For the second time, in spite of notoriously censorious defamation laws, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been confirmed to be a war criminal. After spectacularly losing a defamation case against Fairfax Media’s Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe in 2023, Roberts-Smith’s appeal, heard by a full bench of the Federal Court, went down in flames on 19 May. 
Central to the case was claims, now upheld twice to be substantially true, that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes during Australia’s occupation of Afghanistan. These crimes included kicking a man off a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot him; murdering another man and encouraging other soldiers to drink alcohol from his prosthetic leg; and multiple instances of directing other soldiers to kill unarmed people.
In his repeated attempts to clear his name and punish his accusers for telling the truth, Roberts-Smith has succeeded only in proving more convincingly that he is, indeed, a war criminal. His arrogance is almost comical. He presents as a man who believes that he is untouchable. 
In 2021, Roberts-Smith fronted a court to explain why he had petrol-bombed hard drives in his backyard in 2018. This was after McKenzie broke the story that he was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for war crimes. Roberts-Smith explained: “If you don’t get rid of a hard drive, all of the data on the hard drive ... can typically be pulled off it”. Indeed. These were the actions he was trying to paint as those of an innocent man.
At the time of the original defamation case, barrister Bruce McClintock deployed a foolproof defence in the mould of another war criminal, Bill Clinton: “My client did not drink from the leg”. Unfortunately for Ben Roberts-Smith, video footage has recently emerged which shows that he did, in fact, drink from the leg.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging to work out where Roberts-Smith’s self-righteous arrogance comes from. He likely believed he could get out of trouble, like so many private school boys before him, simply by asking the question “Do you know who my father is!?” His own dear papa being, of course, a former Supreme Court justice in Western Australia. 
He is also backed by a who’s who of Australia’s rich scumbags, from Seven Media’s Kerry Stokes—who funded Roberts-Smith’s original defamation case to the tune of $30 million and gave him an upper management job—through to MAGA mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who has sprung to his defence in recent weeks.
He expected the establishment to defend him. He assumed, not without reason, that anything goes in the pursuit of Western interests in the Middle East—that a culture of impunity is an important part of hyping up soldiers to commit the sort of atrocities that are part and parcel of carrying out military campaigns. Australia’s most decorated soldier has become a symbol of the hubris of an empire which gave itself the right to kill not just four innocent Afghans, but thousands upon thousands in the course of a nihilistic 20-year slaughter and occupation. 
If that wasn’t enough, Roberts-Smith is ostentatiously remorseless. In 2023, he posed for a photo at a beach club in Bali alongside Zachary Rolfe, the still-serving Queensland police officer who shot dead Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu in 2019. In the comments, Rolfe mockingly wrote “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
Satisfying as it is to see Roberts-Smith lose again, the reality is that he is walking away with a slap on the wrist. Despite twice being found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes, he is not rotting in a cell, nor lying dead at the bottom of a cliff like one of his victims. Instead, he continues to wear his Victoria Cross—Australia’s highest military decoration—proudly on his chest. He was spotted doing so only a month ago, at Perth’s ANZAC Day dawn service. 
His uniform continues to be displayed in Canberra’s War Memorial, alongside a story of his award-winning “gallantry” in Afghanistan. Only now, it has a mealy-mouthed disclaimer: “In June 2023 a Federal Court judge determined that there was ‘substantial truth’ to the allegations that Roberts-Smith had been involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan”. It goes on to remind us, “Roberts-Smith has appealed this decision. Roberts-Smith has not been charged with any offence under criminal law”. 
The Brereton report, which was commissioned in response to news of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan surfacing, has been similarly toothless. Despite finding evidence of 39 “unlawful killings” perpetrated or participated in by 25 special forces soldiers, not one has been convicted of a crime. Only one, former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, has faced charges. Naturally, the report stopped short entirely of laying any blame at the feet of the generals and ministers who were ultimately responsible for the war. 
By contrast, former army lawyer David McBride, who leaked documents about the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan to the ABC in 2016, languishes in prison, serving a five-year sentence. Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, for the simple crime of telling the truth, McBride has faced far harsher consequences than any of the murderers in the ranks of the Australian army. 
Astoundingly, Roberts-Smith has indicated he will be launching a second appeal, this time to the High Court, presumably bankrolled by Gina Rinehart. Despite all the legal professionals who have so far deemed him a war criminal, he obviously thinks there is a chance of winning and getting revenge on those who dared bring his crimes to light. 
Real justice won’t be served until Roberts-Smith, and every murderous general, politician and media baron who enabled and decorated him, is locked up.

