Donald Trump is on a rampage against workers in the United States. According to the 2025 Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation, the new administration has “taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers”. Trump has stripped protections and bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public sector workers and paralysed the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ rights to organise and join unions. And he’s just getting started.
The US union movement is historically weak. Strike rates remain at decades-long lows. Union density has steadily declined from a peak of 35 percent in 1954, recording a new low in every decade since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10 percent of all workers are now in unions. This obviously poses challenges for the workers’ movement, particularly for workers who want to organise against Trump’s reactionary agenda.
Red Flag’s Ryan Stanton spoke to Joe Burns—a labour lawyer, union activist and bargaining negotiator since the 1990s—about where the US union movement has gone wrong and what needs to change. Burns recently completed negotiations for 27,000 United Airlines employees and Association of Flight Attendants members. He has written three books on labour organising: <a href="https://www.igpub.com/strike-back/">Strike Back</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Reviving-Strike-Working-Transform-America/dp/1935439243">Reviving the Strike</a>, and <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/class-struggle-unionism">Class Struggle Unionism</a>.
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What is the state of the American labour movement in the era of Donald Trump?
It’s obviously a difficult period with Trump in office. He has unleashed attacks on immigrant workers and workers in the federal government. But the problem is much bigger than just Trump. The United States has seen a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to trade unions. Only six out of 100 private sector workers now belong to unions. While there are flashes of success here and there, the reality is that the labour movement has been stuck for decades.
This is in large part because we’ve abandoned the principles of class struggle unionism. We put a lot of money into organising, but we’ve been unable to convince workers to join our weak and ineffective unions. We were told that when Democrats like Biden got in and we had a new NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], things would be different. But the similarities between presidential administrations over the last few decades outweigh the differences. The decline in union membership has continued at an equal rate under both Republicans and Democrats. All the Democrats have done is change some rules around the margins. 
We’re not going to revive the labour movement this way. The union reform movement and the left within the labour movement are the weakest that I’ve seen in decades. Certain sectors of the economy and certain states are better organised, but I think the crisis is pretty much throughout the labour movement in the entire country. There are a lot of fuzzy ideas about teaching organising approaches, as if that’s our problem. 
We really need a complete revamp of approach. Labour’s decline is not fundamentally a product of one party or another—they are both capitalist parties. It reflects a deeper problem with the labour movement. What we really lack are the principles of class struggle unionism and how we fight both inside and outside of our unions to take on the capitalist class. And I think it starts with the left of the labour movement coming to grips with the crisis that we face and what it’s going to take to move forward. That’s the fundamental problem. 
My first two books focused on reviving the strike in both the public and private sectors. My most recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, focuses on the internal problems within the labour movement, including our inability to confront the shifting regimes of labour law, the legal restrictions on the right to strike, worker self-activity and so on. Although my knowledge of the Australian union movement is somewhat limited, I do try to follow things over there and it seems that both union movements face similar problems. 
How have the unions approached the Trump administration?
Well, obviously Trump is doing this sort of right-wing populism thing. He’s certainly won over a base with his tariffs and protectionism, which have an appeal to auto workers and steelworkers, who have been decimated by decades of neoliberal attacks and the elimination of protections for workers. Many liberal labour leaders are aghast that Sean Fain from the UAW [United Auto Workers] and others support the tariffs. However, we spent a lot of the 1990s fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade agreements that were geared towards allowing corporations to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without regard for workers. These agreements allow capitalists to exploit workers around the world, while eroding manufacturing unionism. 
So, it’s not surprising to me that some of these unions support tariffs. It’s economic nationalism, but it’s also rooted in material reality in which workers have faced job losses. They’ve felt the effects of an era of neoliberalism that was spearheaded in many ways by the Democratic establishment. However, the tariffs are not going to fix things. To the extent you support them and take a narrow, sectional point of view, you cut yourself off from your natural allies and move away from class struggle unionism. In the worst case, you end up like the Teamsters [one of the largest unions in the US], who have been cosying up to Trump. This is an abandonment of working-class principles. 
Has there been much opposition to the Trump administration from the union movement?
For the most part, the union leaders oppose Trump—at least rhetorically. To be fair, while the UAW came out with qualified support for Trump’s tariffs, they have fought him on other issues. Although we’ve seen some protests, there hasn’t yet been the same kind of opposition we saw during his first term. I think he came on so ferociously that it put people on the back foot. While the union movement is participating in smaller, localised protests, I wouldn’t say they are doing much to seriously oppose Trump. 
What is the relationship between the US union movement and the Democratic Party? 
The union movement allied itself with the Democratic Party through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The unions deluded themselves into thinking they had an important role in business and government. They have the trappings of power, but not real power. Over the years, the labour movement has allowed itself to be incorporated into the Democrats and become increasingly dependent on the state for its existence. In doing so, we’ve accepted of a lot of restrictions on unions and the right to strike. 
However, despite what we are commonly told, the Democratic Party is no ally of the labour movement. We have to keep in mind that Trump is not the first president to attack migrants or attempt to gut the federal workforce. Democratic governors called out the National Guard in the 1980s to break the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Minnesota, where I’m originally from. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, got rid of 400,000 federal worker jobs in the 1990s, probably more than they’ve cut so far with Elon Musk and DOGE. 
The problem isn’t just that the labour movement spends a tonne of money supporting Democrats, money that could go into organising. And the problem isn’t just that this offers a false path and defrays the real issues affecting workers. The real problem is that it reflects the entry of capitalist ideology into the labour movement. As Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who tried to start a labour party in the 1990s, used to say: the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one. The Democrats are a wholly corporate-funded and controlled political party. It was the Democrats’ anti-working-class policies that provided the basis for Trump’s rise to power. 
In your book Class Struggle Unionism, you loosely define three approaches to modern trade unionism: business unionism, liberal unionism and class struggle unionism. What do you mean by these terms? 
For the first 100 or so years of trade unionism, the fundamental divide was between what I call business unionism and class struggle unionism. Business unionism tended to be a narrower trade unionism, often focused on representing a group of workers under a particular employer or industry. Business unionists didn’t see themselves as having a broader role in society, and certainly not a role of transforming the relationship between workers and employers. Their slogan can be famously summed up by the slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”. 
In contrast, we have a long, rich history of class struggle unionism, which takes a fundamentally different point of view. It recognises that the source of power and privilege in society is exploitation in the workplace. Whether you’re at Starbucks, Amazon or Ford, your labour creates value during your shift. You get paid a portion of that value in wages, and the rest flows upwards to a handful of people. That’s how we get billionaires in society; that’s the source of power and privilege. 
So, if you truly want to take on the billionaire class, you have to start in the workplace by challenging exploitation. When I talk about class struggle unionists in the United States, I think of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies as they are better known, in the early 1900s. I think of the folks around the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League of the 1920s. I think of Farrell Dobbs and the Trotskyists who led the Teamsters rebellion of the 1930s. I think of the powerful, left-led international unions that came out of the 1930s, who were then decimated in the red scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 
In the 1970s, thousands of anti-war and student activists joined the new communist movement. Many of those people then joined the labour movement with a conscious viewpoint of class struggle unionism. They went into the labour movement to transform it and put it on a fighting class struggle basis. They saw the working class as critical to a broader transformation of society. A lot of those leftists who went into the labour movement in the 1970s engaged in a lot of good struggles. They were probably a bit ultra-left and spent too much time fighting each other, but I think a lot of good struggles came out of their efforts. 
However, in the 1980s, we faced a withering attack on trade unionism. We saw a wave of legal restrictions on the right to strike and on solidarity action, and the permanent replacement of striking workers. Great Britain, Australia and the United States shifted to restrain the sort of worker self-activity that had built a powerful labour movement, especially solidarity, cross-class and class-wide trade unionism. We were getting pummelled. This was one of the factors that led to the implosion of the socialist left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. A lot of these people drifted away into labour education, and some of them entered the mid-levels of the labour movement. This is when we saw the rise of the “third way” of labour liberalism in the 1980s. It was somewhat rooted in this grouping of people who were ideologically progressive or even socialist, but who began to turn away from class struggle unionism.
They hoped to straddle the two worlds of business unionism and class struggle unionism. They focused on things like the “corporate campaign” and the “organising approach”. A lot of this is rooted in the technical expertise of these sorts of mid-level staffers in the labour movement. Their politics flips from idea to idea. One minute we need social unionism, then we need broad community campaigns, then we need more trained organisers and so on. Unions have developed all sorts of alternatives to the strike, and they’ve begun to look more like NGOs than actual fighting organs of the class. In many ways, they have just walked away from the fundamental root of the crisis. 
A good example is the Service Employees International Union, which has led well-promoted campaigns to organise fast food workers. But this was all bullshit. They would lead “industrial action” that would have like 50 staffers and a handful of fired workers pretending that the workers were on strike. Some of the recent Amazon strikes were like that, too. There’s a real proliferation of these types of actions—what I call publicity strikes. Even groups such as Labor Notes talk less about the reform and how fucked up the labour movement is, and a lot more about the “secrets of the successful organisers” and “what are the techniques that organisers need?” 
Well, the problem isn’t the techniques. What we need is class struggle unionism. We need more fights with the bureaucracy that doesn’t want to engage in the sort of militant struggle that’s necessary to revive the labour movement. These bureaucrats don’t want to break with the Democratic Party or the state apparatus by violating injunctions and doing all the things that we would need to do to win and to attract workers to our movement.

