic initiatives after May.

The ALP needs internal reform to allow adopted policies and members’ views to prevail and the restoration of caucus democracy so that isolation of the Government from the community can be addressed. Instead of blaming the Greens for the plight of the ALP, ask why it is that the Greens have won the progressive constituency where ideas count and swing votes.

The Greens have found articulate and knowledgeable leaders who are able to communicate the issues effectively while the ALP lurches from crisis to crisis alternating between denial and ultimate policy concessions which win no new support.

Withdrawal from the war-without-mandate in Afghanistan is an example; costing billions, lives and life-long disabilities for purposes never explained and then ended, but not ended with SAS units to continue indefinitely. US bases that are not bases but ‘joint facilities’, drones being launched from Australian territory and billions to be spent on submarines and aircraft for the privilege of the US alliance just don’t add up. Who are we arming against again?

The Carbon Tax is another – something which could be a key building block for the new economy which is now being downplayed and blamed on the Greens while renewable energy is downgraded in favour of more coal and gas exploitation. When it is known that the compensation is real, the costs are minimal for households and the sky has not fallen in, the Coalition’s scare campaign could be neutralized.

Instead of sulking about the success of the Greens, and prophesying doom with Bob Brown’s departure, the ALP should accept that Milne’s team will be vital to regaining government and act accordingly. One way would be to make Bandt the Minister for Energy, replacing the corporations’ favourite son.

Short of that, a reform program which distinguishes Labor from the Coalition and joins the Greens in building a coherent vision for a more just and sustainable Australia would reach traditional and new ALP voters. Leaders who can articulate and reach voters who are sick of spin and manipulation is another necessity. The ALP of all parties knows that its first duty is to win elections and to find the people who can do it.

The Greens new leadership in Christine Milne and Adam Bandt will see the party maintain its vote and reach out to more traditional labour voters in unions and social movements beyond the environment. Marriage equality and all the issues which relate to it, rights for workers to organise beyond the half-finished repeal of Work Choices, ending the demonization of refugees, the unemployed and Indigenous people are all part of the Greens future.

Christine Milne began the leadership of the Greens with a stellar performance which illustrated her command of the economic and environmental issues facing the nation. With a background as a community activist and state politician she has experience in government with both major parties as well as their hostility and ruthlessness.

Of all Federal politicians she has shown her knowledge and ability and is respected internationally for her political and community campaigns against harmful emissions. The Greens’ near 20% primary vote in the recent Queensland by-election shows that predictions of the party’s demise are premature.

Both the Greens and the ALP will continue to compete, particularly in inner-city electorates, but both parties also need to recognize that sitting on cross benches does not achieve much in the way of reform; together they can win government but apart they will be on the sidelines.

The immediate challenge for the two parties is whether or not to exchange preferences in Deputy Leader Bandt’s seat of Melbourne. For its part the Coalition is likely to not preference the Greens as they showed in the 2011 Victorian state poll.

This is a challenge to both the ALP and the Greens, but it is also symbolic of the wider challenge for the two anti-Coalition parties.

- Rob Durbridge, SEARCH President

http://www.search.org.au/archives/3112

About 100 unionists packed the Unions NSW Atrium on May 14 to discuss the right to strike campaign, at a fringe event of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Congress that began the same day.

Titled “Advance Australia Fair? Australian jobs and the right to strike”, the forum was sponsored by the Victorian Trades Hall Council. VTHC secretary Brian Boyd said it had not generally sponsored or organised ACTU fringe events, but this campaign warranted it.

The VTHC launched the Right to Strike campaign after it was first raised at the December 2010 Union and Community Summer School.

The forum was opened by Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon, who said that in NSW “there is no right to strike … and with Barry O’Farrell’s new laws, there is no right for unions to even affiliate to a political party of their choice any longer in NSW”.

