Alexis Vassiley

Workers’ revolution in Portugal, 1974-5

The following is is an edited and abridged extract from <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/trade-union-organising/products/striking-ore-the-rise-and-fall-of-union-power-in-the-pilbara">Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara</a>, a new book by Red Flag contributor Alexis Vassiley published by Monash University Publishing. 
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When Harry Hoskin came to the Pilbara in 1968, the mine superintendent made him a “powder monkey”. His job was to blast the ore body with explosives. But he had no experience: “I can’t even spell gelignite let alone [know] what it’s about”. His boss insisted, so he got on with it. Fortunately, he wasn’t injured—others weren’t so lucky. It was like the “Wild West”, Hoskin recalls. Safety was terrible.
But business was booming for the iron ore companies. When the iron ore export ban was relaxed in 1960, there was a development bonanza in the Pilbara. Demand for iron ore was relentless. Tonnage of iron ore increased from 6.8 million tonnes in 1967 to 50.5 million tonnes in 1972.
Conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s for miners were tough. Production worker Randall Grant remembers the “soaked and soggy” salad sandwiches at Dampier in 1968, stating, “The guys were really pissed off with that. They wanted a hot meal”. Grant later became an Australian Workers’ Union shop steward (union representative who continues to do their usual work for the company, now usually called a “union delegate”). 
Lance Elliott, a staff member at Mount Newman, describes conditions at that time as “unairconditioned, dusty, unsafe to say the least”.
In the 1960s, before workers exercised their collective muscle, the companies used their responsibility for food, housing and amenities in the “company towns” to their advantage. Towns were run by the companies rather than by a local government. 
So, for example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) reported that in June 1968, a Hamersley Iron boilermaker had his accommodation, and therefore job, withdrawn after making “sharp criticisms” of the food to the messing officer from Poon’s.
The same month, a worker’s complaint about food resulted in his alleged assault by a manager. Three workers were framed and remanded in custody for eight days by a justice of the peace who worked for the company; the three were then sacked. Power rested squarely with management in these early days.
Workers took action even while the mines were being built. On Christmas Day 1965, the construction crew on a Hamersley Iron mine rioted over the food.
It was in the late 1960s, however, that both workers’ struggle and union organising really took off. The two things went hand in hand. 
AWU organiser Gil Barr relates that Mount Newman was unionised in this period by using the sacking of three workers as an organising opportunity. After previously getting only ten to fifteen workers from a 400-strong workforce to a union meeting, he “fronted the company” and got the workers reinstated. “From then on, we started to get membership as the guys could see the benefit of it”.
Randall Grant was present at the first AWU meeting at King Bay in 1968. Workers with union traditions from the eastern states—who later became shop stewards—got Grant to the meeting: “They were saying this wouldn’t happen at Port Kembla [an industrial hub eight kilometres south of Wollongong, NSW] and places like that”. Grant himself didn’t come from a union background, but he became a shop steward too: “as soon as you got onsite and saw what was going on it’s like ... hang on, things have got to be improved here”.
AWU officials addressed around 40 workers in the single men’s quarters, signing them up to the union. Yet the Pilbara’s remoteness posed a significant challenge. Unions needed to devote significant resources to the task. They required sacrifices from organisers, some of whom camped in tents with their family while on organising drives. 
The formula for union organisers was as follows: go up north for a few weeks, talk to workers about their grievances, sign them up to the union and establish a union branch or sub-branch.
So, for example, Jack Marks of the AEU, Frank Bastow of the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths Society and J. Quinn of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners went on a “North-West Organising Trip” of several weeks in July 1967.
Marks reported back to his union that they “set up new shop stewards wherever we found a group of workers, and when this group consists of more than one union representative, shop committees were formed”.
In 1968, workers at Goldsworthy’s port on Finucane Island tried unsuccessfully for weeks on end to convince management to let them eat at the mess (canteen) rather than consume the “power packs” in the smoko room. The entire workforce of 80 then struck for four days to force the issue and were sacked. The company re-employed them days later when a ship needed loading.
Union militancy increased in 1969. 
On 22 May 1969, workers at Tom Price, Mount Newman and Goldsworthy stopped work for a day as part of a statewide strike in support of jailed Victorian Tramways Union secretary Clarrie O’Shea.
In October 1969, there were strikes lasting seventeen days and involving all unionists at two Hamersley Iron sites. Starting with one union at one site, the dispute quickly spread to other unions and a second company site. The grievances included dust, refrigeration, food and heat money (an allowance for working in the hot weather). The strike “was controlled/administered by newly established combined union committees at each of the two sites. Compulsory conferences held between union officials and the company in the Industrial Commission failed to resolve the strike. Further, union officials were given hostile treatment by mass meetings of the workers”.
In late 1970, workers broke through and made significant gains in their wages and conditions. Workers at Hamersley Iron won an over-award payment in May. The deal was a substantial increase, worth around $1,000 for lower-bracket workers and $550 for those in a higher bracket.
Mount Newman workers were in dispute with the company for about four months, ending in a stunning victory. The workers obtained “more money for a 40-hour week than they were offered for a 60- hour week”.
There was a tug-of-war between the company and its workers during these on-again, off-again strikes over many months. Mount Newman tested the workers’ strength, determination and organisation and tried to avoid meeting the unionists’ demands. As Lance Elliott remembers, “All of a sudden there were union meetings, there were union delegates talking with the management and it all came to a severe head ... and the whole place went out on strike”. The atmosphere was “acrimonious”. 
Staff (managers and white-collar workers) crossed union picket lines to do workers’ work. Key to the victory was the industrial pressure put on the company in the context of high demand for iron ore. Idle iron ore carriers were visible from the site of union-management negotiations.
Power relations were changing. The mining companies didn’t grant any concessions willingly—improved pay and conditions were hard fought. Engaged in a show of strength with the unionists, companies reneged on agreements if they thought they could get away with it. Gains won at one company did not automatically flow through to another mining company. 
Accounts of the Pilbara iron ore industry can make the gains in wages and conditions, and union organisational success, seem almost inevitable.
A tight labour market and clauses in industrial awards for “union preference”—where workers need to be members of the union to work in the industry—certainly wouldn’t have harmed the unionists’ cause. But on their own, these are not enough. 
100 percent union membership had to be won, enforced and even re-won from the ground up—including by withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, labour. Once established, this became a weapon in the union movement’s arsenal.
The 1969 Iron Ore Industry Award gave limited recognition to shop stewards for the first time. These rights, however, were heavily circumscribed. Concerned that their negotiating role not be usurped, some union officials opposed even this limited clause.
Committees consisting of shop stewards representing each of the different unions on a site were first established in 1967. Similar structures were set up at various companies and worksites in the next few years, undercutting management’s ability to play unions off against one another and engendering solidarity between the different unions. 
These grassroots bodies would later organise strikes in the region involving all or many of the unions, lasting weeks and costing the mining companies millions of dollars in lost production.

