Fightback conference

BRISBANE — Forty people attended Queensland's Socialist Alliance Fightback conference on May 7 to discuss and organise resistance to the federal government's planned attacks on workers' rights once it takes control of the Senate on July 1.

Among the speakers at the one-day conference were sacked SEQEB worker Bernie Neville and Queensland Transport Workers Union state secretary Hughie Williams.

Williams said his union was taking the impending attacks very seriously. "For working people who are just keeping their heads above water, these changes are a major attack on their basic rights at work and their living standards. The Howard government says that these changes are about simplifying the awards and reducing the number of allowable matters in the award to create a more workable industrial relations system. But this is code for stripping the awards of the conditions Australian employees and their families have come to depend upon. What the left needs to do is to unite against these attacks."

The conference was also addressed by special guest Zoila Quijada, from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the main opposition party in El Salvador.

Andrew Martin

From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.

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From GLW issue 627