The following is a summary of the new introduction written by Nick Reich for a reprint of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/revolutionaries-they-could-not-break">Revolutionaries They Could Not Break</a> by Ngo Van, published by Red Flag Books.
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Colonial rule in Indochina stands as one of the most grotesque monuments to capitalism’s capacity for systematic torture, cruelty and humiliation of masses of people. The price paid by the Vietnamese people for the forceful imposition of French imperialism was desperately high. 
During the war of occupation in the mid-1800s, the French dispossessed tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants of their only means of subsistence: their land. As they vanquished the much less well-equipped Vietnamese defending armies, they concentrated that stolen land into the hands of French settlers and Vietnamese collaborators. Those peasants lucky enough to hold onto their farms suffered the economic burden of much greater taxes, rents, debts and forced labour for the French colonial authorities. Under the new colonial regime, the French managed the inevitable resistance stoked by their system of exploitation through a sprawling network of police spies and torture prisons. 
But French colonisation also laid the social basis for its own demise. In order to make as much profit as possible from the colony, the French state encouraged investment and urbanisation. Under torturous working conditions, a modern rural working class developed in the mines and rubber plantations alongside an urban proletariat and middle-class intellectuals in the cities. With increased education, compact organisation and social power, these forces provided leadership to the hyper-exploited peasantry in their struggle against colonialism. 
The Vietnamese intellectuals were barred from any serious advancement in the colonial state bureaucracy. The French suffocated the development of a free press, independent schools or any other associations they suspected could become subversive. This left only low-level teaching or civil service jobs open to educated Vietnamese. Urban intellectuals articulated their frustrations at being held back and their anguish at the humiliation of their people through nationalism. 
The early modern nationalists in Vietnam looked to advanced countries like France or Japan as models to emulate. They sought to supplant the French as ruling class through elitist methods. One camp embraced conspiratorial terror and the other advocated gradualist lobbying for reforms, hoping France would honour its ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Both methods stalled by the 1920s. 
In the inter-war years, many Vietnamese students in France searched for ways to overcome the failures of the earlier generations of nationalists. They found inspiration in the 1917 Russian Revolution. They viewed it as an answer to the unique problems they faced in a colonised and underdeveloped country. Workers’ taking power in Russia demonstrated that even a small but concentrated industrial working class in a majority peasant country could seize and hold state power to begin the transition towards socialism. 
But the Russian Revolution was an inspiration not just because it was an underdeveloped country. Tsarist Russia was an empire in its own right, often referred to as “the prison-house of nations”. The new workers’ state inherited this imperial structure and almost immediately affirmed the right for all oppressed nations to self-determination, up to and including secession. The Russian revolutionaries also established the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to attract, lead and organise revolutionaries in other countries to foment workers’ revolutions elsewhere. The early Comintern congresses, in appealing to revolutionaries in colonised countries, laid out their support for national self-determination as a fundamental democratic right and as a means to build international workers’ revolution. They also emphasised the importance of maintaining the independence of revolutionary workers’ parties from pro-capitalist, nationalist forces. 
Unfortunately, international workers’ revolutions did not follow in the footsteps of the Russians, so by the mid-1920s, the revolution was isolated and degenerating under the weight of invasion, famine and economic collapse. Over time, a state bureaucracy came to substitute itself for mass workers’ democracy. This counter-revolutionary process expressed itself politically in Joseph Stalin’s rise to power. Stalin rationalised the increasingly undemocratic, state-capitalist form of rule and turned Communist parties around the world from organisers of international revolution to geopolitical satellites for Soviet Russia. 
This was cruelly demonstrated when a revolutionary struggle broke out in China in 1927. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was prepared to play a leading role in organising workers to challenge for power just as the Russian workers had a decade before. Stalin ordered that they subordinate themselves to the pro-capitalist, anti-colonial nationalist party, the Kuomintang. This was a cynical reversal from what the Comintern had propagated in early congresses. Tragically, the Kuomintang betrayed the Communists as soon as they took power and slaughtered tens of thousands of them. 
Among the Vietnamese students in France, the success and then degeneration of the Russian Revolution created two hostile camps of Vietnamese communists in the 1920s. On one side were the followers of Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. His politics were more influenced by the Comintern during its degeneration into a foreign policy arm of the Russian state than by its revolutionary period. He was a die-hard Stalinist. He adopted the perspective that the socialist revolution in Vietnam was not on the immediate agenda, and so the key task for communists was to support and develop the forces of nationalism. Where he did fight for “socialism”, he identified that with the one-party dictatorship of Stalin: a powerful state exploiting workers and peasants to drive industrial development.
On the other side were the followers of Ta Thu Thau. He began as a nationalist, leading the Annamite Independence Party in the mid-1920s. Ta Thu Thau watched the revolution of 1927 closely, and was repelled by the Kuomintang and the Comintern’s directions to the CCP demanding servile submission. His reading of Leon Trotsky’s critiques of Stalinism, particularly his articles about the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, converted Ta Thu Thau and his followers to the politics of Trotskyism. 
Both of these camps attempted to build mass parties to fight for their politics in Vietnam during the 1930s, particularly in the most industrialised city, Saigon. Initially, both Trotskyists and Stalinists agreed to unite around the newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle) and a joint electoral ticket in the local municipal council. This Stalinist-Trotskyist alliance was tested in a major struggle that broke out following the election of a Socialist Party-led government in France in 1936. 
 