Ryan Stanton

Class struggle unionism in the USA: an interview with Joe Burns

United Workers Union (UWU) members in six warehouses supplying Woolworths supermarkets across the eastern states are walking off the job this week. Industrial action of this scale is unprecedented in warehousing. The UWU has led many strikes in individual warehouses across Australia, but never this many at the same time.
The workers are striking for better wages and conditions, and for Woolworths warehouses to be covered under a single enterprise agreement. They also want to get rid of the company’s “productivity framework”, which requires all workers to meet 100 percent of targets unilaterally set by management or face harassment, discipline and, eventually, dismissal.
Warehouse work is difficult and repetitive. Each worker is expected to pick hundreds or even thousands of boxes a day to be stacked on pallets, loaded onto trucks and sent to store shelves across the state. The weight of items varies widely, from packets of chips to slabs of beer and crates of milk weighing up to 20 kilograms each. This repetitive, endless lifting and shifting of often heavy loads significantly strains the body and mind. Forklifts, loaders and other heavy machinery wizz around these pickers at ever higher rates to keep up with productivity targets. 
The workers in these warehouses experience constant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn7GtoiiLNM">surveillance and performance monitoring</a>. They are told by a computer exactly what to do at all times. They are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse">treated like robots</a>. And there is evidence that the drive towards automation may be making things more difficult, rather than easier. According to Amazon’s <a href="https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-crisis/">internal safety reports</a>, the rates of serious workplace injuries are 50 percent higher in warehouses with robots than in those without.
Finding reliable statistics on workplace injuries in warehouses is difficult, as pickers and packers are usually lumped in with truck drivers and other labourers. However, the broader statistics paint a damning picture of the industry as a whole. According to the <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/work-related-injuries/latest-release#occupation-and-industry">Australian Bureau of Statistics</a>, the transport, postal and warehousing industry suffers from the third highest workplace injury rate in the country. <a href="https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-stats-2023">Safe Work Australia</a> has found that roughly 80 percent of workplace injuries are caused by body stress: falls, slips and trips; being hit by moving objects; and mental stress. These incidents are endemic to warehouse environments and will likely only worsen under Woolworths’ drive for even higher productivity.
But it gets worse. <a href="https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-stats-2023">Safe Work Australia</a> has also found that the transport, postal and warehouse industry has the highest number of fatalities of any industry, and the second highest fatality rate. Machine operators and labourers perform the deadliest types of work. 
These statistics were <a href="https://7news.com.au/news/nsw/woolworths-worker-killed-in-horrific-pallet-accident-remembered-as-beautiful-man-c-11173079">tragically brought home</a> in 2023 when Basel “Baz” Brikha was crushed by falling pallets in the Woolworths distribution centre in Minchinbury, NSW. Basel later died in hospital. Two of his workmates suffered head injuries when they tried to help him.
These workplace tragedies result from Woolworths’ endless drive for higher profits. The company squeezes workers at one end by increasing productivity at the expense of safety, and it squeezes consumers at the other by price-gouging in the supermarkets. 
From the perspective of Woolworths investors, the strategy has worked marvellously. <a href="https://thedailyaus.com.au/stories/woolworths-group-reported-a-1-7-billion-profit-for-the-financial-year/#:~:text=The%20Woolworths%20Group%20has%20reported,0.6%25%20from%20the%20previous%20year.">The company reported</a> $1.7 billion in profits last financial year. The four leading Woolworths executives pocketed more than $8.8 million in pay, which was down on their “earnings” of $18 million the <a href="https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/content/dam/wwg/investors/reports/2023/f23-full-year/Woolworths%20Group%202023%20Annual%20Report.pdf">year before</a>. 
No doubt Woolworths’ Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre workers, who earn roughly $66,000 per year if they work 38 hours per week, will be deeply concerned about how these executives will make ends meet after this pay cut. 
Corporate greed is driving the cost-of-living crisis in Australia. Since the COVID crisis, one of the greatest transfers of wealth to the capitalist class in history has taken place. The richest 1 percent now owns half of the world’s wealth. Our side, the working class, needs to start fighting back.
That is precisely why strikes—like those beginning in Woolworths warehouses this week—are so important. Previous strikes have demonstrated the considerable industrial power of these workers. 
The just-in-time revolution has turned warehouses into gigantic logistics factories employing hundreds. All the goods that reach the hundreds of Woolworths supermarkets in each state pass through only a handful of warehouses, and little excess stock is held in the supermarkets. Deliveries from the warehouses arrive daily and go straight to store shelves. This means warehouse strikes can be incredibly disruptive. Store shelves begin to empty within a day or two, or even hours, of work stoppages.
These workers deserve the support of the entire union movement. Come to one of the picket lines in Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane. Bring your workmates, your classmates, your friends and family. Pass motions of support in your union and pass the hat around to raise money for the strike fund or to buy food to bring down to the pickets. 
Let’s show solidarity with these workers as they stick it to a corporate goliath.
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Workers at the following warehouses will be striking from Thursday morning this week:
From 12am Thursday morning:
Woolworths Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre (MSRDC), 2 Portlink Dr, Dandenong South VIC.
From 5am Thursday morning:
Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre (MLDC), 1 Interchange Dr, Laverton North VIC.
Logic Wodonga, 28 Bilston Dr, Barnawartha North VIC.
Woolworths Distribution Centre, 29 Sarah Andrews Cl, Erskine Park NSW.
From 2am Friday morning:
Lineage Cold Storage, 60-68 William Angliss Drive Laverton North VIC - from 2am Friday.
In addition, Primary Connect in Heathwood QLD, another distribution centre supplying Woolworths, will be holding stop-work mass meetings from this Friday to discuss industrial action.