Jack Mansell

Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal

Looking through the Greens’ social media in recent weeks, you find many posts referring positively to the minority government the party formed with Labor PM Julia Gillard between 2010 and 2013. “The best parliaments are hung!” says one post featuring Sydney candidate Luc Velez. Gillard’s government was “one of the most productive parliaments in Australian history”, glows another published on the Australian Greens page. 
In a January interview with the Guardian, party leader Adam Bandt went so far as to argue that a new Labor-Greens coalition government could usher in “a golden era of progressive reform”. What better way to substantiate his claim than to recount the last time it happened? But was the Gillard experience really that wonderful? What did this “most productive” parliament deliver?
Gillard took an even more rightward course than her predecessor, Kevin Rudd. One of her first moves was to placate the mining industry by scrapping Rudd’s super-profits tax in favour of a watered-down Minerals Resource Rent Tax. Figures from the Parliamentary Budget Office from 2021 show that Gillard’s capitulation cost the government—and saved the mining industry—a whopping $33 billion between 2012 and 2020. Gina Rinehart’s newest Pilbara project was approved to sweeten the deal.
Cuts to services were another hallmark of the Gillard era. Despite its purported feminist credentials, the government slashed $700 million in welfare for single parents in 2012, lowering payments by $56 per week when children turned eight. This mainly affected impoverished single mothers. Despite announcing an “education revolution” ahead of the 2010 election, university funding suffered two rounds of cuts under Gillard: $1 billion in 2012 and a further $2.3 billion the following year. 
Even the NDIS, the flagship social program established by the Gillard government, has been riddled with problems. For one, it is a for-profit system based on private providers underwritten by tens of billions in government funding. Predictably, it has been a free money button for business owners wanting to make a buck off some of society’s most vulnerable. 
Also, Gillard was thoroughly conservative on social questions. Despite having majority support, she continued Labor’s opposition to marriage equality, arguing in a 2011 television interview that “for our culture, for our heritage, the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status”. The following year, she voted down a private members’ bill on the issue, sparking significant protests at Labor’s 2013 national conference.
Refugees perhaps suffered the most under Gillard. Soon after assuming the prime ministership, she announced the so-called East Timor solution—a plan to reopen mandatory offshore detention for refugees who arrive by boat. Refugee rights activists widely viewed the move as a return to the Howard-era “Pacific Solution”. 
This is the real record of the last Labor-Greens minority government. It was hardly a progressive paradise. 
What did the Greens win in exchange for propping up Gillard? Mostly, a series of commissions, committees, inquiries and some changes to parliamentary procedure. A suite of bureaucratic and non-binding measures that enabled Labor to do what it does best: talk about problems in a back room, commission a detailed report about them, and never have to act. The only substantial gain was dental being included in Medicare for under-18s, who today enjoy only partial coverage.
It’s a real reform. So it’s worth asking whether it was worth the compromise. Our society faces overlapping crises—climate, housing and cost of living, to name a few. Can we afford to limit our ambition to horse-trading on one issue for inaction on the others? Can the left win the radical change we need through a strategy premised on weighing up which oppressed group we can accept being thrown to the dogs in exchange for minor reforms somewhere else? Are these the heights we should aspire to? 
While they were not the architects of Gillard’s crimes, the Greens provided political support for them in government. Even when the Greens eventually decided to pull their backing for the increasingly unpopular Labor government in 2013, they still agreed to back supply and confidence, rendering the move functionally meaningless. Now, they are arguing for a repeat of the formula based on phoney receipts. 
Rather than facing up to the facts, the Australian Greens Instagram page talks up Gillard’s “mining tax legislation” and apparently “world-leading climate laws”. These are the same policies that saved extractive industries $33 billion in taxes. This sort of honest accounting complicates things if you want to convince progressive people to repeat the drama all over again.
Today, the Greens are approaching minority government with a shopping list of demands to negotiate with Labor. One social media post by WA Senator Jordon Steele-John spells it out. “It’s time to make way for a minority government where Greens hold the balance of power”, he writes. Only that way will we get dental into Medicare, proper funding of the NDIS, affordable housing, climate action, rent caps and other things. 
The Greens also entered 2010 with lofty ambitions—climate action, marriage equality, better treatment of refugees—and ended up reduced to the wagging tail of the Gillard government. We need to learn the lesson, not commit to repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that the same compromises won’t come along with another minority government this time around. The Greens have already waved the white flag on housing and climate policy under Albanese. 
Resurrecting the corpse of the Gillard government has gone hand in hand with a quiet backpedalling on Gaza. As David Speers pointed out in a recent cross-examination of Bandt on the ABC’s Insiders, the Greens leader now avoids calling Albanese complicit in Israel’s massacre in Gaza. He is complicit. But it would be an awkward look for Bandt to accuse the man he wants to form a government with of being an accessory to genocide. 
It would also be awkward for The Greens to claim they will have significant housing policy wins by shacking up with the party that Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather described in 2023 as “the political arm of the property industry”. 
This is one of the disagreements socialists have with the way the Greens go about politics. For all the accurate criticisms they may make of Labor, the Greens accept that the parameters for change are set by what a coalition with that same rotten party could achieve. Sadly, it’s the sort of politics that leads not just to one compromise, but to habitual compromise and, now, attempts to dress up, justify and replicate those compromises. This is precisely what the Greens are doing by peddling revisionist narratives about the Gillard years. 
Socialists campaigning in the federal election want to do things differently. We want to untether the left’s strategy from what a thoroughly right-wing Labor government is willing to agree to. We want to plant the flag for radical solutions to society’s problems—not as a bargaining chip to be traded in, but as a goal to fight for. 
Unless we build an alternative that is willing to stick to its guns, the left will constantly be pulled back into the orbit of what is tolerable to Labor.

The Greens’ phoney history of the last minority government

Israeli soldiers describe the Zionist state’s vast network of prisons as “hell”. In them, at least 9,600 Palestinians are held hostage, almost half of whom were detained “without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves”, according to a report published in August by Israel-based human rights organisation B’Tselem. 
Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as Network of Torture contains 55 testimonies from Palestinians released since 7 October. Despite their being only a fraction of the imprisoned population, their stories shine light on a brutal apparatus of physical and psychological terror designed in every facet to crush the Palestinian people. 
Since 7 October, Israel’s prison system has operated under a “prison state of emergency”. Even the most basic inmate rights—such as the right to speak to a lawyer and family—have been stripped away. 
Accounts of beatings at the hands of guards and mauling by dogs come up again and again in the report. And some 60 Palestinians have been killed in custody in the past year. Take the case of Arafat Hamdan, a diabetic held in Ofer Prison in the West Bank. When his health rapidly deteriorated, his cellmates called guards for help. 
“The guard said Arafat needed food and drink, and I told him we had nothing to feed him. He said to wait for breakfast”, Muhammad Srur, a 34-year-old father of two from the West Bank village of Ni’lin, recounted. But by breakfast, Arafat was dead.
Israel’s torture regime is designed to degrade and humiliate to a level of detail so sophisticated that only the cruellest mind could have conceived it. 
Twelve to fourteen prisoners are crammed into cells designed for six. Prisoners are forced to eat spoiled food. One testimony describes having only six slices of bread to eat per day. Another relates how they were forced to eat mouldy yoghurt. 
“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun”, Thaer Halahleh recounts. 
Sami Khalili, who spent twenty years in Israel’s prisons, had letters from his late mother confiscated. Olive oil and spices that he and his fellow inmates had previously used to cook for themselves were destroyed. Routinely, guards attempt to force Palestinians to kiss the Israeli flag or sing Zionist songs. Refusal, the response of many, is met with hails of fists and batons. 
“Once, when a detainee in the cell next to ours asked to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed, they punished all the inmates in the cell: they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up”, Hisham Saleh recounted. “The next day, I could still see their blood on the floor.”
Long before the “prison state of emergency”, the carceral system had been a pillar of apartheid. Before Israel’s genocidal campaign began last year, 5,192 Palestinians languished in the regime’s vast prison network. Israel employs a series of categories to imprison Palestinians without even a pretence of due process. Administrative detention is one of the most notorious. Human rights group Amnesty International defines it as:
“A form of detention under which individuals are detained by state authorities based on secret security grounds that the defendant and their lawyer cannot review, effectively circumventing due process guaranteed for all persons deprived of their liberty under international law.” 
Nearly 40 percent of Palestinian men, and 20 percent of the population, spend time in Israel’s prisons at some point in their lives. Few families are untouched by the system’s vast reach. Having served prison time is one of the legal bases for being denied working rights inside Israel, amounting to de facto discrimination for the “crime” of being Palestinian.
Welcome to Hell is a reminder that apartheid is not simply a government policy in Israel. It is embedded in the structure of the state. Judicial, military and prison apparatuses are structured to oppress and discriminate against the Palestinian people. Their apartheid function is established by more than just legislation. 
Even the most rudimentary legal “rights” for Palestinians are rendered meaningless by the racist structure of the state apparatus. Muhammad Srur’s description of his attempt, in a court hearing, to appeal his treatment at the hands of guards illustrates this:
“I also spoke about how we were brutally attacked and abused by the guards during transfers, but the judge didn’t pay attention to that. After the hearing, on the way to the cell, the IPS [Israel Prison Service] people took revenge on me for complaining about their behavior. They hit and kicked me brutally the whole way.”
Under far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, apartheid is open policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime has given the state apparatus licence to commit any and every act of violence. The “prison state of emergency” has emboldened and strengthened the far-right government’s allies in the state machine. Negev Prison chief Brigadier General Yosef Knipes explained as much to the conservative Orthodox magazine Mishpacha: 
“We can categorically say that the new policy and the tone set from the top are good for us—the executive authority. When government-level officials back decisions and give the professionals in the field the powers needed to get the job done properly, it produces the desired outcomes.”
A change in government will not fundamentally alter these institutions, not least because every significant party is committed to apartheid. As the report concludes: “Minister Ben Gvir’s influence remains evident, but his policy could not have been implemented without the cooperation of the entire system”. 
Liberation for Palestine means the dismantling of the whole system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

