On 6 October the South Korean labour movement lost Bang Yeong-hwan—a comrade, leader and, for many, a friend. 
Born in 1968 to a working-class family, Bang’s early life was marked by the tumultuous struggle against the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship. Chun ruled South Korea from 1980 to 1988, when he was forced to hand over power to a successor in the face of a mass, millions-strong movement for democracy.
The “liberalisation” that followed, however, was limited. Business owners were satisfied with winning the right to have their interests represented in parliament. For them, the movement was over. But many workers—who in the period of the dictatorship had very few rights and suffered terrible wages and working conditions—were emboldened by the democracy movement’s gains and attempted to extend newly found political freedoms to the workplace.
Data from the Korea Labor Institute shows union membership doubled to 2 million between 1987 and 1989, and there were more industrial disputes in 1987 alone than in the preceding ten years combined.
Bang entered the workforce in the late 1980s. This was a time when, according to a Washington Post article by Peter Maass, workplace casualties in South Korea were “about 15 times the rate in Western nations”. 
Bang was employed at Wonjin Rayon, the biggest South Korean producer of rayon, an artificial silk. Workers there were forced to work with murderously inadequate safety gear and ventilation. Exposure to carbon disulfide—a highly toxic solvent used in the manufacturing process—resulted in more than 300 deaths and hundreds more suffering lifelong afflictions as severe as paralysis.
Bang became involved with the union and rank-and-file industrial activity. After successive strikes in which he played a significant role, the Wonjin Rayon workers forced the company to make significant investments to improve health and safety. 
Unfortunately, this victory coincided with a time of generalised retreat in the South Korean workers’ movement. In the early 1990s Wonjin Rayon moved its assets to China. Like other big capitalists, the company felt confident enough in the stability of the new South Korean democracy to wage an offensive against workers. Demoralised and blacklisted from employment, Bang resorted to petty crime to survive.
Tellingly, the post-democracy movement governments never repealed the draconian 1948 National Security Act, using it as justification for thousands of politically motivated incarcerations during the 1990s. Targeting “any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the state”, the act justified the imprisonment (and torture) of thousands of radical students, socialists and trade union organisers. 
Revolutionary socialist Choi Il-bung, in an interview published in the International Socialism journal, recalled, “During the whole decade more than 200 of our members [out of an organisation of never more than 300-400 members] were arrested, some comrades twice or even three times”. 
Bang was among those who spent time in jail. Although he was charged for petty crimes rather than being targeted because of his union activities, his experience of prison was similar to many working-class militants in oppressive regimes. He developed relationships with political prisoners across a variety of traditions and organisations, and was convinced of socialist politics. He emerged from jail with the intention of dedicating his life to being a revolutionary rank-and-file worker.
Bang eventually found work as a taxi driver. It was a difficult life, drivers often forced to work 12-hour shifts just to scrape by. To minimise costs, the taxi company, Haesung Transportation, instituted arbitrary unpaid work stoppages during non-peak times and would force drivers to operate vehicles drenched in vomit. 
Amid these conditions, Bang unionised his workplace, establishing a branch of the Public Transport Workers’ Union Taxi Division under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 2019. 
In 2020, Bang was fired from his taxi job for refusing to accept a new yearly contract which offered no long-term security. After a long struggle involving coworkers, socialists and supporters, he was reinstated in 2022—but still refused to sign the dodgy contract the company insisted on. As punishment, the company paid him no more than three and a half hours’ worth of wages a day, while still expecting that he would work a full 40-hour week. 
Understanding how Bang found himself in this situation requires a broader view of the state of the class struggle in South Korea today, and how this relates to historical developments going back to the 1980s.
The flagrant disregard for minimum wages and conditions is encouraged in South Korea by extremely loose and largely unenforceable labour laws. In the current context, companies feel particularly emboldened in this area. The South Korean government is concerned by recent weak economic data. Milton Ezrati,<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/04/17/south-korea-signals-trouble-throughout-asias-economy/?sh=10f603a44a7e"> writing in Forbes</a> in April this year, reported a drop in exports of around 15 percent in the year to February and factory activity lower than would be expected in a healthy South Korean economy. Although there was a slight jump in GDP in the most recent quarter, forecast growth is still barely half of the 1.4 percent desired by the Central Bank of Korea. 
Since the 2022 election of the ultra-conservative People Power government, President Yoon Suk-Yeol has intensified the ruling class offensive against the union movement—despite the total days spent on strike during 2022 being the lowest of the last decade. At this point, the workers’ movement seems to be decisively in retreat.