Support striking Woolworths warehouse workers this week (and next)

Australian Services Union members in the Geelong public library system have achieved a hard-fought victory. After months of gruelling negotiations with management, and industrial action unprecedented for the library sector, workers finally came away with a new enterprise agreement that incorporates many of their demands.
Foremost on the workers’ list was pay. Despite Geelong’s libraries being regarded as the best in Victoria, they were ranked 45th in a field of 49 libraries in terms of pay for entry-level customer service staff. The final agreement included pay rises of more than 2 percent per year for most staff, and close to 5 percent in each of the first two years for the lowest paid staff. It is structured in such a way that entry level customer service staff, who are the lowest paid, will get an immediate increase of almost 10 percent. This will be enough to push pay at Geelong library up from 45th to roughly 20th in the state. 
Another big issue was safe car parking for staff at the central Geelong Library. There is no free car parking in central Geelong, so library staff, many of whom are women, were forced to walk 20 or 30 minutes to their cars at night when they finished their shifts. Despite the progressive image that the Geelong Regional Library Corporation (GRLC) has cultivated, management was doggedly opposed to doing anything about this during the 12 months of negotiations. In the end, however, they caved. Now, staff that finish after 8pm in non-daylight saving months are entitled to free taxis to their parked cars.
Other victories include: the early closure of libraries before public holidays with staff on full wages, strict limits of the use of short-term contracts, three-hour minimum shift lengths, paid gender-transition leave, guaranteed right to two 15-minute tea breaks in a 7-hour shift, rights for union delegates and the inclusion of delegates in staff inductions and, for the first time, Sunday and late-night penalty rates for venue hire staff.
None of this was in management’s original log of claims, which aimed to significantly roll back pay and conditions. Management initially offered no pay rise in the first two years, and 1 percent in each of the last two. They also wanted to eliminate Saturday afternoon penalty rates, reduce evening penalty rates, and increase evening and weekend work. All of these claims were eventually withdrawn.
According to union member Joey (not their real name), library staff were subjected to 18 months of stone-walling from management. Regular emails from the CEO contained thinly-veiled threats to jobs, and several staff were told their pay would be docked for amounts of time as small as 12 seconds for handing out union leaflets on the job. The CEO even sent an all-staff email to justify underpaying staff—most of whom are women—by noting that industries in which women work are usually paid less!
Staff countered this with determined, systematic industrial organising among 180 total staff across the network of 19 libraries. They repeatedly voted down offers from management which didn’t address their concerns. This culminated in two half-day stop works at the largest and most important library in central Geelong, and a 24-hour strike that included several other libraries as well. The November 24-hour strike, in particular, was a massive coup for library staff.
“So many people were only too happy to strike—a lot of people wanted to show management we were serious, and once the vote to strike was taken, it acquired a massive momentum” Joey told Red Flag. According to Joey, a total of nine of the 19 GRLC libraries were forced to close on the day. The GRLC Library Board was due to have a fully-catered meeting at the central library on the same day, which was embarrassingly forced to take place on zoom due to the strike.
Industrial action like this is unprecedented in the public library sector and it left management scrambling for a response. They were forced to remove the head of human resources from the negotiations and sack their anti-union lawyer, as it became clear that they had lost control of the situation. Patti Manolis, the notorious CEO of GRLC, was also forced to resign, and the entire executive resigned one-by-one in the months that followed.
How did library staff achieve all this in the middle of a pandemic? They handed out leaflets on the job that detailed the union’s demands, and countered managements misinformation and thinly-veiled threats. They regularly held raucous, democratic union meetings to update members on the negotiations and discuss next steps. They cultivated support from the local community by handing out leaflets to library users and by linking the demands of library staff to the conditions faced by all workers. A committee with representatives from almost all the library branches met weekly to plan strategy and build support for industrial action.
All of this has had an electrifying effect on staff. Union membership ballooned to 60 percent across the library network. A culture of participatory democracy has flourished among a union membership that was largely inactive only a couple of years ago.
“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” says Joey, “but we got so much more than we would have if we hadn’t done all this. Even the people who wanted to keep going [with the negotiations] were still really happy. We pulled all this off in the middle of the pandemic. Boosted membership massively, organised the workforce and so much more. I’m blown away by what we’ve accomplished.”