Victorian Electrical Trades Union secretary Dean Mighell discussed what was happening to jobs of his members while their ability to take industrial action was restricted. “Jobs are being offshored to Mexico, where capital can get cheaper labour costs … Free trade is cut-throat.” He said the current mining boom was concerning: “We need to think beyond the quarry.”

ACTU president Ged Kearney discussed the union movement’s campaign around insecure work, and said the right to strike is a fundamental right.

Len Cooper, Victorian secretary of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union said: “We live in a country that is described as democratic – yet the basics of international labour laws are excluding both federal and state law.

“This is not a small issue – this affects 11 million workers. This is about the right to strike, the right to picket, the right to take solidarity action.”

Cooper said that in the capitalist crisis, many militant unionists were being sacked or seeing their jobs outsourced or offshored.

We need to defend the right to strike. And the right to strike will only be won by striking,” he said to cheers from the crowd.

Chris White, former secretary of the South Australian Trades and Labour Council and a union activist for 30 years, told the meeting that all penal powers needed to be repealed, including “all restrictions in Fair Work Australia that were adopted word-for-word from Work Choices”.

“The right to strike should not mean having to go to a commission, giving three days notice so that employers get forewarning to make contingencies to undermine workers’ industrial action. It should just be about a meeting of workers making a decision collectively.”

White also called for the abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission completely, not just in name.

White said the importance of striking should not be limited to economic interests: “Unions should be able to take solidarity strikes. In the past, when Indonesia was committing genocide in East Timor, we used to be able to strike to support the people of East Timor.”

He also said the question of workers’ control and self-management needs to be on the agenda. “Workers can control our own economy without capitalists.”

In discussion, South Coast Labour Council secretary Arthur Rorris spoke strongly in favour of the campaign, saying it shouldn’t be a fringe event, and “the right to strike is the main game. Capital can strike, and we should be able to as well. If you don’t have the right to withdraw labour, you are a slave.”

Geelong Trades Hall Secretary Tim Gooden said the campaign needed to spread. He said unions should not be allowed to be picked off, but build a fighting alliance together to push the right to strike.

Gooden said the experience of unions in the Clarrie OShea case in 1969 showed that the battle to free O’Shea, who was jailed for striking, was not a short one, but a campaign built over years.

Susan Price, branch secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union at the University of NSW, said attendees should sign on to a joint statement in support of the right to strike campaign that was initiated in NSW. Many rank-and-file and union leaders had pledged support.

Initial NSW signatories to the statement include veteran trade unionist Fred Moore; assistant national secretary of the MUA Warren Smith, deputy branch secretary of the MUA in Sydney Paul Keating, NSW state secretary of the CFMEU Brian Parker, University of NSW branch secretary of the NTEU Susan Price, Sydney University branch secretary of the NTEU Michael Thomson, and state councillor of NSW Teachers Federation John Gauci.

The ACTU Congress voted on a 釘etter Bargaining Policy・ that included “restoring an effective right to strike”. This policy notes that the International Labour Organisation has described Fair Work Australia’s regulation of industrial action as 兎xcessive・ and calls for industrial action to be available without a secret ballot. The policy also calls for bosses to have to give three days notice for lockouts and not be able to use replacement labour during industrial action. It also demands an end to the outlawing of pattern bargaining, and for an end to workers or their unions facing coercive or punitive court orders from industrial action, unless Fair Work Australia has ordered an end to the industrial action.

[To sign the right to strike statement or for more information, contact Susan Price on 0400 320 602 or pricesusan9@gmail.com.]
From GLW
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51070

The ashes of Joe Hill

Let’s start from three interlocked expressions of the IWW’s approach to educating, organising and agitating: its humour, its slogans and its songs.

In comparison, today’s grouplets, including the IWW, seem po-faced.

The first aspect is the power of IWW satire, sarcasm and irony. We remember jokes and repeat them in ways we don’t with the best argued ideas. On slogans, ‘Fast Workers Die Young’ is still going the rounds when not many Marxist scholars can define universal labour-time.

