Triumphant workers at the Ausreo site in western Sydney after learning that their struggle had forced the company to grant them a real wage increase. The workers, members of the AMWU manufacturing workers union, picketed the site for 10 weeks after the bullying bosses locked out the workers and refused to negotiate a pay rise. The workers defiant struggle won solidarity from many other trade unionists. Class struggle methods are the road to workers victory!
Photo Credit: AMWU
Rely on Class Struggle Not Campaigning for ALP/Greens Governments. Unleash Industrial Action Now to Reverse Three Decades of Attacks on Working Class People.
3 July 2014 – Over the last four months, tens of thousands of people have been marching in large rallies protesting against the right wing Abbott regime. The first budget of the Liberal-National government has rightly enraged working class people, students and leftists. In measures that will hurt the working class, retrenched workers and the poor the most, Treasurer Hockey’s budget has slashed funding for public hospitals and will make people pay a $7 fee for each doctor’s visit. The latter measure is likely to be the thin edge of a wedge aimed at slicing up any semblance of universal health care. Resources for Aboriginal services will be slashed, public funding for universities will be cut by 20% and graduates will have to pay their tuition fee debts back when their incomes are lower. People on the Disability Support Pension are to face nerve-wracking “re-assessments” of their eligibility for the pension. Most cruelly, unemployed people under the age of thirty are to be thrown off payments for six months a year. This will surely lead to even more homelessness, poverty and youth suicide.
Sensing public sentiment, opposition parties have come out against several budget measures. Even greedy tycoon Clive Palmer and his conservative party have stated their intention to vote against some measures. ALP leaders have tried to restore their battered credentials with their working class base by denouncing the unfairness of the budget to low and middle income people. But let us not forget that the previous government, for the most part a de facto Labor-Greens coalition, also made life harder for the poor. The former ALP/Greens government cruelly drove 84,000 low income single parents mainly single mothers – into extreme poverty when they threw them off the parenting payment onto the much lower Newstart Allowance. Furthermore, the last government undermined public housing. In 2010, then housing minister Tanya Plibersek a supposed “Left” who today is Labor’s main spokesperson at anti-Abbott rallies worked together with the then state ALP government to plan the sell-off of public housing from NSW’s biggest public housing estate at Claymore. Plibersek’s program, which saw a large number of public dwellings sold off, is now being carried through further by the present state Liberal government. Continue reading Smash Abbott’s Budget