Intellectuals, workers and peasants expected a more liberal colonial policy from this government. La Lutte used these raised expectations and relative freedoms to propose “action committees”. These committees were bodies in which Vietnamese workers and peasants discussed their grievances and formulated demands. Just as the action committees began to stall, a strike wave spread across all major industries in Vietnam from mid-1936 to mid-1937. La Lutte played a leading role in this strike wave. But as it spread, the French government shifted decisively towards repression. 
Friction grew between the Stalinists and Trotskyists in these years. Ta Thu Thau and the Trotskyists wanted to denounce the mass arrests and reactionary policies of the rightward-moving French government. But the Stalinists, loyally following Moscow’s orders to help keep the French government as a Soviet ally, refused to condemn it. In late 1937, the Stalinists were directed to leave La Lutte.
Freed from the Stalinists’ conservative influence, the Trotskyists grew their prestige. In the 1939 Saigon Municipal Council elections, the Trotskyists won 80 percent of the vote. 
Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War II, the ascendancy of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France and Japan’s occupation of Vietnam all combined to suppress and break up the Trotskyists’ organisation after 1939. These historical developments also created a revolutionary situation in which Ho Chi Minh’s forces rode to power.
In the dying days of their doomed war effort, the Japanese redirected rice from the Mekong Delta to use as fuel for their power stations. As a result, about a million Vietnamese peasants died. Seeing that the war was coming to an end, Ho Chi Minh called on starving peasants to storm rice warehouses and resist taxes, winning mass support. That support enabled his forces, organised in the Viet Minh, to enter Hanoi unopposed after Japan’s surrender in August 1945. On 2 September, Ho declared independence to a crowd of half a million. 
But they fought the French attempts to take back their colony with one arm tied behind their back. Stalin had agreed with the US and Britain to restore French rule in Indochina. Since France lacked troops, the Allies agreed that the British would take over in the south as a stopgap. When British forces arrived in Saigon, the Communist leaders, acting on Moscow’s instructions, welcomed them as anti-fascist allies. 
Needless to say, freeing Vietnam was the last thing on the minds of the British. The British commander, General Douglas Gracey, turned on the Communists and their nationalist allies. Gracey freed and rearmed Japanese forces and French colonials, then drove the Viet Minh and its nationalist allies out of every government building, killing all who resisted. In response, the people of Saigon rose in revolt. Workers, Trotskyists, Buddhists and communists who rejected compromise with the British seized weapons and held the working-class suburbs for days. Ultimately, the French would overpower them and retake the city, but even as they retreated from French attacks, the Stalinists continued to arrest and kill thousands of Trotskyists. Under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh wiped out the entire Vietnamese Trotskyist movement along with many militant workers.
Revolutionaries They Could Not Break documents this history. It is a tragedy written by an exiled participant, Ngo Van, four and a half decades after the events took place. His attention to naming so many of the Trotskyists who fought and died, and his careful account-keeping of the crimes of the Stalinists, all read like a cry for the world never to forget what happened. Such an appeal we must heed. The heroism and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyists represent more than just a footnote in the grander narrative of Vietnam’s history—they fought for a path not taken and embodied a spirit upon which the counter-revolution had to pile mountains of scorn and rubble in order to suffocate it for future generations. 
Ngo’s book is a political argument about the lessons of their experiences as much as it is a demand to remember.

