Chris White Online

The recent tragic loss of life and house fires due to a deregulated labour market in the insulation industry and poor health and safety must not be repeated nationally.
But DPM Gillard is ruthlessly pushing ahead with her lower national OHS ‘harmonisation’ model approved December 2009, despite major union criticism (see earlier blogs).
One feature of [...]

BOOK REVIEW: Andy Alcock
“Framework of Flesh – Builders’ Labourers battle for Health & Safety”
by Humphrey McQueen (2009) Ginninderra Press (Port Adelaide)
I am very interested in this topic, because at an early age, I was confronted with the hazardous circumstances in which building workers were forced to accept.
For most of his working life, my father [...]

Abbott tells corporate leaders that WorkChoices was not an economic mistake, not all bad, but politically a mistake.
WorkChoices was necessary as regulation for unlimited freedom for profit making and undermining unions.
Turnbull was to hide WorkChoices 2. With Abbott the contest is back in the open.
But the Murdoch press weekly has propaganda “Abbott [...]

TRAGIC BRISBANE DEATH RINGS BELL FOR URGENT CHANGES IN WATERFRONT SAFETY 21 Feb 2010
As the family of dock worker Brad Gray mourn, co-workers and the Maritime Union of Australia are demanding overdue action to prevent a repeat of the fatality.
Brad was tragically killed on Saturday just before
3pm in an horrific workplace injury while working the [...]

‘It’s hot, there are flies, and we’re all sick of sausages – but morale amongst the coalminers here at Tahmoor is higher than ever.
Workers at Xstrata coal mine in New South Wales, Australia have been locked out in a bitter dispute over sackings but they are determined to keep fighting until Xstrata managers sit down [...]

Worker participation is not on the ALP’s Fair Work Australian agenda. But worker participation is debated in Europe.
“The type of labour needed by European companies – skilled, mobile, committed, responsible, and capable of using technical innovations and of identifying with the objective of increasing competitiveness and quality – cannot be expected simply to obey the [...]

ACTU media release. Liberals will bring back WorkChoices to cut wages and conditions at next election: new poll
A majority of Australians believe a Liberal Government led by Tony Abbott-led will bring back WorkChoices, a new national opinion poll released today shows.
The poll of 2,099 working Australians finds fewer than one fifth (18%) believe it unlikely [...]

Turkey: The Working Class
(Literally) Takes the Stage
by Sungur Savran
After at least a decade and a half of stagnation, the working class movement of Turkey is making a great stride forward, thanks to the militant
action of the workers of a now privatised former state economic enterprise,Tekel, the state monopoly of tobacco and alcoholic beverages.
The resolute [...]

IUF on Turkey: 10,000 workers protest despite police violence.
TEKEL Workers Protest in Ankara
Workers, their family members and supporters have been demonstrating in near-freezing temperatures in protest against a snap government decision to close their workplaces at the end of January 2010.
The protest began in front of the headquarters of the AKP (the political party [...]