In the middle of Brisbane’s legal district, spitting distance from the police headquarters and bustling Roma Street train station, dozens of striking construction workers congregate on a traffic island. A huge metal sculpture of a kangaroo looms comically over the impromptu camp, renamed by the workers “Solidarity Island”.
The workers, employed by CPB—the lead engineering contractor at the Cross River Rail construction site—have been striking on and off since May as they fight for a new workplace agreement. CPB is a wholly owned subsidiary of the industrial giant CIMIC, whose profits last year were nearly half a billion dollars. Somehow, no doubt perfectly legally, it paid only $55 million in tax, <a href="https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/ASX_CIM_2023.pdf">according to the company’s annual report</a>. 
The 150 striking workers have been consigned to Solidarity Island since 19 July, thanks to a court injunction banning them from being within 15 metres of a worksite entrance. Despite the whizzing traffic, persistently hostile media reports, and the looming threat of a federal government takeover of their union, the workers are confident and defiant. 
And they are right to be. The vast majority of CPB employees are taking part in the strike. The workers know that every time they stop working, so too does the site. They talk about receiving support from construction sites across the city. Even though the dispute has dragged on for months, they plan to win.
When the enterprise agreements for the huge Cross River Rail project in Brisbane were first negotiated in 2019, the CFMEU was locked out in preference for a cut-price deal between the bosses and the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU). It’s only now, more than four years later and after the expiry of that dodgy deal, that the CFMEU has been able to edge in by organising the workers on site.
The workers’ determination comes not just from their strength but because they know this is a fight to improve the industry standard. This includes pay rises, but, importantly, the CFMEU is also trying to ensure that workers employed by subcontractors (which is most workers on any construction site) are paid the same rates as other workers.
In addition to equal pay for all workers, the union also demands a heat policy in line with other CFMEU agreements. The union wants all work to stop once the temperature reaches 35 degrees (or lower if there is high humidity). 
There have been several deaths and other serious injuries on the $6.3 billion Cross River Rail project. Late last year, 29-year-old Daniel Sa’u died from heat stress after finishing a full day’s work. He left behind a wife and three young children. His wife Jeraldine later said at a CFMEU rally: “What happened to him is not right ... those in power who could have prevented his death need to be held accountable”. 
CFMEU members striking at CPB have been at the centre of many of the recent attacks on the union, which have come from the federal Labor government and the state Labor government of Stephen Miles, as well as the usual suspects: the corporate media, the right-wing parties and the bosses’ spokespeople. This strike predictably has been reported as emblematic of union thuggery. 
In a sense, the CPB workers and their strike are emblematic of what is at stake in the federal government and Fair Work Commission <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-02/fair-work-moves-to-appoint-cfmeu-administrator/104176634">move</a> to sack all elected officials—268 all up—in the CFMEU’s construction division (only the WA and ACT branches have been spared). While allegations of serious corruption and criminal dealings have been made in the Victorian and NSW branches, in Queensland, the main charge seems to be that the CFMEU is leading a strike.