‘Welcome to hell’—the barbarity of Israel’s prisons

“Resembled a Hitler Youth rally”. Those are the slanderous words that Executive Council of Australian Jewry Deputy President Robert Goot chose to describe the 500-strong student general meeting held by Students for Palestine at the University of New South Wales on 25 September.
Quoted in the Australian last week, Goot’s comment adds another salvo to the barrage of attacks on the student-led Palestine solidarity movement, levelled under the pretext of “combating antisemitism” on campuses.
It was a strange sort of “Hitler Youth rally”, where half the speaking list was Jewish, and the vast majority of attendees voted against a genocide. Two of those Jewish speakers, UNSW associate professor Dr Peter Slezak and Students for Palestine member Milo Riggs, spoke in favour of the motion to stand for a Free Palestine and demand that UNSW sever its ties to weapons companies.
For all the howling about a climate of fear prevailing on campus for Jewish students, and the supposedly Nazi-like nature of Palestine activism, seventeen pro-Israel students attended the meeting draped in Israeli flags and holding a banner that said “Students Supporting Israel”. They were able to participate in the meeting and make their case—they were not harassed or silenced. 
Comments like Goot’s trivialise one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed. The idea that hundreds of students gathering to vote against genocide and for peace is anything like a rally of Nazis calling for the murder of millions of Jews is beyond offensive and patently absurd. It’s a cynical strategy to deflect criticism of Israel’s atrocities—using the legacy of one genocide to justify another.
Thousands of students across Australia have mobilised because they have watched as Israeli leaders describe Palestinians as “human animals”, pledge to “raze Gaza to the ground”, and then proceed to obliterate human life and vital infrastructure in the Gaza strip. Yet in Australia today, if you attend a mass meeting to register your opposition to this unfolding genocide, it is completely acceptable for a public figure such as Goot to compare you to a Nazi and demand retribution. This will then be published in a major news publication such as the Australian without any challenge from journalists.
Goot was particularly upset by the fact that meeting attendees applauded Dr Slezak’s comment that “Jews should feel uncomfortable. It’s our duty to make them uncomfortable”. The Australian makes out like Dr Slezak was saying Jewish people should be made to feel uncomfortable simply for being Jewish. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 
His point, wilfully taken out of context, was an important one. Israel purports to act in the interests of all Jews, and many pro-Israel Jewish organisations actively promote this idea. But growing number of Jews feel uncomfortable about the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza in their name, and they are right to feel this way. And it is understandable then that they appeal to other Jews to resist this. As Dr Slezak pointed out, this is precisely why there is now a growing constituency of Jewish people who have shunned the lie that Judaism and Israel are synonymous and joined the movement for Palestine.
The foundational Zionist idea—that the only decent response to the Holocaust is to unconditionally defend Israel—is in tatters. In fact, it’s the brutal reality of the genocide in Gaza that has driven many progressive Jews, who know all too well what a genocide looks like, to speak out against Israel. Imploring students to vote in support of Palestine, Riggs, a Jewish student activist, argued that “never again”, a rallying call to prevent future Holocausts, “means never again for anybody”. 
The other part of Dr Slezak’s point about discomfort was to say that the oppressed are not obliged to account for the feelings of their oppressors. If wearing keffiyehs, calling for justice “from the river to the sea”, and mobilising against Israel on an unprecedented scale means that defenders of a genocidal state feel uncomfortable, then so be it. No such handwringing about discomfort is afforded to Israel’s actual victims, nor to the students of Palestinian and Lebanese background who are confronted by students draped in the Israeli flag—the symbol of their oppression. Nor is the discomfort of Russian students who might support the invasion of Ukraine, or Chinese students who might approve of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, afforded the same deference. And nor should it.
Incapable of making, let alone winning, a convincing argument amongst the student body, all that supporters of Israel can do is rile up university administrators and the political establishment to repress pro-Palestine students on bogus charges. While the universities, that are tied to the weapons industry that arms Israel, might relish this line of attack to put activists back in the box for daring to oppose them, they’re sorely mistaken if they think it will stop the movement.


As the campus meetings all over the country demonstrate, students know that the enablers of genocide are not just in Tel Aviv and Washington. They also sit in executive suites and chancelleries right here in Australia, counting their millions as the bombs rain down on children. Thousands of students have mobilised against them this year in Australia’s largest ever campus actions for Palestine. The days where slander like this would deter anyone from standing on the right side of history are over.