Western audiences might have glimpsed the element of class-based radicalism within South Korean politics through cultural outputs like Parasite and Squid Game. To understand why this latent, unorganised class consciousness hasn’t translated into an uptick in the workers’ movement, two factors—both related to the role of trade union bureaucracies—must be understood.
The first is the distinction between “regular” and “irregular” workers, manifesting in a culture of workplace sectionalism even within industries with a high rate of unionisation and militancy.
 Irregular workers are those employed without an official contract. They are not covered under existing labour laws, but nevertheless often fill exactly the same role as their “regular” coworkers. A comparison can be made to “two-tier” contracts in Australia, and the division created is exploited by the bosses in the same way. The presence of irregular workers with inferior wages and conditions is used to scare regular workers out of taking strike action and fighting for improvements either for themselves or for their irregular coworkers.
The KCTU, despite posturing as a radical union confederation, will happily accept contracts enshrining divisions between workers if it means avoiding class conflict. Organised irregular workers are usually in unions or union divisions separate from their regular counterparts. Regular workers’ unions will do deals which (supposedly) benefit those workers at the expense of irregular workers. In reality, the main beneficiaries are the companies, which can deliver the bare minimum of improvements to one section of workers while dodging costly strikes and maintaining access to a growing pool of cheap, unprotected labour that can be used to undermine future organising efforts.
Many recent high-profile industrial disputes in South Korea have been concluded through sell-out deals pushed through by the KCTU. As recently as September, 89 percent of workers in Hyundai car plants represented by the Korean Metal Workers Union voted in favour of a walkout for higher wages and job security. A radical rank-and-file minority successfully won the inclusion in the log of claims of demands around the rehiring of fired workers and for irregular workers to receive equal benefits.
Before the strike even began, however, the union leadership forced through a sell-out deal which settled for a below inflation pay rise of 4.8 percent and nothing for irregular workers. The “sweetener” was a considerable one-time bonus for regular workers.
The second factor explaining the dynamics of Korean class struggle today stems from the defining period of Bang and many other working-class militants' political life: the failure of the 1980s democracy movement, and class struggle since, to cohere into a working-class-based political organisation.
A workers’ party—even a thoroughly neoliberal one like the Australian Labor Party—is interdependent with union bureaucracies, granting the union movement more structural permanency and legislative protections (although obviously not without the tendencies towards reformism inherent within trade union structures).
In lieu of this, the KCTU has adopted a tactic of lobbying the bourgeois Justice, People Power and especially Democratic parties to institute more progressive legislation, and shying away from strikes to avoid stepping on the toes of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/chaebol">big chaebol corporations</a> (like Samsung) to which those parties are beholden.
A significant portion of the union bureaucrats’ energy is spent isolating and suppressing rank-and-file militants like Bang Yeong-hwan, who they see as a threat to this strategy. Indeed, the executive branch of the Public Transport Workers’ Union reportedly disciplined Bang in retaliation for protesting against the union’s treatment of militant low-level organisers—using crucial union resources to run a smear campaign against him. Exercises in internal discipline like this, the unions hope, will keep them out of the government’s crosshairs.
All this, then, explains why Bang ended up in such an impossible predicament.
On 26 September—the 227th day of his protest against his employment contract and the sell-out dealing of the union bureaucrats who were supposed to fight for him—Bang set himself on fire. On 6 October, he died. “Self-immolation” implies that the painful death was his own doing. This lets off the hook the corporate bosses, cowering bureaucrats and politicians whose action or inaction offered no dignified way forward to a decent life.
Before succumbing to his wounds, Bang spent his last days bandaged and unconscious. His final moments are a tragic but poignant metaphor for working-class life.
Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that workers are physically and mentally degraded by capitalism into becoming merely “an appendage of the machine”. Bandaged or healed, without class consciousness we are at the mercy of the relentless regime of exploitation and oppression that rules every aspect of our lives, and our horizon is confined to the day to day struggle just to reproduce our ability to work.
A universal class experience gives workers, regardless of language or ethnicity, an implicit understanding that society is unfair—that it doesn’t have to be like this—yet the vast ideological and coercive institutions of the capitalist class tirelessly work to bludgeon this consciousness out of existence. 
To honour Bang Yeong-hwan and the countless other martyrs of this system, we must build a mass party: one that can cohere and foster the militant spirit of workers like Bang, rather than allowing it be defeated by the capitalist weapons of demoralisation, violence and isolation. A party that can, through the power and courage of ordinary workers, make every glimpse of collective struggle and solidarity—such as we are witnessing internationally around Palestine—a chance to further tear away the bloodied bandages, revealing the conscious, loving and free humanity beneath.

