En Passant

Aussie jobs and similar slogans are part of the problem, not the solution. Class struggle offers the best way to defend foreign workers and win them residency and employment rights and conditions the same as other workers in Australia. That fight can then lead to a fight against the same and other bosses when they sack workers in Australia or cut their wages or conditions.

And that is what happened in Melbourne today. Workers responded to direct government attacks on them by walking off the job, an action that is illegal under Labor’s industrial laws. It may be just the start of a real fight against these draconian laws against construction workers.

Workers in Perth could follow suit, not for Aussie jobs and other dead ends but for more jobs, for permanent residency for all who come here to work, for proper wages, for empowering unions to police all worksites and for more spending on education and training, paid for by the bosses.

The ramifications of the collapse in class struggle are clear for all to see – growing inequality, more wealth being shovelled to the wealthy, long working hours, high levels of disguised unemployment and politically a cowered trade union movement meek in its mildness and terrifying in its timidity, with a Labor Party whose raison d’etre appears almost indistinguishable from the Tories.

Instead of attacking Chinese and other ‘foreign’ workers we should welcome them and fight for them. In doing that can we begin rebuilding our capacity as a movement to defend all jobs and help keep at bay the nationalist flag of racism.