Slander won’t stop students from resisting genocide

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim that a pro-Palestine demonstration at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October was “akin to a Port Arthur moment” (referring to a shooting in 1996 at the tourist town of Port Arthur that killed 35 people) reaches a new level of absurdity. The claim came in a recent speech at the Sydney Opera House, which condemned the supposed “violence” and “anti-Semitism” of Palestine supporters, and threatened migrants with deportation. 
What really happened on 9 October was that 1,000 supporters of Palestine rallied peacefully, under the slogan “No War on Gaza”, to resist what we all knew was coming: a massacre. We marched from Town Hall to the Opera House, much like protesters have done at dozens of other demonstrations about a range of different issues, where we chanted and heard speeches and then went home. 
People attended the rally because they knew that “Israel’s right to defend itself”, so frequently cited in those early days by those now backing the war, is a euphemism for murdering Palestinians, one which has been used to justify slaughter after slaughter since the state of Israel was established in 1948. 
There is something stomach-churning about being accused of violence for being part of a peaceful protest against a war that has been more brutal than most protesters could have anticipated. Israel has carried out a cruel, calculated, precision-guided murder of more than 35,000 Palestinians so far. It has imposed starvation on hundreds of thousands of Gazans, and it has assassinated those who try to help feed the hungry. It has displaced more than 1.6 million people, of whom a million currently are languishing in Rafah, under threat of an Israeli invasion. 
If Dutton wants a Port Arthur comparison, Gaza is a thousand Port Arthurs.
And there have been no incendiary speeches about the acts of violence and intimidation committed by Zionists in Australia since the genocide began. There was more media coverage of the fact that Qantas cabin staff had, god forbid, worn Palestinian flags on their uniforms than there was of a Palestine supporter in the Sydney suburb of Botany having an improvised explosive device placed on his car because he hung a Palestinian flag outside his home. 
The political establishment isn’t really concerned about violence. It is concerned to intimidate, marginalise and discredit anyone who criticises its ally, Israel. Accusations of “anti-Semitism”—ironically from the leader of the racist “No” to the Indigenous rights campaign—are a key part of this. Dutton, and the Israeli state, read from the same handbook of doublespeak. 
It doesn’t matter to these newly minted “anti-racists” that the banner of the group Jews Against the Occupation flew proudly that night, as it does frequently at Sydney Palestine rallies. Nor that members of the Jewish anti-Zionist collective Tzedek marched on 9 October and have been part of the campaign week in, week out, ever since. 
Nor does it matter to them that the allegation at the centre of this charge of anti-Semitism, that a small minority of rally attendees had supposedly chanted “gas the Jews”, turned out to be a fabrication. On 2 February, it was <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-02/nsw-police-opera-house-protest-video-analysis/103418582">reported by the ABC</a> that an independent investigation commissioned by the NSW Police found “no evidence” of those words being chanted. In fact, the claim had been made by a Zionist organisation in order to smear the protests.
When we decided to march on 9 October, it wasn’t just Dutton trying to slander us. Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also called on us to desist. Zionist organisations like the Executive Council for Australian Jewry tried to whip up fear by telling Jewish people not to enter the CBD. This was not in response to any actual threat, but an attempt to cast the march as a violent mob. In the following days NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns attempted to ban future marches.
It was right to march. The last six months have horrifically demonstrated this. But even by the night of the rally, Israel had murdered nearly 700 Palestinians. Israel has, since 7 October, killed more than twice as many Palestinians as it did during the Nakba of 1948. Sydney has seen 27 consecutive weekends of demonstrations in support of Palestine, with hundreds more protests smattered in between.

