The first time Vickie Roach had a serious encounter with the criminal justice system, she was 17 years old. It wasn’t the first time she’d been put in a cell, but it was the first time the charges stuck.
She’d been doing sex work in Kings Cross, Sydney, for a couple of years and had developed a heroin habit. One night she handed money to someone to bring her another hit (a rookie mistake, she tells me, but she sort of trusted the person). While she waited for her acquaintance to return, a cop car pulled up and four officers swooped and bundled her up.
With no paraphernalia or drugs on her, the police carted her away on nothing but suspicion. She was thrown into the central cells in the city.
Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women make up 34 percent of incarcerated women, but only 2 percent of the adult female population.
“Down Market Lane?”, she struggles to recall. “It was a little lane, off George street.” The conditions, though, she remembers well.
“These things were convict-built; they were like dungeons – evil, disgusting, horrible places. They remanded me at first, for two weeks. So, I thought, ‘OK, they’re trying to throw a scare into me’. The day before I went to court, I gave all my shit away: all my cigarettes, everything, ’cause I thought I was getting out. But they put me back in for six months”, she says.
When she was 18, one of her friends inside died of an overdose. She was passed some barbiturates during a visit and had swallowed them, but they weren’t wrapped up properly. She ended up having to have her stomach pumped.
When she returned she was put in a cell within hearing distance of Vickie and her other friends. They couldn’t see her, but they could communicate. At first they laughed as she gave the screw a hard time.
The screw, according to Vickie, wasn’t up to the task. Scared of the inmates, she was “probably one of those types that goes to church on Sunday and wears one of those bloody stupid hats”, Vickie says. “She was never meant to be in a prison.”
The screw was put in front of the woman’s cell and given orders to check on her every three minutes.
At first Vickie and the others could hear her yelling at the screw to give her a cigarette. They were all calling out to the other inmate, having a chat and a laugh. But eventually, she fell silent.
They yelled at the screw to check on their friend, but she refused. She called some higher ranking staff and waited until they came. Apparently an ambulance came and went, the official explanation being that they refused to transport a dead body. Eventually another vehicle showed up. They wrapped her in a blanket and took her away.
Vickie’s face lights up when she talks about various escape attempts by her fellow inmates.
“We had a girl escape from Silverwater once. Bimbo, her name was. A Koori girl, I think she was from Brewarrina. Bimbo from Bree. I can’t even remember what her real name was. She was one of them short, chubby chicks.
“She used a doormat to get over the razor wire. But how she got over that fucking barrel, I don’t know. They had these big corrugated iron barrels that, if you tried to get onto them, they would just roll. But she managed to get over! But then her knees knocked her in the head on the way down and she knocked herself out.
“The women’s prison was inside the men’s prison, so she landed on the ground where the blokes were on work release. They found her out cold and hid her until she came to and helped her get out. I think she was out for three months!”
Over-representation
Vickie is now a prominent activist, as well as a writer, poet and public speaker. Since her last release from prison in 2008, she has thrown herself into the cause of social justice. Her most recent collaboration, with the Human Rights Law Centre, is Over-represented and overlooked: the crisis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s growing over-imprisonment. The report reveals some stark truths.
Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women make up 34 percent of incarcerated women, but only 2 percent of the adult female population. Their imprisonment rate has increased 148 percent since 1991 – when the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were handed down – and they are currently imprisoned at 21 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. The report also notes the effects of successive “law and order” campaigns:
“The result of punitive ‘tough on crime’ approaches is a swelling of prison populations – caused more by an increased use of and reliance on imprisonment rather than increases in crime. For example, an increase in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s imprisonment in NSW between 2001 and 2008 was found to be the result of more frequent use of imprisonment rather than an increase in offending – 25 percent of the increase was caused by greater use of remand and 75 percent because more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were sentenced to imprisonment and for longer periods.”
Vickie saw women held for months at a time on remand – sometimes three, sometimes six, sometimes even more.
“I’ve been held on as little as 500 bucks. Actually, fuck, I’ve been held on 50!” Vickie laughs when she talks about herself. Even as she tells tale after tale of horror from her time locked up, her mood isn’t soured.
“My first job when I went to jail was sewing shrouds for paupers. You know, for poor people. Like, how many of us were gonna end up in one of those?”, she ponders with a cackle. “Then they’d give you a certificate for dressmaking when you got out! The next job was sewing Australian flags – sewing the stars on Australian flags.”
What a bitter irony, women who had been so oppressed by the Australian state and all its institutions, compelled to decorate the flag. But Vickie, in standard fashion, finds the silver lining.
“Those were government jobs”, she says. “Better than the private companies people are forced to work for now.”
She insists that people today have it worse. “They’re still doing everything they did to us back then, and more. We never had spit hoods or anything”, she says, referencing the recent case of Dylan Voller in the Northern Territory.
“All those women who were on remand … They would have lost their houses”, she says, recalling the plight faced by women in decades past who were locked in Victorian prisons but who lived in housing commission flats.
“If you went to jail, say, for three months – if you had someone on the outside who could pay that 15 bucks a week, you could keep the house. But, otherwise, you’d lose everything”, she says. The erosion of public housing means that jail time now is more likely to result in people losing everything.
“Now, with this permanent placement bullshit [a recent Victorian Labor government initiative giving the Department of Human Services the power to remove a child permanently from their mother, after an order is made by the Children’s Court], if your kid’s not with you or your kid’s in foster care for more than 12 months, you lose all parental rights. And it’s not even confined to Aboriginal kids this time, it’s all kids”, she says.
Vickie is keen to bring it back to the broader issue at hand, the topic of the recent report she’s helped to put out.
“Chicks that are doing years get real hard. Re-integration is really important. We all lose everything when we go to jail. Even six months, to someone who’s not used to prison, is a lifetime – but I wouldn’t try telling that to someone with a life sentence.”
What’s the solution? The report makes many recommendations, but one aspect Vickie makes clear in her introduction:
“The criminal justice system damages women, children, men, entire communities. Governments need to get rid of laws that are criminalising so many of our women … Governments should be looking for ways to close prisons … We know the solutions – investment in housing, education and health – that’s what makes a difference and helps communities stay strong and healthy.”

