En Passant

The way to avoid total defeat is to go on the attack now. Sitting around the campfire chanting Kumbaya and holding hands with the bosses and Abbott won’t stop them knifing us in our sleep. Massive discord holds the key to the possibility of success and of beating back the bosses. Or as the BLF says in much plainer English: ‘If you don’t fight you lose.’

I think that, once the fire danger has passed, the threat of a probably illegal strike campaign in NSW by all firefighters for massive increases in pay and government funding should be on the cards.

Industrial action, especially strike action, has the potential to win real gains for workers, to defend jobs and to help rebuild unions. The way to reform industrial relations in Australia is to make the draconian anti-strike and other rotten provisions of Labor’s Fair Work Act a dead letter by concerted strike action challenging the rule of the bosses.

Victorian nurses have the power to destroy the system of fines and threats of jail that are part and parcel of Labor’s Fair Work Act. Indeed, such is the importance of this dispute that other workers and unions should be mobilising in support of the nurses to help them smash Labor’s draconian and anti-worker Fair Work Act and win better pay and conditions.

It’s time for workers to fight for real wage increases to end the obscenity of the super rich wallowing in their untaxed billions.

Teachers have banned national numeracy and literacy tests. The results from these tests will become league tables and reinforce the cycle of lower funding for schools with students from less well off backgrounds. Rather than addressing problems the tests will reinforce them. The teachers’ ban is about protecting students. However under Labor’s industrial relations laws such action is […]

The reality for the working class is that to defend jobs and living standards they will have to strike, despite the opposition of Rudd Labor and the ACTU.

The ABCC is Labor’s law. Lobbying MPs and passing motions at the ALP national conference won’t change a thing. Cutting off profit to the bosses is the way to force them and the Government to back down.

Queensland teachers are showing us that industrial action has a much better chance of getting real wage increases and protecting jobs than relying on Rudd’s largess and industrial laws.

40 years ago workers across Australia struck and smashed the penal powers. We can do the same today to smash Labor’s penal powers.