About 350,000 Queensland workers plan to fight Labor Premier Anna Bligh’s plans for massive privatisations. Unions have warned of widespread industrial action, including strikes.
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MELBOURNE On May 29, union and community activists protested against Pacific Brands attempt to move machinery out of Australia. The protest was held at Swanston Dock. Pacific Brands, which makes government uniforms, said in February it would sack 1850 workers and move clothing production overseas.
On May 13, the Nigerian military began a military assault, including land, naval and air bombardments, on the oil-rich Niger Delta. Thousands of people are reported to have died, with entire villages destroyed.
Telstra workers took their campaign for a new enterprise bargaining agreement to the streets on May 27, with a farewell to former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo.
NEWCASTLE The NSW ALP and property developers are yet again pushing to cut the Newcastle train line, this time proposing rail services end at Wickham and be replaced by buses.
Hundreds of thousands of workers answered the call of the European Trade Union Confederation with protests on May 16. The protests were in support of the ETUC’s “Fight the Crisis: Put People First” campaign and its efforts to win the adoption to win a “new social deal” for Europe.
The climate is changing faster than we thought. Changes we believed would happen in 100 are starting to happen now.
BRISBANE— Unions at the University of Queensland (UQ) held a rally and barbeque on St Lucia campus on May 27 as part of their campaign for a new collective agreement.
On May 24, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa marked national independence day ceremonies with a promise to “radicalise and deepen” the “citizens’ revolution” his government is seeking to lead.
In a time of climate crisis, logic dictates we should be cutting carbon pollution and ending our reliance on burning coal for energy. Yet the opposite is happening in Australia.
The Bolivian people, led by the government of President Evo Morales, are continuing their campaign to bring former president Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada and members of his cabinet to justice over the government-ordered massacre of dozens of protesters in 2003.
The threat of climate change means that for the first time humanity is faced with the very real possibility of extinction. The root cause of the ecological crisis is capitalism’s drive to maximise immediate profits above all else.
Abdul Hekmat, a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan, doesn’t believe that the US-NATO invasion and occupation of his country amounts to a “good” war, and is troubled by the prospect of the Taliban seizing more power.
The most popular leader among the Arab population in the Middle East, the May 20 Christian Science Monitor said, isn’t even from the region: it is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
In 2000, the small Pacific island nation Tuvalu made a formal request to Australia to accept its people if they were forced to evacuate because of global warming-induced sea level rises.
The federal Labor government wants to introduce its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), otherwise known as the emissions trading scheme, in July 2011.
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