Lisa Moon

Life inside the lockup: Indigenous women and the prison crisis

Public housing residents at the Sirius complex in Millers Point, Sydney, are outraged that the government has rejected a unanimous recommendation from the NSW Heritage Council that the building be given a heritage listing.
To add insult to injury, the residents, who are being evicted so that the site can be handed over to rich developers, were told that the bid to have their homes saved had failed hours after media had already broken the story.
According to Barney Gardner, a lifelong resident of Millers Point and spokesperson for the Millers Point, Dawes Point and The Rocks Public Housing Tenants Group, said that a media release went out at 12am on 7 August, and the story appeared in the morning’s papers.
“At 9am on a Sunday morning, a relocation officer was knocking on the doors of the tenants. They said, ‘How you going? Just letting you know the building isn’t going to be heritage listed. Just a courtesy because we didn’t want you to hear about it in the media’”, Gardner told Red Flag.
“They’re saying it’s courteous to knock on someone’s door at 9am on a Sunday morning to tell them the building is going to be knocked down and you have to get out.”
Gardner said the situation is a slap in the face reminiscent of the threat made on their homes two years ago, when Red Flag first reported on the issue.
“This is like 2014 again, when it was announced on national TV and then we had letters slipped under our door”, he said.
Twelve residents remain in the Sirius building, occupying eight units in the 79-unit complex.
Residents are hoping for support from the CFMEU, whose predecessor organisation, the Builders Labourers’ Federation, vowed to protect the building until the end of its lease. The BLF placed green bans on the whole of The Rocks and Millers Point area, which meant that unionised construction workers would refuse to work on any site if it meant the demolition of working class housing.
“There was an old story that the building, if it was to be threatened before the lease was up – and the lease ran for 52 years, from 1978-2030 – that the green ban would be reissued”, Gardner said.

