Don’t Blame Overseas Workers -
Unite with Them to Stop Millionaire Aussie Bosses From Doing As They Please!Prevent Company Owners from Slashing Jobs!
Union Industrial Action Now!
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March 27- Workers are furious. They are being told that their jobs are not safe by the very same corporate big wigs that have leached millions out of workers’ toil in the last few years. Even as the bosses announce job cuts or tell workers that they must forego pay rises, they hand themselves more millions. About a year before she announced the layoff of 1850 workers, Pacific Brands head Sue Morphet had her salary increased from $686,000 to $1.8 million. Meanwhile, outgoing Telstra boss, Sol Trujillo will leave the company in June with a total payout of $20 million. This after boasting that he had personally axed 10,000 Telstra jobs!
However, we should not be distracted by the Liberal and Labor parties telling us that the problem is simply that the executives are ripping off the shareholders. No! The big shareholders and the executives are in this together … in this together against the workers. It is the main shareholders that hire the executives in the first place. They select the executives solely for the executives’ ability to squeeze as much labour out of as few workers as possible while paying the lowest wages they can get away with. For their part, the executives are often substantial owners themselves.
The fact is that we workers are being made to pay for the crisis of their capitalist system. But in actual fact workers would not be losing their jobs if the capitalists were prepared to accept lower profits. The bosses could, for example, maintain production volume and therefore jobs by lowering the sale price of their companies’ products. The workweek could also be shortened with no loss in pay. And when there is less work available, employees could undergo fully paid skills training.
Let us look at the numbers behind these proposals. Take Australia’s biggest company, BHP. In January BHP announced that it would be laying off 6,000 workers worldwide. But even if we assume that all the laid off workers would, if they remain employed, produce no added revenue for the company and if we generously put their average salary at $80,000 a year then the total cost to BHP of retaining the 6,000 workers would be $480 million. Yet last financial year BHP made a profit that was 33 times this figure! They extracted an after tax profit of over $16 billion. That means BHP could pay the annual wages of all the workers that they will dump with just 3% of last year’s net profits. By sacrificing just three percent! But BHP’s rich shareholders are not prepared to do that – they are not willing to forego buying that fifth holiday home or that fourth top of the range BMW or miss out on flying first class every time just for the sake of saving thousands of workers jobs. No way! Not “our” Big Australian owners.
What about other companies that might not make such huge profits this year? Well, they should be made to wear a loss and pay workers out of the profits that their owners have already sweated out of workers in previous years. That may mean the capitalist owners have to sell their private jet or one of their luxury yachts. Tough!
However, it is against the nature of the greed-based capitalist system for corporate owners to sacrifice profits for the sake of workers’ jobs. That is why these millionaires must be forced to do this by union industrial action. They must be shown that if they lay off any workers they will lose much more from the resulting strike action than the money that they save from reduced wage payments.
If bosses try to lay off some employees at a firm then no employee must work until the job cuts are reversed. In cases where companies are closing whole factories or even closing down operations, the plants should be occupied by the workers and the company prevented from selling its assets. Such militant action will need to be protected by solidarity contingents of unionists from other workplaces. Often workers are being confronted with a situation similar to BHP workers where the company closes down some sites while retaining all its most profitable operations. In such situations workers in the most profitable sites need to hold the corporate owners to ransom through determined strike action until the bosses agree to reinstate all the workers laid off in closed sites.
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One Year after Rudd’s “Sorry”…
The Racist Brutality of The Australian Authorities Continues!
February 3 - It has been nearly a year since Kevin Rudd’s “Apology.” Since then his regime has outrageously continued to refuse any compensation to the Stolen Generation. The ALP government has instead pursued the former Howard government’s paternalist “Intervention” into Aboriginal communities. Rudd and Jenny Macklin have ensured that black communities are now being hit with even more cops. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people continue to be killed at the hands of cops and prison guards. On January 10 in Alice Springs yet another Aboriginal man was “found dead” in cop custody within hours of being arrested.
Defend The Right to Oppose The Racist Brutality of The Australian Rich People’s State!
Free Lex Wotton Now!