Seona Cho

Nick de Voil

South Korean struggle through the life and tragic death of Bang Yeong-hwan (1968-2023)

“Culture cannot be destroyed by violence”, read the banner held by representatives of the Toho Labor Union on 19 August 1948 as they faced down more than 2,000 police and five American Sherman tanks, “everything but the battleships”, according to actress and unionist Akagi Ranko. Behind the barricades, hastily constructed from set pieces of films in progress, stood a thousand striking workers from every department of the Toho studio in Tokyo. 
Kyoko Hirano, in her 1992 book Mr Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952, documents the strike in extraordinary detail. Hirano cites US government documents that describe how large set fans, which faced the strikebreakers like artillery pieces at the barricade, were primed with “shards of glass and sand”, although it was more likely to have been cayenne pepper according to Hirano. Set technicians likewise repurposed rain machines into water cannons. A “defence captain” wearing a cowboy hat emerged periodically at the front of the barricade to crack jokes at the expense of the police. Workers and bosses across Tokyo anxiously waited to learn the fate of the striking Toho stronghold. This fight was to become a critical juncture in Japan’s class struggle.
The Toho company was Japan’s most prominent film distributor, theatre and studio company for the first half of the twentieth century. Western audiences are likely familiar with Toho’s output through Godzilla or Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
Before its defeat in World War II, Imperial Japan underwent rapid and brutal industrialisation, the brunt of which was born by the poor, especially the Korean colonial subjects and urban working class. John Halliday writes in New Left Review that most workers “had no rights, no job security (and) no guaranteed wage increase”.
There were few outlets for workers to express discontent; unions were banned or violently restricted to the point of impotence, and activists caught handing out propaganda were known to disappear. The fate of many such activists is recorded in the compilation of pre-war writings, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, edited by Mikiso Hane.
Anarchist and communist sympathies simmered in the underbelly of Japan’s cities, occasionally culminating in strikes, such as by the Tokyo subway workers in 1932. While victories were few, the strikes were important for radicalising workers and demonstrating the counterposed interests between bosses and workers that could lay the foundations for a socialist current to emerge. An example is the semi-legal Print and Publishing Workers Club, which organised strikes because “what is important is the number of class-conscious activists who will emerge… to actively join the class struggle”, according to Club leader Shibata Ryuichiro.
Hirano describes film studios in this period as being run on an authoritarian auteur model, with creative input from technicians, crew and even actors discouraged. This was seen as the best way to churn out commercially viable films, as staff were kept to a strict timeline and budget, shunted from one project to the next, overworked, and often with little knowledge of the film they were producing. 
The initial policy of the US occupying forces in their period of direct control over Japan after the war was towards “democratisation” of the country—they encouraged unions and held elections in the hope that a stable domestic government could be relied on to protect US investments and contain their rival imperialist power, the Soviet Union. 
The hitherto suppressed working class exploded into frenzied political activity. Historian Andrew Gordan claims “union membership rose from about 5,000 in October (1945) to nearly 5 million by December 1946, over 40 percent of the nation’s wage earners”. The Toho studio was located in Tokyo’s industrial centre, the heartland of workers’ struggle.
In March 1946, the 5000-strong Toho Labor Union started its first strike. Holding membership across the spectrum of different roles required for filmmaking, from director to caterer, they demanded and won a moderate minimum wage increase. More significant than the pay rise, however, was the workers’ decision to establish a “Struggle Committee”. 
Struggle Committees, which first appeared in the mining and transportation industries, comprised elected rank-and-file union representatives who would negotiate day-to-day production with management. By the end of 1946, workers in Tokyo had set up 250 such committees.
The power and politics of these bodies depended wholly on the militancy of the workers. Everyone from careerist hacks to hardcore communist militants was involved in the committees.
Historian Joe Moore, whose works on post-war Japan are an excellent introduction for Marxists interested in the Japanese class struggle, explains the tendency towards radicalisation inherent in these bodies: “[A]t the beginning the Japanese workers did view production control as an effective if unorthodox dispute tactic,” but it was “a short step further to the position that the enterprise need not ever be returned to the control of the owners… they as workers could not only run an enterprise successfully but also do it better than the capitalist owners.”