Another slap in the face for Sydney public housing residents

Captioning workers who were sacked after demanding the minimum wage will have their case heard by the FairWork Commission in September. 
The workers at Caption It, provider of closed captions to the ABC, SBS, Channel 7 and Channel 10, had been taken off their casual wage of $26 an hour and put onto piece rates, which left some earning as little as $14 an hour. 
When six casuals submitted a joint letter to their CEO, Nicole Gilvear, to say that this was below the minimum wage of $21 per hour and therefore illegal, they were told to leave the building, and Gilvear called the police. 
“From what we’ve heard, it’s not the first time she’s called the police on an employee. I’m really glad we stood up for ourselves though. Bosses will try to get away with it if they think they can and if nobody says anything”, said Ben Crabtree, one of the sacked workers. 
After being sent home, three workers had their shifts cancelled, pending management’s decision on how they would be disciplined. 
“They left us without pay for weeks pending this sham ‘disciplinary meeting’”, Crabtree said. 
The workers refused to meet with management individually to be disciplined and demanded instead to have a collective meeting about the pay dispute with their union present. Management refused. 
Within days, workers were told to return to work at their previous hourly wage, with back pay for the amount that they were underpaid. 
“I think they got some legal advice and saw that we were right, so they had to find another way to get rid of us”, Crabtree said. 
Two days after their return, a round of redundancies was announced. Everyone who signed the original letter either quit or was made redundant. 
But Crabtree says workers are determined to keep fighting. 
“We won the first round. That’s the great thing. Then they thought that they could get some clever HR firm to make us go away. But we’re not going anywhere.”

Boss tries cutting wages from $26 to $14 an hour

Nine months ago, steelworkers at Port Kembla, on the NSW South Coast, accepted a historic compromise: a three-year wage freeze and 500 job losses to ensure that BlueScope Steel profits remain high enough that management would stop threatening to close down local production and move the operation overseas.
But it wasn’t enough. Workers have had conditions slashed and been under pressure to increase production. Tensions boiled over on 24 May, when workers at Spring Hill, against the advice of their union, walked off the job for 24 hours.
“You know these people had enough because the bosses always bullshit to them. The union couldn’t even fuckin’ stop it. Things just spilled over. Enough was enough and that was it”, Jerry (not his real name), a worker at Spring Hill, told Red Flag.
Now BlueScope is taking the Australian Workers Union (AWU) to the Federal Court for compensation or punitive damages. The union expects this to amount to $2.4 million.
“Our boss checked out which lot of people were [in the union] and docked their pay. Originally, they wanted to fine everyone who was on site for $8,000. Now, they’re going after the union instead”, Jerry said.
Workers are under pressure to work more overtime as the workforce shrinks and the company refuses to hire anyone else. Jerry said that it doesn’t want to pay the $6,000 insurance plus training costs to hire someone new.
“They expect you to do at least one a week, maybe two a week”, he said.
But the overtime is not enough to cover the work that needs to be done. People who have taken voluntary redundancies (VR) are being called back to work, but as casuals with fewer entitlements.
“They’re giving people VR and then they’re calling them back on contract for a single time to work, at least three days in a week but a single time – because people need to take holidays and that but they don’t want to employ anyone else.”
But workers who want voluntary redundancies have been waiting months for the company to upgrade machinery so that their position will not have to be replaced.
“They upgrade machinery and put [in] robots so they can cut one man here and one man there”, Jerry said.
Management has also monitored workers very closely in the hope of finding an infraction that can be grounds for dismissal.
“Any time you make a mistake, you drop a coil or something, they take you for a blood test. You got no choice. Before, they used to give you a bit of leeway. But now, nothing. Get a drug test”, he said.
Workers are angry that they appear to be the only ones sacrificing, while the company continues to post millions in profits.
“They don’t want to give us nothing, but they’re all still treating themselves with all the extras. They still get their bonuses. They even took our meal dockets. We used to get three in a 12-hour shift, now we get two. But they’re still feathering their own nests”, Jerry said.
And expectations remain high for quantity and quality of output. “They want the best product but they’re skimming everyone to the bone. They don’t want the workforce to be there. The bosses want the best quality, but they’re still taking everyone’s entitlements.”
Jerry is frustrated that legal requirements surrounding strikes can sap momentum and that, despite workers giving a militant lead, the union has failed to back them.
“When you want to go on strike now, you have to apply, you have to do this, [then] the attention is gone. People are disappointed because nothing happened [after the strike]. I would love to change it, but they’re governed by the government now. The union got no balls. They got not much power now”, he said.