Tom Barker was gaoled in 1915 for a headline in Direct Action to counter wartime recruiting: ‘Your Country Needs You: Workers, Follow Your Masters.’

Similarly, we remember snatches of IWW songs because they are witty and because we sing them together.

The whole of a May Day march should be a massed choir. ‘Bump me into parliament’ to ‘Pie in the Sky’ circulated long after speeches and manifestos were forgotten.

The second weapon in the Wobblies’ armoury was ‘Propaganda by deed’.

My father and his workmates at a Brisbane tannery joined a union in 1917 after a Canadian seaman Wobbly king-hit the foreman. The workers had never seen anyone stand up to the boss. Of course, the effectiveness of that blow was increased because it took place during a revolutionary upsurge around the world.

Propaganda by deed is not just the one-off punch but involves building up strength in the workplace by initiating a campaign for a winnable demand that has broad support, for a shithouse or potable water on site.

That is the way to recruit and to keep those who join active once they pay their union dues.

Read the whole article here

http://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2012/05/11/iww-then-and-now/

joe hill

“Australia must pursue universality in labour law. Doing this effectively requires:

Expanded definitions of employers and employees;

Reforms to better capture indirect employment arrangements like labour hire and dependent contracting;

A firmer definition of casual work; and
Expanded National Employment Standards that create a set of inclusive minimum standards that protect all employees.

We have also provided recommendations on how our industrial relations system can be reformed to provide stronger legal pathways from insecure work to ongoing employment.

However, as I have said simply refining labour market regulation won’t limit the growth of insecure work.

To provide decent work for all, we also need to ensure that an effective safety net is in place for people who fall out of work and invest more in our workforce – especially the most disadvantaged.

We have called for a number of reforms aimed at achieving a more skilled workforce, including:

A broader focus on work-life transitions, rather than the narrow preoccupation with the transition between employment and unemployment that has given led to an emphasis on ‘Welfare-to-Work’ initiatives.

A commitment to lifelong learning, including a call for the ACTU to investigate learning accounts as a model for investing in the capability of workers over the lifetime.

Reform to Australia’s tax and transfers system to provide a stronger safety net by:

Addressing the inadequacy of the Newstart Allowance;

Simplifying income declaration systems;
and
Abolishing the Liquid Assets Waiting Period.
Changes to the way Job Services Australia interacts with forms of insecure work such as labour hire.

Read the whole speech here

http://www.actucongress.org.au/site/congressmedia/speeches-and-opinion/1623-address-by-brian-howe-address-to-actu-congress-2012

Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Secure Jobs. Better Future
Preamble
Despite strong and sustained economic growth, recent decades have seen a worrying and dramatic rise of insecure work in Australia.
Today, only about 60% of workers are in full-time or part-time ongoing employment; the rest – some 4 million workers – are engaged as casuals, on short-term contracts, in labour hire, or as independent contractors.
Insecure work leaves a large section of the workforce not sharing in our national economic prosperity. They have inferior rights, entitlements and job security to their counterparts in ongoing employment. It makes it tough for working families to plan for their future when they cannot rely on regular incomes, but have rising household costs and are shouldering more and more household debt.
The rise of insecure work in Australia is the result of a business model that shifts the risks from the employer to the employee. Australian unions do not believe a strong, prosperous economy must come at the expense of quality jobs, of respect for workers’ rights, and of workers exercising some control over their working lives.
Resolution
Congress welcomes the report of the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia and thanks the Inquiry panel for their work.
The report we have heard today demonstrates that this issue is not confined to the margins of the Australian labour market. Insecure work can affect any worker – blue collar, white collar, private sector, public sector. It affects younger and older workers and, disproportionately, women, indigenous workers and workers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
It affects the high skilled as well as the low skilled.
But there is no reason why we should accept that a modern economy must drive insecurity at work.
Congress commits to a properly resourced Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign.
Congress recommends that the report be properly considered with appropriate recommendations incorporated into a detailed campaign plan to be submitted for approval at the next meeting of ACTU Executive.
The campaign will work actively to diminish the incidence of insecure work in the Australian labour market and will be aimed at actively and effectively involving the ACTU, Trades and Labour Councils, National and State unions and community partners.
The campaign will be multi-layered and will involve workplace, industrial, political, and community strategies to tackle the issue. It will include a clear framework for legislative changes and will outline a high profile communications strategy.
We believe reliable workers should have jobs they and their families can rely on with:
 Fair and predictable pay and hours of work;
 A say about how, where, and when they work, and to be consulted about change;
 Access to important conditions like annual leave, paid sick leave, overtime, penalty rates and long service leave;
 Protection from unfair dismissal;
 Quality skills and training and career opportunities; and
 A healthy and safe work environment.
To achieve these aims, Congress determines, as part of the Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign, to pursue an industrial and legislative agenda that includes:
 Improved regulation of the labour market that provides all workers with a universal set of protections and entitlements;
 Reducing and removing the ability of employers to shift economic risk onto their workforce;
 Measures to provide better protections to workers employed indirectly through labour hire and agency arrangements, and eliminate disguised employment arrangements like sham contracting; and
 Measures that empower workers in insecure work to build a working life based on dignity, respect and fair recognition of their work.