The rise of union power in the Pilbara mines

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has passed landmark motions calling for an institutional academic boycott of Israel and condemning the “scholasticide” in Gaza—the systematic destruction of educational institutions and academic life.
At its national council meeting in Melbourne in early October, a motion supporting the institutional academic boycott of Israel passed overwhelmingly. This followed calls from Palestinian civil society going back many years, as well as campaigning from the union’s rank-and-file members and left-wing delegates at national council. 
The motion encompassed refusing cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, promoting divestment from Israel by international academic institutions and supporting Palestinian academic institutions directly.
The union is calling on Australian universities to conduct a nationwide audit of their connections to the Israeli military and its suppliers, and is pushing for an immediate end to any such ties. 
Another motion opposed recent attempts to curtail protest rights at universities. University administrations have increasingly attempted to restrict Palestine solidarity activism across Australia, including through disciplinary actions against students and staff. The NTEU’s motions are a significant push back against this development, asserting that the right to protest and debate remains central to university life.
National Council also formally recognised and condemned the scholasticide. The motion refers to the Israeli military’s demolition of every university in Gaza, the killing of hundreds of students and academics, and the destruction of libraries, museums and archives.
“These motions are a step forward in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign”, said Robin Laycock, a national councillor and member of Socialist Alternative. “At a time when university managements are trying to silence protest and debate about Palestine, union members have stood up for the fundamental right to organise on campus.”
The motions also reflect an important shift in sentiment. Ten years ago, in the wake of an Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, the union’s national council narrowly voted down a BDS motion.
The motions distinguish between opposing Israeli state policies and antisemitism, the union reiterating its stance against all forms of discrimination including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
The union also calls on universities to provide scholarships to Palestinian students and scholars and to support the rebuilding of Gaza’s destroyed higher education system.
Alexis Vassiley is a national councillor of the NTEU.

University union endorses academic boycott of Israel, defends right to protest

Academic workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have achieved a stunning victory with a serious campaign of industrial action, centred on an open-ended strike. Their approach is a model for unionists in Australia.
The five-day strike united all academic workers, from graduate teachers through to tenured professors. Management was forced to concede a 43 percent pay rise for the lowest paid, as well as more job security. This is the latest in a wave of seventeen strikes in US higher education in the last year, including a five-week strike at the University of California. 
The Rutgers strike was distinctive because it involved all sections of the academic workforce. It was the first strike in Rutgers’ 257-year history, and New Jersey’s biggest ever public employee strike. 
Before the strike, Rutgers administration was refusing to budge. No progress had been made in ten months of bargaining. Unions responded by balloting their members for an open-ended strike. On 9 April, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy tried to get it called off. The unions refused. The following day, 9,000 workers walked out. Unionists set up pickets at Rutgers’ three campuses and organised big rallies.
The strike showed what can be achieved with serious and consistent preparation. Over the previous six years, the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT) built a strong network of workplace delegates. From October last year, 500 members were educated in the union’s strike school. Later, 800 attended a picket line school and hundreds attended picket captain training.
“Once the strike began, member participation on the picket lines and creative protests demonstrated our strength, and generated media attention and political pressure on the university”, Sherry Wolf, organiser for the AAUP-AFT, told Red Flag. “There was an Arts and Events coordinator for the strike. They had drag shows, entertainment, concerts. There were creative workers in the union, but they weren’t active previously. Now, given the opportunity, they went into overdrive.” 
The president of Rutgers, historian Jonathon Holloway, emerged as a hate figure, especially after he threatened legal action against the strike. A viral social media clip captured the spirit of resistance. The song “Hey Baby” was changed to “Hey Holloway”; protesters sang “Hey Holloway, I want to know if you’ll raise my wage!”. Wolf recounts: “1,500 people together led by a bunch of musicians who’d never played the song before, sung by a bunch of people who’d never sung the song before, led by the guy who’d made up the song a couple of hours earlier”. 
Meanwhile, intensive negotiations took place during the strike days. After five days, and the governor’s intervention, the unions decided to suspend the strike. This was controversial because some workers wanted the strike to continue. The unions organised protests during the continuing negotiations. 
The agreement includes big salary gains: 30 percent for the lowest-paid adjuncts in the first year, and 43 percent across the life of the contract. “Adjuncts” are paid per class (unit) taught and must reapply for their jobs each year. This is like casual (sessional) teaching at Australian universities. For adjuncts, the agreement also includes “multi-semester and multi-year appointments—a first—as well as professional development funding, binding arbitration for grievances, quicker and new paths to advancement, and a new title”, Bryan Sacks and Michael Reagan observe in <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/05/rutgers-strike-wins-big-more-needed-change-higher-education">Labor Notes</a>.
Non-tenured, full-time faculty—like academics on fixed-term contracts in Australia—won presumptive contract renewals. These measures reduced job insecurity.
Finally, graduate assistants—precarious, low-paid workers who conduct teaching or research while undertaking postgraduate degrees—won a 33 percent pay rise. Because the pay of grad assistants is generally low, Australian university bosses are starting to create these kinds of jobs, unfortunately with the encouragement of senior union officials.
“We tried very hard over a long period of time to talk to people in a language they would understand”, Wolf explains. “‘Rutgers has the money, we have the power. We can’t be treated this way, we can build a different type of university. If we stand together, they can’t beat us—we can do this’. That made sense to people.” 
Negotiations were not behind-the-scenes affairs—sometimes management would be forced to negotiate with 50 unionists in the room. And more than 650 people have joined the union since the strike authorisation vote on 28 February. “There’s nothing like an organising plan and a struggle to get people to see the value of their union”, Wolf argued.
The organised left played an important role. Wolf says that the AAUP-AFT at the university is “widely seen as a more progressive union, even a left union ... Rutgers is probably the Chicago Teachers Union of higher ed at this point. It’s a wall-to-wall union across ranks and categories, with a wider vision”. Wolf, a socialist, was hired by the union ten years ago “to build them a rank-and-file shop stewards’ network, which I’ve done”. Others in the elected leadership and union staffers are radicals and “all of our air war was led by people with some political sophistication and knowledge”.
“So, we had active leftists like ourselves. Then there’s also a number of people from the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] who are among our members—faculty as well as graduate workers. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and just the pandemic, organising mutual aid ... played a role in creating the ideological basis for deeper sympathy with this kind of posture”—that is, a serious strike strategy.
For Wolf, a highlight of the strike was watching people be transformed by the struggle: “Seeing people who were well outside their comfort zone of a few days before signing people up, serving coffee, setting the parameters of a picket line and just being leaders” she said. “Watching people flourish was one of the most beautiful things for me.”
Alexis is a workplace representative for the National Tertiary Education Union.