Steelworkers not ready to give up the fight

Teachers in NSW prisons are protesting against moves to replace them with less qualified, private training providers.
“They’re keeping 20 teachers in four particular jails; they’re keeping some senior education officers and education officers, but they’re downgrading the position to clerks. They’re deleting all the positions – then they’ll just have everyone scrambling for the same positions”, Stewart Burkitt, education officer at Long Bay Jail and president of the Corrective Services Teachers Association, told Red Flag.
The NSW corrective services minister, David Elliott, is cutting education at 31 prisons across the state. Currently there are 152.5 full time equivalent teaching positions. When he’s done, there will be only 20. Where Burkitt works, at Long Bay, 25 teaching positions will be slashed.
Staff are outraged not only about job cuts, but about the attack on the rights of their students.
“Education is a human right … [But] there’s no right to education in our prison system, only the right to libraries. Education is at the governor’s pleasure’ – that’s actually a quote on the books somewhere”, Burkitt said.
“About 67 percent of students are below level two, which is about what the level of functional literacy is. So it’s a huge task. And people often have learning disabilities, higher levels of mental illness and addiction histories. Those people who need skilled, qualified teachers are getting unqualified, inexperienced people.
“Nobody will need a teaching qualification anymore to teach in NSW”, he said.
The cuts are part of a broader agenda to attack the conditions of public sector workers, which are better than those in the private sector.
“They’re going to tender it out to private providers. We’re assuming it’s going to be one of these crappy little training providers … They’re not going to save any money out of it; it’s just part of their ideology to privatise everything, to bash public sector workers. They’ll come and get you next”, he said.
Workers are determined to fight back: protest actions are taking place at prisons around the state.
“Out of about 150-160 people total, about 130 are union members. A few of them, of course, are scared to put their heads up. Bathurst yesterday was brilliant; we were at Silverwater the day before and we got something on ABC news. We’ve had one every day this week – one at Emu Plains and today at Wellington.
“We had a big one at Long Bay a couple of weeks ago. Loads of people. Lots of support from individual school teachers attending our actions.
“Morale is actually pretty good. We can see stuff happening. If we can get the story out, we’ll win. When people have got a bit, and feel like that they can do it, they will.
“I’m pretty sure they just thought we’d all roll over and die. We’ve had some really good support from the Teachers Federation”, he said.

Fighting for workers’ and prisoners’ rights in NSW

Students and staff at UNSW overwhelmingly support the teaching of Australian history as “invasion” rather than “settlement”, according to student activists.
About 50 students attended a speak-out on campus on 7 April to present an open letter signed by more than 1,000 students who endorse the use of the word “invasion” in classes and teaching materials.
“Invasion not settlement” and “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land” banners were displayed at the event.
The action came in response to negative coverage in the Daily Telegraph and other media outlets of UNSW’s Diversity Toolkit.
“It does not surprise me that people like Keith Windschuttle oppose the term ‘invasion’ and shock jocks like Alan Jones and Kyle Sandilands have said the toolkit will ‘divide society’”, Bridget Cama, UNSW Student Representative Council Indigenous Officer, told Red Flag. “The problem is our society is already divided. You only have to look at gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to know this.
“It is time that the education system rid itself of white homogenous history books, teachings and terminology. It is time for the real, true and terrorising history of this nation to be told. The Diversity Toolkit has the potential to make real change for the true history of Australia to be taught and is something more universities and education providers should be adopting,” she said.