This 85 page report is well worth reading and studying, but more importantly campaigning with unions for the implementation of its recommendations too detailed to record here but covers major changes to our Fair Work Act for secure work orders.

The resolution is:
Secure Jobs. Better Future
Preamble

Despite strong and sustained economic growth, recent decades have seen a worrying and dramatic rise of insecure work in Australia.

Today, only about 60% of workers are in full-time or part-time ongoing employment; the rest – some 4 million workers – are engaged as casuals, on short-term contracts, in labour hire, or as independent contractors.

Insecure work leaves a large section of the workforce not sharing in our national economic prosperity. They have inferior rights, entitlements and job security to their counterparts in ongoing employment.

It makes it tough for working families to plan for their future when they cannot rely on regular incomes, but have rising household costs and are shouldering more and more household debt.

The rise of insecure work in Australia is the result of a business model that shifts the risks from the employer to the employee.

Australian unions do not believe a strong, prosperous economy must come at the expense of quality jobs, of respect for workers’ rights, and of workers exercising some control over their working lives.

Resolution
Congress welcomes the report of the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia and thanks the Inquiry panel for their work.

The report we have heard today demonstrates that this issue is not confined to the margins of the Australian labour market. Insecure work can affect any worker – blue collar, white collar, private sector, public sector. It affects younger and older workers and, disproportionately, women, indigenous workers and workers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

It affects the high skilled as well as the low skilled.
But there is no reason why we should accept that a modern economy must drive insecurity at work.
Congress commits to a properly resourced Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign.

Congress recommends that the report be properly considered with appropriate recommendations incorporated into a detailed campaign plan to be submitted for approval at the next meeting of ACTU Executive.

The campaign will work actively to diminish the incidence of insecure work in the Australian labour market and will be aimed at actively and effectively involving the ACTU, Trades and Labour Councils, National and State unions and community partners.

The campaign will be multi-layered and will involve workplace, industrial, political, and community strategies to tackle the issue. It will include a clear framework for legislative changes and will outline a high profile communications strategy.

We believe reliable workers should have jobs they and their families can rely on with:

 Fair and predictable pay and hours of work;

 A say about how, where, and when they work, and to be consulted about change;

 Access to important conditions like annual leave, paid sick leave, overtime, penalty rates and long service leave;

 Protection from unfair dismissal;

 Quality skills and training and career opportunities; and

 A healthy and safe work environment.
To achieve these aims, Congress determines, as part of the Secure Jobs. Better Future campaign, to pursue an industrial and legislative agenda that includes:

 Improved regulation of the labour market that provides all workers with a universal set of protections and entitlements;

 Reducing and removing the ability of employers to shift economic risk onto their workforce;

 Measures to provide better protections to workers employed indirectly through labour hire and agency arrangements, and eliminate disguised employment arrangements like sham contracting; and

 Measures that empower workers in insecure work to build a working life based on dignity, respect and fair recognition of their work.