Historic US university strike wins big

A mass meeting of Australian Nursing Federation members in Perth has voted to demand a 10 percent pay increase, a Consumer Price Index top-up and a one-off payment of $4,500. They are also demanding “enforceable nurse/midwife-to-patient ratios” as part of an escalating campaign of industrial action. 
The Western Australian Labor government is offering an insulting 3 percent pay “rise” (a real wage cut) and a one-off $3,000 payment.
Two thousand five hundred nurses filled the Convention Centre for a stop-work meeting, blowing whistles and holding signs reading “Ratios—it’s a matter of life and death” and “1:4 or out the door”.
Union officials’ initial motion called for a pay increase of 5 percent plus a CPI top-up, but this was increased by the meeting after speeches from the floor by socialists.
Rachel Goldsborough, a Socialist Alternative member, spoke first, arguing for a pay rise of at least 8 percent. Pointing to the campaign by NSW nurses, who are fighting for a 7 percent pay increase after union officials there also <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nurses-union-raises-pay-claim-under-pressure-rank-and-file">increased the claim under pressure from the rank and file</a>, Goldsborough asked her fellow union members, to rapturous applause: “If we’re not reaching for the stars, what’s the point of trying?” 
Chris Jenkins from the Socialist Alliance followed Goldsborough, saying nurses should demand 10 percent. This was adopted by acclamation. Conditions in WA hospitals are atrocious, affecting workers and patients alike. Two nurses attending the meeting told the West Australian that staff at their hospital regularly skip meals to look after patients. 
Severity assessment code 1 clinical incidents—events that have or could have caused serious harm or death as a result of the care provided (or not provided)—at Perth Children’s Hospital have doubled since 2019.
One union member told Red Flag that working in a hospital has never felt more unsafe. “Being short multiple nurses per shift has become the new norm. I can count the number of times I’ve worked on a fully staffed ward this year on one hand. We need enforced nurse-to-patient ratios like Victoria. It’s time for us to take a stand and say enough is enough”, she said.
Meanwhile, Mark McGowan’s Labor government continues to impose austerity on public sector workers. Until last December, wage increases were capped at between 1 and 1.5 percent for most public sector workers. This has increased to 3 percent and a one-off $3,000 payment, far short of Perth’s CPI rise, the highest of all capital cities at 7.4 percent. 
To add insult to injury, last month Treasury revealed that the state surplus was a record $6 billion, up hundreds of millions of dollars from the May budget. The state’s iron ore riches have increased the personal net wealth of mining magnates Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest to more than $30 billion, according to the Australian Financial Review.
Posts on the ABC Facebook page were overwhelmingly supportive of the bold claim, with calls for McGowan to “cough up”, and much support for the nurses.
Unfortunately, other public sector unions have settled cheaply. The State School Teachers’ Union, for example, agreed to a below-inflation deal earlier this year, while the United Workers Union, which has some coverage in health care, has recommended that members take the government’s current offer. 
By contrast, amid cheering and fanfare, the nurses’ mass meeting authorised escalating industrial action, starting with bans over the next four weeks, followed by day-long stoppages, bed closures and “indefinite strike action”. 
Goldsborough told Red Flag that the government has been treating nurses disgracefully, and “it’s time to fight”. “Workers don’t get anything by asking nicely”, she said. “We need to stand together and force the government’s hand. Industrial action is the only thing they’ll listen to.”
The nurses’ ambitious claim lays out a path for other workers to follow, and the industrial action authorised will certainly be needed for victory.