Nick Reich

Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

Reconciliation Day in Canberra last year was ice cold, the air thick with fog. For 232 days, Israel had been indiscriminately bombing the people of Gaza. For 28 days, hundreds of students and staff had maintained a protest encampment on Kambri lawns, the heart of the Australian National University campus, demanding that the administration cut ties with Israel and condemn the genocide. ANU managers had spent the month slandering the protest and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-16/act-palestine-anu-gaza-encampment-members-ordered-to-vacate/103858184">suspending student activists</a> involved in the encampment. 
It was Monday morning, 27 May; the university bosses finally decided that they could no longer tolerate the encampment in such a prominent position. Their official justification was that we were blocking a fire evacuation point, and the backup evacuation point just would not do. In truth, they wanted the protest out of sight. 
Dozens of security guards and a handful of police officers arrived to serve the students with an evacuation notice. Those awakened by this order initially complied. Ambushed and outnumbered at 7am, they began dismantling the tents. The media soon arrived to witness the supervised self-destruction. 
Yet, as the morning fog cleared and the sun came out, a handful of students sat down in defiance and began chanting: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest!” More spontaneously joined, sitting around the camping gear, which had now been packed down, linking arms and chanting. The circle of hi-vis security guards retreated as supporters surged closer to the first movers and joined in the chanting. 
More police arrived. Blue and white chequered vans, cars and motorbikes pulled up across the creek to establish a “command centre” about a hundred metres away. Security was no longer fit for the task, so ANU had called in the cavalry. 
Meanwhile, the students had now convened a meeting. Did we want to stare down the police, risking arrest, to defend the camp? After a brief discussion, we took a vote. The decision was close to unanimous—we would not move. 
Some volunteers sifted through the crowd to write the phone number of a supportive lawyer on the arms of everyone willing to get arrested. Those who preferred not to face arrest stepped off the grass and formed a human chain around the camp. About a hundred sat ready to be dragged off in a divvy van, and a few hundred more stood with their arms linked in an unbroken chain around the perimeter. People with megaphones were stationed throughout the picket line, leading songs and chants to keep spirits high. 
We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s planted by the water
We shall not be moved.
But after several hours, the ultimatum finally came. Two of us were given the job of police liaisons. We walked to their “command centre” next to the creek and were told that the university was prepared to offer a second location for the camp, a few hundred metres up the path. If we refused to move there by 3pm, we would be arrested. We went back to the camp and relayed what the officer had said. We took another vote. “Knowing what we just told you, who is committed to staying?” Everyone cheered. I passed their message back to the officer. 
The deadline came and went. We kept checking our watches. Eventually, at 4pm or so, an officer marched to a spot across from the camp and placed a small speaker on the ground to announce an official directive: that everyone must vacate Kambri lawns by 11am Tuesday or face arrest. 
We had forced the police to back down—for now. Every cop van, car and bike left the campus, and we were left to debrief. We fought the law and, for a moment, we won. 
Later, we heard that the university had issued a directive to all students to avoid the Kambri precinct the following day, and that businesses in the precinct were instructed to shut down in preparation for a major police operation. But we also heard from some unionists that workers on ANU construction sites were organising to walk off the job in solidarity with us. 
We put a call out to every community group we could think of to mobilise the next day and support us against mass arrests. The university managers were preparing to escalate the situation—but we had won once, and the mood was that we could win again. 
Yet, after hours of debate, several votes and a thinning out of people in the camp, the scared and tired few who remained at around midnight finally voted to accept the university’s directive. The anticipated showdown never came. Construction workers still walked off the job. Students, community members and reporters still showed up the next day in expectation. But the police didn’t need to return—they scored their victory through intimidation. 
This wasn’t the end, however. The camp continued in its new location for 83 more days. By the end of the year, there had been several general meetings, countless rallies, a referendum and one of the longest campus protest encampments in the country—all demanding divestment from Israel and weapons companies supplying the Israeli military. 
Under pressure, the university reversed the suspensions and expulsions of student activists and <a href="https://www.woroni.com.au/news/anu-to-divest-from-controversial-weapons-manufacturers-but-questions-remain/">promised to divest</a> from “controversial weapons companies”. Exactly which companies were “controversial” was never clarified, and no updates have been provided since that promise was made. They have not yet condemned the genocide in Gaza or cut ties with Israel.
The fight for a free Palestine continues, but the strength of our side is nourished by small acts of defiance and partial victories like the one we scored last year on Kambri lawns.

