Recently, some groups of workers have been in intense battles defending their conditions in various EBA negotiations.
Workers from Swift Cold Storage, Baiada Chicken Processing, Schweppes, Victorian Nurses and most recently the Toll/Coles warehouse workers have succeeded, through hard and long struggles, to defend their existing conditions against the unprecedented assault on the Australian working class by multinational monopoly capital.
The Baiada Chicken and Toll/Coles workers’ victories went even further, to win some improvements on their inferior conditions. Social and community sector workers won equal pay for equal work, after their protracted struggles.
In all of these struggles, workers and their fighting union leaderships drew wide support from the community and other unions, and found ways to overcome or get round the oppressive, anti-democratic Fair Work laws, designed by big business and aimed at crushing workers and unions to maximise corporate profits.
This has been achieved through the discipline, determination and courage of many workers and their unions. Workers are crying out for fighting union leadership, dedicated to protecting and upholding working people’s interests, above all else.
A number of newly emerging union leaders and activists are dedicated to building an independent union movement that fights for the rights of workers and working people first and foremost. This is an encouraging sign for the working class movement in Australia. Workers know well that the decisive battles are not won in the bourgeois courts, but on the ground, by mobilising and organising the rank and file and their supporters. Experience has shown time and again that leaving workers’ livelihoods in the hands of big business, Fair Work or the bourgeois courts and lawyers, is a recipe for defeat.
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