Gaza is a thousand Port Arthurs

In the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote that the “most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events”. Chile in the early 1970s was a society embroiled in such a process, as workers fought with growing strength and self-confidence to build a new society under—and at many points, in spite of—Socialist Party President Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity ruling coalition. 
Peter Winn’s gorgeous Weavers of Revolution, an oral history of the workers’ struggle at the Yarur textile mill through the 1960s to the bloody coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, animates Trotsky’s words through the story of one factory. It’s a compelling portrait of the Chilean working class, a tapestry of its personalities, passions, anxieties, hopes and courageous partisans, battling for three electric years to reshape radically the world around them. 
The Yarur story is both an element and embodiment of the broader Chilean workers’ struggle, which radicalised sharply through 1972-73. As Winn illustrates, each decisive point in Chile’s revolutionary process involved not only the machinations of Popular Unity and the political right, but huge exertions of popular muscle—of which Yarur was a crucial sinew. 
The story of Chile’s revolutionary process normally begins with Allende’s election in late 1970. But Allende’s rise reflected a growing militancy amongst workers and peasants through the latter years of the 1960s, characterised by a spate of unauthorised land seizures and growing strike action. So too, the Yarur story began many years before the election of Popular Unity, with an attempt to win an independent union inside one of the country’s most notorious workplaces.
Life inside the flagship Yarur mill in Santiago resembled a dictatorship. It was named after its owners, the Yarur family (“rich as Yarur” was a common saying). For decades, Yarur had staved off unionisation attempts through a mixture of patronage, company unionism and repression. The firm cultivated a network of loyalist workers as informants, making independent union agitation risky; rebels were punished mercilessly, deterring sympathisers. The crushing of a nine-week strike in 1962 instilled a pessimism amongst older workers, who were wary of young activists promising change.
Against this difficult backdrop, young leftist workers, many of them in the Socialist Party, the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) or, to a lesser degree, the Communist Party, began a tooth and nail fight to build underground cells in the factory and win a free union. Facing routine sackings, bribery and even death threats, they fought a clandestine campaign to convince workers of their cause. Ingenious plots were employed, like disseminating leaflets through the factory’s ventilation shafts.
Efforts to organise Yarur came to a head during the 1970 national election campaign. Company boss Amador Yarur invited Allende to speak at the factory, hoping to win favour on the chance that he was elected. It was a coup for the free union activists. Hundreds of workers attended, and their material was at last distributed openly. Two clandestine cells operating in different departments of the factory even learned of each other’s existence for the first time.
On the eve of Allende’s election, the free union activists captured the company union with a smashing four-to-one victory—a decisive mandate to begin a campaign to transform the factory. It was emblematic of a trend all over Chile: workers beginning to organise, their efforts both reflected and focused by the election of a genuine reformer. 
Allende’s victory likewise inspired confidence amongst the Yarur workers. Nationalisation of Chile’s monopolies was a key plank of the Popular Unity program, and workers were impatient to play their part in the transformation of the country. In April 1971, 1,700 Yarur workers went on strike in retaliation to Amador Yarur’s decision to stop communicating with their new union. They demanded that Yarur be turfed out and the factory taken over by the state. 
To Allende, though, the nationalisation of monopolies was a distant task contingent on another election victory in 1976. The first tranche of nationalisations would include only foreign-owned companies like the copper mines, and companies that had been sabotaged or abandoned. Workers in the domestic monopolies would simply have to wait. But the Yarur workers had already waited for decades. 
Their strike sent a shock wave through the government. To his ministerial staff, Allende raged at the idea of nationalising Yarur: “If I give the OK to this ... there is going to be another and another ... just because one was already gotten out of me”. Workers would face the resistance not only of their boss, but of their supposed compañero too. Admirably, they persisted, continuing the strike and confronting Allende at the Presidential Palace to put the case for nationalisation.
In Weavers, Winn captures the tense exchange between the workers and government officials, recounting strike leader Ricardo Catalan’s explanation that they “had a duel with el compañero presidente”. What was at stake was not only the goal of nationalisation, but the confidence and aspirations of nearly 2,000 workers who had embarked on the imposing task of making their own destiny after years of belittlement and intimidation. Strike leaders writhed with anguish at the thought of letting their workmates down. 
They stood firm, and the strike split the different Popular Unity component parties, winning support from figures in the left of the Socialist Party who favoured a bolder approach to nationalisations. Allende was forced to relent, to the jubilation of the strikers. “The joy was really indescribable ... something very difficult to translate into words successfully”, independent union leader Jorge Lorca said to Winn. “It was the kind of thing that remains in your mind forever ... At the bottom there was a sense of ... liberation.”
Upon victory, the blue-collar workers saw the opulent, marbled interior of Amador Yarur’s office space for the first time. “It reminded me a lot of that photograph of the Russian Revolution ... of a Russian soldier standing in the throne room looking up ... the same expression of incredulity ... of not being able to imagine the lifestyle and luxury that took place there ... or their own conquest of such heights”, described one MAPU (Popular Unitary Action Movement) activist.
With workers now in charge, they unceremoniously placed a sack over the statue of the company’s founder Juan Yarur and raised a banner at the factory gates: Ex-Yarur: Territorio Libre de Explotación (Ex-Yarur: Territory Free of Exploitation). As Winn summarised, “the Yarur workers became central protagonists of a revolution from below that changed the course of the Chilean road to socialism”.
Yarur was brought into the government’s Social Property Area (enterprises under state control) and placed under a form of co-management that allowed the firm to operate according to a national plan, with worker participation. Whilst not socialist control or planning, this arrangement allowed a significant increase in the agency of workers on the shop floor. Following Ex-Yarur’s lead, dozens of factories followed suit, demanding that their own workplaces be nationalised by Allende. 
Before long, Yarur workers would press their involvement in running the factory far further than the scope of the Social Property Area. Alongside many hundreds of thousands of other Chilean workers, they would transform the Allendist slogan “Poder Popular” (Popular Power), into a magnificent reality. 
In retaliation to workers’ new-found confidence, the transport bosses and middle-class professionals attempted to paralyse the country in October 1972. Trade union leaders put a call out to workers to defend the government from the bosses’ strike. Factories across the country leapt into action, “interpreting”, as Winn wrote, “the CUT’s [United Workers’ Centre] call for vigilance as a license for direct revolutionary action”. 
Workers seized more factories than ever before, turned the nationalised factories over to combat the lockout and began coordinating their activities in the cordones industriales, radical grassroots organisations to restart production without the bosses. 
Ex-Yarur helped found the Cordón O’Higgins—one of Santiago’s most significant nerve centres of working-class power—and assisted smaller factories in seizing their own workplaces. Furious workers voted to cut out the merchants and instead distribute materials directly to consumers and occupied garment factories. They formed a self-defence organisation to guard against right-wing violence, and converted the factory’s machine shop to produce parts for trucks so that transportation could continue without the truck owners. 
Ex-Yarur’s trajectory—from the fight to win an independent union, to the strike for nationalisation and eventually running the factory under workers’ control—epitomised the struggle of an entire generation.
Eventually, the bosses’ strike collapsed. The cordones represented the high point of workers’ involvement in Chile’s revolutionary process and would again flourish in the months leading up to the September coup. 
But when Allende was overthrown by Pinochet on 11 September 1973, the workers of Ex-Yarur suffered on the front lines. In the factory, soldiers under arms took back each workbench and shop, department by department. Murals that had been painted to celebrate workers’ control were whitewashed. Amador Yarur, the hated factory boss, was reinstated. 
Pinochet’s coup would brutally end the lives of the finest working-class activists in a generation, including many from Ex-Yarur. It would subject the surviving population to a reign of terror and a miserable life in a laboratory of neoliberalism. Berta Castillo, a young woman worker who had greying hair and stooped shoulders from life in the factory, lost her job, her house and her husband to the counter-revolution. But she later recounted to Peter Winn that “worst of all ... they have killed my dream ... It was such a beautiful dream”.
The defeat of the Chilean workers, amongst them the heroes of Ex-Yarur, would set the class struggle back generations. But their memory of courage and conviction, of militancy and self-reliance even when abandoned by their compañero presidente, of organisational brilliance and heroism as part of the class-wide cordones, should serve to furnish a vision of humanity’s socialist potential. The story of this Chilean textile mill is a glimpse not only of what is possible, but of a world worth fighting for.