Duncan Hart

Strike shows stakes for Queensland CFMEU

More than 1,500 students attended a student general meeting at the University of Queensland (UQ) on 29 May, the largest student meeting in Australia in decades. The meeting voted overwhelmingly to stand in solidarity with Palestine and against university cooperation with Israel and the weapons companies that are enabling and profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 
The meeting was the culmination of a month-long Gaza solidarity encampment organised by Students for Palestine. Like student encampments all over the world, the UQ one has called for the administration to divest from Israel. 
A particular focus of student anger is the presence of the Boeing Centre on campus, a symbol of the partnership between the university and the US multinational Boeing. Boeing is the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, <a href="https://www.sipri.org/visualizations/2023/sipri-top-100-arms-producing-and-military-services-companies-world-2022">according to </a>the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, with an annual revenue from weapons sales of US$29.3 billion. As <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/28/middleeast/gaza-us-munitions-rafah-strike-analysis-intl-hnk/index.html">reported</a> by CNN, it was a “high-precision munition” built and sold by Boeing that Israel used to murder at least 45 people in a tent city in Rafah on 26 May. 
The student general meeting, which is an extraordinary meeting held under the rules of the UQ student union to determine the official attitude of the student body, was requisitioned by a petition of more than 1,200 students collected by Students for Palestine. Three questions were posed to the meeting:
1. Should UQ sever ties with companies that supply weapons to the Israeli Defence Force?
2. Should UQ shut down the Boeing Centre?
3. Should UQ financially divest from Israel?
When registration for the meeting opened, the line to get into the UQ Centre, with a maximum capacity of 600, stretched for hundreds of metres. By the time the meeting began at 6:45, the venue was full and the line outside totalled 850 people. 
In the end students occupied three more overflow lecture theatres and the numbers lining up to register continued to grow right up until the vote was taken inside. Everywhere, the sentiment from students was the same: “Will we be able to vote?”, and “We didn’t come here just to watch”.
A small group of Zionists inside the lecture theatre attempted to win students away from supporting Palestine. Despite being offered many chances to speak against the motions, only one took the chance. He was listened to in silence but failed to make an impact: it was the pro-Palestine speakers that generated all the applause. 
It was Ella Gutteridge, an activist with Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine, who summed up the sentiment for the “Yes” case. “I think that students should come to university to learn to make the world a better place, not a worse place” she declared to the cheering crowd. “We should not accept that we come here, we keep our heads down, we study, and we go and be quiet worker bees for Australian capitalism. [cheers] Actually, students have the responsibility to not become complicit in the war machine! [loud cheers] And this is not a new argument. I am sure people in this room know of the radical history of students, standing up for justice, for humanity, against the crimes of our ruling classes, all around the world. [applause]...That’s what we need to do, again, today, for Palestine. Just like we did for South Africa, just like we did for Vietnam, we need to make these disgusting states, these genocidal, apartheid states, we need to make them pariahs in the world system. And any company that wants to work with them, any company that wants to arm them, they need to become a pariah too!” 
When the vote was taken the chorus of “yes” votes shook the entire room. Outside, as hundreds more students milled around, still trying to register, a vote was called by show of hands and a forest of arms rose. When those against were asked to vote, not a single hand was raised. 
With the atmosphere electric, a victory march to the chancellery took place, stretching from one end of the campus to the other. The chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, and “Out, out, Israel out!” were roared by more than a thousand students despite the efforts of the university to forbid them the week before. After a few more speeches, students marched back to the camp elated. 
This historic student protest for Palestine is the largest demonstration at UQ since protests against the Springbok tour and in solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in 1971. At that time, mass meetings of thousands of students voted to boycott classes for two weeks in protest at police violence meted out to demonstrators. 
This is also the second student general meeting in just five years at UQ, with a meeting of 400 students in 2019 voting to reject the university’s plans to demolish the student theatre and establish a Bachelor of Western Civilization in partnership with the right-wing think tank, the Ramsay Centre. 
This revival of student activism is clearly part of the international student revolt in solidarity with Palestine, with thousands of students at campuses all over the world taking part, including many in Australia. At the same time, it is a credit to the hard work of the activists on the ground, who have been working together tirelessly to keep the camp going and to raise awareness and organise opposition to the genocide in Gaza. 
The ball is now firmly in the university’s court. Vice Chancellor Deborah Terry, while finding time to send frequent student and staff emails about “security and safety” around the encampment, has not so far acknowledged the demands of the camp. This mass demonstration of students puts the administration under even greater pressure to respond. 
Encouraged by this huge show of support, campus Palestine activists are vowing to continue the fight for justice in Palestine, and against university cooperation with and support for Israel.

Students at UQ revolt in historic stand for Palestine

I got an email from my union last week informing me that we’d just had a “union win”. I’m a casual worker at a university, and my union previously negotiated an enterprise agreement locking in pay rises that won’t make up for the last few years’ inflation.
So, eager to hear what this big win was, I opened the email. It was about new federal laws giving employees the “right to disconnect”:
“When this comes into effect in about 6 months, you can’t be required to monitor your emails or respond to work-related matters beyond your designated working hours, unless that requirement is reasonable. This applies to student contact as well as contact by your supervisor.”
Unpaid work is rife at universities. The combination of rampant casual and contract work, as well as the moral pressure of wanting to do a good job for your students, means that, whether it’s marking, teaching prep or many other things, you’re often not getting paid. While casuals scrabble for any paid hours, full-time academics find themselves with an unmanageable workload. 
The “right to disconnect” in this situation would be at least some help. 
Yet the idea that the new laws are a “union win” is overstated. The <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fsched%2Fr7134_sched_c87cd2e2-5540-4d46-8301-60d22e1e5932%22">legislation</a> says:
“If discussions at the workplace level do not resolve the dispute, a party to the dispute may apply for the Fair Work Commission to ... make an order ... to stop taking certain actions.”
Fair Work has the power to tell the boss, if the employee exercising their “right to disconnect” is at risk of being victimised, or if the boss persists in harassing their employee, to stop or face a fine. 
The problem here is that precarious employment and a lack of power at work are at the root of why bosses feel they can tell us what to do 24 hours a day. This legislation won’t change that, which means that very few people will be willing to risk having their shifts cut or being fired by taking their boss to Fair Work.
I asked a friend, who has worked long term as a casual in a jewellery chain, what he thinks about the new law.
“Well, in my work people are routinely asked to show up for opening the store half an hour before they are rostered, and we have to clean up every night, again after our roster ends”, he said. “Even when we clock off at the time that reflects our actual hours of work, the manager just alters it so that we never get paid for our extra time —this ends up being about half an hour at least every day.” 
Another friend, Louisa, has recently been involved in leading a collective fight back at her employer, Mint My Desk, to be paid the legal minimum wage. How long did it take the Fair Work Ombudsman to address the clearly illegal situation at Mint My Desk?
“It’s been over five months since my workmates and I made a complaint to Fair Work, and while workers have had their pay go up, in most stores people still aren’t being paid legal wages, nor have we received the correct amount of back pay.”
That the workers can claim any win at all is mainly due to the fact that they stood together and took industrial action, rather than just relying on Fair Work to do the right thing.
A similar process to the “right to disconnect” exists for cases of bullying, with the commission able to issue a Stop Bullying Order. The legislation has been in place since 2014 and, like the new legislation, allows an employee to complain to the commission. 
In the first fifteen months of the law’s operation, nearly 900 applications were made for an order, <a href="https://www.marsh.com/au/services/workers-compensation/insights/workplace-bullying-update-in-and-out-of-the-fair-work-commission.html">but only four were granted</a>.
It’s certainly preferable to have better laws rather than worse laws. But, again, the question of a law being enforced often comes down to how well organised workers are in their workplace, not how compelling their individual submission to the relevant authority is.
Laws that properly address this issue are needed and welcome. But unless unions rebuild genuine collective power in the workplace, the new law will be only as good as the Fair Work Commission and Ombudsman are in advancing workers’ rights. That is, it will likely not make much difference in the real world. 
What we really need is a union fight back.

