The union-bosses-government working groups to discuss industrial relations reform have not delivered and the PM has signalled new IR laws before Christmas. Sarah Hathway argues union leaderships need to get prepared.
Ensuring Integrity Bill
The Coalition’s union-busting Ensuring Integrity Bill failed to pass after One Nation leader Pauline Hanson changed her position. But Sam Wainwright writes that it reveals a serious strategic and political weakness in the union movement.
This bill is about giving even more power to a billionaire class that has shown itself to have absolutely no integrity.
Governments — and the corporations they serve — understand that as the economic and climate crises deepen, they will need to resort to more authoritarian measures to maintain their ecologically and socially destructive system.
School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C) is calling on all workers and unions to join the Climate Strike on September 20. To make this a reality they have been working on building links with trade unions and have expressed their condemnation of the Scott Morrison Coalition government’s latest attacks on the rights of trade unions.
It is well-established that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s 1948 Freedom of Association Convention and 1949 Convention on the Right to Organise. However, this is another internationally recognised right that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government has been incrementally eroding.
Tony Abbott was elected in 2013 on the “promise” that the Coalition’s proposed industrial relations legislation, Work Choices, was “dead, buried and cremated”.
Of course, few workers genuinely believed that an incoming Coalition government would keep its word. Certainly, construction workers knew it was only a matter of time before they were in the firing line.