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.
Read the article here

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/08-1

“You can get depressed hearing all the stories of low-wage and immigrant workers,” Ahmad said. But at Labor Notes, “the energy is amazing.” Vision sharpens, and all of a sudden the movement that can stand up against the odds comes into view.

http://labornotes.org/2012/05/troublemakers-union-gathers-stronger-ever

“From Cairo to Madison, 2011 was the year people stood up—or sat in—putting democracy back on the agenda,” Brenner said. “The game changer for most of us was Occupy Wall Street. 99 to 1—I like those odds!”

“Nothing is without sacrifice,” Shalaby said, recounting the strike wave that has swept Egypt since last year, and the revolution that claimed many lives.

Shalaby said his union federation is reaching out to the whole Arab world because Egypt is the door to that world. “We all live under one sky,” he said. “In Egypt we have a saying: workers of the world, unite.”
Union members from coast to coast are making it clear they’re hungry for a fighter in their corner. From the new leadership at the New York State Nurses to the second generation of reformers in AFSCME Local 3299 on California campuses, attendees at the conference brought plenty of reasons to be confident that rank and file workers see what so many union leaders don’t: that the power is still in our hands.

Fellow Verizon worker and CWA Local 1101 organizer Ken Spatta spoke Sunday on the long road of reform inside his union, which culminated in a takeover of the local in the wake of last summer’s Verizon strike.

The strike showed who the local’s real leadership was. With no warning, Spatta said, the local’s reform caucus put picketers on the street just a half hour after the national union called the strike. Reformers stepped up to captain picket lines and take extra shifts protesting at wireless stores.

The strike stalled, but Spatta said his local and the other fighters inside CWA and the IBEW are still working to mobilize against a company whose CEO makes $55,000 a day—including weekends. …

“Up, up with the union, down, down with the Hyatt,” shouted hundreds of demonstrators at a rally that filled a city block.

Read the report here
http://labornotes.org/2012/05/troublemakers-union-gathers-stronger-ever

Unionists need to organise for the right to strike, for the effective strike and for workers’ control.

1. Unions’ right to strike campaign is to repeal all Fair Work Act penal powers and for a ‘firewall’ protection for workers in their unions taking industrial action.

ILO principles can prevail:

‘The right to strike is one of the essential means available to workers and their organisations for the promotion and protection of their economic and social interests. These interests not only have to do with obtaining better working conditions and pursuing collective demands of an occupational nature but also with seeking solutions to economic and social policy questions and to labour problems of any kind which are of direct concern to the workers.’

The ACTU argued ILO principles with the 1993 Keating reforms for the first enterprise bargaining protected action regime, but we did not achieve all our the aims. This protected action limited right to strike was weakened under Reith’s 1996 WRAct.

‘Repressive tolerance’ of strikes under corporate legal attack moved to repression of strikes under WorkChoices – the most severely regulated anti-strike regime in the OECD world – still retained in FWA. Howard’s WC spin says ‘we are not taking away the right to strike’ but in practice unionists are not free to strike.

Still no one argues against the principles. ALP MPs and Rudd in 2005 criticised WC and supported the ILO right to strike. But the Rudd and Gillard government flouts such a right to strike.

In ACTU policies there remains scope for the endorsement of ILO principles, based on an appreciation of the right to strike as a civil, political, and socio-economic entitlement.

In 2012 right to strike amendments can go through this Parliament.

Minister Bill Shorten can first delete all of the FWA/WC strike provisions. Then insert the above ILO principles and a section to ensure no one can take a legal case against any industrial action, full stop.

Employer legal sanctions to stop strikes and fine striking workers and union officials are not available. Corporate law firms are out of industrial relations. The right to withdraw our labour-power is legally paramount over all corporate law.

