Alexis Vassiley is the author of “Establishing Trade Unionism in the Emerging Iron Ore Mining Industry in Western Australia’s Pilbara Region, 1965–72” published in Labour History 115 in 2018. He recently completed a PhD thesis From “Union Power” to De-unionisation: Explaining the Rise and Fall of Trade Unionism in Western Australia’s Pilbara Iron Ore Industry and its Consequences.
A mass political and military movement led by the working class and headed by Communists freed Italy from fascism in the early 1940s. “A society which seemed extremely stable and controlled, destined to continue in the same way forever, suddenly exploded from below with mass activity, such that for a brief period everything seemed possible”, Marxist historian Tom Behan writes of the period.
The mining industry’s super-profits are underpinned by deaths at work, to say nothing of the trashing of Aboriginal land rights and environmental destruction.
“It was important to have stood up and said this is not right”, unionist Arthur Clarke reminisced in 2011 of the stand the trade union movement took for Aboriginal rights during the Noonkanbah dispute of 1979-80. The support of the labour movement caused a political crisis for the Western Australian government, resulting in blockaded roads, unionists arrested, truck drivers refusing to work and drillers refusing to drill for oil on Aboriginal land. Workers’ industrial action very nearly stopped a multinational company in its tracks.
Union officials in Australia’s tertiary education union (NTEU) responded to falling revenue in the higher education sector by offering up savings for management in the form of deep cuts to members’ wages and conditions. Officials hoped to buy themselves a seat at the table with management. They started these concessionary negotiations in March, but it wasn’t until 17 April that members found out that pay cuts were on the agenda, via the Guardian newspaper.
Italy's coronavirus epicentre is also home to a tradition of working class militancy. Its factory workers are on the frontlines of the global class struggle to shut down non-essential production – and they're having to drag their union leaders behind them, kicking and screaming.
Italian workers have gone on strike to shut down the country as the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic surpasses 7,500 – mostly in Lombardy, the main industrial region in the north-west of the country. Despite the government’s well-publicised lockdown, it has been business as usual for many sectors of the economy.