Green Left Weekly — Australia’s leading non-corporate newspaper — has an ambitious target to raise $300,000 for it’s fighting fund this year. This is the amount needed to ensure we can cover all the costs associated with research, production and distribution. It’s no small thing to produce such a quality publication.
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On May 10, skilled trades members of the Electrical Trade Union (ETU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union from Geelong and Broadmeadows Ford plants held a 24-hour stoppage.
They were demanding better pay and conditions under their enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) and took their protest to the street.
Ford wants to freeze the wages of all fixed-term employees at the current (2008) level one entry rate ($986.65 a week).
The company did not verify the length of its proposed wage freeze.
The tremendous success of the April 19-22 World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, has confirmed the well-deserved role of its initiator — Bolivian President Evo Morales — as one of the world’s leading environmental advocates.
Since being elected the country’s first indigenous president in 2005, Morales has continuously denounced the threat posed by the climate crisis and environmental destruction.
Morales has pointed the figure at the real cause of the problem: the consumerist and profit-driven capitalist system.
“There are two ways forward: Either save capitalism, or save Mother Earth”, Bolivian President Evo Morales said, stressing that this was the choice facing governments at a May 7 press conference in New York. There, he discussed the outcomes of the 35,000-strong World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The campaign against league tables continued on May 11 with a protest organised by the Inner City Teachers Association (ICTA) of the NSW Teachers Federation.
Fifty people rallied outside the office of NSW education minister Verity Firth. After the Australian Education Union federal executive’s last-minute decision to lift the ban on the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy tests, the action showed the campaign against league tables, and the damage they do to school communities, will continue.
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