Win for Geelong library workers

Elon Musk recently put on another classic Tesla press conference to announce his company’s next breakthrough: the Tesla Bot. These fully automated, humanoid robots will, according to Musk, have the ability to perform “boring, repetitive and dangerous” work, potentially eliminating labour shortages. 
Of course, there was no actual robot that could replace a human being for Musk to unveil: no-one in the world, including anyone at Tesla, has demonstrated anything like the ability to create such a thing. Instead, the audience was subjected to someone dressed as a robot dancing around for a painfully awkward 20 seconds. The spectacle nevertheless raised the question: is there any possibility of Musk replacing the working class with robots? 
The answer is no. Even the most high-tech robots, like those developed by Boston Dynamics over a decade, require an enormous level of human oversight and are nowhere near capable of performing the wide array of complex tasks that people can. Tesla hasn’t even built a prototype of its Bot yet. 
And the robots themselves, just like all other forms of technology, depend for their success on vast quantities of human labour. The very tech boom that Tesla is riding to shatter records on the stock market is an example.
The digital world is often portrayed as being almost immaterial, emanating primarily from the minds of billionaire geniuses like Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg. It exists on computer screens that seem disconnected from physical reality. It is based on the nearly instantaneous transfer of information over long distances. It connects nearly everyone on the planet through the seemingly incorporeal vehicle of the internet.
But what is the internet? It’s a network of computers and devices manufactured in factories across global supply chains. These factories were built by construction workers and engineers, and require lab workers and factory technicians when in operation. Computer chips are made from silicon, lithium and other minerals extracted by workers in mines all over the world. Workers on ships, ports, roads, rails and in warehouses transport raw materials and intermediate and finished products needed to manufacture computers and smartphones throughout huge global supply chains. The electricity fuelling all of this is powered by coal dug from mines, wind harnessed by turbines and sunlight harvested by solar farms. This electricity is then transported on copper conductors, and digital information is transported along optical fibres—both of which run along millions of kilometres of cables installed by armies of tradespeople. 
High tech industries, computerisation and automation actually require vast amounts of human labour. The working class as a whole cannot be automated away any more that Elon Musk can put on a press conference about robots without the aid of a living person dressed as one. 
There is no better example of this than Amazon. This company used robots and computer algorithms to lead the way in automating its huge “fulfilment centres” (warehouses). Contrary to assumptions that automation would lead to massive layoffs, Amazon has actually hired hundreds of thousands of workers and built dozens of new fulfilment centres over the last two years. It now employs 1.3 million people—the second largest employer in the US. 
Rather than replacing workers with technology, Amazon increases the efficiency and productivity of its workers by turning their labour into the physical extension of robotic assembly lines and computer algorithms. Automation is used to de-skill the productive process, thus increasing productivity. It strips workers of all initiative and control over their activity while at work. 
According to a former Amazon employee writing in <a href="https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/?fbclid=IwAR3-_8e0m67AEtUIAR_hQkQcb4nsSHTE0VWKMLwJEo-oqcsji-DT_H-mbvk">Time</a> magazine, workers can walk up to 24 kilometres per shift. Computers force the pace of work, squeezing out inefficiencies such as “time off task”, otherwise known by human beings as rest. Managers are alerted if workers have too much of this time, which can be as little as 18 minutes in an 11½-hour shift. The monitoring technology creates a “constant buzz of low-grade panic”, while the “isolation and monotony” of the work leave workers feeling as though they are “losing [their] mind”.
According to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-21/inside-amazon-amzn-flagship-fulfillment-center-where-machines-run-the-show">Bloomberg</a>, which interviewed several workers at Amazon’s flagship centre in Seattle, “workers describe feeling like cogs in a giant machine that can spit them out with little more than an automated termination email”. Karl Marx wrote of this process more than 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him”.
If Amazon creates the digital era’s version of workers turned into a machine, as Marx observed, we can look to the very source of machine learning for examples of workers thrown back into barbarous types of labour. 
The automation and machine learning of big tech companies require clean, annotated data. This is produced by categorising and labelling enormous amounts of raw data. You might imagine that tech juggernauts like Amazon, Tesla, Google and Facebook would use warehouses full of supercomputers to do this, but you’d be wrong. It is done by thousands of people in refugee camps and slums throughout the global South. 
Phil Jones, author of Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism, calls this work “microwork”. “Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance—just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed”, he argues. “Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life.”
Artificial intelligence, the pride of the modern tech industry, is therefore built on the misery of the people that make it possible in the first place. Jones describes the work done by Syrian refugees living in Lebanon’s Shatila refugee camp: “Their nights are spent labelling footage of urban areas — ‘house’, ‘shop’, ‘car’—labels that, in a grim twist of fate, map the streets where the labellers once lived, perhaps for automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads on those very same streets”.
No, automation will not mean the end of the working class. Technological innovation has been a constant feature of capitalism since the system’s earliest days. And it’s not just a question of how quickly technology can advance or how difficult it is to replicate human labour. It is possible to increase the productivity of labour, or increase the rate of exploitation of the labourer, but it is not possible to do away with labour entirely, any more than complex life forms can do away with the carbon in their cells. 
Automation can, however, make workers’ lives worse. It can lay waste to whole industries and lead to redundancies, even while it creates different jobs elsewhere. And it can be used to intensify work and increase the ability of management to monitor workers’ every move in order to drive up productivity. 
For workers, this doesn’t so much raise new issues as put a premium on existing ones: the need to win secure employment, for example, with redundancy entitlements and pensions for workers in older industries, and good wages, conditions and union rights for workers in new industries. These can be achieved by fighting to limit the pace of work and pushing back against authoritarian management, as workers have done throughout the history of the union movement. 
Ultimately, the problems that automation poses to the working class are not inherent to technological development itself. In a rationally ordered society, labour-saving technology would be a good thing. People being relieved of the burden of performing dangerous, repetitive work and having a machine do it instead would be welcomed if it didn’t also mean the destruction of many workers’ livelihoods. 
In a rational, socialist society, we would make technology work for human beings, rather than the other way around. Until then, we’ll have cutting edge technology that only makes more lucrative the dancing all us human robots do for companies like Amazon.

