Chris White Online

International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.
Each year on March 8th, people across the globe come together to honor women and to work for their safety and equality.

www.internationalwomensday.com.
Happy International Women’s Day 2010!
On International Women’s Day, this official minute from the [...]

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 [...]

From ABC Radio National.
‘The Matilda Myth, on radio and online, makes the case that the real swagman, immortalised in our ‘Ballad of the Fair Go,’ didn’t drown himself in a billabong but was most probably murdered beside one, assassinated to silence the rebellion of the 1894 Shearers’ Strike.
This contentious hypothesis, based on 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 [...]

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 [...]

Typical media reactions against current workers’ strike actions hides the political reality analysed in detail on this blog that Labor’s Fair Work fails to ensure the right to strike, largely denies workers’ lawful industrial action, and so continues one of the worst repressive regimes against unions.
I will look at in 2010 some of the specifics [...]

TWO young Victorian workers have died in the past 24 hours.
It is reported in the Age yesterday that “A 24-year-old Wangaratta man was hit by concrete as he cleaned out a concrete pump hose yesterday, and a 21-year-old plumber died in hospital on Monday night after receiving an electric shock while working at Stawell in [...]