When Palestine solidarity protesters defied police at the ANU

Michael Hiscox, the acting secretary of the ACT branch of the CFMEU, was removed from his position and replaced by an unelected bureaucrat on 13 May. This came nine months after the union’s national office was put under <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-set-to-impose-dictatorial-powers-over-construction-union">administration</a>
by the federal Labor government, which removed the right of union members to elect their officials. 
Labor justified its attack on the union by referring to media reports about alleged criminal behaviour in the union. There have been no allegations of such behaviour in the ACT branch, which, along with Western Australia, was not placed under administration last year. 
The consequences of Mark Irving’s appointment as administrator are clear to anyone in doubt. Replacing elected officials with appointed administrators across every branch has brought restrictions on organisers’ and members’ rights to raise criticisms within the CFMEU and shape the union’s direction—an atmosphere unconducive to the kind of confident and militant organising that construction workers need to defend their working conditions and rates of pay. 
“Labor has learned [from the deregistration of the BLF] how to best attack our union through this administration system: by passing a law that removes any unfair dismissal law for officials who get sacked for no reason”, Dusty Miller, a local CFMEU member and former member of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, told Red Flag. “Under the administration, there is no democracy. There is no ability for the union to have their own elections.” 
The union’s former national secretary, Zach Smith, recently proposed a restructure to expand the role of the CFMEU’s national office. Less than two weeks before being removed from his position, Hiscox cosigned a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16NnxuTg4v/">statement</a> opposing the restructure, stating that it “would only deprive rank and file members of having a voice in the way that their Union is run”. 
So, what reason has Irving given for his intervention in the ACT branch? There are no charges of criminal activity, credible or otherwise, and no accusations of corruption or misconduct. The reason given was a drop in membership and a small budget deficit. But the union has plenty of cash reserves and a solid, loyal membership base—hardly a crisis.
Even if the branch were in crisis, government intervention would not be the solution. Its most likely effect will be the same as administration has had in every other branch: putting compliant organisers in positions of power while promoting fear and passivity in everyone else. 
Miller said that many members have voiced their disgust at the move. 
“We now have a person called Ben Davison sitting in the branch secretary’s office in Canberra, who doesn’t have a clue about anything with our industry, who doesn’t understand construction”, he said. “To me, it’s a payback to Michael and our branch because we stood up to this [centralisation] plan.”
The demotion of Hiscox should stand as clear proof that “cleaning up criminal or corrupt behaviour” was not the overriding purpose of the sackings, restrictions and centralisation. It was about disciplining a union with some industrial strength by punishing anyone speaking out. 
Zach Smith announced on 22 May that he would step down as national secretary, presumably because of backlash against the proposed centralisation plan. It’s unclear what this means for the plan’s viability, but there will undoubtedly be ongoing pressure on people like Hiscox who speak out against the administration. 
Miller has a clear message for members facing the degradation of their union’s democracy: “Stay strong and united. Stay strong and push back”.