Algorithms of exploitation: class struggle in the age of artificial intelligence

I’ve worked in the construction industry for the last three years and know several of the men who attended this week’s rallies. Indeed, many of the thousands of people who attended the protests were construction workers and trade union members. I am shocked and disgusted by what they are doing.
There are around 7,000 active COVID-19 cases in Victoria right now. And the numbers have been rising relentlessly. 
What do the protesters have to say in response to this crisis? “Fuck you.” 
“Fuck you” to my friends, family and loved ones; and “fuck you” to yours as well. 
“Fuck you” to their own workmates and to the friends and families of their workmates.
“Fuck you” to our sisters and brothers in health care, who each day plead with increasing desperation for us to spare them from being completely overwhelmed by the sick and the dying.
These selfish, petulant clowns are militantly hostile to the most basic health measures designed to combat an outbreak of a pandemic that has killed as many as 18 million people globally. 
It’s anti-human and abhorrent. They deserve nothing but contempt from the trade union movement and the working class. 
Why did the rally march up the West Gate Bridge on Tuesday afternoon? Footage indicates that at least some of the leading elements mistakenly thought that construction union Secretary John Setka’s father died in the notorious bridge collapse in 1970—the worst industrial disaster in Australia's history. They went there to troll Setka. 
While Setka’s dad didn’t actually die on that day, 35 other construction workers did, and eighteen more were injured. What did they do when they reached the top of the bridge? They threw a party; literally singing and dancing on the graves of dozens of dead building workers.
Not everyone who attended these rallies is a fascist. I have no doubt that if the story about the West Gate was widely known by the workers there, many of them would be appalled. 
But the workers who went to these protests were duped. They’ve been inspired and/or galvanised by the paranoid conspiracy theories of the far right. Whatever legitimate anger they might have felt towards the bosses, the government or the CFMEU officials has been completely coopted and absorbed into a mass mobilisation of reaction that is antithetical to everything that the trade union movement stands for.
After all, what is the union movement without solidarity and health and safety on the job? During a pandemic, these core principles mean supporting vaccination efforts. They mean the closure of non-essential industry during an outbreak to slow down or stop the spread of the virus, with workers stood down on full pay. They mean fighting for health measures on the job—including proper ventilation, air filtration and face masks.
The anti-vax garbage peddled by the far right clearly has resonance in at least some sections of the building industry. Why?
I was employed on a large, unionised building site in the city last year when COVID was beginning to reach Australian shores. Much less was known about the virus, but it was increasingly clear how dangerous it was. 
A space opened for more militant responses to the threat of the virus. People were outraged that we were forced to work and expose ourselves in an industry that obviously wasn’t essential. Many wanted the building sites to be shut down. Keep in mind that this was before the JobKeeper wage subsidy had been introduced and when the world economy looked like it was on the brink of collapse, which gives a sense of how concerned people were.
This space snapped closed when the CFMEU leaders came down decisively on the side of the bosses. The union has, in the words of Setka, “tried to do everything we can to keep our members working”, no matter how many might be exposed to the virus. Indeed, Setka and the CFMEU leaders were on the hard right of calls to keep things open, threatening to sue employers who closed a site when a worker tested positive for COVID.
The logic of this argument was that we accept or adopt selfish, sectional and anti-social ideas. If the polls that show consistent support among the broader population for health measures and vaccinations are anything to go by, most people feel at least some responsibility to look out for the greater good.
We construction workers, on the other hand, have been taught the exact opposite lesson—that our jobs, rather than the good of the whole working class, are the most important thing. 
But we’re not like the nurses or workers performing the essential tasks to keep food and other necessary goods and services being produced and delivered during this crisis. We build things regardless of whether they are of any social value or required immediately. We could be building a school, a hospital, a prison or a nuclear missile silo—it is completely irrelevant. We build things to make money for our employers.
The logic of our union leaders has been one of cruel economy and profit. Business, pay packets and the sectional interests of our “industry” (that is, our employers) are of supreme importance. Social solidarity is not. The seriousness of the virus is downplayed. No wonder so many think that the vaccine is unnecessary and invasive.
Of course, it’s not just the CFMEU. The ruling class, including the Andrews government in Victoria, now agrees that the needs of business owners outweigh the need for serious public health measures to protect workers. Many construction workers have clearly been won over by this argument.
There are doubtless many other factors as well. The decline of the left-wing traditions embodied by the Builders Labourers Federation has left a hollowed-out union machine, devoid of politics, ruled by bureaucrats and increasingly disconnected from the struggles of its own members—easy pickings for obnoxious, right-wing shit-stirrers.
Likewise, almost all construction workers are men. Sexism in the industry is clearly a problem. It drags virtually every break room conversation to the right. Misogyny makes it more difficult to win people to positions of human empathy and social solidarity. This certainly is not helped by the fact that the CFMEU is led by a man who pleaded guilty to harassing his former partner, and that the membership is regularly called on to defend him from allegations of abusive behaviour. 
So, was this disaster inevitable? Of course not.
What if our leaders had not spent the last eighteen months demanding that the building industry be kept open regardless of the number of COVID cases? 
What if we had spent that time mobilising to shut down construction and have workers paid to stay home? 
What if we had toured victims of the virus, nurses, doctors and health experts around the building sites to explain how serious the virus is and how important it is to get vaccinated? 
What if we had fought for the ideas of social solidarity, rather than economy and narrow self-interest?
If we had done some of these things, we might not now be forced to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this catastrophe.
Socialist class politics still matters. It is, in fact, the only thing that I’ve found that can consistently cut through the right-wing nonsense that all too often comes out of my workmates’ mouths.
I recently had a conversation with my workmates on a non-union building site. One of them is on the far right of the spectrum when it comes to vaccinations and COVID. I have no doubt that he will be sympathetic to these rallies; he might have attended them. An abridged version of the conversation went something like this:
Him: Hey, I heard you support vaccines?
Me: Yep
Him: But do you think they should be mandatory?
Me: Yep
Him: But what gives you the right to tell me what I have to put in my body?
Me: What gives you the right to give me a dangerous disease? Or give it to your mother, or your daughter, or the old guy you pass at the supermarket?
[Period of circular debate ...]
Me: We should just shut the construction industry down and have everyone paid to stay home.
Him: Well who’s gonna pay for that? You happy to have your great-great-grandchildren paying off the public debt?
Me: No. There are plenty of billionaires in Australia. We should just tax them more.
[Silence ...]
Him: Yeah, that’s actually a pretty good point.