WA nurses demand 10 percent

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.
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had ruled the country since 1922. But the tide turned in 1942-43. His army suffered disastrous military defeats in North Africa and, from 5 March 1943, more than 200,000 workers in Turin went on strike for higher wages, greater rations and an end to the war. It was the first and largest strike wave in occupied Europe during the Second World War, and it sealed Mussolini’s downfall.
In July 1943, the Allied armies invaded Italy from the south, landing in Sicily. Two months later, Italy announced an armistice. Meanwhile, Germany invaded the north of the country and propped up Mussolini. An alliance of anti-fascist parties formed the National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale). And at the end of September, Naples was liberated without assistance from the Allies, the first civilian uprising against Nazi occupation in Europe.
From this time until the final liberation of Italy from fascism in April 1945, the country was split in two. In the south, the Allies ran the show in concert with General Pietro Badoglio and the king—a non-fascist regime, but nonetheless repressive towards workers and the left.
The Italian resistance in the north was military, political and industrial, led by workers and the left. In March 1944, 1.2 million workers went on strike, demanding peace and the cessation of war production for Nazi Germany. “In terms of mass demonstrations, in occupied Europe nothing can come close to the revolt of Italian workers”, a New York Times reporter wrote.
The Communist Party had cells in many factories in the northern cities. Some of them had access to arms and carried out armed actions against the occupying German forces at night and on weekends. According to a party report, at Milan’s Redaelli factory, of 1,295 workers, there were “twenty male party members, one female, and many sympathisers. A committee of agitation exists. Football team [code for armed workers] discreetly equipped”. Many women were couriers who would transport information, medicine, money, ammunition or bombs.
Florence was liberated by a three-week insurrection in July and August. The partisans refused the Allies’ demands to disarm and made it known than if the Allies tried to disarm them, they would be treated as an enemy. Partisans liberated their own city, and residents spontaneously joined the insurrection.
Left-wing newspapers began to be sold openly, even during the fighting, as Behan recounts in The Italian Resistance. “A man stopped me in piazza San Marco, he must have been 70-75. Without saying a word he held out his hand to take the paper, and held it just as a Christian might hold a sacred object”, Socialist leader Sandro Pertini recalled of his time selling the party paper, Avanti. “And he kissed it ... And he started crying.”
Hundreds of thousands of partisans fought in the mountains, usually operating in military units of 40 to 50. The Communist Party organised the Garibaldi Brigades, comprising at least half of the partisans. Each brigade had a military commander and a political commander, both elected and recallable. The political commander organised a “political hour” every day to discuss the war and to organise more general political education and debate. They even tried to keep libraries of books.
With little equipment or military experience, and being poorly fed, clothed and housed, partisans faced the most formidable fighting machine in the world in the German army. The resistance was full of left-wing volunteers, fighting not just for the defeat of fascism, but for a better world. This was key to their victory.
The Communist Party was by far the largest left force in the resistance. Its members and supporters were fighting for socialism. But the leadership pursued a fundamentally conservative strategy. The party argued for national liberation first and “progressive democracy” second—an application of the Stalinised Comintern’s Popular Front to Italy. The working class was to form an alliance with the “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie, while the party would form a political alliance with the centre-right Christian Democratic Party.
After the 1943 Allied invasion, Communist leaders agreed to work with the Italian army and the king to oust Mussolini. Meanwhile, the Badoglio government was shooting down striking workers. On 2 April 1944, after a meeting with Stalin, Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti issued the “Salerno turn”, announcing that the party would join the king’s government under Badoglio.
This ensured the integrity of the Italian state and set the scene for the rehabilitation of fascists after the war. As journalist and partisan Giorgio Bocca argued, “Whoever collaborates with Pietro Badoglio, Marshal of the Empire, and with the King, who legalised the March on Rome, can obviously no longer demand the purging of those who worked on behalf of the fascist state. Togliatti and the PCI received great political prestige because they provided a lot: a previously non-existent certificate of anti-fascist credibility”.
Other left-wing parties with a national presence were the Action Party and the Socialist Party. The Action Party provided about one in five of the resistance fighters. Its revolutionary wing rejected the Soviet Union as a socialist model. It attracted many radicals to its ranks and was less willing than the Communist Party to compromise on issues of principle. But it didn’t have a stable working-class base, having been founded only in 1942.
Unlike the Communists, the Italian Socialist Party hadn’t maintained an underground organisation. Like the Action Party, it had both revolutionary and reformist wings. The revolutionary wing was highly critical of the Badoglio government. But it was too small to have a decisive influence on events.
Other political forces to the left of the Communist Party operated in various cities. In Rome, there was the group Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag), which was the biggest resistance faction in the city. In the two decades of Mussolini’s rule, Communist cadres had been exiled in France or the Soviet Union. But local activists, left to their own devices for decades, had not undergone the same process of indoctrination in Stalinism. Historian David Broder writes that they “rejected the idea of a common national interest” and “pursued a class war and revolutionary agenda”.
The Allies and the anti-fascist partisans had a tense relationship. Britain and America’s alliance with the partisans in Italy was based on geopolitical considerations, not a principled opposition to fascism. And their support was limited. Supply drops focused on non-military goods.
The Allies wanted fighters who would risk their lives but make no political demands. What they got was hundreds of thousands of armed partisans, largely workers, alongside a political mass movement and strikes in the cities.
On 13 November 1944, Allied officer General Harold Alexander ordered the cessation of operations and cut off supplies for months. The partisans were ordered to go home—an impossibility for outlaws. The partisan movement survived but was weakened. In December, resistance leaders agreed to disarm and hand over military and political power to the Allies immediately upon liberation, in return for money.
Women were involved in all aspects of the resistance, as striking workers, anti-fascist activists and armed fighters. There were female commanders and all-female units. Some urban militias (“terrorist groups”) were led by women.
Eighty of the 200 members of the 7th Gianni GAP (Patriotic Action Group) in Emilia-Romagna were women. Commander Novella “Vanda” Albertazzi reportedly said: “It seemed absurd and impossible to stay bent over a table ten hours a day, to gossip with friends, while the Germans walked the streets, while the fascists arrested young men”. An estimated 35,000 women took part in military action. Five hundred and twelve women were recognised to have been political commissars.
While the politics of the Communist Party regarding women, and the behaviour of male partisans, were far from perfect, the mass struggle opened up a space for women’s involvement in politics and for sexist attitudes to be challenged. After the resistance struggle, women were granted the vote.
In April 1945, insurrections took place in all the cities of the northern industrial triangle—Milan, Turin and Genoa—to finally throw off the shackles of fascism. All took place before the Allied armies arrived.
Thirty thousand German troops were stationed in Genoa in the lead-up to the insurrection. Partisans numbered 8,000, some with only hand guns. Against the Allies’ wishes, the resistance called for an insurrection and told the Nazis they would accept only unconditional surrender.
Residents spontaneously joined partisan squads, arming themselves with weapons seized from fascists. Gunther Meinhold, a decorated major general and career officer in the German army, surrendered to an emaciated partisan in civilian clothes, Remo Scappini, an industrial worker and Communist leader. In the days after the liberation, Mussolini and his closest associates were executed by partisans.
When the Allies arrived in liberated cities, they found them functioning, with some form of democratic control over civil society. Bosses feared the prospect of social revolution. But they need not have worried. The Communist Party wasn’t interested in mobilising the masses to create organs of workers’ power. It insisted on a self-limiting insurrection aimed at giving its leaders a bargaining chip to ensure their participation in the postwar Italian state. “The insurrection we want does not have the goal of imposing social or political changes in a socialist or communist sense”, party leader Togliatti declared.
As historian Paul Ginsborg argues in A History of Contemporary Italy, the Stalinist strategy of national liberation first, social and political reform second, caused the party “to dissipate the strength of the resistance and of worker and peasant agitation ... at the very moment when the partisan and workers movement was at its height ... The Communists accepted the postponement of all questions of a social and political nature until the end of the war”.
The Allies were handed control of the cities and the workers’ guns, while the Communist Party leaders took three ministries in a grand coalition government.
While fascism was defeated, many partisans were disappointed with postwar Italy. Factory bosses who had collaborated with fascism and profited from the war stayed around. The purging of the state apparatus was limited. Togliatti, as justice minister, shamefully passed an amnesty—which meant that many fascist acts of torture, rape and murder went unpunished—and worked closely with Giuseppe Azzariti, the president of the “Tribunal of the Race”, which enforced anti-Semitic laws from 1938 to 1943. Hunger and rationing continued, and many former partisans were left unemployed.
Workers hid their arms on a huge scale. In large factories, one or two workers were delegated to keep weapons in working order. In Emilia Romagna, 413 kilos of ammunition were found between 1970 and 1995. For partisan and historian Claudio Pavone, the burying of the machine gun symbolised the covering up of an alternative path—one that would not have stopped with the defeat of fascism, but would have continued on to try to establish a socialist society.