The films of the Toho workers from this period display the workers’ growing confidence as eloquently as any written manifesto could.
Entirely made on company time, 1946’s Those Who Create Tomorrow was, according to co-director Kurosawa, the product of democratic deliberation and intended as both a celebration of the workers’ unionisation effort and an argument for how the struggle of the oppressed can inspire others. Hirano points out that the film’s central characters are not the usual flashy stars but the forgotten workers behind every film—notably featuring a working-class woman protagonist. “Only the company is making money… they never think about our audiences”, a low-level technician says, “we want to make good movies, but the fighting spirit should be shared”.
Nor was it just socialist workers enthused by the products of democratic control over cinema: Kinema Junpo, the premier Japanese film criticism magazine, would rank six Toho films in its top 10 movies for its 1947 awards.
But while democratic control of film production led to an increase in the quality of films and the well-being of the producers and consumers, it was a disaster for the bosses.
Workers were calling the shots, with executives relegated to paying the bills and salaries. Hirano notes that budgets on some projects were exceeded by almost 200 percent. 
Throughout 1947, it became increasingly clear to the Japanese bosses and US political authorities that coexistence with the Struggle Committees was untenable. Class confrontation became inevitable as high wages cut into profits and workers challenged the orders of their bosses.
Since Toho’s output was cultural and therefore not central to the functioning of the economy like other similarly militant sectors, they were the perfect first target for a capitalist counter-offensive.
The company allegedly encouraged the creation of an anti-communist scab union, Shin-Toho (or New Toho), to exploit the deeply held prejudices of actors from upper-class backgrounds. These scabs, Hirano writes, were “troubled by the way in which normally capable, friendly, and quiet employees were transformed into aggressive, polemical demagogues who stirred their listeners with militant rhetoric”. 
This scab union was offered its own studio and, combined with other split-off groups, eventually reached two-thirds of the size of the original union. Pressing their advantage, bosses began a “restructuring” of the Toho company. In April 1948, they sacked more than one-sixth of the workforce on charges of being “suspected communists” and locked out the workers.
Workers reacted with a strike and an immediate occupation of the studio, opening it to friendly unionists and socialists. Hirano details life behind the barricades for the two months the occupation held firm: “[D]ance parties were held, the “Internationale” was sung, and group discussions and demonstrations were conducted inside the studio itself”.
However, the Japanese Communist Party, the most significant force in the workers’ movement, had effectively abandoned the tactic of workers’ control by 1947. Moore summarises the argument of the leading faction of the party: “If Japan was expected to follow the parliamentary road to socialism, rather than see the early establishment of a people’s republic, then neither extra-legal revolutionary bodies like soviets nor illegal workers’ takeovers of enterprises through production control could have a role.”
Counting on the unwillingness of the Communist Party to defend its rank-and-file membership in Toho, on 19 August 1948, the Tokyo district court handed down an eviction order to break the strike.
Even the most politically advanced Toho workers did not expect the strike-breakers to be accompanied by US tanks. Without a response from the broader workers’ movement, which deferred to the Communist Party, the Toho workers were isolated. 
By the 1950s, Struggle Committees in Tokyo had been crushed. Moore marks the outcome of the Toho battle as a precedent-setting “test case” for the bosses’ wider campaign to regain control over industry. The smashing of such a high-profile stronghold demoralised the union movement nationally, leading many workers to lose confidence in their collective power. 
Most leading militants were loyal to the Communist Party. There was no organisation of experienced worker activists capable of unifying the workplace-based committees into combined political organisations—workers’ councils—which could contest the dominant capitalist institutions.
The Toho workers were not just fighting for better films; they were fighting against the dictatorship of bosses and government departments in all spheres of life. The collective culture they built lives on through their influence on cinema but can only be properly honoured, and hopefully realised in full, through the continued struggle for a better, more beautiful world.