I’m a construction worker. The protesters don’t speak for me

Australian Services Union members in Geelong’s libraries system are fighting for better wages and conditions. This is the culmination of two years of rank-and-file-driven activism that has resulted in a surge in union membership and in democratic participation in the union.
The Geelong Regional Library Corporation (GRLC) oversees seventeen libraries and two mobile libraries in the Geelong area, and is rated as the best public library service in Victoria. But this prestige conceals a troubling fact: the system operates on the low wages and insecurity of its workforce.
“We’re ranked number one”, says Alex (not their real name), one of the union members. “But in terms of wages and conditions we’re just about at the bottom. For example, the starting salaries for entry-level customer service staff, who make up the majority of staff, are 45th lowest out of 49 public library services in Victoria.”
GRLC is overseen by the second highest paid library corporation CEO in Victoria, Patti Manolis OAM. What does “OAM” stand for? After winning the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2019, Manolis insists on including OAM at the end of her name in all company emails.
After the expiry of GRLC’s old enterprise agreement last June, management offered a four-year agreement with pay increases of 0 percent in the first year, 0 percent in the second year, 1 percent in the third year and 1 percent in the fourth year—a significant pay cut once inflation is factored in. They also wanted to abolish Saturday penalty rates, dramatically reduce evening penalty rates and force staff to be available for more weekend and night shift work. This was particularly irksome for staff, many of whom have childcare responsibilities.
Negotiations stalled for five months. When union reps took management’s offers back to the members, the members repeatedly voted the offers down. Management, likely assuming that union delegates were lying about the desires of their members, eventually initiated their own ballot, controlled by them and including non-union members.
Every staff member was subjected to a mandatory two-hour “briefing session”, as well as weekly emails sent by the CEO and a glossy seventeen-page “Information Pack”. Staff were warned that this would be the “final offer” and that, if they voted against it, worse offers would follow—along with the possibility of redundancies. Posters with the official GRLC logo instructing staff to “Vote yes” began to appear all over worksites.
Unfortunately for management, library staff were unimpressed—they voted that deal down too. Union delegates then called a mass meeting in which members voted to condemn management’s “bullying behaviour” and voted unanimously to ballot for protected industrial action.
Despite this significant win of the “no” vote, there is still a long way to go. Management backed down from their initial attempts to eliminate Saturday penalty rates, but their pay offer still stands at a measly 1 percent, 1.4 percent, 1.6 percent and 1.8 percent. Managers still want to cut evening penalty rates and force library staff to work more nights and weekends.
Staff want wage parity with staff at other nearby libraries. This would require an 8 percent increase for all staff in the first year of a new agreement. They also want basic conditions that other libraries already enjoy, including minimum staffing levels and full pay for an early finish on Christmas Eve, along with basic safety measures like a full-time security guard and free, accessible car parking for staff.
Library staff in Geelong were not always this fired up. According to Alex, the union had an inactive membership of only 50 or so in a workforce of about 160 across the library system. Union members had no experience challenging management, and most didn’t really know what the enterprise bargaining process was about.
For the last two years, a handful of union activists have worked hard to turn things around. “From the beginning, we’d call mass meetings at the union offices”, Alex says. “We’d talk to anyone that showed up about issues in their libraries and try to turn them into activists.”
The turning point came in the middle of last year. “When the pandemic hit and Victoria went into lockdown, the entire casual staff was stood down for months without pay”, Alex says. “That was very upsetting and disillusioning for most people. We [the union] had our biggest mass meeting to date.”
That meeting wrote a collective letter of protest to management, which was dismissed by the head of HR with a short email. Library staff had another, angrier meeting the next month. According to Alex, at this meeting the usually “polite and diplomatic” staff resolved to conduct a public campaign.
An online crowd-funding campaign was set up to raise money for casual staff. Thousands of flyers were also letterboxed throughout Geelong asking people to write to the Library Board in protest. This public campaign embarrassed the City of Greater Geelong to such an extent that it was suddenly able to find an extra $180,000 in the budget to give to casual staff. During the second lockdown, casuals were provided with work instead of being stood down without pay.
These victories gave workers confidence, and the intransigence of management made them angry. Union density has doubled to 60 percent, and delegates now have an activist network that reaches into the most important libraries.
“Twelve months ago, the staff wanted to be so diplomatic”, Alex says. “They didn’t want to do anything that might be seen as ‘rowdy’ or ‘unruly’. They just wanted to write a polite letter. Now people unanimously voted for protected industrial action without even needing much discussion. If anything, they were just impatient to get to the vote.
“My workmates are usually so passive and unassuming, but they are beginning to find their voice. And their voice is angry. I almost can’t remember if I’ve heard some of them speak a word before, and now those same people are railing against management at union meetings.”
In an era of rock bottom levels of industrial action, hollowed-out, shrinking union organisation and endless concessions to the bosses, this dispute stands out. It’s defiant, it’s democratic, and it’s driven by rank-and-file activists.
“You can so easily replicate this elsewhere”, Alex insists. “We just started calling meetings, and lo and behold people started to join up and get involved. There’s nothing special about us. It just takes a bit of organising and politics. People everywhere are itching for someone to lead a fight.”
Geelong Regional Libraries staff are currently balloting to take industrial action and are asking for unionists at other workplaces to send solidarity photos declaring their support. Send your photos to <a href="mailto:louise@redflag.org.au">louise@redflag.org.au</a>, and we’ll pass them on.

Library staff refuse to be shooshed

Four years to the day after National Football League quarterback <a>Colin Kaepernick</a> took a knee during the national anthem in a pre-season game to protest against racism and police brutality, the sports world in the United States was struck by an unprecedented rebellion.
It started when the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team refused to take the court for their play-off game against the Orlando Magic on 26 August. The Bucks are the best team in the NBA this year, probably the favourites to win a title—the lifelong dream of every pro athlete. However, these young men simply could not stand by in silence while police continue to murder and shoot Black people. The players released a statement that was read aloud by veteran players George Hill and Sterling Brown: 
“Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we’ve seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, and the additional shooting of protesters. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.”
After the Bucks’ show of defiance, other NBA players held a meeting to figure out what to do. Los Angeles Clippers players threatened strike action during the 2014 play-offs after their notoriously racist owner, Donald Sterling, was recorded asking his girlfriend not to associate with Black players. At that time, Clippers coach Doc Rivers convinced them to continue playing. 
This time he and the other coaches were asked to leave and let players make up their own minds—and that’s exactly what they did. The Lakers and the Clippers, both also contenders for this year’s title, voted to cancel the rest of the play-offs. 
The strike by the best three teams in the league threatened the viability of the rest of the season. The league was not able to wrest back control of the situation until the following day, when coaches, players’ union leaders Chris Paul and Andre Igoudala, and Michael Jordan (now the owner of the Charlotte Hornets) pressured players to let the season go ahead.
However, the players’ defiance created a domino effect. NBA commentator Kenny Smith walked off the set of NBA on TNT in solidarity. This was followed by statements of support from other announcers and commentators, many of whom are former players.
There is no precedent for athletes taking collective action on this scale in the United States, and it soon spilled over to other sports. 
The Seattle Mariners, which has more Black players than any other team in Major League Baseball, unanimously voted to strike ahead of their game against the San Diego Padres. They were followed by the Boston Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics, the Minnesota Twins, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Colorado Rockies. Seven baseball games have been postponed—a momentous stand in a league known for rampant racism.
Naomi Osaka, one of the top women’s tennis players in the world and perhaps best known for defeating Serena Williams in the 2018 US Open, dropped out of the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati to protest against the police shooting, despite being only two matches away from potentially winning the tournament.
Five Major League Soccer games were also postponed when players decided not to play. When the league released a statement claiming to have made the decision, Los Angeles FC midfielder Anthony Kaye took umbrage in a tweet: “We as players made the decision, please give the right narrative”.
Perhaps the strongest stand was taken by players in the Women’s Basketball League, who are, if anything, even more militant than their male counterparts. They too walked out, but not before players from the Washington Mystics held a press briefing to denounce police violence and racism. They each wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a letter of Jacob Blake’s name on the front, and seven bloody bullet holes on the back. Atlanta Dream centre Elizabeth Williams read a statement from the team: 
“We will kneel, lock arms and raise fists during national anthem. We stand in solidarity with brothers in the NBA, and we will continue this conversation with brothers and sisters across all leagues and look to take collective action.” 
This extraordinary strike wave is the culmination of years of growing discontent among professional athletes at the racism in US society. Nearly three-quarters of NBA players are Black. Although some are millionaires, many are only a few years removed from the poverty and inequality that afflict African Americans and other minorities. Black players still deal with endemic racism and police brutality. Sterling Brown, one of the players who led the Bucks walk-off, was tackled and tasered by police only two years ago over a parking violation.
The rebellion illustrates just how far things have come in recent years. After Colin Kaepernick took a courageous knee just four years ago, NFL owners blacklisted him out of the league. Kaepernick was isolated in a political environment in which most players did not have the confidence to back him openly.
That is not the case today. Even the notoriously reactionary NFL has not gone untouched. At least nine teams shut down training camp on 27 August as players voiced their outrage on social media and wore tape with Jacob Blake’s name on it.
The Black Lives Matter rebellion and the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically shifted mass consciousness and the consciousness of professional athletes along with it. In turn, the stand taken by athletes will encourage the struggles on the streets. Players such as Lebron James have an enormous amount of influence among young people all over the world. The demands they champion cannot be so easily sidelined by the political right.
Unlike the NFL, the NBA has spent recent years marketing itself as progressive by allowing players to protest within the framework of the game. Black Lives Matter is commonly displayed in huge lettering on banners and floors during games. Players are encouraged to wear approved political slogans on their T-shirts and uniforms. Players and commentators can voice their political concerns during post-game interviews.
However, this strategy has put the NBA in something of a bind. Rather than coopting and pacifying players’ anger, as it was intended to do, this liberal attitude has emboldened them and given them confidence to take more defiant stands. Many are now demanding that the billionaires who own NBA teams do more to deal with racism in broader society. 
“When you get drafted, or a team signs you, first thing they say is, ‘Welcome to the family, if there’s anything you need, we’re here for you’”, said Kendrick Perkins, a commentator who is close to many players in the NBA. “Does that only apply when it’s beneficial to the owners? When we’re selling out arenas? No ... we need them to step forward. You’re either with us or against us. You can’t tell me that these white American owners don’t have great relationships with governors and mayors and people of power, even President Trump. It’s time for them to step up.”
A number of players have voiced discontent at the NBA bubble, a quarantined section of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where games are currently being played. Players are unable to see their families in person or anyone else in the outside world. Many players feel that their place is on the streets and in their communities, not confined in an amusement park playing basketball for a TV audience.
“We shouldn’t have came to this damn place, to be honest”, Bucks guard George Hill told reporters several days before the strike. “Coming here just took all the focal points off what the issues are ... We’re down here playing in the bubble to do these things for social justice and all that. To see it all still going on [police brutality against Blacks] and we’re just playing the games like it’s nothing, it’s just a really messed up situation right now.” 
No matter how the current struggle ends, the NBA and other sports are taking place in the pressure cooker of US society. The racist police violence will continue, as will the protests against it. The profound social and economic crisis born out of the coronavirus pandemic will continue to destabilise life at every level. 
Chris Webber was an all-star in the NBA, and now comments for NBA TV. He spoke passionately about the turn of events while sitting in front of an empty NBA court: “I’m very proud of the players ... If not now, when? If not during a pandemic, with countless lives being lost, then when? That’s all I want to hear. Martin Luther King got shot and risked his life, Medgar Evers ... we’ve seen this, all of our heroes constantly getting taken down. We know it’s not going to end”. Webber then looked directly at the camera to make an emotional appeal to any players who might be watching:
“But that doesn’t mean young men that you don’t do anything. Don’t listen to these people telling you, ‘Don’t do anything because it’s not going to change right away’. You’re starting something for the next generation, and the next generation ... I applaud them. It’s the young people leading the way and I applaud them.”