Weavers of Revolution: the story of a Chilean textile mill

Clothing and footwear manufacturing is characterised by a globalised “value chain”, in which each phase of production is concentrated in a different region.
Giant retailers in the developed economies make huge fortunes in concert with smaller-scale textile and garment factories, the bulk of them in Asia and other parts of the global South. The factory owners act as junior partners in a global network of profiteering. Far from liberating some of the world’s poorest people, export-oriented development has brought luxury for a privileged few but plunged millions into a vast matrix of exploitation.
Hundreds of millions of workers are involved in making garments in some way, united by an enormous value chain that spans tiny, impoverished farms, large sweatshop factories and the shopping malls of Sydney, Shanghai and New York. At each step, individual capitalists endeavour to squeeze out as much profit as possible for themselves.
There is a fortune to be made. According to one estimate, clothing and footwear are a US$1.55 trillion retail market. Lower down the value chain, industry analyst IBISWorld puts the total wholesale value of manufactured garments at around US$850 billion, a lucrative trade for aspiring capitalists in the global South. 
The creation of this wealth begins with the production of fibres such as cotton, jute and polyester, which are turned into textiles to be cut and assembled into garments. Cotton is by far the most popular natural fibre, most of which is produced in China, India, Pakistan, the United States and Brazil. 
Brazilian and American cotton is produced by large, mechanised farms. In Asia, it’s a different story. Industry group Better Cotton estimates there are 5.8 million smallholder cotton farmers in India and another 1.5 million in Pakistan. The Discover Natural Fibres Initiative estimates that total employment in natural fibre production, including part-time and seasonal workers, is a staggering 300 million people. 
Smallholding cotton farmers are extremely poor. Indian daily the Hindu last year reported that average income for Indian farmers was A$5 per day. Fluctuations in global prices, which are under downward pressure from mechanised production, can drastically impact farmers’ lives. According to the International Labour Organization, in India children often work on these farms, and many farmers are forced to work as casual labourers to supplement their low incomes. 
Polyester, a petroleum-based plastic and the most common synthetic material used in garment manufacturing, is produced and processed in factories in China, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Japan. Production for textiles consumes more than 300 million barrels of oil annually.
Most of the fibres are bought and processed, not by big global brands, but by regional capitalists. Often these bosses directly own both textile weaving and garment manufacturing plants, “vertically integrating” production to cut out the middleman and leave higher margins for the bosses when they eventually on-sell to wholesalers or retailers. The process of turning fibres into usable textiles employs 50 million people in India and more than 150 million in China. 
The cutting and assembling of garments are concentrated in the same areas of the world. China produces 52.2 percent of the world’s garment products, other producers being Germany, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Italy, Turkey, the United States, Hong Kong and Spain. European exporters, home to high-end brands, are disproportionately represented in value terms, but the bulk of the volume of exports is from Asian countries.
Textile and garment production has a distinctive lack of monopolies. No one retailer controls even a single percentage of global market share, and at the manufacturing stage there is a glut of middle-sized factories. The wide range of suppliers available to multinational retailers creates a ruthless competition for contracts, which in turn creates huge downward pressure on wages and working conditions. 
Big companies stock their shelves by making contracts with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of these factories. Swedish retailer H&amp;M, with 4,702 stores in six continents, for example, claims on its website that it is supplied directly by 1,519 factories, concentrated in Bangladesh and China, where more than 1.5 million workers are involved in producing for its range. Hundreds more factories supply it indirectly through textile weaving and dyeing. 
Making clothes and shoes is labour-intensive. Workers bear the brunt of the competitive drive of factory owners, who deliberately target oppressed sections of the workforce, such as women and refugees, to keep costs low. Many Syrian refugees work in Turkey, for example, where informal work is the norm and few official work permits have been granted, according to the Business Social Compliance Initiative.
Modern sweatshops break down the work process into simple, repetitive actions to increase the pace of production for each worker. Workers don’t produce clothes so much as parts of them—collars, pockets, sleeves. Over and over. Conditions are often terrible and shortcuts on safety are common, as a spate of factory catastrophes in Bangladesh testifies. 
Local bosses and big international retailers work together to ensure a steady supply of orders, backed up by governments eager to expand export industries. In Bangladesh, for example, the Observatory of Economic Complexity estimates that textiles and garments make up 90 percent of exports. Both major parties in the country are thoroughly in bed with the industry; as recently as 2015, almost 10 percent of all Bangladeshi parliamentarians were textile and garment factory owners.
Retailers are in on it too. Helena Helmersson, H&amp;M’s current CEO, cut her teeth in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the mid-2000s as a production manager overseeing the supply chain. This was a period before even minimal regulatory standards were introduced following the 2012 Tazreen Fashion fire that killed 117 people, and the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse that left 1,134 dead. Today, H&amp;M employs up to 2,000 people to work with suppliers to keep production running smoothly.
Recent workers’ protests, a series of high-profile factory accidents and international criticism have forced some changes to the industry. The old strategy of keeping suppliers at arm’s length to deny the use of sweated labour has been replaced by glamorous sounding international agreements, including a “transparency pledge” that commits manufacturers to disclosing their supply chains publicly. Ultimately, although these agreements represent some progress, they can gloss over the ongoing poverty and hazards faced by garment workers.
Integration of suppliers in the underdeveloped world and major companies in the advanced economies is facilitated by compacts such as the European Union’s “Everything But Arms” (EBA) agreement, which removes all tariffs on imports from the “least developed countries”, incentivising retailers to secure supplies from the poorest countries in the world. Touted as a way to overcome “structural impediments to sustainable development”, in reality such agreements are just another way to enrich the bosses. 
In the case of Myanmar, the 2012 EBA agreement signed in the aftermath of the country’s partial transition to democracy helped drive a fivefold increase in the country’s garment and textile exports. Garments and textiles are now the country’s biggest exports, accounting for approximately a third of its total exports, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. The EU is the destination for 70 percent of these exports, which supply major brands such as H&amp;M and Adidas. 
However, the conditions remain shocking in factories contracted by big companies. Ninety percent of Myanmar’s 700,000 garment and textile workers are young women, a majority of them drawn into urban areas from the countryside as the sector expanded over the past decade. The minimum wage is a meagre US$95 a month, just over a quarter of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance’s estimate for a monthly living wage of US$367.
When the military overthrew the government in February 2021, the industry’s fundamental class divisions were laid bare. Myanmar’s garment factories came grinding to a halt as hundreds of thousands of women workers joined a mass strike wave for democracy. They faced reprisals from bosses and the state alike. Al Jazeera reported last year that supervisors at the GY Sen Apparel Company, which manufactures garments for Irish brand Primark, locked nearly 1,000 workers inside their factory in retaliation for their participation in pro-democracy strikes. 
For all the EU’s posturing and imposing of four separate rounds of sanctions on Myanmar’s military government, it has stubbornly refused demands from both Myanmar’s independent garment workers’ unions and the global trade union body IndustriALL to withdraw the EBA agreement, unwilling to impose any restriction that would harm the interests of European clothing retailers.
Adidas, which boasts on its website of its “concern for the well-being of workers in our factories”, admits in its own, publicly available 2022 supply chain report that it still contracts to six Myanmar firms, employing more than 19,000 workers to make clothes and footwear under the dictatorship. Likewise, H&amp;M, which placed a temporary and theatrical pause on imports from Myanmar after the coup, took less than three months to begin ordering from the country again. 
Like their counterparts in the factories of Asia, workers in the clothing retail industry in the West are exploited too. They are some of the lowest-paid workers in the developed economies. In the United States, the average weekly income for apparel retail store workers in 2019 was a measly US$314. The Australian Bureau of Statistics identifies retail as having the second-lowest pay in the country. 
According to the Australian Bulletin of Labour, women make up 92 percent of the clothing retail workforce. The concentration of women in low-paid industries such as retail is one of the pillars upholding the gender pay gap. Where retail trade unions have attempted to fight for better conditions, they have encountered resistance from global giants. New Zealand news outlet Stuff reported that, in 2019, staff at Auckland and Christchurch H&amp;M stores were suspended for wearing union stickers as part of a campaign to win a living wage.
Despite the industry sprawling across borders and seas, the same dynamic of exploitation is replicated at every stage. Aside from clothes, the end products of this exploitative chain are the capitalists that the industry enriches. Among them are the mid-level capitalists of the global South, who own and oversee the regimented workhouses that churn out cheap clothing. By global standards they might seem insignificant, but in countries such as Bangladesh, where garment workers earn a paltry US$94 per month, their fortunes are staggering. 
At the very pinnacle are some of the world’s richest people. Sweden’s richest man is former H&amp;M chairperson Stefan Persson, who boasts a net wealth of US$21.2 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List. His children, simply by virtue of being born, are each worth more than US$1.5 billion. Unlike those who labour in fields and factories their entire working lives to make ends meet, Persson’s kids are free to pursue frivolous ventures, like producing films in the case of young Tom Persson. 
They have never picked nor processed cotton and would not know warp from weft; although European CEO magazine reassures its readers that Karl-Johan Persson indeed “spent summer holidays working in H&amp;M stores” before, miraculously, “at just 25 years of age and with very little commercial experience under his belt, he was sitting on the boards of directors of H&amp;M subsidiaries”, before becoming the company’s CEO in a stunning display of meritocratic achievement. As CEO, he was immediately preceded by his father. His grandfather founded H&amp;M in 1947.