The Italian resistance to fascism

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.
Twenty-five-year-old Indigenous man David Armstrong was killed on 30 September at Fortescue Metal Group’s Solomon Hub iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Part of the drill and blast team, he died after the ground collapsed beneath him. 
Armstrong’s brother Coen told the West Australian: “Everyone who’s been touched by Dave knows the kindness his soul shared, and we hope everyone finds solace in the fact he lived life to the fullest as we have”.
An ABC article carried a picture of a smiling Andrew Forrest, billionaire owner of Fortescue, but took it down after a backlash. 
The picture was appropriate, in its own sick way. Profits bring smiles. It is hard to overstate just how much money these mines make for the bosses. Western Australia’s iron ore sales were A$97.7 billion in 2019. Iron ore is Australia’s largest export, and Australia is the number one exporter in the world. 
This year, the price of iron ore has moved wildly between US$120 and $220 per tonne. It costs only US$15 per tonne to produce, as Fortescue revealed to its workers earlier this year. BHP has a train that can carry 82,000 tonnes of ore—between $9.8 and $18 million worth of crushed rock. This is what super-profits look like.
Just two weeks before David Armstrong’s death, 52-year-old scaffolder Eugene Tata fell to his death at another Pilbara site, the Sino Iron mine, 1,000 kilometres south of Karratha. The mine is run by CITIC Pacific, which bought the rights to mine from another billionaire, Clive Palmer. Disgracefully, the company did not even shut its whole operation on the day of the death. 
“Sino Iron has been the subject of 51 improvement notices and twelve prohibition notices in the past six years, covering operations at the open pit, port and processing areas”, noted the West Australian. “Notices covered issues such as working at heights, plant operation, electrical and movement of vehicles.” 
One CFMEU occupational health and safety officer described the safety record of the Sino Iron site to the newspaper as “outrageous”. “Conditions on mine sites have been deteriorating since 2013-14”, he said. “They know there’s no inspector on the beat so companies cut corners.”
Safety costs money. With profits like these, and with very little push-back, it’s easy to see why companies choose profits over workers’ lives. 
“Someone on the ground will tell you a hundred percent it’s always about production over safety”, union organiser Jeff Carig said when I interviewed him in 2019 for my PhD research. The pressure to work fast is relentless. As one miner told me: “When they put a job up on the board you might have ... four hours on a job card to do it ... But the job actually takes probably eight hours”.
Union sites are safer sites. Where unions are of sufficient strength, workers can point out safety breaches, and insist on realistic times to complete tasks. But unions have been shut out of the Pilbara iron ore industry, in which fewer than 5 percent of workers are union members. Union-negotiated agreements are the exception. 
Such is the atmosphere that those unionists who do exist can’t organise openly. Workers are also afraid of losing their jobs for raising safety concerns. 
Added to this is the issue of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) worker suicides. (Most iron ore miners are FIFO workers, living in Perth or interstate.) 
Companies are not required to investigate when there is a suicide in their mining camp, let alone if one of the workers or contractors takes their own life during an off swing (the week off after working two or three weeks consecutively). 
Twelve-hour days, for fourteen or 21 days consecutively in a remote region, away from family and friends, takes its toll. But this is the work arrangement imposed by the mining bosses, one they refuse to change despite the evidence of its impact on mental health. 
It doesn’t have to be like this. When the industry was unionised in the late 1960s and early 1970s, workers civilised an industry with wild west safety standards. All manner of safety measures, such as strict isolation lock procedures when machinery was being maintained, were opposed by bosses but won through strikes.
The ’70s and ’80s were years of union strength and militancy in the Pilbara, with strong shop steward networks, frequent strikes and union influence over staffing levels, overtime and safety. The bosses hated it.
They smashed unionism in the region throughout the <a>’</a>80s and ’90s. This started with the Robe River dispute of 1986-87, when the bosses railed against “restrictive work practices”, including hard-fought-for safety standards. The strategy of the union officials against this vicious offensive was to fight through the industrial tribunal, lobby Labor governments to intervene and avoid strike action at all costs. It failed dismally. 
Other companies followed suit, leading, eventually, to the sorry state of the industry today. Union strength, powered from the grassroots: that is the kind of culture we need to rebuild, for all our sakes.

