A secretly negotiated union deal to cut university staff pay by up to 15% has led to an insurgency against the NTEU national executive that has been described as a battle “for the heart of this union”.
More than 200 pieces of so-called anti-terrorism legislation have been rammed through since 9/11, but the surveillance state is far from done, with “dangerous and cynical” new spy powers proposed including warrantless surveillance.
Organised labour must be willing to break the law and become more militant or unions won’t survive, let alone achieve anything like the social and environmental outcomes won by Jack Mundey, current and former union leaders say.
Young people are expected to be the hardest hit by the COVID-19 recession, so why is the union movement selling them out? Investigations reveal big corporations like McDonald’s wield such control over union membership fees that workers can get shafted.
The Federal Government has succumbed to “well organised corruption and capture” by fossil fuel billionaires who are “a threat to life”, using the cover of the COVID-19 crisis to push dangerous, uneconomic projects and strip environmental protections.
Workers are organising and joining their unions in droves with the ACTU revealing an up to 300% increase in member applications, as the COVID-19 crisis exposes the weakness of corporate capitalism.
From opening schools early to racing to the brink on climate change, this is a government that is willing to sacrifice lives at the altar of corporate profits.
Over a million people with disability and carers have been left out of the government’s key coronavirus stimulus, and a parliamentary committee found this may be discrimination and a breach of United Nations rights treaties.
Urgent “major reform of the social security system” is needed after a Senate committee found payments such as Jobseeker would need to be almost doubled to keep people above poverty levels.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says Australia’s neoliberal approach to coronavirus recovery will prolong the downturn, while “special interests” create an “ersatz capitalism” whereby “you socialise the losses but you privatise the gains”.