UNSW students and staff support teaching the true history of Australia

Oceans have warmed as much in the last 20 years as they did in the previous 130 years, according to a new study.
The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, drew on data from as far back as 1865 in its findings about oceanic heat content.
Scientists compared data from two main scientific expeditions: the HMS Challenger in the 1870s and the Argo floats in 2004-10. They estimate that the ocean has absorbed 3.3 x 1023 joules of energy more than it otherwise would have if capitalist industrialisation had not occurred.
To put that figure in perspective, the excess heat energy in the ocean is equal to perhaps 60 million years’ worth of Melbourne’s current household electricity use.
Thirty-five percent of the heat created by industrial activity is stored at depths below 700m. Just 20 years ago, the deep ocean contained only 20 percent of the warmth created by human release of greenhouse gases.
This rapid increase in ocean warming is worrying scientists, who speculate that it could affect ecosystems that humans have little knowledge about.
The chief author of the study, Peter Gleckler, told the Guardian, “When we discuss global warming, the most familiar way we do that is talk about temperature changes on the surface – but it’s clear that the oceans are doing the bulk of the work in terms of absorbing the heat in the system.
“And if we want to really understand how much heat is being trapped, we can’t just look at the upper ocean any more, we need to look deeper.
“The findings are concerning. It’s clear evidence that the oceans are taking the brunt of the greenhouse gases and are accumulating a lot of heat. As for the ecological implications, that’s hard to say. There is a lot of life in the deep oceans and there’s lots we don’t know about the impact upon that life.”