US professional sports strike shows how much things have changed

Distribution centre workers have a prominent place in the appalling daily lists of workplace Covid-19 clusters coming out of Victoria. 
There have been 12 positive cases so far at the Coles chilled distributon centre, Laverton, 10 at the StarTrack parcel distribution centre, Laverton, and 12 at the Linfox Coles distribution centre in Truganina. 
Talking to some of the workers in these facilities, it’s obvious why. “People are going over each other to pick boxes,” says George. “They can’t really social distance inside the warehouse. They’ve got extra cleaners going around wiping, but that died down after a while.” 
George (not his real name) has helped provide food for millions of people over the last 20 years. He works at the Woolworths chilled distribution center in Mulgrave, where most of the produce, milk and fresh meat that end up on Woolworth’s store shelves in Melbourne comes from.
George didn’t work last week. The week before, a worker tested positive at the Mulgrave centre. The place kept operating. Then there were another two. Once there were five positive tests, the warehouse was finally shut down. As of writing the warehouse remains closed: 21 workers have now reportedly tested positive.
Despite the obviously essential nature of the work performed by George and his roughly 350 workmates, they have largely been kept in the dark throughout the outbreak. “We don’t know when we will be back” George told Red Flag, “but we’ve heard that they have gotten clearance from the health department to open up again.”
The company hasn’t even told the workers how many are sick – they find that out through the news. After the workers were sent home last week, George was told that he had been in contact with a positive case at work and that he needed to self-isolate.
“Management didn’t tell us who was sick,” said George, “but we knew who it was. Everyone was really worried wondering whether they came in to contact with him. I got a message from DHHS saying to get the 11th day test middle of this week, but the actual day is next week…Health department messaging and corporate messaging [from Woolworths] was very confusing.”
When George asked the company and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) whether he needed to isolate from his family, he couldn’t get a clear answer. He also says the company only has sketchy records of the dates and times that casuals have worked, making contact tracing more challenging.
The situation is made even worse by the complete silence coming from the union covering the workers at this distribution centre, The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Assosiation. According to George, the workers haven’t even received a text message from their union.
Roughly 150 full time workers at the Mulgrave centre are being paid full wages while the warehouse is shut down, without any loss to their sick pay or other entitlements. The 250 labor-hire casuals that work there, however, get nothing.
“The casuals are quite worried,” said George. “Some of them are trying to get that $1,500 payment, but it’s not going well for them. They have just been without wages this whole time, but some are concerned that they will be sent back to work too early, before it is safe.”
This was highlighted last Monday, when management unsuccessfully tried to send casuals back in to the centre while it was closed in order to clear some stock. The casuals refused to go out of concern for their health and safety. 
This is an extraordinary and courageous stand from these workers, especially since the whole process to do with workplace outbreaks – like so much of our working lives – seems purposely designed to leave workers powerless. Workers overcoming this, and taking some control over their working lives in response to the renewed surge in the pandemic, would be the most important public health measure that could be implemented in Victoria. 
As it is, information and legal power around workplace outbreaks is concentrated with the DHHS. The department is currently overwhelmed by the task of identifying contacts, ordering isolation, supporting those who need to isolate, and ensuring remedial measures have been implemented. And of course the department doesn’t address the issues of insecure work, low pay and lack of leave which are driving people to work and thus maintaining the high rate of infection in the current Victorian outbreak. 
It was not difficult to predict that outbreaks like this would likely occur in Melbourne’s warehouses. The majority of warehouse workers live in working class areas, which are being disproportionately affected by the virus. Despite some degree of management-enforced social distancing, temperature checks and the provision of masks and hand sanitiser, these massive distribution centers are designed to maximise productivity at the expense of the health and wellbeing of its workforce.
Catching the virus is not the only thing on the minds of the Mulgrave distrubution centre workers either. Woolworths recently announced 1,300 layoffs in its Melbourne and Sydney warehouses as it transfers product to new, automated warehouses. Mulgrave will be shuttered by the end of October and its workforce will be out of a job – an unnerving proposition for these workers given double digit unemployment and unprecedented economic turmoil.
But the immediate concern of the workers is to stop the virus’ spread. “My biggest worry is that I will pass it on to my workmates,” says George. “There are diabetics here, and they obviously need to come in for the money. People realise how hard it is now.” Workers are being put in an impossible position by a system used to putting them last.