The limits of the ‘right to disconnect’

Australia’s goods and services tax is the one tax that the rich in this country love. 
The GST, being a tax on general consumption, disproportionately falls on the working class—it’s paid every time we go to the shops to buy basic household items (or anything else), jacking up the price of goods and services by 10 percent. 
This makes the GST a regressive tax: one that is paid at the same rate by everyone, regardless of income. That extra 10 percent paid at the supermarket is a lot more noticeable if you’re earning $1,000 a week rather than $5,000. Relative to incomes, the GST is a greater burden on the poorest.
Every few years, some combination of conservative politicians, consultancy firms or right-wing think tanks proposes an increase to the GST for this reason. 
The “teal independents” are the latest to jump on board. The Financial Review reports that Victoria MP Zoe Daniels said in August: “There is a solid argument to increase tax on consumption as long as lower-income households are adequately compensated, as John Howard did when he introduced the GST”.
Former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard made the GST part of his anti-working-class agenda during the 1998 federal election campaign. As Daniels referenced, Howard was able to push the GST through on the promise of income tax cuts for workers. Thanks to inflation, these tax cuts proved temporary, but we’re stuck paying the GST. 
And the only people getting a tax cut right now are the rich, thanks to the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/albanese-persists-reverse-robin-hood-policies">regressive Stage 3 tax cuts</a>.
But surely, the people in favour of the GST aren’t doing it solely out of hatred for the poor and a desire not to pay taxes themselves? 
According to their paid mouthpieces, like the consulting firm PwC, the rationale is that the GST does “not impact economic growth to the same extent as other taxes such as corporate or personal income taxes”. 
<a href="https://www.pwc.com.au/tax/assets/tax-reform/2020/how-gst-reform-can-help-reboot-prosperity-for-australia-july2020.pdf">Writing</a> in 2020, PwC explained for us plebs that switching from progressive taxes—those that result in a general transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor—to higher consumption taxes could increase the size of the economy by up to 1 percent “in the long term”. 
Of course, there’s no discussion of the effect an increase in taxes on workers and pensioners would have on poverty rates, wealth inequality or living standards.
The GST should be abolished, and tax rates on companies and the wealthy should be increased to make up the difference.

Abolish the GST!

Workers across the Brisbane stores of a stationery chain walked off the job on Saturday to highlight their demands for minimum award pay and conditions.
Mint My Desk, and its connected arcade chain Million Life, operates around twenty shops across the east coast of Australia. The chain has expanded rapidly in only a few years. And according to employees, the expansion has been enabled by the underpayment of the mostly young and female workforce.
In documents sent to Fair Work, and seen by Red Flag, Brisbane Mint My Desk workers accuse company bosses of a range of abuses. These include the payment of workers in cash, failure to pay superannuation, failure to pay penalty rates and failure to provide pay slips. 
The underpayment of the workers, who generally work alone and are responsible for opening and closing the stores as well as securing the cash registers, usually amounts to a loss of more than $10 an hour compared to the minimum rate set out in the General Retail Award. This quickly adds up to losses in the hundreds of dollars each week, not including the superannuation. 
Louisa, a socialist who has been organising the workers in Brisbane, said that staff members have previously raised the issues with the company. “Everything from the hourly rate to the fact many people don’t get payslips—they have been unwilling to fix it”, she said.
The workers decided to start a campaign for their legal rights with a bang, stopping work across the three Brisbane stores and organising a demonstration in the middle of the CBD, attended by around 50 supporters and fellow unionists. Workers carried handmade placards with slogans such as, “Mint My Desk Stole my wages!”, “If our pay doesn’t rise, we will”, and “Sell your Maserati, pay our wages”. 
After a few short speeches, the workers took their chants and signs in a march through Queen Street Mall, highlighting the issue to the busy Saturday morning crowds. 
It was the workers’ first experience of collective action, and the sense of nervous excitement and empowerment was palpable. 
“This action is not just about these Brisbane Mint My Desk workers, it’s about the whole company and no doubt many other workplaces”, Louisa said. “So we feel it is important to stand up and speak up, to show other young workers that they can fight back when they stand as a collective.”
Having submitted their demands to the company and to the Fair Work Ombudsman, it remains to be seen how the bosses will respond.
The workers’ ongoing campaign can be followed on social media at Mint My Desk Workers United, on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550553377134">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/mintworkersunited/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@possessed.possum/video/7274016819877334273">TikTok</a>.