The workplace deaths behind Australia’s mining riches

“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.
In June 1979, the Western Australian government approved oil drilling exploration by US multinational Amax, despite the location being on sacred land. The Noonkanbah community in the Kimberley region resisted from the onset. Their determined stand shocked the establishment, the afternoon newspaper Daily News noting that it was “the first time in WA an organised group of Aborigines is determined to keep outsiders off what they consider is their land”. On 15 June, they locked the gate and refused to let company representatives onto their land.
The Noonkanbah community won support from Aboriginal communities as far away as the Northern Territory, organisations such as the Kimberley Land Council (founded three years previously with seed money from unions and no government funding), anti-racism groups, Uniting Church ministers and some Labor politicians. Crucially, they won support from the union movement. One hundred delegates at the Trades and Labour Council (TLC, today called UnionsWA) meeting in Perth 2,500 km away, unanimously passed a solidarity motion on hearing about the traditional owners’ stand. 
Noonkanbah was at the time a successful Aboriginal-owned and -run pastoral station. Aboriginal workers at Noonkanbah had walked off the white-owned pastoral station in 1971 to protest against the non-payment of wages and the generally horrific conditions. To take one example, they were first provided with “toilet facilities”—one earth pit latrine for 30 people—that year. The station eventually went bankrupt, and the federal government bought it “back” for the community, which “quickly restored it to good health”, wrote anthropologist Erich Kolig in The Noonkanbah Story.
There was a mining and resources boom at the time, and the vast Pilbara and Kimberley regions in the state’s north-west were key sites of exploitation. Premier Charles Court was pro-development and an arch reactionary. His anti-union section 54B (of the Police Act) prevented three or more people gathering without a permit. He told his biographer Ronda Jamieson: “You’re not dealing with a mob of naughty Sunday School children when you’re dealing with these hardline, left wing, militant trade unionists”. 
He also brought in laws to deny Aboriginal people the vote and described the 1968 equal wages decision for Aboriginal pastoral workers, which unions supported, as “devastating”. 
On 25 March 1980, the trade union movement increased its support from the political to the industrial, the TLC placing bans on the transport and operation of the drilling rig that was to be used at Noonkanbah. Amid delayed plans, the union opposition and campaigning against the drilling, Amax wanted to pull out of the whole thing. But Premier Court wouldn’t let it, offering compensation instead. “If we walk out of Noonkanbah it will be the next station and the next station, and the next, and the whole of Western Australia will be denied oil exploration”, he told Jamieson.
The Transport Workers’ Union instructed members not to transport the rig. Given the high level of unionisation in the industry, and that major trucking companies didn’t want to anger the union, this put a big spanner in the works. As then secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union John (JJ) O’Connor told me in 2011: “The trade union movement doesn’t just get involved in industrial things, it gets involved in social issues ... We could see an injustice and ... Charles Court’s bloody storm trooper attitude to all these things ... and we felt we needed to do something”.
Incredibly, the government set up its own scab trucking company especially for the operation, paying drivers well above the going rate. The scabs left Midland Brick—owned by prominent Liberal Party donors—in the dead of night. The convoy of 50 trucks had a police escort for the whole 2,500 km journey. Many of the scab drivers wore disguises, so scared were they of repercussions from trade unionists. Unionists and Aboriginal people protested at several locations along the scab trucks’ long journey.
At the North West Highway near Karratha and Roebourne in the Pilbara region, around 50 protesters blocked the road. Transport Workers’ Union organiser Paddy Hartnett was arrested after parking his car in the middle of the road to block the trucks. Hartnett told WA’s Irish Scene magazine many years later that the use of scabs “was like a red rag to a bull and as the union organiser in Karratha it was my job to stop the convoy”. Five more unionists from a range of unions were also arrested. 
Graeme Haynes—a long-time Electrical Trades’ Union shop steward at Cliffs Robe River iron ore company—took part in the protest. “A copper chased me—I was taking photos of all the idiots with false beards”, he says over the phone from Victoria. “A few hundred metres into the shrub and spinifex, he realised he wasn’t up to the task.” Haynes, a socialist, abhorred the anti-Aboriginal racism so prevalent in the state’s north-west and had been campaigning against it for years. There was even talk among unionists of parking a train loaded with iron ore across the road, but this didn’t eventuate.
Aboriginal protesters stopped the convoy at Strelley, not far from Port Hedland. “About one hundred and sixty of the mob occupied the bridge at Tabba Creek and covered it with rocks and stones”, activist Steve Hawke wrote in Noonkanbah: Whose Land? Whose Law? During the 1946-49 <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/may-day-1946-pilbara-aboriginal-workers-strike">Aboriginal pastoral workers’ strike</a> in the Pilbara, the “Strelley mob” came together as a self-sustaining strike community. Many never went back to work. 
The Broome protest was organised by the local Waterside Workers’ Federation branch and the Aboriginal community. Aboriginal unionist Terence (Terry) Mathews, on the union’s Broome branch committee, was central. The federation and other left-wing unions had a <a href="https://sa.org.au/interventions/kooris_unions.htm">history of support for Aboriginal rights</a> going back many decades. 
Between 200 and 400 protested, setting up a picket across the road. Most of the protesters were Indigenous, joined by some wharfies and other unionists. Some handwritten signs read, “Poor fella my country” and “ACTU picket line”. Another was “There’s no flies at Noonkanbah but the scabs are on the way”.
The picket temporarily stopped the convoy, but eventually the trucks “smashed through the picket line at about 30kph showing no regard for the safety of protesters ... with sirens and horns blasting”, according to the Maritime Worker. Union representatives Kevin Bullen and Mathews were both nearly hit. They were arrested along with four others. 
The final blockade was at Mickey’s Pool, just out of Noonkanbah, where a crowd of 60 Noonkanbah community members, Uniting Church ministers and unionists tried in vain to stop the convoy. Six ministers were arrested.
When the convoy arrived at Noonkanbah, the twenty workers employed to do the drilling held the fate of the entire dispute in their hands. They had joined the Australian Workers’ Union six months earlier. A right-wing union with a mixed record on Aboriginal rights, the union eventually came around to supporting the dispute. After an ACTU call-out garnered $128,000 in donations, in part to pay the drillers’ wages, the workers decided to ban drilling. 
“The ban imposed by the drilling crew was the union movement's triumphant tactical counter to the convoy”, Steve Hawke wrote. “The roughnecks ... who worked the drilling rigs were renowned as a hard-working, hard-drinking, high-living, independent-minded mob. There was a high degree of mobility in the industry ... No one had counted on them coming out on an issue like this.”
The government organised a scab crew, which started drilling on 29 August, when virtually the entire Noonkanbah community was at Fitzroy Crossing for the races. No oil was found.
As well as industrial action and the protests against the convoy, unions contributed by way of visits by union leaders to Noonkanbah, through articles in union publications, by lobbying the government and relevant companies, and by participation in demonstrations. For example, in August, protesters marched to St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne to set up a mock “oil rig” made by members of the Builders Labourers’ Federation.
Three factors explain how this incredible episode came to pass. First, the inspiring resistance of Aboriginal people at Noonkanbah. Without this, it could never have happened at all. 
Second, the high level of industrial struggle in Australia at the time. The 1969 Clarrie O’Shea strike had opened a floodgate of union militancy, which didn’t subside until the 1983 Prices and Incomes Accord. Workers struck for an incredible 11 million days between 1979 and 1981. Workers in the iron ore sector in the Pilbara region, where some of the Noonkanbah protests took place, were one of the most militant sections of the Australian working class at that time, strongly organised, regularly striking and driving management wild. For example, in 1979 workers struck for ten weeks at Hamersley Iron (a large iron ore company, now part of Rio Tinto), pushing back attacks on union rights and winning big increases to wages and conditions. 
This is not to say all workers were convinced anti-racists—far from it. But when unions are fighting and winning over issues of wages, conditions and safety, they are more likely to take serious industrial action in support of social issues. There was also a legacy of social campaigns, including for Aboriginal rights in the 1960s and 1970s, campaigns that left-wing unions strongly supported. 
Third was the presence of activists highly committed to the cause. Those activists spearheaded the union response on the ground and argued for solidarity. 
The Noonkanbah dispute remains an important chapter in both the struggle for Aboriginal rights and union solidarity with the struggle. The song “The Noonkanbah Scabs” by R U Ready—sung at the protests—captures the essence of this campaign:
<blockquote>The Noonkanbah scabs 
each one of them’s a mug, 
they’d sell their mothers 
and their kids for just a buck. 
The Noonkanbah scabs 
helping Charlie Court the thug, 
push the oil rig to Noonkanbah 
on scabby black-banned trucks. 
Up here in the Kimberley 
a struggle’s going on, 
the Yungyora of Noonkanbah 
are standing up real strong. 
They’re fighting for their country 
and for people all around.
</blockquote>
 
Alexis Vassiley is a labour historian based in Perth. He is the author of a longer article on trade union solidarity during the Noonkanbah dispute published in Labour History 110 (May 2016), on which this article is based.

