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Crunch Time Conference

By on March 26, 2009 in Public Policy, Social justice

Crunch Time A Sydney conference with speakers from Australia’s leading progressive think tanks. At the halfway mark of the Rudd Government’s first term, and a year on from the 2020 Summit, this conference considers the principles and values that should guide progressive policy making into the 21 st century. For the past three decades governments [...]

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Abolish ABCC says ILO

By on March 25, 2009 in ABCC Australian Building and Construction Commission

A damaging report has just landed on Kevin Rudd’s desk from the International Labor Organisation (ILO) slamming the Rudd Government for allowing the ABCC to continue to operate. This is the sixth time the international community has come out against the ABCC. But the PM is ignoring the report. http://www.rightsonsite.org.au/file.php?file=/news/IIIYFXAPNP/index.html Building and construction workers need [...]

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‘Fair’ Work Act

By on March 20, 2009 in Labour Law, WorkChoices, Workers Rights

I was going to go and watch in Parliament as I do the ‘Fair’ Work Act debates but could not bear seeing MPs watering down further the protections for workers. Nor to live in the new by-partisan spin world that ‘WorkChoices is dead! ‘ (in name only). We will see later what good/bad news for [...]

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Global public works

By on March 19, 2009 in Capitalist Financial Crisis

Global Labor’s Forgotten Plan to Fight the Great Depression http://globallaborblog.org/ from Global Labor Strategies In the early 1930s, as global unemployment tripled in two years and the world plunged into the Great Depression, the world’s labor movements developed a program for fighting the global crisis through international public works. It’s a little-known historical might-have-been that [...]

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China keeps labour law

By on March 10, 2009 in China

China won’t revise labor contract law amid financial crisis: lawmaker www.chinaview.cn http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/09/content_10979130.htm BEIJING, March 9 (Xinhua) — China will not revise the Labor Contract Law to compromise workers’ rights as suggested by some people to help enterprises cope with the global financial turmoil, a legislator said here Monday. “The labor contract law has nothing to [...]

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Workplace Democracy and Democratic Unions

By on March 10, 2009 in Capitalist Financial Crisis, Collective Bargaining, Right to Strike, Workers Rights

Workplace Democracy and Democratic Unions: The only bill that fits a Fair Workplace, Guest post by Peter Curtis. Workers are losing their jobs and paying in a multitude of ways for what is an inevitable and systemic crisis of the capitalist economic system. Greed or a lack of control or regulation of the finance system [...]

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Profits and surplus value

By on March 10, 2009 in Capitalist Financial Crisis

This is the second item in a sequence spotlighting elements in Michael Lebowitz’s ‘Marx’s falling rate of profit: a dialectical view’ from the Canadian Journal of Economics, IX (2), May 1976, pp. 232-54 (to be available on surplusvalue.org.au). Humphrey McQueen continues. This item begins to dissect the phrase ‘rate of profit’ by pointing up the [...]

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Dialectics

By on March 10, 2009 in Capitalist Financial Crisis

Humphrey McQueen on ‘A dialectical view of laws and tendencies’ This item is the second in a sequence to spotlight aspects of Michael Lebowitz’s dialectical critique of political economy. The exercise aims to add to the intellectual weaponry at the disposal of the working class as we confront the crisis of the accumulation of capital. [...]

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Tracey dismayed on the Fair Work bill

By on March 8, 2009 in Collective Bargaining, Labour Law, WorkChoices, Workers Rights

The Fair Work bill (FWB) is set to go through Parliament this week. The Fair Work Bill being decided in the Senate will be weakened by Labor’s deal with the opposition and independent senators. This further delivers the corporate agenda to undermine gains for workers’ rights. I posted on this blog substantial union and academic [...]

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