En Passant

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

The only protection we have from the Daniel Grollos of the world, and their contempt for our safety and our rights, is a strong union that is independent from multi-millionaires and their goons – the issue at the heart of the Grocon dispute. And we’ve shown in spades that, if we’re given a fighting lead, we’re prepared to do what it takes to defend it.

And of course, there’s the most basic fact. The fact that infuriates the rich and the powerful, and that drives their bought and sold apologists in the media into a frenzy. That is, as we demonstrated in the streets of Melbourne on Tuesday, we have the power to fight and win.

Having Grocon in charge of safety is like putting John Howard in charge of refugees. Only union reps on site can really help enforce safety. Only the ability to walk off the job without loss of pay over safety issues can really force the bosses to take the issue seriously. It has been a long long time since workers as workers have fought the bosses and their police so successfully and drawn in other workers in their own city and elsewhere. A long long time. What a great day.

This is an important fight. If the Coles/Toll holdings workers win other workers might feel confident to try to win better wages and conditions and claw back some of the wealth that the bosses have won from them over the last 30 years. Victory to the Toll Holdings’ workers at Coles!

If you were serious about representing ordinary working Australians and not big business, Julia Gillard, you’d join the Coles’ picket line at 6 am on Friday morning and mobilise the ALP and its members in Melbourne to be there to support these ordinary working Australians in their just fight against two greedy and very tough companies.

You could get a lift and an ear-bashing from Trades Hall at 6 am with Socialist Alternative.

See you on the picket line, Prime Minister.

With enough determination and support the Toll Holdings workers can win and show the rest of the workforce that strong industrial action supported by other workers and the community can win even in the face of the power of big companies and Labor’s rotten industrial laws.

You are right of course. Protests never achieve anything.

Resistance across the Arab world. The occupy movement in over 800 cities in over 80 countries. Strikes and demonstrations across Europe against austerity. The Equal Love campaign and the Baiada poultry workers’ picket in Australia.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing came of them.

If the workers are going to win, there needs to be a substantial union and community mobilisation in their support – starting now. Everyone who supports union rights needs to get down to the picket line (the factory is in Pipe St, Laverton, just off the Westgate Freeway). There has already been substantial community support for this strike, but it needs to be stepped up dramatically. If the strike is to win we need hundreds of people defending these picket lines 24 hours a day.

Defy Labor and their pro-boss industrial laws. Spread the Visy dispute. Close them down. Victory to Visy workers.