Aboriginal leader Lex Wotton was jailed by a racist court in Brisbane on October 24. He was outrageously convicted on a charge of “riot with destruction.” Wotton had been among those singled out by the state following a mass uprising by the Palm Island community against racist violence after police bashed to death Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee.
Defend The Right to Strike - Don’t Buy Rudd & Gillard’s “Workchoices Lite”!
Smash The ABCC – Industrial Action Can Do The Job!
On April 3 Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard released the Wilcox report into the transition to Fair Work Australia for the building and construction industry. In her media release she shamefully vowed that the notorious work of the ABCC would continue under the auspices of a Specialist Division of the Inspectorate of Fair Work Australia stating, “It is the intention of the Rudd Labor Government to always have a tough cop on the beat in the building and construction industry.” Like all cops, we know that this one will exclusively serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class, the bosses, targetting the toiling worker with intimidation, fines, jail and worse. The following is a leaflet produced by Trotskyist Platform for the anti-ABCC rally in Sydney that was held on December 2 last year.
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American Capitalists Bank on Renewal through Obama
An extra 17,000 U.S. troops will be sent to Afghanistan, the President announced. Motivating this new surge, he argued that the Afghan intervention “has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.” “I think Afghanistan is still winnable,” the President insisted. That’s the right-wing former President Bush of course? No - that’s the new President Barack Obama just weeks after taking office! The tone coming out of Washington may have changed but the substance has not.
Some Leftists Are Sharing The Hopes of Conservatives.
Why Are They Willing China’s Economy to Also Collapse?
March 7 - Factories closing, recession, financial institutions collapsing. These realities which are engulfing capitalist countries (realities which hurt working class people the most) are making propagandists for the “free market” system rather uneasy. In fact, more than uneasy. The whole situation is likely to give advocates of capitalism a case of the runs that is even worse than that which afflicts their stock markets. After all, the main argument that they have been throwing at the masses for decades is that, despite everything, “capitalism develops the economy.” How are they going to bailout pro-capitalist ideology now!
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Hold Back The Washington & Canberra Backers of Israel -
For Mass Workers’ Action to Protest The Gaza Massacres!
January 3 - The Israeli military is committing the most horrific massacres in Gaza. People the world over are being spurred into action to protest against these crimes. Tens of millions of decent people. Let us make sure our outrage is not diverted by imperialist politicians that speak deviously of putting an end to “violence on all sides.” We must be clear: we must take a side - the side of the downtrodden Palestinian people against the Israeli state. Palestinian people are a subjugated people. Palestinian resistance struggles against the Zionist military are fully justified.
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Australian Apartheid in Practice
One Law for The Whites, Another Law for The Blacks: Police Ignore Racist Bashings on The NSW Far South Coast
Muriel and Gary Campbell’s family links to their home town of Bermagui on the NSW Far South Coast and its surrounding areas go a long way back. Gary’s great grandparents Ninum Campbell and Ada May Coombes even lived in this area in pre-white settlement times (The Triangle, February 2009.) Though they are respected elders within their community, little respect was shown to them by the local police force after they were horrifically bashed by two young white men while walking home from the Bermagui Country Club in the early hours of New Years morning. “Mrs Campbell and her nephew Kenneth Bell were punched in the face; her husband, Gary Campbell, a teacher’s aide at the primary school, was knocked to the ground and kicked; and their son Ian was knocked out by an elbow to the jaw.” She said that her family was now living in fear and had “given up on police.” (The Sydney Morning Herald, March 4 2009)
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Ten Reasons Why Capitalist Economies Don’t Work
More and more, people see the inequalities created by capitalism. Here in Australia, low-paid or casual workers struggle to pay rent while James Packer enjoys billions of dollars of inherited wealth. Hard-working employees who have toiled away in particular jobs for decades are threatened with lay offs while mining tycoon Andrew Forest sits on a massive fortune that he acquired through stock market speculation.
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Hu’s Pledge to Castro: China Will Firmly Support Cuba's Socialist Cause
HAVANA, Nov. 18, 2008 - Chinese President Hu Jintao makes a visit to Fidel Castro (who while stepping down as president due to ill health is still secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba.)
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