‘Mint My Desk stole my wages’

The Australian Labor Party’s national conference, representing trade unions, party branches and parliamentarians, has decisively backed the AUKUS nuclear submarine treaty. While AUKUS was the most controversial question internally, the conference was largely silent on the pressing cost-of-living crisis, particularly on housing. 
As the first ALP national conference to meet while the party has been in government since 2011, the gathering was always going to be a flashpoint for discontent with Labor. In 2011, there were protests of thousands against Labor’s opposition to marriage equality and against the mandatory detention of refugees. 
This time, smaller protests were held on the issues of opposing AUKUS, calling for genuine action on the environment, in particular ending native forest logging, and for real action on housing affordability. By and large, these protests, while not massive, indicate the breach between left-wing, even majority sentiment, and the Labor Party’s commitment to ruling for the rich. Outside the conference, people called for justice, whereas inside the heavily fortified convention centre, such calls were either ignored, mocked or watered down. 
The first day started with a bang, with a sizeable work stoppage organised by the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) at city construction sites, marching on the conference to demand a ban on silicosis-inducing stone cutting and in support of the union’s call for a super-profits tax to fund affordable housing. 
While conference did amend the ALP platform to ban the engineered stone responsible for the fatal silicosis disease, every day that either a union or government ban on this stone is not implemented means workers being exposed to a slow and painful death. Yet another paper commitment isn’t worth much. 
On housing, as well as the CFMEU demonstration, the Greens organised a rally of 300 people on the final day of the conference. The rally called for significant investment in publicly owned housing, as well as a rent freeze. Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather told the demonstration, to cries of “Shame!”, that the ALP has “locked in $368 billion for the nuclear attack submarines, and they tell us all they can spend is at most $500 million a year, at most, from 2025, on social housing”. 
On the inside, Zach Smith, CFMEU national secretary, watered down the union’s call for a $290 billion super-profits tax to fund housing to a mealy-mouthed motion “committing” the ALP to a progressive tax to fund housing. Smith <a href="https://michaelwest.com.au/the-ayes-have-it-alp-conference-flashpoints-fizz-out/">told</a> Michael West Media, “We had to make a decision, whether we ... run up a more rigid position that we know will get defeated, or take a position which shifts the dial on corporate tax”. How exactly it shifts anything for the ALP to say it supports progressive taxation, who knows. 
This is a double shame for the CFMEU to try to sell, not only because of the current political contest between Labor and the Greens over the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund, but also because of the other elephant in the room at the conference: Labor’s support for the “stage three” income tax cuts. This $250 billion handout to the rich was legislated under the Liberal Party but is set to come into effect only from July next year. When the ALP is actively undermining progressive taxation, it is a farce to say a conference motion is a step forward. 
It was AUKUS, discussed on the second day of the conference, that was most anticipated as an issue of internal dissent. Several unions, particularly the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), have opposed the deal due to it involving Australia in the nuclear industry. Other voices in the ALP, most prominently former Prime Minister Paul Keating, have criticised it for signing up Australia to a US war against China. 
A protest of around 150 people, including a contingent of ETU delegates, took a stand outside and heard from Peter Ong, ETU state secretary, and Arthur Rorris, South Coast Labor Council secretary, who condemned the treaty. 
On the inside, however, a vote wasn’t even taken on AUKUS. A 1,300-word motion thoroughly endorsing AUKUS was passed “on the voices”, indicating that among the 400 accredited ALP delegates, few disagreed. This followed a carefully stage-managed debate featuring Prime Minister Anthony Albanese taking to the podium to make clear the full-throated commitment of the ALP to US imperialism. Albanese <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/remarks-aukus-alp-national-conference">argued</a> that obtaining submarines capable of attacking targets anywhere in the world is necessary for Australia to “promote peace, security, stability and prosperity right across the Indo-Pacific”. 
Following the conference, anybody paying attention cannot retain any illusions in Labor’s “Socialist Left” faction. It was members of the left—Pat Conroy, Albanese and Penny Wong—who defended AUKUS. As chronicled in the Guardian’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2023/aug/19/australia-news-live-tony-abbott-to-give-keynote-speech-at-cpac-labor-national-conference-to-conclude?page=with:block-64e005678f08af8aaccefb02#block-64e005678f08af8aaccefb02">live blog</a> of proceedings, despite a left majority of delegates, the conference couldn’t even be moved to ban the logging of native forests, which 360 ALP branches had backed prior to the gathering. 
The total capitulation of the left to the priorities of capitalism was capped off by the election of the national executive of the party, during which sections of the left voted with the right to ensure factional parity on the highest leadership body. 
For any real action opposing the drive to war, for environmental justice and in defence of workers’ living standards, the struggle continues.