Noonkanbah 1979: when unionists stood up for Aboriginal rights

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. 
On 13 May, details of the so-called Jobs Protection Framework were released to members: pay cuts of up to 15 percent at universities most affected by coronavirus-induced revenue reductions (so-called Category B institutions). Category A universities could implement cuts of up to 10 percent to wages. Union officials estimated that 90 percent of universities would fall into one or other category. 
A rank-and-file rebellion led by activists from NTEU Fightback led branch after branch of the union to vote to reject the deal. 
Initially it was the largest and most militant branches, such as Sydney University and RMIT in Melbourne, voting to reject the deal, but by the time the deal was withdrawn by national officials, branches not known for militancy such as the University of South Australia and Australian National University in Canberra had also voted against. By 26 May, the deal was dead. 
In extremely difficult circumstances, where face-to-face meetings and discussion were not possible and in the midst of a major economic and health crisis, union activists managed to overturn their leaders’ attempts to trade away hard-won conditions. A rank-and-file victory like this is a rarity in Australian union politics, let alone in the context of a pandemic, and is a credit to all the activists involved.
Since the defeat of the Framework as a national deal, attacks on workers’ wages and conditions have continued at many campuses. This has taken three forms. First, at campuses where the management wants to deal with the union, deals trading off wages and conditions in return for unenforceable promises to save some (but not all) jobs are being put to staff. This includes La Trobe and Monash universities in Melbourne, the University of Western Australia, Western Sydney University and University of Tasmania. These deals, like the now withdrawn framework, amount to blackmail: agree to cuts or you could lose your job. 
La Trobe’s deal involved vicious pay cuts – $174 per fortnight for those on the median full-time female wage of $65,000 – the trashing of protections around major change and restructures, and no enforceable protections against job cuts. Naturally, this was not popular with members. The saga at that university provides a case study in just how far the union bureaucracy will go to get their deals up. 
Large branch meetings at La Trobe rejected these proposals – twice. Before the framework was released, union members voted to reject any concessions on pay. After its release, a meeting of several hundred people voted to reject the deal. But the national leadership of the NTEU adopted the attitude of, if at first you lose the vote, why not try again until you get the desired result?
An online push poll on the deal was put to members to provide a fig leaf of consent for the deal. On Tuesday, 2 June, La Trobe NTEU members saw the details of the deal and were told by the Victorian office they would be polled less than 48 hours later – Thursday to Saturday. Despite the NTEU and other unions rightly decrying the government’s reduction of employers’ required notice period for a ballot to change the enterprise agreement from seven days to 24 hours, these standards did not apply in the La Trobe union polls. 
The schedule of changes members would be voting on was publicised on an NTEU website with the name “savelatrobejobs”. This highly questionable campaign slogan was linked on the online ballot paper itself, along with the false assertion that the union supports the changes. The NTEU expended significant resources in phone-banking members and texting members to vote yes – an effort not extended to organising on the ground against non-union variations such as at Melbourne University. 
Meanwhile management tried to terrorise staff into thinking the university’s finances were extremely dire, including at a town hall meeting attended by thousands. On the day the union ballot started, the Age carried a fallacious article on its front page, shared on union social media. It opened with the statement “La Trobe University is at risk of going broke in a matter of weeks”. Much of the information matched up with what management told staff about the financial situation. Hours later, when the damage had already been done, vice-chancellor John Dewar released a statement “clarifying” that “the university is not at risk of going broke” and is in fact “in the top 30% of Australia’s top 2000 companies for revenue”. Nevertheless, the union bureaucracy got its way, with a 74 percent yes vote in the push poll. Yet the no campaigners achieved a respectable vote – 26 percent – for a new group up against the combined might of management and the union machine.
At the University of Tasmania, less than 24 hours’ notice was given for a push poll of members on a pay freeze, deferral of increments and pay for promotions, and the gutting of change management clauses. The Tasmanian division of the union tweeted that it had won the vote “overwhelmingly”. What a thing to be proud of! A poll with less notice than that required under union rules for branch meetings comes out in favour of wage cuts!
Notably, at Western Sydney University, the union stitched up a wage cut agreement with management, again without a mandate from members. A branch meeting was called, an hour before which members were given a copy of the agreement. The branch voted in favour. The desired result had been reached, so no poll of members was organised.
These tactics, frankly worthy of authoritarian regimes, and certainly not a union claiming to be “member-led” and “extremely democratic”, show the leaders cannot win support for their strategy in an open debate. 
The second form of attack following the defeat of the national framework has involved university managements moving to sideline the union and impose pay cuts unilaterally. This includes the University of Melbourne and University of Wollongong. 
At Melbourne University, management are putting the enterprise agreement variation to staff this week. The variation would cut pay by 2.2 percent – one week’s pay per year – and reduce redundancy entitlements. The union is opposing this variation, arguing that management cannot be trusted and that “If the university is so serious about saving jobs, why are there no enforceable job-saving provisions in its proposed variation?” These are precisely the type of arguments NTEU Fightback activists have made all along. 
The trouble is, the union is opposing this variation only because it was locked out of the process. Where the union has been included, such as at La Trobe, it has backed similar deals with no enforceable job-saving provisions. The difference at Melbourne Uni is that the union officials have been left out in the cold. 
Alarmingly however, national and state NTEU officials have done little campaigning for a no vote at the University of Melbourne. Instead, they are using paid union resources to campaign for the pay cut deal at La Trobe, phone banking and texting members. Even without proper union support, delegates at Melbourne Uni managed to organise 17 local meetings in just one week to put the case against the variations, with more than 1,300 staff attending. If there is a win for the union this week, it will be thanks to them, not the union officials.
The third form has been mass job cuts, rather than cuts to both pay and jobs. This has been the management approach at Deakin University in Melbourne, as well as regional universities such as Central Queensland University. 
Supporters of the framework have blamed these job losses on those who successfully campaigned against the framework. This could not be further from the truth. By willingly attempting to trade away members’ conditions, the union leadership showed its weakness, softened up some union members for attacks and indicated to university managements that they would not fight to defend conditions. This concessionary bargaining only encouraged managements – they smelled blood and went on the attack. 
As NTEU Fightback activist and NTEU national councillor Alma Torlakovic put it, “Pay cuts do not save jobs. University managements attacked staff in the good times, and now they’re attacking them in the bad. Supporting these deals signals that workers are an easy target and we will pay for a crisis we didn’t cause. Rejecting them instead ring-fences enterprise agreements and tells management and state and federal government they must make up the shortfall from elsewhere”.
Australian labour history is full of examples of unions emboldening bosses by adopting a moderate approach. Even supporters of the framework claimed it would save at best only 12,000 jobs, out of 30,000 under threat sector-wide. And this figure came from dodgy modelling by professor Jamie Doughney, a former union president at Victoria University, who joined senior management to help oversee a series of cuts to jobs and conditions. 
It essentially assumes that any and all money saved from pay cuts would be spent on ensuring people retained employment. This was fanciful – nothing in the framework enforced this. 
The challenge now is to resist attacks on many local fronts. But the campaign against the National Jobs Protection Framework offers a valuable guide to action. While the union leadership’s approach has encouraged university managements, opposition to it has rejuvenated rank and file activism. Rank and file groups have formed across the country. Members are becoming activists for the first time, learning how to organise fellow workers.
These developments are tenuous and small scale in many places. Nevertheless, it is this rank and file activism to build union power that offers a path forward, not dodgy deals with university bosses.

