En Passant

The union movement is rallying around the sacked workers at Hutchison’s on the wharves in Sydney and Brisbane. We will not be intimidated by Hutchison’s tactics – we’ve seen it all before.

It’s a lockout, a sit in, a picket writes Jerome Small in Red Flag. It’s a rolling conversation. It’s woodsmoke, and chairs that fall apart. It’s the most ordinary thing that could happen, on an ordinary street, in an industrial suburb, in any city you care to name. In an ordinary, everyday way, it has paralysed the Australian operations of one of the biggest corporations on the planet.

It’s a lesson that I never get tired of learning. When workers stop working, it’s the most powerful thing on Earth.

The lockout, sit in and picket continues at International Flavours and Fragrances, 310 Frankston-Dandenong Road, Dandenong South. See Red Flag and the National Union of Workers facebook page for updates.

It is time for students, staff and the public to reclaim our Universities from the snake oil sales men and women of neoliberalism. Occupy our Universities. Close them down to win a new era in higher education.

Since 24 September a daily community picket has dogged test drilling sites for the Victorian government’s controversial East-West road tunnel project. If completed, the toll road will link the existing Eastern Freeway to Melbourne’s western suburbs at a cost of some $8 billion.

At a morning picket in the inner north suburb of Collingwood, Red Flag spoke with Tony Murphy about campaigning for public transport, not roads.

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

The only protection we have from the Daniel Grollos of the world, and their contempt for our safety and our rights, is a strong union that is independent from multi-millionaires and their goons – the issue at the heart of the Grocon dispute. And we’ve shown in spades that, if we’re given a fighting lead, we’re prepared to do what it takes to defend it.

And of course, there’s the most basic fact. The fact that infuriates the rich and the powerful, and that drives their bought and sold apologists in the media into a frenzy. That is, as we demonstrated in the streets of Melbourne on Tuesday, we have the power to fight and win.

Having Grocon in charge of safety is like putting John Howard in charge of refugees. Only union reps on site can really help enforce safety. Only the ability to walk off the job without loss of pay over safety issues can really force the bosses to take the issue seriously. It has been a long long time since workers as workers have fought the bosses and their police so successfully and drawn in other workers in their own city and elsewhere. A long long time. What a great day.

This is an important fight. If the Coles/Toll holdings workers win other workers might feel confident to try to win better wages and conditions and claw back some of the wealth that the bosses have won from them over the last 30 years. Victory to the Toll Holdings’ workers at Coles!

If you were serious about representing ordinary working Australians and not big business, Julia Gillard, you’d join the Coles’ picket line at 6 am on Friday morning and mobilise the ALP and its members in Melbourne to be there to support these ordinary working Australians in their just fight against two greedy and very tough companies.

You could get a lift and an ear-bashing from Trades Hall at 6 am with Socialist Alternative.

See you on the picket line, Prime Minister.

With enough determination and support the Toll Holdings workers can win and show the rest of the workforce that strong industrial action supported by other workers and the community can win even in the face of the power of big companies and Labor’s rotten industrial laws.