When workers ran the film industry: Tokyo 1946-48

One thousand asylum seekers of all ages gathered at Parliament House, Canberra, on 6 March to demand permanent residency.
Inside, Labor member for Swan Zaneta Mascarenhas used her time—which is really our time—in the lower house to talk about an apparently equally pressing public concern: <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F26425%2F0169%22">her favourite contestant on the recent season of Married at First Sight</a>. “Sandy has inspired a whole generation” of women to find true love, she said. 
The irony of a government MP using their time to discuss nuclear family simulation television while ignoring the thousands of desperate refugee families a couple hundred metres away would be comical if not so cruel.
Representatives of Afghan, Tamil, Fijian, Iraqi, Malaysian-Indian, Pashtun and more refugee communities were present at the rally. They and their supporters from across Australia chanted and held hundreds of homemade banners and signs on the parliament lawn.
“Last year I could not come because it is a busy time (for work). This time it’s still busy, but six of us have come. A whole assembly line is not running”, one refugee remarked.
Rupeni, a Fijian construction worker, drove three days from Western Australia to the capital for the protest. “We’re here to knock on Albanese’s door and remind him what he promised to us”, he told Red Flag. 
Rupeni is one of an estimated 12,000 refugees excluded from the government’s Resolution of Status visa program, which provides a path to permanent residency for 19,000 people on temporary protection visas.
Mohammed, an Iraqi who arrived before 2013, said that he has spent more than $35,000 on legal fees yet didn’t secure a visa—but others who arrived on the same boat did. “I don’t understand”, he said. “Why am I less of a human being?”
It’s unsurprising that so many refugees are confused. Many campaigned for the ALP in last year’s federal election, believing that a Labor government would treat them better than the Liberals had.
Refugees are often advised—by politicians, media commentators and lawyers—to keep their heads down, be quiet and simply follow the “proper channels”. But the system is stacked against many asylum seekers because the laws on which the “proper channels” are based are unfair and unjust.
Prasanth, a Tamil refugee and nurse, spent three months in the Christmas Island concentration camp. Speaking about Priya and Nades, a Tamil couple who waged a successful campaign to be returned with their family to their home in Biloela, Queensland, he said: “They fought, and everybody knows what happened. The government tried to deport them. How did we stop that? It was protest”.
The victory of the family, who won permanent visas after a number of attempted deportations, is an example of the sort of campaigning we need to continue. Years of determined community organising and public campaigning, driven by Priya’s determination to fight the government won the family permanent residency.
They certainly didn’t wait calmly for the politicians to finish gushing about the latest episode of Married at First Sight before demanding their freedom.

Refugees demand permanent protection

Karl Marx understood the individual “as the ensemble of social relations”. Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders’ music reflects such a sentiment perfectly. It is the circumstances of social upheaval which allowed the innovative jazz saxophonist to play a revolutionary role in jazz like few others.
Born 1940 in segregated Arkansas to a working-class family, Sanders lived through the racism of the post-war American South and the immense hope of the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. 
Sanders’ own innovations in sound were closely tied to the prevailing experimentation and struggle in the cultural life of young, radical, black America. The freeform nature of his work was more than a continuation of John Coltrane’s experiments. It was an encapsulation of the changing world around him, and Sanders was conscious of this fact. Sanders saw “black music [as] the lifestyle of black people as expressed in sound rather than words”.
Sanders focused on immersive group interaction rather than the winding solos of Coltrane, an innovation to freeform jazz paralleling the rise of radical, collective politics in Black America. He drew inspiration from his social environment: “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.”
New York in the civil rights period was an explosive cauldron of ideas, politics and action. A common call for revolution—although in an often-confused, sometimes spiritual, sometimes nationalist, sometimes socialist form—was in vogue. It had the highest urban population of African Americans at the time when Sanders, carrying little but a saxophone held together by “rubber bands all over it [and] wax paper” moved to the bustling metropolis in 1961.
He was usually homeless, despite playing with greats like Don Cherry, Coltrane and Sun Ra. He worked to eat, and was in close contact with both the Maoism of the Black Panthers and an increasingly popular African spiritualism, as well as the growing militancy of the Black working class. 
The bellowing, firm and assertive performance of 1967s Tauhid is a prime example of Sanders’ early work. Recorded before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr and the violent repression of the black panthers by law enforcement, his tenor playing gives the sense of movement, of advance against a relatively rigid percussion. 
His leading saxophone is empathetically withdrawn, allowing the performances of his band to progress naturally yet firmly, inevitably prompted towards progress and his “Africa”—a metaphor for peace and freedom as much as veneration of his identity as an African American man in the racist US.
Sanders’ work both reflected and helped shape the changing black urban consciousness. Black America was caught between the urgent, explosive inspiration of the national liberation struggles in the global south and the pessimism of a defeated civil rights movement. A new world was possible, many concluded, but not today.
The creative chaos of 1971s’ Thembi exemplifies this contradictory new mood. It tosses aside conventions of tone and tempo to encourage a swirling soundscape of competitive yet harmonious character: cowbells strike against long winded saxophone solos. Through the process of their dialogue, they settle their differences and join together in unity.
Unity was the central point that Sanders returned to throughout his 60-year career and over the course of his more than 35 albums. He never abandoned a genuine optimism that the world could be changed, and strife and suffering ended. It is still the struggle against this horrific system of exploitation which can realise for humanity the creativity, emancipation and unity which Pharoah Sanders reached for so beautifully. “If you’re in the song, keep on playing”.

