News

  • Putting the Spotlight on AWAs

    Dirk van Dalen & Liam Mitchell The retailer Spotlight has imposed Australian Workplace Agreements on staff, giving a $0.02 per hour wage rise in exchange for eliminating penalty rates, rest breaks, and overtime and holiday pay rates. The result is

  • Spotlight targeted

    BRISBANE — The rotten individual contract that fabric retailer Spotlight is trying to "persuade" its employees to sign has so enraged people that protests are being held outside Spotlight stores around the country. In Brisbane, 60 people protested

  • Construction worker sacked for speaking out

    Russell Pickering, Perth Mal Peters, the only remaining worker-elected occupational health and safety (OHS) representative on the Leighton Kumagai-run Perth-to-Mandurah rail construction project was sacked on August 8 after criticising fines that

  • Protesters score MP's sell out to Big Coal

    Simon Butler, Newcastle Climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle held a protest rally outside the Hunter Street office of federal Labor MP Sharon Grierson on May 29 to condemn her for failing to oppose the new coal export terminal in Newcastle

  • Universities: next battleground over Howard's IR laws?

    Fred Fuentes & Simon Cunich, Sydney According to the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), Sydney University may become the next battleground in the fight over PM John Howard's new industrial relations laws. The university has signalled its

  • Prison bosses misled parliament

    SYDNEY — Acting NSW prisons commissioner Ian McLean misled parliament when he claimed that the women prisoners of the Emu Plains minimum security prison initiated reductions to their visiting hours, Brett Collins of Justice Action claimed on

  • RMIT staff brain tumours

    MELBOURNE — Seven RMIT University staff have been diagnosed with brain tumours since 1999, five in the past month. All seven have worked on the same two floors of a building at RMIT's city campus, with six of them working there for 10 years. One of

  • Election campaign launched at Victoria's 'Guantanamo'

    Selena Black, Melbourne Three Socialist Alliance candidates in the upcoming Victorian election joined s protest outside Barwon prison on August 20. "We now have our very own Guantanamo-style prison camp", said Vannessa Hearman, the candidate for

  • Queensland politicians ignore Indigenous issues

    Dave Riley, Brisbane Members of the Murri community and their supporters rallied and marched on September 1, in the week that the state inquest into the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island on November 19, 2004, wound up. The inquest

  • 'Guest worker' laws used to sack workers

    Ben Courtice, Melbourne According to the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), 35 casual workers employed at Ballarat's MaxiTrans, which builds semi-trailers, have been sacked while 25 guest worker welders hired last year have been kept

  • Cleaning company signs on to union campaign

    Roxana Fuentes, Sydney On September 6, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) announced that the ISS office cleaning company had agreed to sign on to the principles of the union's Clean Start: Fair Deal for Cleaners campaign. "Today