Inside the global garment industry 

The NSW Liberal government has passed draconian anti-protest legislation with the vocal backing of Labor. Rushed through 48 hours after being introduced and less than a week after being drafted, the laws state that protesters who “enter, remain on or near, climb, jump from or otherwise trespass on or block entry to any part of a major facility” will be subject to fines of up to $22,000 and a two-year prison sentence. 
Major facilities, as defined by the legislation, include railway stations, public transport facilities, private ports and “infrastructure facilities”—anywhere providing “water, sewerage, energy, manufacturing, distribution or other services to the public”. Any bridges, tunnels or roads nominated by the government can also been added to the list, meaning virtually all protests that disrupt anything are in the firing line.
A briefing circulated by the government before the vote lamented the “millions of dollars through direct economic loss and lost productivity” that protests have caused. “What we are stopping, or criminalising even further, are protests that shut down major economic activity”, claimed Attorney-General Mark Speakman in a press conference.
According to the government, these laws apply only to “unlawful” protests. But protesters in New South Wales already face a labyrinth of undemocratic restrictions that make most protests “unlawful”. To hold a “lawful” protest in NSW, written notice of nearly two weeks is required, including proposed march routes and the number of participants. After this form has been submitted, the police have the right to apply to the High Court to have the protest deemed unlawful. Anti-racism, climate action and LGBTI-rights protests have been subject to such rulings in recent years.
Snap protests cannot be “lawful” because there is not time to give the required two-week notice. Likewise, any protest that deviates from the submitted proposal—by spontaneously marching or sitting down on a road, for example—can be considered “unlawful” and therefore subject to criminal penalties. 
These measures are an attempt to crush dissent by intimidating activists into thinking twice about calling protests. They give the state virtual carte blanche to stop protests through the courts or criminalise any that intend to cause real disruption: i.e., any protest that works. And they are part of a long erosion of democratic freedoms in New South Wales that demands stubborn resistance. 
Activists who are being specifically targeted, from climate action groups Blockade Australia and Extinction Rebellion, have shown commendable courage fighting for the planet. We will need similar courage and defiance on a mass scale to push back against these new laws. As the government has implicitly admitted when putting its case for these laws, disrupting the economic status quo is where our power lies. Individual actions leave activists far more susceptible to police repression, and do not generate the same collective anger and political pressure that targeted, mass actions do.
Recent successes in pushing back against anti-protest measures during the COVID pandemic demonstrate the way forward. In June 2020, 60,000 people defied the state to participate in a Black Lives Matter rally during the global uprising; the New South Wales courts were forced to approve the banned protest retroactively after it had already started. Likewise, the Democracy is Essential civil liberties campaign refused to accept hypocritical restrictions on protests at a time when the rest of society was reopening. Activists pursued a strategy of defiance that eventually <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7459">restored the right to protest in NSW</a>. We are going to need to mobilise our collective power again to fight back against the latest attack on the right to protest.

Resist NSW anti-protest laws

Students and staff at the University of Wollongong are locked in an ongoing battle with university management. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a sustained attack on conditions of teaching, learning, and campus services. When the pandemic disrupted the normal operations of universities, bosses seized the moment to launch a restructure named “One-UOW” that will see up to 40 per cent of non-academic staff cut in some departments.
Under former vice chancellor Paul Wellings, who has since taken up a position as advisor to Scott Morrison, 185 permanent staff were made redundant in the past year. On top of that, the Campus Morning Mail <a href="https://campusmorningmail.com.au/news/uni-wollongongs-2020-a-financial-loss-and-staff-gone/">reported</a> that 1,512 casual positions were scrapped. Staff endured “temporary” cuts to wages and conditions. Amenities including the campus counselling service were gutted, and staff workloads have increased enormously.
This year has seen the abrupt closure of the bulk billed on-campus GP. In a message to patients, clinic doctor Cartan Costello described the closure as a result of a “culture at UOW that treats students and healthcare as commodities to be exploited”.
All this has hit students hard. Teaching staff are overworked and hard to reach. In the student centre, often only two of the dozen desks are staffed, and basic administrative requests take weeks or months to resolve.
Over the past year, an organised resistance to management has developed in the form of a campaign group called UOW Fightback, led by socialists in the student union and rank-and-file members of the local NTEU branch.
A high point of the campaign came with the departure of the much-loathed VC, Paul Wellings. To celebrate a career of cutting ribbons and cutting wages, Wellings organised himself a dinner that cost at least $20,000, inviting a host of notables including senior Liberal Party figures rumoured to include John Howard and Tony Abbott, notorious former UNSW VC Ian Jacobs, and a host of other Wollongong high-flyers.
Incensed at such an ostentatious display of contempt towards sacked staff and struggling students, UOW Fightback organised “Blockade UOW”. In the largest on-campus protest since the campaign for marriage equality, 150 protesters picketed Wellings’ farewell dinner, surrounding the event and barring access to the carpark where tuxedoed guests were being ushered in.
Management responded by inviting riot cops and mounted police onto campus intimidate and manhandle protestors. After a couple of hours of back and forth, police and campus security retreated into the building.
Wellings’ departure, however, presents challenges for the campaign. University bosses are hoping that a re-brand under new vice chancellor Patricia Davidson will disarm student and staff anger. Davidson has launched a campaign to put a human face on the cuts. Her first all-student email asked us to call her “Trish” and talked up her origins as a nurse, one who would “listen carefully to your views and feedback”. In an interview with ABC Illawarra on her first day as VC, Davidson vowed an “open door” approach to management, and again emphasised her credentials as a former nurse.
To clarify Davidson’s stance, student activists took advantage of this “open door” policy early in her tenure, meeting with her to get a direct response to the campaign’s key demands: will you reverse the cuts, offer all sacked staff their jobs back, and commit to no further cuts or restructures at UOW? Her response to every single one of these demands was at first evasion, and then a gently worded email that amounted to no on all counts.
When pressed in the meeting about her $1.1 million salary, and what exactly she did to deserve it, Davidson simply reiterated, with increasing levels of irritation, that it was “industry standard”, and that she was “a scientist”. One would be hard pressed to find another “scientist” or “nurse” on a seven figure salary in Wollongong.
On top of existing staff cuts, management is seeking a further $10 million cut to the wages bill in 2022 as they consolidate the One-UOW model. Davidson’s ABC Illawarra interview foreshadowed permanent online content, “fee paying online courses”, as a priority for UOW. Already, the pandemic has been used as pretext to recycle lecture content at UOW and cut live teaching hours as a cost-saving measure, and its further implementation represents an extension of the attack on learning and teaching quality.
Likewise, the campus clinic’s closure soon after Davidson’s arrival reveals quite clearly that her past life as a nurse means little, compared to her current interests as head of Wollongong’s second largest employer.
With ongoing cuts and a new PR strategy from management, activists must continue to fight against backsliding standards. There’s good reason to think that students will support a continued campaign. UOW Rants, a student-run Facebook page, is filled with anonymous grievances about the impact of campus cuts. One recent post read: “Uh is anyone absolutely horrified that the uni is making our lecturer (king Greg) WORK THIS WEEK AFTER ALMOST HAVING A MAJOR HEART ATTACK? He messaged the cohort and has said he’s been classified as fit to work????”
UOW Fightback will be rallying via Zoom at 12:30pm on Wednesday September 29 as a crucial step to building an ongoing struggle against the cuts.