Attack on democracy in the ACT CFMEU

Students at the Australian National University in Canberra have defeated an attempt by campus Labor clubs to abolish the environment collective. 
Almost 300 students attended a mass meeting on 26 March, at which the new ANU Students’ Association executive, representing both factions of the ALP student clubs, tried to amend the constitution to create a committee in place of the collective, strip 80 percent of its budget, place the new committee under strict executive oversight and strip students of the right to vote at meetings. 
The pretext for such a brazen assault on environmental activism came from an audit conducted by a consultancy firm last year. The firm, NFP Success, specialises in advising not-for-profit organisations on how to “reach new levels of excellence”. 
Yet student unions are not like other NGOs. Nor should they be. Student unions are activist bodies steeped in a democratic culture and shaped by leading fights for justice. The environment collective has a 50-year history of supporting campaigns such as the anti-war movement when the US and Australia invaded Iraq, the Woomera Detention Centre refugee breakout, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the climate strikes and the Palestine solidarity movement. 
Auditors like NFP Success have no sympathy for this history, as its recommendations show. While the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was still active last year, its governance review claimed that there had been “too much focus on pro-Palestine campaigning” and argued: “[I]t is crucial the president avoids becoming too involved in divisive political campaigns”. 
The new ANUSA executive has its own reasons for opposing the environment collective. The ALP student clubs are stacked with careerist apparatchiks loyally promoting party policy, such as support for fossil fuel expansion and Israel’s war on Gaza. The consultant’s report provided a pretext for them to go on the offensive. They froze the collective’s funds earlier this year and drafted constitutional changes to abolish it. This semester, they have publicly argued that students can’t be trusted to run the collective. 
Our victory was not guaranteed. The traditions of activist student unionism are not as strong as they used to be. And anti-activist arguments cloaked in legalism can always find an audience on university campuses. The ANUSA executive had the resources of the student union behind it, sending out several official all-student emails. It also had sizeable social networks through which to call in favours. Supporters of the ANUSA executive were even found to be bribing students with offers of free beers in exchange for their votes.
The fightback coalition included Socialist Alternative members, students from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the No Cuts at ANU campaign and, of course, members of the environment collective. 
We handed out leaflets around the campus, put up posters, made announcements in lectures, called around stay-in-touch lists and built networks through WhatsApp group chats. 
We only needed 25 percent of the vote to defeat the attack, but we won 42 percent. Importantly, our vote represented students who were won to a vision of left-wing, democratic, activist student unionism. 
Those traditions are more important now than ever as we stare down historic staff cuts, the threat of a rising far right inspired by Donald Trump, and the rolling catastrophes of climate disaster and war.

