When
to
Where
State Library, 328 Swanston Street, City
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
Why
The COVID pandemic has accelerated this system’s inequalities and attacks on working people and the most marginalised. While the bosses and rich have multiplied their soaring wealth and profits since 2020, governments' neglect and 'living with COVID' regime is ruining our health and killing people. Our exhausted health system can barely cope. Access to testing and RATs for most people barely exists. Workers are forced to work sick with COVID and our vital supply chains are near breakdown. This emergency and falling official joblessness has failed to reverse the decline of union membership density among workers in Australia. Is this the only way things can be?
Two years into this global pandemic, our politicians have refused to increase spending on urgent public health & services or invest in pandemic-proofing our community to anywhere like what's needed. Instead, they've clawed back what little increase in welfare support they allowed and are trying to weaken workers' health and safety laws. Working people have been abandoned to fend for themselves again. It's not as if the money to do it isn't there - why not tax the billionaires or divert public money away from military and big corporations? But governments' real priority isn't us, but the profit-making of the rich and 'Business As
Usual'. With much of the world still denied access to life-saving vaccines, no country is safe. Meanwhile, the growth of far-right movements with their false answers as well as expanded
police powers, targeting Indigenous people, people of colour and other groups worst of all, bring their own alarming new dangers.
This is why we urgently need to build a fight back now to start to rebuild a fighting trade unionism in Australia, and build a workers'-led response to this pandemic to not just return things to normal, but improve the conditions of working people's lives. Our greatest strength is our solidarity. Join us on March 19 to Fight for Public Health and Workers Safety.
We demand:
1. A Living Income for Everyone – end casualisation, paid pandemic income support for everyone
2. Free Health Care for everyone – free RAT tests, more nurses, fully fund hospitals, full access to PPE
3. Secure housing for everyone: massively expand public housing; stop the selloffs; moratorium on evictions
4. Right to organise
• Right to organise & strike any time
• Repeal Secondary Boycott laws
5. Roll back police powers, drop the COVID fines
6. COVID health and safety for all workers in all industries, especially in frontline healthcare
7. A global solution to the pandemic – remove patents from COVID vaccines and provide free to all countries