Struggle continues for university workers after pay cut agreement defeated

Italy is a massacre. Patients who would normally be in intensive care are left in wards without the equipment or staff to treat them. Hospitals have run out of beds and doctors must triage patients, deciding whose life and whose death to prioritise. There are 5,000 intensive care beds. The ministry of health says that 2,500 more are needed to tackle the crisis. Nearly 3,000 medical workers have been infected – more than 8 percent of the country’s total cases. Daniela Trezzi, a 34-year-old intensive care nurse in Lombardy, tragically took her own life. Trezzi tested positive and feared that she had spread the virus to others.
While Italy is often reported to have a good health care system, its bed-to-population ratio is 3.6/1,000, down from 5.8/1,000 in 1998 and one of the lowest in the OECD. Seventy thousand beds have disappeared and €37 billion has been cut in recent years. Workplaces were shut down far too late – the horse had already bolted. There had been 4,000 deaths in Lombardy alone. Even then, “essential” industries were deemed to include things such as tyre production and arms manufacturing. Industries exempted from the government decree employ an estimated 12 million workers. 
Crumbling hospitals, savage cuts to health over decades, lack of widespread testing and the bosses’ stubborn determination to keep production going has caused this human-made tragedy. Now, there are fears that the disease will spread to and overwhelm the south of the country, from its current epicentre in the much wealthier, industrialised north. The south has 4 million informal economy workers, including in factories run by organised crime, 50 percent youth unemployment and only 60 percent of families have an internet connection.
Workers have shown remarkable resistance in the face of the health and social crisis. According to Antonello Zecca of Sinistra Anticapitalista, a socialist group: “Workers spontaneously went on strike because they felt their lives should come before profit. Strikes were massive, like we had not seen for 10 years or so. The strikes were inspiring to us, because they marked the beginning of a new class consciousness. For the first time in years, workers perceived their interests as completely different from their bosses”.
The strikes pushed the government to take more measures to shut down non-essential production. Nationwide strikes on 25 March had two characteristics, according to Italian socialist Piero Maestri. “Firstly, a strike of a number of different industrial sectors: chemicals, air transport, metalworkers, organised by mainstream union federations CGIL-CISL-UIL”, he explains via email. “Secondly, a nationwide general strike called by Unione Sindacale di Base and other grassroots unions.” Health care workers also participated through solidarity photos and symbolic one-minute stoppages.
The strike was a response to a recent upsurge of strikes from below demanding that production cease. The spontaneous strikes spanned the length of the country, particularly in large workplaces such as FIAT-Chrysler factories, often stopping production under the slogan “Our lives are worth more than their profits!” According to Maestri, many people struck in private sector workplaces, and where the biggest industries remained open, despite the emergency measures. 
Workers in the north have huge industrial power and a history of militancy. Workers in the industrial north drove bosses and union officials alike crazy in the 1960s and 1970s with wildcat strikes, mass meetings and a profound disrespect for management. The liberation from fascism was marked by an insurrectionary general strike in April 1945 in the northern industrial triangle: Milan, Turin and Genoa. In 1919, factory councils were formed by workers in Turin – named “Italy’s Petrograd” (the city in which the Russian revolution broke out) by the great revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. The following year, 500,000 metalworkers up and down the peninsula occupied factories for a month and continued production under workers under workers’ control. 
The state of the Italian workers’ movement and (especially) the left today is a far cry from those heady days. Nonetheless, their industrial power remains significant and their determination to fight is encouraging. Eliana Como, from Italian metalworkers’ union FIOM, told German socialist magazine Marx21: 
“The workers began to question the schizophrenic policies of the government: on the one hand, a government flooding you with invitations and obligations to stay at home. On the other, you are going to work every day as if it were nothing. But here, however, the unions made a mistake. As anger and fear grew, the union focused on an unrealistic claim, that of work in safe conditions.
“In many workplaces, especially in factories, this is impossible, there is no way to respect social distancing. And it was also unrealistic to think that protective equipment would arrive, which in the meantime was even missing for health care workers! In the current circumstances of lack of protective equipment, it is negligent to demand safe work instead of simply closing down factories.”
According to Como, focusing on demanding safe work, rather than the shutting down non-essential production, meant that precious time was lost. On 14 March, a safety protocol was signed between the union federations and the government. But this put only non-binding recommendations on companies and resulted in millions continuing to work. Nonetheless, even this inadequate protocol came about because of workers’ grassroots actions in the factories. For example, two days earlier, metalworkers across the north took wildcat strike action, with a very high participation rate at the companies MTM, IKK, Dierre and Trivium in Piedmont.
“It may seem strange, but it was after the signing of the protocol that anger and fear exploded”, Como continued. “A wave of strikes swept through the country. Not only where the workers were already strong and organised. They helped set an example, but even in less radical factories the workers stopped production. Also because when some large factories closed, those of the downstream industries began to lose orders and contracts. The workers saw the situation change and acted accordingly. To organise, workers used social networks. At Electrolux in Forli [in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna], the strike, which was successful, was organised entirely through WhatsApp.” 
In factories such as GKN, Piaggio, Electrolux and Fincantieri – which have strong existing grassroots organisation – workers had already made their voices heard, alongside those at FIAT-Chrysler. Strikes were strong in logistics, where grassroots union Si-Cobas has been organising for several years. Ciro Tappeste and Giuliana Martieri reported in Left Voice on 26 March that for around 10 days after the signing of the protocol, “activities have been suspended or paralyzed by strikes in several sectors where ‘rank-and-file unions’ are active. 
“Since Monday 23 March, with [prime minister Giuseppe] Conte’s response to the employers’ demands, the situation has escalated, with strikes in the aeronautics sector, in particular at Leonardo (36,000 employees), Gavio and LGS, but also at the Safilo eyewear group (where the unions have proposed converting luxury production to make protective masks), and in the metalworking sector in Padua, where workers ... went on strike on 24 March for 48 hours.”
Strikes in hundreds of FCA plants after 14 March caused the closure of half a dozen factories, at least temporarily. For example, on 17 March at the Sevel car factory in Atessa, owned by FCA, in the southern region of Abruzzo, 5,000 workers struck, saying “non siamo carne da macello” (we are not cannon fodder). There have been strikes in several Amazon distribution centres, including by 1100 workers at the Castel San Giovanni distribution centre in Emilia-Romagna on 17 March, demanding the multinational carry out its obligations under the 14 March decree. In other workplaces, protest took the form of calling in sick, taking holidays or absenteeism. 
The union bureaucracy has been dragged kicking and screaming into supporting strikes. “Struggle from below – either spontaneous strikes or strikes often led by grassroots committees of the main union federations – has certainly sent strong signals to the national leaderships, which has brought them into various deals with the government”, says Maestri.
“[The union leaders] missed an historic opportunity. The national leadership took two weeks to call for the closure of non-essential production. They didn’t even ask for it in the days when spontaneous strikes multiplied”, said Como. “That was the moment when the general strike had to be declared. The workers were there and the government would have been forced to hear them. Time was lost, which in this situation means human lives, and left room for [employers’ association] Confindustria to dictate its conditions. Now we are here, with these late and insufficient decrees. Imposing the closure of all non-essential production was the condition to save even those who work in the many companies where there is no union.”
Fortunately rank-and-file unionists didn’t wait as long as their leaders to act.
The international nature of the crisis means we can draw strength from struggles around the world. Some of the slogans from Italy – “Stop everything – Defend health – guarantee wages” and “We don’t want to return to normality, because that normality is the problem” – are universal demands, as applicable to Australia, Spain or the United States as to Italy. 
Italian workers are showing incredible solidarity throughout this horrific crisis. Left group Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) shared photos on Facebook of “an army of thousands of silent, determined volunteers showing solidarity, from Sicily to Lombardy”. One photo shows an older woman using a pulley from the window to get a bag of shopping from a young activist below. We’ve seen videos on social media of choirs made up of people of all ages singing in unison from their balconies. These people are our hope, as are the health care workers, and the factory workers flexing their industrial muscle for the social good.
Workers in big, unionised workplaces have largely succeeded in shutting down production, but the bosses want to start it up again. The metalworkers’ union has vowed to stop this from happening including by striking. It is a life or death struggle.

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University union endorses academic boycott of Israel, defends right to protest

Historic US university strike wins big

WA nurses demand 10 percent

The Italian resistance to fascism

The workplace deaths behind Australia’s mining riches

Noonkanbah 1979: when unionists stood up for Aboriginal rights

Struggle continues for university workers after pay cut agreement defeated

Italian workers’ remarkable resistance to murderous establishment policies

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