How we saved the ANU environment collective

Workers feeling the sharp end of employer attacks on wages and conditions are doing it tough this Christmas. Coal miners at Oaky North in Queensland have been locked out since July. Workers at Esso’s Longford gas plant near Sale, Victoria, have been on strike since June, and maintenance workers at the Griffin coal mine in Collie, Western Australia, have been out since August. All are trying to defend hard-won entitlements.
Red Flag spoke to Collie maintenance workers, members of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), a few days before Christmas. Like most coal mining towns, Collie has a strong union tradition. When we arrived to find the picket empty, we asked the nearest group of people wearing hi-vis for help. They turned out to be unionists who worked at a local power plant.
“We’re all socialists here”, said the first person we spoke to, who gave us a beer each and called everyone he knew to get us in touch with the strikers. Soon, we were sitting down with a group of Griffin maintenance workers in the office of the local Labor MLA, himself a former coal worker.
The cause of the strike was the company’s decision to terminate its enterprise agreement in June 2016. The maintenance workers’ contract reverted to the award minimum, meaning an immediate 43 percent pay cut on a per-hour basis, and loss of entitlements. But even this wasn’t enough for Griffin.
“We believe the company has been manipulating the award”, said one striker. “One blatant one was they didn’t recognise Christmas Day and ANZAC day as public holidays.” Griffin also refused to pay sick leave on Sundays, demanded an unreasonable amount of overtime, and implemented a new family-unfriendly roster.
“It was evil. They’d done their best to make it as mean as possible.”
After a year on the award, with Griffin management showing no sign of wanting to negotiate a new agreement, the maintenance workers voted to walk out the gate to demand a new contract.
They were feeling the strain at Christmas after months without pay.
“I guess it’s a bit emotional for a lot of people now that it’s Christmas and perhaps you can’t do what you did with your family or for your kids or for others”, said one maintenance worker.
“Financially we’re hamstrung”, said another. “The guys that have got a big mortgage, kids and all that sort of thing, it does take its toll. You definitely tighten the purse strings for when its Christmas time.”
Donations from other unions and the community have kept them going, with two unions bringing Christmas presents for school-age kids from the affected families.
The strike is now the longest in Western Australian coal mining history, a record the maintenance workers never intended to set.
“Even we wouldn’t have expected to be here for this long. But they’re more than happy to string it out. They would love us to crumble.” Another chimed in: “You get the feeling that they’re trying to starve us out”.
For Griffin, the dispute seems to have become as much about teaching the unionists a lesson as it is about the money. In November, the company pulled its own offer from the table when the parties were close to reaching an agreement. The maintenance workers have been replaced with scab contractors paid more than what the strikers are asking, and Griffin has spent a fortune on legal fees. All this while the company says the strikers’ demands are unaffordable. One worker summed up Griffin’s attitude:
“Since we’ve been so strong and our camaraderie’s been really good, because they haven’t been able to break us and we’ve still been together, I think it’s a personal vendetta … to make sure they get the job done by ultimately smashing us … You just sort of get the idea that because we’ve said no to ’em on every turn and we just want that little bit of a better deal, now they’ve made it personal and they’re just out there to punish us.”
Everyone we spoke to expressed frustration at the rigged industrial laws. The picketers are not attempting to blockade the mine or stop production. Fair Work has threatened massive fines if they do.
“They can impose a loss on us but we can’t impose a loss on them … Fair Work doesn’t work”, was how one striker summed it up. “If only we could turn the power off for a week”, said another. “Imagine that! I’m sure somebody would ring!”
Despite the hardship, there is determination. The Collie strikers know that they are part of a nation-wide battle to maintain hard-won rights. Their message for the strikers at Esso and Oaky North was simple: “Stick together, stay strong … We’re really proud that they can stick together. And actually it gives us good morale too to keep on going”.
Red Flag also visited the picket line outside Esso’s Longford gas plant in Victoria. The workers there, also members of the AMWU, walked out in June over a new contract that offered a 30 percent pay cut. They also lost their roster arrangements of one week on, one week off and faced two, three or even four weeks in a row at the whim of management.
“This fight goes well beyond our own self-interests”, said Malcolm, an AMWU delegate at Esso, speaking of the fight to maintain wages and conditions across the country. “Basically, our resolve is so strong because we are in the right; we won’t succumb to their bullying and intimidation.”
The Esso strikers’ resolve is impressive, with pickets continuing without breaks over Christmas and New Year’s. “It’s so rewarding to be able to stand together with everyone and fight for our rights, even at Christmas”, said Malcolm. “It’s a comfort in itself to know that what we’re fighting for is a better place.”
The workers at Esso have also come face to face with the rigged industrial laws. Not only could they face fines if scabs were blocked from the workplace, but Fair Work has threatened them for simply raising their voices. On 21 December, a court injunction banned the workers from using a megaphone or derogatory language towards scabs.
About 20 workers have also received letters banning them from any property owned by Exxon-Mobil (Esso is the Australian affiliate of Exxon-Mobil), effectively blacklisting them from future work with Esso. This comes after 24/7 surveillance of the picket line by the company.
One Esso worker said his dad was arrested three times in a past dispute for lying on the road to stop scabs from crossing a picket line. “That’s why we’re out here”, he said. “Everything we have, someone’s old man got arrested for. We can’t just give it up – it wouldn’t be right.”
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To help out the workers at Oaky North, Collie and Gippsland, chip in to the Union families appeal: <a href="https://www.australianunions.org.au/union_families" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://www.australianunions.org.au/union_families</a>.