Masters of war: Labor conference backs AUKUS

In much of the reporting on Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, a great deal has been made of the involvement of the Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit run by billionaire capitalist Yevgeny Prigozhin. Indeed, the scale of mercenary involvement in Russia’s Ukraine war has been so great that it has “completely erased the boundary between mercenary groups, regular troops, and ‘volunteers’”, <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/14/a-mercenaries-war">according</a> to the Russian opposition website Meduza. 
Less discussed is the scale of mercenary involvement in Western militaries, most significantly that of the United States. Russia has Wagner, but the US has Amentum, L3Harris and Constellis—formerly known as Blackwater.
The blurring of the lines between private armies and the rest of the war machine has been a feature of the post-Cold War years. With vast reserves of material suddenly available, former military personnel and weapons went to the highest bidder, as documented by P. W. Singer in his 2002 book Corporate Warriors. The result has been the fastest growth in private military companies since the days of the British East India Company. 
As the United States launched its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the involvement and role of private military companies expanded. Rather than US soldiers guarding military bases, it was mercenaries from Blackwater or the UK firm AEGIS. US mercenaries organised much of the logistics of the occupations—from catering to telecommunications to bodyguards for the collaborationist president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. 
At the height of the occupation of Afghanistan, US “security contractors” made up over 60 percent of the occupying forces, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504850.html?hpid=topnews">according</a> to 2009 Congressional Research Service estimates. 
Just as the Wagner group has committed war crimes in Ukraine and everywhere else it has operated, US mercenaries have abused and slaughtered civilians with impunity. The most infamous cases came during the US occupation of Iraq. 
On 7 February 2007, as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110702751_pf.html">reported</a> in the Washington Post, a Blackwater sniper deployed on the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry building gunned down three Iraqi security guards working for the Iraqi Media Network, a state-owned television channel. While Blackwater claimed that the shootings were in self-defence, workers at the TV station disputed this; Iraqi police called it an “act of terrorism.” 
Among the three dead men was a father responsible for seventeen children, including those of his brother, who had died during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. When the Iraqi Media Network director contacted the US military about the incident, he reportedly was told that the military “had no information”. 
Blackwater’s reputation was cemented by the Nisour Square massacre, which took place in Baghdad seven months later. At a Blackwater roadblock, mercenaries opened fire on a slow-moving vehicle using machine guns and grenade launchers. Seventeen civilians were killed, including many bystanders. The scale of the atrocity was such that the US military revoked Blackwater’s licence to operate in the country and eventually brought charges against some of those involved—though Donald Trump pardoned those convicted as one of his last acts as president in 2020. 
US mercenaries were also implicated in the heinous scenes of torture and sexual abuse carried out at the Abu Ghraib prison, in which suspected enemy combatants were stripped, smeared in shit, raped, hooded and electrocuted. While US soldiers were held accountable to some degree, none of the mercenaries who took part in one-third of “documented incidents” were, according to Singer in his 2005 book Outsourcing War. 
Jean Richter, when investigating Blackwater for the US State Department, was told by Daniel Carroll, the company’s Iraq project manager, “that he could kill me at that very moment, and no one could or would do anything about it”, according to a report in the New York Times. 
Far from holding Blackwater or other mercenaries accountable, the US military has consistently sought to cover up their crimes. Paul Bremer, the head of the US occupation of Iraq from March 2003 until June 2004, provided mercenaries immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law. Bremer had been under the protection of Blackwater mercenaries during his tenure. 
The billionaire owners of Western military companies are just as unscrupulous as Yevgeny Prigozhin. The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, inherited his wealth from his father, a factory owner. While Blackwater mercenaries were killing and dying in Iraq and elsewhere, Prince paid himself an annual salary of over US$1 million, according to his congressional testimony in 2007. Prince has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/05/04/feature/a-warrior-goes-to-china-did-erik-prince-cross-a-line/">since</a> sold his services to the United Arab Emirates and the Chinese government.
Wagner is not the first mercenary outfit we’ve seen in the wars of the twenty-first century, and it will not be the last.