Pharoah Sanders, 1940-2022

Moreland Council librarians, home care workers, gardeners and waste collection workers—members of the Australian Services Union and the Municipal and Utilities Workers Union—are taking industrial action.
The action is in response to a pathetic 1.75 percent average annual pay rise offered over the next four years, which given rapidly rising inflation will result in a significant pay cut in real terms, as well as worse working conditions in the new industrial agreement the Council is trying to force through.
Moreland Council is in Melbourne’s inner north and like other inner city areas is rapidly gentrifying. It includes trendy Brunswick as well as more working-class areas with large migrant communities like Coburg and Fawkner. The Council area overlaps with the federal electorate of Wills, which Red Flag contributor Emma Black <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EmmaBlackforWills">will be contesting</a> as the Victorian Socialists candidate in the upcoming federal election.
The Greens are the largest force on the Council and hold the position of Mayor. When workers held a stop work rally outside the Brunswick Town Hall on 4 May, however, they were absent—having previously released a statement on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MorelandGreens">Moreland Greens Facebook page</a> explaining that “The Victorian Labor Government has capped rate rises, making it harder for Councils to raise the necessary revenue to continue to deliver quality community services, facilities and infrastructure”.
While the statement highlights that Greens members “support people’s right to strike and take industrial action”, this hasn’t prevented the Council employing expensive non-union contractors to collect garbage piling up along Sydney Road and other areas due to the workers’ action.
It also didn’t stop the Greens ex-mayor of Moreland and current federal candidate for Calwell Natalie Abboud calling on residents, via the Facebook group “Brunswick Fairly Good Karma Network”, to scab on the strike by picking up rubbish themselves and declaring to those who had done so already: “I love you”.
More than 500 of the 850 workers employed by the Council are involved in some form of industrial action. This includes a hard picket line preventing access by scabs to the Council’s garbage depot in Hadfield.
The 4 May stop work rally, attended by around 200 people, marked the first time most of the Council’s library staff had been on strike. They were supported by other striking Council workers, community members and socialists. The most remarkable part of the rally was the blue-collar and white-collar workers who had never met one another standing side by side, hugging and joking to each other—clearly excited to be having a fight with the same boss and recognising their shared interests.
The library workers’ action has been building-up since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Up until a few years ago, union meetings took place only quarterly and usually involved only five core activists. Campaigns around health and safety leading up to and during the pandemic have helped workers build up their confidence to fight around wages and other issues. Union activism has grown consistently, and today union meetings involve a big portion of the workforce and take place every fortnight or whenever there’s a campaign to discuss.
“At the very start of negotiations”, one worker told Red Flag, “we were told that they [management] wouldn’t budge. Well our actions have made them budge ... It’s all about building confidence slowly—people know their shit, they know what needs to change, it’s about giving them the space to take that initiative”.
The waste collection workers displayed similar confidence. They knew they had worked every day through the pandemic and that they were owed far more than the Council bosses were offering them.
Whether the strikers win their demands is yet to be seen, but the worker who spoke to Red Flag advised that we should “watch this space”. Given their determination to organise and fight back against the garbage deal they’ve been offered, here’s hoping other workers will too!

South Korean struggle through the life and tragic death of Bang Yeong-hwan (1968-2023)

When workers ran the film industry: Tokyo 1946-48

Refugees demand permanent protection

Pharoah Sanders, 1940-2022

Moreland Council workers strike against garbage wage offer

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