Lewis Todman

Christmas on the picket line

There’s not much being held back in the jeers hurled from the picket to those crossing the line to work. At the union protest outside the Longford gas plant in Gippsland, accusations that scabs “betray the spirit of Eureka” are directed towards those in sight of the picket line among a cacophony of recorded monkey noises and other cries from the crowd. 
A sombre call, “Remember 1998!” rings from one megaphone, referencing the catastrophic explosion at the plant that killed two workers. Everyone on the picket has heard the reports that a few weeks ago, one of the strikebreakers made a mistake that brought the plant close to another disaster of the same scale. 
After almost 150 days picketing, the energy and dedication of these sacked maintenance workers remains solid, seemingly unshakable. It’s clear that their resolve is buoyed by their understanding of the significance of this dispute. 
“We want to stop other companies using the same tactics to undermine their workers, because if we allow this to keep on happening, soon there’ll be nothing left”, explains Troy, a maintenance worker on the Bass Strait oil rig and an Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union delegate. 
Troy, like the others, was employed by UGL, which has the maintenance contract for the jointly owned Exxon Mobile-BHP oil rig and gas processing plant. The dispute started almost five months ago when UGL sacked Troy and around 200 other skilled maintenance workers. It offered them their jobs back if they agreed to work under an inferior enterprise agreement. 
It’s an aggressive tactic intended to break the back of a well-unionised workforce and wreck the wages and conditions fought for and won over decades of struggle. The company has successfully employed the same strategy at a number of sites UGL is contracted to maintain, including at Altona in Melbourne and Darwin. 
The agreement UGL is trying to force its workers onto would cut wages by 30 percent and introduce an open-ended roster that would allow the company to roster them for two, three or more weeks straight before they can access one week off. Even then the company wants the power to cancel that one week if it deems it necessary.
A roster like this has been blamed for a raft of suicides at the Inpex LNG plant currently under construction in Western Australia. Refusing to be blackmailed into signing away their wages and conditions, the workers rejected taking their jobs back on the company’s terms. Instead, with the support of their unions, the AMWU, ETU and AWU, they immediately set up a protest site outside the plant.
I was at Longford on day 148 of the picket, and the mood was resolute. Only a minority of the sacked workers have gone back to work; most are holding out. The entrance to the picket is adorned with Eureka flags and the painted shipping container from the CUB picket last year, a reminder of the nearly identical 185-day dispute that ended with a victory at the brewery in Abbottsford. 
Referencing the CUB dispute is a reminder, not just that victory is possible, but also that this is not an isolated battle. These workers can see that bosses everywhere are exploiting industrial laws to push down wages and conditions. They are conscious that the push back will be led by the best organised sites, like their own. “If we continue to fight this, with the support we’re getting, we’ll fight until we win”, Troy says confidently. 
As lunch rolls around, a crowd of construction workers in orange coveralls stream into the picket and share sausages from the barbecue with us. They’re building a new section of the plant nearby. Every day they share lunch with the picketers. They also each make a generous weekly donation to the strike fund, which Troy says “keeps them going”. Speaking about the importance of a win, one of the construction workers says, “This is just the start of it; if it happens here, then we’ll see it at the next EBA and the next and the next”.
This image of dominoes falling seems to fit what’s happening here. Management has picked off section by section of the workforce and tried to isolate the Longford workers. This is why the solidarity of other workers and the support of the community are key to maintaining the determination of the picketers. “Sometimes you’ve got to take a stand and fight for a cause”, says the construction worker, “this is a fight worth fighting”.

Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

When Palestine solidarity protesters defied police at the ANU

Attack on democracy in the ACT CFMEU

How we saved the ANU environment collective

Christmas on the picket line

Longford gas dispute: ‘a fight worth fighting’

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