Before Wagner, there was Blackwater

The Australian Greens achieved unprecedented success at the last federal election, gaining their highest ever number of parliamentary seats after <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/adam-bandt-reveals-balance-power-asks-greens-national-campaign-launch-qld-0">putting forward a left-wing platform</a> calling for including dental and mental health in Medicare, the wiping of student debt, 1 million affordable homes, free child care and income-support increases.
Party leader Adam Bandt <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-slide-greens-win-mandate-action-climate-and-inequality">described</a> the result as “a massive mandate for action on climate and inequality”. The final Senate results confirmed as much: the Albanese Labor government needs the Greens’ votes to pass any legislation opposed by the Liberal-National Coalition.
Nine months on from the election, what has come of the Greens’ electoral success? How have they used their mandate to bring about changes that their voters want?
From the beginning, the party was clear that, like the rest of the left, it wanted to get rid of Scott Morrison’s Liberal government. Its orientation was to win as many seats as possible and then bring progressive pressure to bear on a new Labor government. The argument boiled down to: if the Greens hold the balance of power, good things will happen. It was up to the ALP to choose, in Bandt’s words, a path of either “<a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/pm-needs-choose-co-operation-or-confrontation">confrontation or cooperation</a>”.
The problem is that Labor is hostile to a program of left-wing reforms. After all, this is the party that has for decades overseen sweeping attacks on workers and the privatisation of public assets. It even went to the federal election promising to maintain the Liberal Party’s tax cuts for the rich. 
Nothing was more emblematic of Labor’s hostility to “cooperation” with the Greens than the very first piece of legislation moved in the new parliament: the climate bill. It not only set an inadequate emissions reduction target of just 43 percent by 2030 but did not provide any enforcement mechanisms or concrete plans to achieve the goal. The target didn’t even account for Australia’s coal and gas exports, which keep climbing. The entire point of the bill, as Jerome Small <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-climate-bill-disaster">explained last year in Red Flag</a>, was to “keep stacking up the cash while the planet burns”.
Labor threw down the gauntlet. It was well aware that the best way to wrong-foot the Greens was to dare them to “make the perfect the enemy of the good”, as the asinine phrase goes. A deluge of finger-wagging, tut-tutting opinion writers and talking heads reiterated the view that, finally, we might see “an end to the climate wars” if only the Greens would sign off on Labor’s bill. 
The Greens capitulated. Despite their own criticisms of the bill (that it was the equivalent of “bringing a bucket of water to a house fire”), Greens MPs voted for it with only minor amendments. The legislation has acted as a soporific to the climate movement—precisely what the ALP wants while it is in government. 
Faced with an unpopular opposition led by Peter Dutton, Labor has thus far gotten pretty much everything it wanted through the parliament. The Greens, meanwhile, with their “cooperative” parliamentary approach, have extracted precious little in return.
Indeed, under the ALP, with the mild-mannered Greens by their side, the fossil fuel industry is booming, real wages have dropped precipitously, and the housing crisis has become much worse. The Greens can’t be blamed for all this, of course. But the question has to be asked: how is their strategy going?
Far from seizing the opportunity to work with the Greens, Labor’s approach to the climate bill set the terrain for subsequent clashes. Take the housing bill currently before the parliament. Parliamentary Library research, seen by Guardian journalist Paul Karp last year, estimates that there is a shortfall of more than 500,000 public housing dwellings and that this is going to rise to almost 700,000 within ten years. Yet the bill will add just 20,000 social housing units. Labor’s “plan” is for more people sleeping in tents and homeless encampments in Australia’s major cities. 
The Greens have rightly <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MChandlerMather/posts/pfbid02KW6ApgM3wk8dC8B9kWWhfPvQWbCZYbgFd4vT7nPn78J7kQ93fBJT6YwzcraGcAiJl">argued</a> for a minimum spend of $5 billion a year on public housing. Labor has responded by castigating the Greens for “voting with Peter Dutton” and again accusing them of “making the perfect the enemy of the good”. 
The same accusation is being levelled in regard to Labor’s proposed “safeguard mechanism”, legislation that, while purporting to make concrete steps to reduce emissions, gives big business <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/08/labor-climate-safeguard-mechanism-does-more-to-save-fossil-fuel-industry-than-planet">easy loopholes</a> to escape any actual reduction by purchasing “carbon credits”. 
The past year has shown that Labor isn’t interested in cooperating to make its legislative agenda more favourable to working-class people. This creates a dilemma for the Greens. Their strategy of cooperation has failed. Is there a plan B?
Their trump card is the ability to block bad legislation. But to do this, they would have to be prepared to weather a storm of indignation from the Labor Party and its backers in the press. They would have to become a genuine opposition.
If they continue down the path of capitulating when push comes to shove, many of their supporters may well ask: what is the point of the Greens?

What is the point of the Greens?

