Some unionists are not aware of the ACTU Senate submission on the Fair Work bill. Here are headings of ACTU criticisms in PART 3 – CONCERNS WITH THE BILL that have to be addressed by Minister Gillard. 24 APPLICATION OF THE BILL. Independent contractors. Foreign ships. Public/community sector employees. 25 THE NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS. 26 [...]

The Politics of Economic Disaster
“The Politics of Economic Disaster” by Immanuel Wallerstein Every day, I read another economist, journalist, or government official opining on how best to achieve economic recovery in this country or that. Needless to say, the remedies all contradict each other. But almost all of these pundits seem to me to live in fantasyland. They actually [...]

Marx on crises
Humphrey McQueen provides two extracts from Marx’s A Contribution to the critique of Political Economy, (1859), 150 years ago. This first passage has been edited to break up Marx’s single sentence into four. A danger in this sub-editing is that his interconnections will be lost. That risk is greater in breaking up sentences than paragraphs. [...]

Turnovers
This sequence of Humphrey McQueen’s responses to the crisis in the accumulation of capital has stressed the need to return to Marx’s critique of political economy. Even people who accept the relevance of Capital to the exploitation of labour wonder whether those insights can help us to penetrate a financial crisis. That skepticism is reasonable [...]

Capital
One mark of the crisis in the accumulation of capital is that second-hand copies of Marx’s Capital are nowhere to befound . Those fortunate to have our own sets are taking them down, and opening them, perhaps for the first time. How many of those who start to read at the beginning are likely get [...]

FWB: Outworkers protections removed
One purpose of labour law, here the Fair Work bill is to provide protection for the most vulnerable workers. One group are outworkers, many migrant women on exploitative piece rates and no conditions in homes making clothes for business. ANU legal academic Michael Rawling in his Senate submission deals with how the Fair Work Bill [...]

My Fair Work bill Senate submission
The Rudd government did not know about or develop this proposed labour law, the Fair Work Bill (FWB) as a response to this most severe global capitalist financialcrisis since the great depression. In my Senate submission I first point out that the changed circumstances of the global capitalist financial crisis means the Fair Work Bill [...]

Priorities
Two previous items from Humphrey McQueen looked at the volume and value of comments from several socialist grouplets on the crisis in the accumulation of capital. Two of the biggest have the least impressive records. Instead of preparing for an implosion of global capital, each is locked onto the campaigns they had developed to attract [...]

Crisis! What crisis?
Humphrey McQueen on Crisis! What crisis? Shortly after the Austrian aeronautical engineer Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911, he drove Bertrand Russell to distraction by refusing to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. These days, I find myself sharing Russell’s frustration because so many socialist grouplets are unable to focus [...]
IMPORTANT NOTE
About The Author
Chris has worked in the trade union movement for 30 years and researches on left politics, union issues and China labour law. He lives in Darwin.
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