What does this ‘firewall’ protection for the strike mean? Such a new FWA guarantees freedom for workers in unions to collectively bargain with strikes. Unionists are free to determine the strike processes, the timing, the negotiations, the notices etc and free to determine how we take industrial action democratically in paid workers’ meetings. Free to pursue our demands not in anyway legally constrained, not restricted by old legalities of ‘matters pertaining to employment’ or so-called ‘not allowed’ matters. Free to put on industrial pressure for claims not only for wages and conditions in collective agreements but over so-called management prerogative decisions, over industry development strategies, for job protection provisions, environmental demands etc.

The right to strike on occupational health and safety is absolute.

The employer right to lockout is repealed. No Minister has the discretion to stop industrial action.

Industry and pattern bargaining industrial action is lawful as the industrial parties are free to determine at what level to bargain.

The Building and Construction regime now in FWA is abolished. Restrictions in trade-related industries, such as the waterfront are repealed.

The lawful strike extends internationally – essential for unions to organise globally in response to powerful multi-national corporate interests.

This right to strike politically is a last resort response to bad government policy affecting workers’ interests. Workers, as citizens in a democracy, have legal protection for political protest assemblies e.g. against WorkChoices; no penalties against workers taking time to attend ‘No War’ rallies or on foreign affairs protesting against dictatorships e.g. in Fiji and fascist acts such as Indonesian TNI genocide against the East Timorese. The lawful strike supports human rights struggles. Provisions in the Crimes Act and anti-terror laws are repealed. No exceptions such as ‘for damage to persons or property’.

Union officials organising the strike have legal protection against ancient British master and servant common law actions in tort, contract and in equity – no possibility of crippling damages. Industrial disputes are settled by the parties or in the FWA system and not in the courts.

Picketing is protected industrial action not subject to injunctions. Employers cannot employ ‘replacement’ labour to break a strike, as this is a violation of our freedom of association. The individual on strike is protected: no return to work orders, no threat of dismissal, no victimization, no fines.

Competition law outlawing solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts is removed.

2. The question is then reviving the strike so working people can regain power and transform Australia.

Unions know the strike is the essential means for the power to win our demands, e.g. secure jobs. How workers organise a winning strike is a priority. Historically in this era strikes are essential to respond to the capitalist and environment crisis and in response to the political attacks on workers’ rights. Democratic control by workers in their unions of their industrial action is central to defeat the employers’ decisions, defeat the corporate attack and defeat right-wing ‘austerity’ cuts.

The effective strike now is very difficult because of the repressive regime and corporate/government lawyers taking legal actions against unions. Employees in their unions in enterprise bargaining have to win ‘protected’ strikes as best we can.

Recruitment succeeds when integrated into successful strike action.

We can criticize past union leaders shifting resources to organize the un–unionized sectors, as this has failed to revive unions. We cannot resolve our crisis simply by adding new members – without a powerful strike in place.

Planned lengthy strikes are necessary to organise. Australian unions are good at the one-day protest publicity strike. But this gives the illusion of struggle, distracting from our real problem, which is the lack of an effective traditional lengthy strike. Secondary bans, boycotts and solidarity strikes are a powerful means of union strength and need to be again back in practice if unions are to succeed.

Mass general strikes in many countries are organised as the global capitalist order is in another chronic crisis period with corporate and state austerity attacks on workers. Occupy activists call for a general strike on May Day. But look back through history about how general strikes happened. They are organized in the workplace by union delegates and organizers organizing their co-workers and can be done again.

Our YRAW campaign proves our capacity strategically to win in civil society and politically. We defeated Howard, but failed to secure key rights at work.

We organise outstanding social unionism struggles with community support. But to win requires the power of collective strike action. Social unionism is not a replacement for direct struggle against employers. Social unionism where the strike is abandoned loses the central role of workers at work, at the point of production.

