En Passant

Aussie jobs and similar slogans are part of the problem, not the solution. Class struggle offers the best way to defend foreign workers and win them residency and employment rights and conditions the same as other workers in Australia. That fight can then lead to a fight against the same and other bosses when they sack workers in Australia or cut their wages or conditions.

And that is what happened in Melbourne today. Workers responded to direct government attacks on them by walking off the job, an action that is illegal under Labor’s industrial laws. It may be just the start of a real fight against these draconian laws against construction workers.

Workers in Perth could follow suit, not for Aussie jobs and other dead ends but for more jobs, for permanent residency for all who come here to work, for proper wages, for empowering unions to police all worksites and for more spending on education and training, paid for by the bosses.

One-sided accounts of the weakness of the working class by left wing writers, even if motivated by sympathy for workers, only reinforce the power of the bosses and the state by making it seem as if resistance is useless. Such analyses are a godsend for the union bureaucracy, which likes nothing better than a seemingly left wing argument to justify its own passivity. They are, therefore, a dangerous diversion and need to be vigorously challenged wherever they appear.