Apple retail workers across Australia have resoundingly defeated an attempt by the world’s richest corporation to force through a non-union enterprise agreement.
The victory follows unprecedented industrial action, for both Apple’s operations in Australia and the retail sector more generally, which has set the stage for a renewed push for better rights and conditions for workers, who are campaigning under the re-appropriated Apple slogan of “Good enough, isn’t”.
Of Apple’s 4,000 retail employees, 68 percent voted “no” in a ballot, with a participation rate of 87 percent. The proposed agreement offered a measly 2.6 percent pay rise each year over the next four years—and only to those workers on the agreement’s lowest wage classification. This offer is well below inflation, which is 7.3 percent.
The Apple retail enterprise agreement was first implemented in 2014 without the involvement of retail unions and has remained in operation despite expiring in 2018. The $22 minimum wage set by the agreement for full-time workers has not increased significantly since.
Three unions are involved in the negotiations: the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the Australian Services Union and the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU). Only RAFFWU has organised Apple workers to take collective action and to be present in negotiations.
On 29 October, an estimated 200 Apple retail workers at stores in Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle and Adelaide, organised by RAFFWU, walked off their jobs for an hour-long stoppage to demand a better enterprise agreement. This followed the first nationally coordinated retail strike in Australian history on 18 October and a 24-hour work stoppage on 22 October, challenging long-held assumptions that it is impossible to organise coordinated industrial action in the retail sector.
It is also significant that RAFFWU, an unregistered union, has been able to organise these strikes. The action shows that the current industrial laws do allow rank-and-file workers, through their bargaining representatives, to organise legal industrial action—important to note when many unions have been avoiding action during the current cost-of-living crisis.
A long-time retail worker and RAFFWU member told Red Flag that Apple workers are being “ripped off by this heartless company”. Apple can hardly cry poor; the company made $11 billion in sales in Australia last year, and the global business is valued at $2.4 trillion. Apple claims that it is a model employer, citing “LGBTI inclusivity” and “pay transparency”. But its hypocrisy is demonstrated by the fact that it denies LGBTI workers gender affirmation leave and prevents workers from discussing their individual pay rates.
The October actions follow successful unionisation drives at Apple stores in the United States and Britain. Workers in Oklahoma City, Baltimore and Glasgow voted to unionise their stores this year, which encouraged Apple workers in Australia to act. Union leaders in the US have claimed that more than two dozen other stores have expressed interest in unionising.
Apple management in the US has responded by increasing the minimum wage of its retail workers from US$20 to US$22. Similarly, RAFFWU’s industrial action in response to Apple’s dodgy pay deal back in August forced management to offer a 17 percent increase to the minimum pay rate, which is now $27.64—still short of the union’s demand for $31.
As rising inflation eats into workers’ living standards, retail workers at Apple are setting an example for workers elsewhere on how to challenge the soaring cost of living.

Stanley Zhang

Striking workers tell Apple ‘good enough, isn’t’