Sean McLachlan

Massive cuts meet resistance at University of Wollongong

Most of the time, they work producing taco kits and ravioli for supermarkets around the country under the Old El Paso and Latina Fresh brands. But for 21 days in June, about 100 United Workers Union (UWU) members at the General Mills plant in the western Sydney suburb of Rooty Hill took the fight to one of the world’s biggest food manufacturers, and won.
Workers at General Mills had never been on strike before, and previous bargaining rounds have been a formality—“usually over in a few weeks”, as one striking worker told Red Flag. In the past, they have given up wage increases when profits have been low, and many expected the same courtesy to be offered in reverse, now that profits are through the roof. 
During 2020—which began with devastating bushfires and then saw the COVID-19 pandemic—production at the plant was in overdrive. The increase in work was so intense that overtime rosters were drawn up three months in advance, and some workers put in six and a half day weeks back-to-back. Management, explained one worker, “stayed and worked from home, [while] we came in and made sacrifices”. 
The workers’ sacrifices brought a profit windfall to General Mills. The Rooty Hill site posted $40 million in profit in 2020, and General Mills made enormous global profits of US$2.6 billion—up 40 percent in five years. For their efforts, the workers were “rewarded” with an unprecedented attack on pay, redundancy payouts, and working conditions (the only consolation: a gift card at Christmas, according to workers on the picket).
Workloads have increased for years at Rooty Hill. According to multiple workers who spoke to Red Flag, a favourite adage of management is: “We want you leaving here tired”. Management were eager to test the strength of the union with their hardball approach. Some even speculated that the site’s general manager wanted to prove herself ahead of a move overseas and a promotion. Add to this the expectation among workers that the company would share some of their soaring profits, and the conditions were laid for confrontation. 
The union submitted very modest claims: for a continuation of existing working conditions and a 3 percent annual wage rise—just above inflation. The offer the company made in response was an insult: pay increases of 2 percent in the first year, then just 1.25 percent in the second and third, which would result in a real wage cut over the life of the agreement; a savage attack on redundancy, which sought to cap payouts at 26 weeks, equivalent to what workers would be entitled to after just seven years at the company; and a lengthening of shifts by 50 percent.
For a site where many workers have been there ten, fifteen, or twenty years, the cap on redundancy represented an enormous attack that could leave them in poverty come retirement. Workers met the company’s “grandfather” clause, which claimed that no current workers would be impacted by the change, with scepticism. On the picket, people told stories of former colleagues and acquaintances who’d had their redundancies cut after “grandfathered” changes opened the door to all-out attack, including one harrowing example of a Shell worker whose million dollar redundancy payment was slashed by three quarters after 50 years working there.
The company’s proposal to increase shifts from eight to twelve hours also angered workers, who, as one striker put it, had already been “worked bare bone” in 2020. The move would slash the significant overtime rates that General Mills workers currently receive.
Faced with this attack on their conditions, and furious at the pay offer, workers at General Mills walked out on 4 June. An estimated 95 percent of permanent staff are in the union, and union members’ participation in the strike was strong throughout. Clearly, management thought they had the measure of the workers. For nearly two weeks, they refused to even respond to the union’s demands. But they underestimated the determination of the strikers, who staffed the picket in shifts—day and night—for the entire three weeks.
A major challenge they faced was that casuals continued to work throughout the strike. The union had conceded to casualisation in previous bargaining rounds—around half the workforce at Rooty Hill are casuals, who, despite some noble exceptions, were reluctant to join the strike. 
With casuals inside, shutting down production would rely on stopping the supply of semolina and other supplies to the plant. Early attempts to physically block trucks gave way to retreat under the threat of fines and arrests. Union organisers acknowledged “frustration” among the rank and file at a meeting on the picket, but offered no alternative for escalation, instead reiterating the legal consequences of a “hard” picket.
Limited production, estimated at around one third capacity, continued while UWU members dug in outside, giving management some reprieve. For a time the strike seemed at an impasse, as the company refused to respond to the union’s demands and production stumbled on. But eventually the company buckled, worn down by attrition. 
On balance, the Rooty Hill workers successfully repelled management’s attack. Their determination is a lesson for workers everywhere facing a familiar situation: if you strike, you can win.

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Inside the global garment industry

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Massive cuts meet resistance at University of Wollongong

General Mills workers repel attack on conditions

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