Workers & unions

  • Canada: Tourist train workers defy lock-out, scabs

    As Rocky Mountaineer’s lockout of award-winning on-board staff enters its 10th month, ads are once again being placed to hire more scab workers. Rocky Mountaineer is Canada’s luxury tourist train that takes tourists throughout the summer months from Vancouver to the scenic Rocky Mountains. Nearly 40% of these visitors to Canada come from Australia. On June 22 last year, as the Rocky Mountaineer pulled into Kamloops for its overnight stop, regular staff were ordered off the train and sent back to their homes in Vancouver. One hundred and eight staff were locked out.

  • Join Jackie Kriz and Green Left Weekly in a May Day celebration

    Jackie Kriz, an Australian Nurses Federation delegate from Geelong, will be the special guest speaker at Sydney’s annual Green Left Weekly May Day dinner, where she will share her experiences of the Victorian nurses’ remarkable victorious campaign and some of the lessons we can learn from it.

  • United States: Occupy relaunches with May Day actions

    The Occupy movement in the United States relaunched itself on May 1 when thousands of people rallied in more than 130 cities across the country to mark May Day — the international day to mark working people's struggles.

  • Mental health workers rally to save jobs

    About 350 members of the Health And Community Services Union (HACSU) attended a state-wide meeting and marched to Parliament House on May 2. The event was held in defiance of the state government’s attempt to shut down the union's campaign against government attacks by using legal processes in Fair Work Australia. The HACSU has been campaigning to defend jobs and ratios in the mental health system that will be slashed under proposed government cuts.

  • Noam Chomsky: What May Day means to me

    People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called, “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labour movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energised by the Occupy movement’s organising, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

  • Greece: Election campaign marked by lies and blackmail

    The people of Greece will go to the polls on May 6 to replace the unelected government of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos imposed by the Greek and European elites on November 10. The imposed government was a three-party coalition, consisting of the social-democratic Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), traditional right-wing New Democracy (ND) and extreme-right Popular Orthodox Alert (LAOS). LAOS left the government in February.

  • HSU East takeover sets ‘dangerous precedent’

    Geelong Trades Hall secretary Tim Gooden released the statement below on April 27 about the move by the federal government to put the Health Services Union (HSU) East into administration. * * * I am very concerned by the announcement of minister Bill Shorten that the federal government will seek to have the HSU East put under the control of an appointed administrator.

  • Qld government plans big job cuts

    Queensland public service union Together has called a stopwork rally on May 1 over the new Liberal National Party (LNP) government's threat of forced retrenchments. ABC Online said on April 25, Together had launched a new campaign to give workers a voice in the government's “restructure of departments”. The ABC reported that Together secretary Alex Scott said the LNP had said before the election there would be no forced retrenchments.

  • Students lay siege to Sydney uni

    Students and staff at the University of Sydney ramped up the campaign against management's proposed staff cuts last week, after management ignored a deadline set by the rally and occupation on April 4 to withdraw the cuts by the end of the Easter break. Four hundred students rallied on the university's front lawns on April 24. Students from more than eight classes walked out to join the rally. In one case, a lecturer emailed her students in advance to tell them to walk out of their class and join the protest.

  • Baillieu plans crackdown on building unions

    The Victorian government said last year it would introduce its own version of the Australian Building and Construction Commission if the ABCC was weakened. Now, on April 3 Premier Ted Baillieu and finance minister Robert Clark announced the Implementation Guidelines to the Victorian Code of Practice for the Building and Construction Industry. The guidelines focus on ensuring workers aren’t “forced” to join unions, and that employers are forbidden from agreeing to union demands for over-award or site payments.

  • Builders rally for job safety

    More than 1000 building unionists rallied in Emma Miller Place on April 27 to mark International Workers' Memorial Day. Protests and commemorations also took place on the same day in Canberra, Melbourne and Perth, and on April 28 in Sydney and Adelaide. Organised by the building unions and the Queensland Council of Unions, the Brisbane action was billed as a time to “remember those who have been injured or killed at or through their work and to renew our commitment to fight for the living”.