Ocean warming worse than thought

Workers at BlueScope Steel in Wollongong have been silenced as part of a deal struck between management and the union that will lose hundreds of jobs.
Arthur (not his real name), who has worked at the Port Kembla steelworks for decades, told Red Flag that he and his workmates had been made to sign confidentiality agreements. “Because fucking BlueScope Steel put a letter out, any leaks out on the media we get in trouble. They made us sign to say if anything comes out, instant dismissal.”
Arthur says that workers are angry that bosses are enriching themselves while workers pay with their jobs. “If there’s one thing I would want the public to know, it’s that they’re feathering their own nest big time”, he said. “And the people that make the money for them, they’re fucking [us] over.”
He says bitterness about job cuts is intensified by the knowledge that the company has done well in the last financial year. “They just made $130 million. They say they got no money – but about eight months ago the bosses gave themselves pay rises and bonuses. Then the CEO gave himself a $300,000 bonus while he’s sacking 500 people.”
On 24 August, the company announced its best financial return since 2008, and a net annual profit of $136.3 million (later upgraded to $180 million). In the same statement, BlueScope CEO Paul O’Malley warned that the company wanted more. He outlined BlueScope’s plan to hold thousands of jobs to ransom to get it – threatening to close the Port Kembla steelworks unless the unions delivered “game-changing” concessions and governments offered tax breaks. O’Malley set the savings target at $200 million and gave an eight-week deadline.
Eight weeks was all it took. On 9 October, the Australian Workers Union announced that it had brokered a new enterprise agreement with the company that included a three-year wage freeze, 500 job losses and provisions that will make further restructuring even easier.
On 26 October, the NSW government announced that, without any strings attached, it would allow BlueScope to defer a $60 million tax bill for up to 15 years.
According to Arthur, things have been tough at Port Kembla for some time now.
“They’re not training any new people. They won’t employ anyone … so if somebody goes, they’re not replacing them. It’s been like that for the last two years … They’d rather give you overtime than employ someone else because they reckon it’s cheaper.
“They just squeeze people more and more and more. This new boss we got, he’s fucking ruthless. All the people they’re bringing in are ruthless. And they’re starting to put cameras everywhere now … They always check on you to find a way they can sack you.”
Arthur’s guess is that BlueScope has been downsizing in preparation for a takeover, citing Japan-based giant Nippon Steel as a possible candidate. Nippon and BlueScope began a joint venture in value-added steel products in 2013.
Whatever the plan, it’s clear that management is pleased with the company’s positioning. In the pages of the bosses’ papers, commentators explained just how well BlueScope had done in extracting its price from workers and the government.
 “If BlueScope chief executive Paul O’Malley wasn’t humming Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ as he jogged his way across the Sydney Harbour Bridge at dawn on [26 October], then there is something seriously wrong with him”, wrote Mathew Stevens in the Australian Financial Review.
Pulling back the curtain on the company’s strategy, Stevens continued: “What looks to have happened very quickly indeed, is in fact, the product of a crisis productively anticipated by BlueScope management and one that they were determined would not be wasted”.
After winning a surrender of this scale, management has every reason to be optimistic about how much more profits it can wring out of Port Kembla workers. BlueScope also has an ideal model to look to at its North Star steel mill in Ohio, USA.
On 2 November, for US$720 million, it bought full ownership of the North Star steel mill, in which it previously had a 50 percent stake. In the lead-up to the deal, O’Malley spoke enthusiastically about North Star’s “highly motivated and focused workforce”. Steelworkers at North Star stand to lose up to half of their pay if the company doesn’t turn a profit.
In a presentation to investors in 2014, North Star management boasted that its “high performance workforce is completely non-union and [the] company has never had to contend with collective labour contracts [or] work stoppages”.
Back at Port Kembla, where Arthur and all of his workmates are union members, the disappointment is palpable that the union didn’t put up more of a fight.
“The union are fucking suckholes too, man. The people are too scared to open their mouth because of all the bullying. The officials, they’re bound by government rules now, too. If you go on strike they fine you.
“The union should be there for every little fight that happens. They should be the first to be notified. But as soon as you go in there … [with] the bosses, they want nothing to do with it.”
 Arthur and many others – mostly those like him, who are older and past the crushing burden of mortgage repayments – have put in for the voluntary redundancies provided for in the new agreement. But, he said, the bosses are scrimping right down to the bitter end.
“They say, ‘If you want to take the VR [voluntary redundancy] take it!’ Then they say, ‘You can only go at our discretion and on our terms’”, he said.
These older workers remember when the steelworks had a fighting union and a rank and file that could strike and could win. “The morale in the workforce is shit right now”, Arthur said.
 Much has been made in the media about the union’s concessions being necessary to keep the fires burning at Port Kembla. But for steelworkers, the blast furnace isn’t the only flame that needs to stay alive if they’re to have a future.

Port Kembla jobs ransom pays off for BlueScope

The ALP has joined with the federal Liberal government to pass legislation approving a cashless welfare scheme. Under the plan, recipients will have access to only 20 percent of their entitlements in cash – the rest will have to be spent in government-sanctioned ways.
Ostensibly, the scheme is about tackling addiction: the 80 percent government-controlled portion of welfare cannot be spent on alcohol or gambling. Yet research on the new scheme’s predecessor, the BasicsCard, found that it did not improve any of the “well-being indicators” it was supposed to.
An evaluation of the program conducted by Australian National University researchers “could not find any substantive evidence of the program having significant changes relative to its key policy objectives, including changing people’s behaviours”.
Jessie Lee Robertson is a full time carer for her son Beau, a non-verbal young autistic adult. She has been his carer for 20 years, and will be affected by cashless welfare.
“I’ll only be able to access 20 percent of my income for cash needs, like school lunches and op-shopping, markets, clothing, pools, P&amp;C contributions and that sort of thing”, she told Red Flag.
“More my concern, though, is the person that I care for has a care worker who takes him for outings, to the movies or the shops. In order for him to do that I give the care worker the amount of cash necessary for expenses for the day. I can’t give a care worker his entire welfare card: that would be pretty negligent. So that will really affect his ability to participate in the community”, Robertson said.
Currently, 12-month trials of cashless welfare have been approved only in selected areas with high participation in alcohol rehabilitation programs or high levels of violence-related hospitalisation. But in the long run, it will likely become universal.
Robertson thinks that the government is deliberately targeting areas that have high Indigenous populations because it will more easily be able to get broader public support by doing so.
“It’s really easy to paint these places with the whole ‘we have to do something’ thing. They’ve already tried technical solutions in Ceduna – they have a list of banned drinkers they can’t sell to”, she said.
“So why you would try this when it’s been shown to be a failure? I guess we don’t have a lot of sympathy for these places because we’re racist, like with the Northern Territory Intervention: ‘Won’t someone think of the children?’ and all that.”
Robertson told Red Flag that cashless welfare discriminates against not just people with disabilities, like her son, but also other vulnerable groups.
“They haven’t given us the details of how it’s all going to work. The closest reference we’ve got is the BasicsCard, which had a $1,500 a day spending limit. So even if you’ve saved up more than that much money, you’re not allowed to access it.
“How would you pay for a funeral, or a car? If you have a stillborn child for example you can access a bereavement allowance, but that would be welfare controlled too. On top of cashless welfare being really racist it’s also something that will obviously hit women harder as it’s mostly women who are carers”, she said.
Why is the government doing it? “I suppose the simple answer is that the poor are not going to bludgeon themselves to death so the government has to help them with that”, she said.
Robertson has organised a protest against cashless welfare.
“We’re rallying to protest on Saturday 21 November, 1pm at Town Hall in Sydney. And marching to Martin Place. We need to show solidarity with Ceduna and the other trial areas, and show the government there’s some opposition to this”, she said.