Co-ordinated strikes against the repressive anti-strike regime requires union members organising across industries, a mass strategy to defeat the penal powers, learning from the 1960’s anti-penal powers organising model resulting in mass national ‘Clarrie O’Shea’ strikes. Working class principles justify the refusal to follow unjust and illegitimate restrictions and for the principled defiance of judicial orders to win the right to strike.

“Labour is not a commodity”, “our labour power creates wealth”, “the right to strike is a basic freedom that distinguishes us from the slave or bonded labour or from fascism”, “ freedom from corporate and HR rule” etc.

3. But the strike is only a means. We return to work with more power. Workers’ struggles can then develop with democratic self-management agendas. Workers’ control over our work to counter employers’ control is the challenge. Tactics historically are sit-ins and occupations when workers facing redundancies took over factories and ran them cooperatively. We can learn about workers self-management cooperatives. We can study workers control developments.

As unionists we can listen to the history of militant workers who acted believing we can control our work and the economy without capitalist rulers.

Some of our richest Australians, like billionaire Clive Palmer, did not pay tax in his main private company last financial year. BRW lists his wealth at $5.05 Billion.

Unemployment has risen to 5.2% as at March 2012, yet Australia still relies on foreign workers.

Australian banks are some of the most profitable in the world, yet finance jobs are being shipped
offshore and interest rates sit above the reserve bank rates.
The social contract is broken.
This paper calls for a fundamental shift in policy, so that:
1) every Australian makes a fair contribution,
2) every Australian receives a fair distribution of wealth; and
3) every Australian who wants a job, has every opportunity to get one.Read in this document below

AJP final document

Jobs, rights, fairness and equality on the agenda as unions prepare for 2012 ACTU Congress
07 May, 2012 | Media Release Better protections for workers exercising their rights, a more balanced bargaining system and a range of improvements to economic and workplace conditions to help deliver secure jobs are all at the heart of a dynamic agenda for Australian unions leading into next week’s ACTU Congress.

The ACTU today outlines its vision to create a better future for Australian workers with secure jobs and a stronger, more equitable economy, to be endorsed at next week’s 2012 Congress.

Almost 1000 delegates representing workers from every industry and sector in Australia will attend the ACTU Congress at the Sydney Convention Centre from 15-17 May. ACTU President Ged Kearney said the triennial Congress – often referred to as a “Workers’ Parliament – was the largest and most important gathering of Australian unions.

In the lead up to Congress, draft policies have today been released covering industrial relations, social and economic policy and representation and organisation of workers. The policies are available at www.actucongress.org.au

Ms Kearney said the Congress would outline a positive agenda for Australian workers against a backdrop of increasingly militant campaign by employers to destroy the hard-fought rights of workers.

“We will put forward solutions to counter this employer militancy, through better bargaining powers for workers and stronger representation rights, including a Charter of Delegates’ Rights,” Ms Kearney said.

“But we also have a growing number of workers engaged in insecure work who are often powerless against hostile employers who put profits before workers.

“In response, unions will call on the Government to strengthen the rights for employees in insecure work, and to improve their conditions of employment.

“Improvements need to be made to allow workers to bargain for job security, and to prevent big employers from holding the economy to ransom through their refusal to bargain in good faith.

“The agenda for wages and conditions will include lifting the minimum wage to $660, improving rates of pay for young workers, and expanding the National Employment Standards.

“Australians unequivocally voted in 2007 for better rights at work and unions have subsequently achieved much success, including the negotiation of the Fair Work Act. But we are seeing a growing wave of attacks on the wages, conditions and job security of workers.

“This short-sighted approach will ultimately lead to a weaker economy. We know that a strong economy is underpinned by good jobs, a workforce in which everyone is given a chance to participate and in turn contribute to the economy.”

A comprehensive plan for economic and employment growth through vibrant service, manufacturing and resources sectors, alongside a strong public sector, will also be debated at the Congress, as will tax reform for a fairer and more inclusive society.