The majority of the world’s population live in so-called developing states, in a condition of shameful economic degradation and inequality.
The usual solutions presented to global inequality emphasise global aid and the work of humanitarian agencies, whether it be bodies of the United Nations or charities such as World Vision or the International Red Cross. The assumption is that the world’s poorest states can be uplifted by following paths of capitalist development, and with a slightly more “charitable” mindset from the wealthy countries.
The reality is that nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of the social structure based on the private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the world’s workers, can remedy the entrenched poverty and oppression that predominate. In a word, socialism is the solution.
This revolutionary imperative has been apparent to the people of the underdeveloped world more than any other population. Inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, millions of workers and peasants in the colonised and sub-colonial states joined Communist parties. Some of the world’s biggest communist movements were established in Indonesia, India and China, among other poor states—movements that have continued to influence the left in subsequent decades. 
In just the last few years, there has been a wave of mass struggle across much of the underdeveloped world, with revolutionary movements in Algeria and Sudan and mass strikes in Colombia, Ecuador and Myanmar. Mass protest movements for democratic reforms have erupted in Thailand and most recently in Sri Lanka. These mass struggles have pointed towards the revolutionary strategy necessary to overthrow the rotten regimes and poverty that prevail across much of the underdeveloped states. 
While the typical image of the underdeveloped world is that its populations are hapless victims, increasingly with globalisation it is the site of some of the planet’s most strategically placed sectors of workers. The factory cities of China have become modern symbols of working-class exploitation. China is the source of much of the world’s steel, cars, toys, computers and phones among many, many other manufactured products. All of the world’s ten busiest ports are in Asia, and six of those (not including Hong Kong) are in China. These ports reflect the immensely centralised production hubs in which Chinese workers labour: cities with more than 10 million inhabitants include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Tianjin. 
The incipient economic power of the Chinese working class is indicated by the level of economic disruption that has occurred to global supply chains during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. While China leads the world in this respect, other states have carved out their own economic niches. Bangladesh and Vietnam have become global manufacturing hubs for ready-made garments, while India is the world leader in vaccine production and export, accounting for 40 percent of global production. 
This impressionistic review touches on the fundamental transformation of the economies of the underdeveloped world to create a massive, dispossessed working class. This working class, defined as those people who possess no means of subsistence besides selling their ability to labour, is now a majority in practically every society. Only fifteen states <a href="https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/employment_in_agriculture/">remain</a> in which the majority of the labour force is employed in agriculture, where a large peasantry could be said to exist. Even this overstates the economic significance of agriculture. Only Sierra Leone in Africa still relies on agriculture for most of its annual gross domestic product. 
The character of this working class is extremely diverse both across and within countries, but it is clear that the majority of people in the underdeveloped states are employed in what is termed the “informal sector”. The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines informal workers as “not subject to national labour legislation, income taxation, social protection or entitlement to certain employment benefits” and estimates that 70 percent of the labour force in the underdeveloped states are in this category. Workers in this sector are typically employed in workplaces of fewer than five people, or are self-employed in similar circumstances, with little or no capital investment. A 2018 ILO <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_626831.pdf">report</a> estimated that 98 percent of people working informally in the underdeveloped states were either employees or working on their own account. 
Discussions of this group typically emphasise the precarity, poverty and lack of collective power of these billions of workers. However, recent revolts in Myanmar and Sudan illustrate how this group is far from powerless, and that it can be mobilised in collective, revolutionary struggle. 
The revolution in Sudan (2019 to the present) was initially led by the Sudanese Professionals’ Association, a union confederation organising doctors, teachers, journalists and lawyers, among others. But the mobilisation they led encompassed the majority of the population in Sudan, including oppressed national minorities, women and millions of informal workers. The leadership of the struggle has since moved to neighbourhood Resistance Committees, grassroots and democratic bodies that have sprung up in hundreds of forms all over the country. 
Centred in the vast urban sprawl that is the Khartoum-Omdurman-Bahri metropolis of 6 million people, the Resistance Committees have proven themselves capable of mobilising largely informal workers consistently under the slogan of “no compromise” with the ruling military. 
As <a href="https://sudantribune.com/article262155/">reported</a> in the Sudan Tribune, the Khartoum Resistance Committees recently dismissed a representative who met with pro-military forces, with a spokesperson of the committees reiterating that “if the army really wants to step down from the political scene, it must hand over all of its companies to the civilian government, with the dissolution of the [pro-regime militia] and its merger with the national army”. Only the destruction of the “socioeconomic structure of the state” will enable the construction of “a state that is more just and inclusive to all the people of Sudan”. 
The movement for democracy in Myanmar and to resist the military coup of early 2021 was sparked by the most organised sections of the working class, providing a lead to the masses of informal workers. As a seafarer <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/until-the-end-of-the-world-myanmars-unfinished-revolution/">described</a> to Rob Narai in Marxist Left Review, “the nurses and civil servants are the true heroes of democracy since they are the ones who started” the civil disobedience movement, which rapidly brought workers on the railways, in the banks and in the large textile sector and other factories into action in a general strike. 
This action also resulted in “the sight of these day labourers arriving in downtown Yangon. These workers are very, very poor ... If they stop work, they may not be able to eat the next day ... when I see them there in the streets of Yangon, I think to myself: how brave and heroic these people are!” The typical representatives of the informal sector, the day labourers, showed their capacity to struggle and sacrifice during the general strike. 
Both of these examples from the past few years illustrate a crucial element of the revolutionary strategy that Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin expounded, which was that the working class, particularly its most organised sections, could act as the “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm">tribune of the people</a>”—as the class that has both the material interest and the social power to fight for the total liberation of all the oppressed. 
Georg Lukacs, in his 1924 <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/">summary</a> of Lenin’s thought, explained that it was the class consciousness of workers and their “position within the capitalist process of production” that made them “capable of leading all the exploited and oppressed elements of bourgeois society in common struggle”. As the classic example of the 1917 Russian Revolution showed, it was not so much a question of the numerical strength of the working class being the precondition for a successful socialist revolution, but the strength of revolutionary organisation that was oriented towards workers as the revolutionary class. 
In Russia, the consistently revolutionary and democratic class politics outlined by Lenin’s Bolsheviks enabled them to lead a working-class insurrection in the cities that could unleash an “elemental explosion of the enslaved and impoverished millions” of peasants and the nationally oppressed peoples, which could shatter once and for all the thousand-year empire of the tsars. If the Russian workers, a tiny minority of a still largely feudal absolutist empire, could lead such a “revolutionary alliance of the oppressed” in 1917, the capacity for such working-class leadership today in the underdeveloped world is even more pronounced. 
Despite the socialist hopes of millions of communists and their supporters who have been active in these countries, tragically most of the socialist parties built in these states, from the mid-1920s onwards, were dominated by various forms of Stalinist politics. These politics discounted the revolutionary potential of workers by prioritising some class-collaborationist “democratic” or national independence struggle that cast socialism into the indeterminate future. 
A rediscovery of the genuine revolutionary working-class tradition of the early years of the Communist International and the Russian Revolution is one of the most important preconditions for a victorious socialist revolution in the underdeveloped states. Such a politics could truly build on the immense possibilities indicated by the revolutionary mass struggles that have shaken many states in recent times and awaken the sleeping giant that is the million-headed mass of the workers of the world working class.

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