‘Cashless welfare’ coming to a town near you

Workers at a major cosmetics distribution warehouse in Sydney have gone on strike for the first time in the warehouse’s history. The Trimex warehouse, in Rosebery, has been the sole supplier of Clarins cosmetics to all of Australia and New Zealand since it opened in 1977, but when Trimex was recently bought out by Clarins, new management was brought in.
National Union of Workers delegate Tawhi Hunapo-Stokes says that management had a “take it or leave it” attitude to negotiations over a new agreement. “Not a negotiation, a meeting”, she said.
The agreement proposed by management would remove procedures for disputes and counselling, which require that workers receive multiple warnings before disciplinary action. “They’re calling it a ‘straight rollover with minor changes’. These are not minor changes”, Hunapo-Stokes told Red Flag.
Workers say that management bullheadedness is why they are out on strike.
“We just want to sit down and come to a resolution. A fair one”, Hunapo-Stokes said at the picket on 30 July. “I think it’s been here for 35 years, this is the first [strike]. We’ve never, ever walked out before; this is the first time.”
Of the 14 full time employees at Trimex, 12 are on strike. They are mostly older workers from migrant backgrounds, and the majority are women. The most recently hired full time workers have been at Trimex for 12 years, while the longest serving has worked there for 29.
George Jimenez says management have been moving towards casualisation of the workforce for some time. “This company had, in the past, 30 full-timers. But as people retired, they never replaced them”, he said. “That’s the reward we get for getting old and working so many years in the company, because eventually they want to kick us out.”
Jimenez is excited to be on strike, despite his inexperience. “That is new for us, as it is for them [management] … We’re not many, but we stick together, which is good”, he said.
Bernadette Abreu, a Trimex worker of 22 years, had been on strike once before in the ’90s, at a company in Lane Cove that made wallets and bags. “Same like here, they brought new management. We went on strike, only five of us; we didn’t let any trucks in. At the end they gave us our redundancy money, which they didn’t want to give.”
	“I’ve always been in a union. The union helps you, for your rights, if something goes wrong in the workplace. The union is for the workers”, she said.

Life inside the lockup: Indigenous women and the prison crisis

Another slap in the face for Sydney public housing residents

Boss tries cutting wages from $26 to $14 an hour

Steelworkers not ready to give up the fight

Fighting for workers’ and prisoners’ rights in NSW

UNSW students and staff support teaching the true history of Australia

Ocean warming worse than thought

Port Kembla jobs ransom pays off for BlueScope

‘Cashless welfare’ coming to a town near you

First strike at Trimex warehouse in Sydney

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