En Passant

Victorian nurses have defied a Fair Work Australia order to return to work and are continuing to walk off the job to win better pay and retention of the current nurse patient ratio.

Meanwhile in the Labor Party Gillard and Rudd, the two neoliberal nobodies, battle it out for leadership of the other party of capital.

Will electing either of these right wingers make any difference to the shift of wealth from labour to capital; to improving living standards of workers; to closing the gap and ending the racist Northern Territory intervention; to addressing climate change in a real and meaningful way; to better public education, public health, public transport; to ending our war of aggression in Afghanistan; to making the rich and big business pay their fair share of tax; to treating asylum seekers humanely; to winning gay marriage?

Not one iota of difference.

Can strike action by Victorian nurses win them better pay and retention of the current nurse patient rations? Yes it can. It has that possibility.

Months of talks with the Baillieu government got nowhere. The nurses’ walkout has focused the government’s attention, and that of the public, on the need for justice for nurses and to fund the public health system adequately.

It is of course against the law to defy a Fair Work Australia order and the nurses’ union could be fined if the hospitals or Government go to the Federal Court. From the way the hospital bosses are talking that is a real possibility.

We need to be clear about this. Nurses now not only have the opportunity to win their immediate demands but to smash fines’ under Labor’s Workchoices Lite or as some others call the Fair Work Act – ‘Fair’ Workchoices.

Don’t give in to the threat of fines. Nurses could refuse to pay them and call on other unions join them in strike action if any attempt is made to impose fines let alone collect them.

The farcical Punch and Judy show in Canberra is a consequence of the lack of fight from the trade union movement over the last 30 years. Victorian nurses are showing a different way, a better way, to win better pay and conditions and by doing that challenging the bosses’ industrial laws.

Nurses in Victoria can win their demands, if they keep the industrial action going. They could even defeat the Fair Work Act penal powers and strike restrictions.

The sideshow in Canberra won’t produce real change. Strikes can.