Fear and resistance as the virus hits Victorian distribution centres

Can you tell us about the context in which the Accord emerged?
In 1972 the Whitlam Labor government was elected on the back of rising workers’ struggle and the black, anti-war, women’s and gay movements. Whitlam introduced a range of reforms in the areas of health, welfare and women’s rights, and oversaw the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Workers saw the potential for more gains, and by 1974 there was a massive strike wave, the most significant since the revolutionary post-WWI years. But the world economy, including Australia’s, soon began trending down. The ruling class turned to what we now call neoliberalism as a way to rescue their system and to reverse working class gains.
Malcolm Fraser, his Liberal/National Coalition and their ruling class backers started the offensive by engineering a coup and throwing Whitlam out of office in 1975. Workers struck in their millions, but the ACTU, as they have done time and again, turned a potential strike wave into an electoral campaign to restore the government, which of course failed. Fraser, who promised much to the ruling class, including an end to strikes, more anti-union legislation and higher profits, did not deliver in government.
The big industrial and political battles during those years ended in a stalemate. By 1980, workers had begun to gain more confidence and industrial action began to pick up. But then came a sudden recession and talk of deals between government and unions, even with employers, became louder. The promise of more jobs, security and stable wages to pull the economy out of recession seemed more plausible than tearing down the system. The most common of these agreements were the social contracts – known as the Accord in Australia – in countries such as Sweden, the UK and Austria.
They promised unions a seat at the planning table, but at the cost of concessions on wages and conditions and limitation on industrial action. With the election of the Hawke-Keating government in March 1983, the Accord became a reality. Bill Kelty, then ACTU president, explained: “The philosophic framework [of the Labor government]... [was to] open up the economy to the rest of the world, increase productivity, promote competition ...”. Of course there were still the fig leaf promises of “powerful safety nets in national health care, superannuation and wages”, but for Kelty these measures were useful only if they promoted “adaptation and change, thus increasing productivity”.
As the Accord years rolled on, workers’ welfare and living standards fell at the same time as productivity and profits for the bosses rose. Meanwhile, workers’ defensive organisations, the unions, collaborated with government and employers to destroy solidarity and rank and file industrial power. For the working class, it was sacrifice after sacrifice to ensure the survival of capitalism. The Financial Review summed up the result: “Under the Accord, the ACTU has deliberately facilitated the biggest redistribution of national income from wages to profits”.
Laurie Carmichael, Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) leader, claimed the Accord was a “pathway to socialism”. What was the role of the CPA and others on the left?
Far from being a pathway to socialism, the Accord was a major defeat for the working class, and the Communist Party and Labor Left played a critical role in this defeat. Using their union and Labor government positions, they “educated” the working class in a retreat from class struggle and into class collaboration. The leading left wing union, the AMWU, began the process. Starting in 1976, the AMWU brought out The People’s Budget and then, along with the ACTU, went on to publish a series of pamphlets – Australia Uprooted, Australia Ripped Off, Australia on the rack, Australia on the brink. All argued for a left nationalist, class-collaborationist solution to capitalism’s woes. The CPA and its Labor Left allies continued to play that role from the lead-up to and formulation of the Accord through every step in its development, supporting and enforcing every attack on workers’ wages and conditions.
You describe a pretty grim scenario, but your book argues that workers didn’t just go along with these attacks – some were prepared to fight back.
I cover around 15 major disputes in the book, from 1983, right through to the end of the Accord in 1996. The smallest – Dollar Sweets, where Peter Costello made his name as a lawyer for the company – involved just 15 workers. Others, like the APPM paper mill in Tasmania, Robe River iron and Cockatoo Island in Sydney, involved hundreds of workers.
Then there were the really big ones – the Victorian nurses, the builders’ labourers and the pilots. Certainly the majority lost, but the resistance was important and remains a legacy of the Accord years. Whether you win or lose, how you fight – or even if you fight – matters. It makes the difference between being crushed or living to fight another day.
Some of the most inspiring of these battles involved women workers – those belonging to the small Food Preservers Union and the thousands-strong Victorian nurses, for example. Their determination, backed by solidarity actions from other unions, delivered them wins in the face of intransigent opposition from the government and ACTU. At the Heinz, Plumrose and Rosella-Lipton factories, the workforce went on strike, imposed bans and took other industrial action for higher pay and better conditions.
Union members at Rosella had the book thrown at them. Industrial relations minister Ralph Willis berated the union for being “selfish”, urging members to defy their officials and go back to work. Hawke instructed the Social Security department (now Centrelink) not to pay the workers or their dependants unemployment payments and tried to get them excluded from the September national wage case. More dangerously, the federal government, backed by Kelty, threatened to rush through legislation to cancel the union’s award, which would have left union members around the country with no protection at all.
In the face of their determined action – and the industrial support they got from other workers and their unions such as the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) and Transport Workers Union – the employers caved in, and the Arbitration Commission was forced to grant them the national wage rise. Food Preservers’ organiser Denis Evans insists that, after listening to the rank and file, the union backed its members. They refused to become, in his words, “industrial policemen”. If members said they couldn’t live on what they were getting, “what right does a union official have to say, ‘you can’t improve your wages and conditions because the Accord says you can’t’? ... Members fuelled the anti-Accord position”.
In Victoria, the nurses’ union held out for 50 days, escalating the dispute until the entire workforce was on strike. They eventually claimed victory, having stared down a hostile Labor government, an obstructive ACTU and Trades Hall Council . These forces accused the nurses of being naive and not knowing the system. Nurses state secretary Irene Bolger was quick to rebuff these charges. “Of course we knew the system”, she said, “but we ignored it because it was their rules and their system – and we’d decided that it was time to chuck their rules out the door ... [our members] were fed up”.
These are inspiring wins, but the Accord left a terrible legacy for workers. What were the defeats that left the unions and their members weakened both industrially and politically?
The losses were significant and overall had a massive effect on workers and their unions. Two of the strongest unions, the builders’ labourers and pilots, were smashed with the help of the police, draconian state and federal laws, other unions and the ACTU.
The BLF did manage to hold on, but in its strongest state, Victoria, the state and federal governments pursued the union to the end, raiding its offices, taking over its finances and passing laws that made it impossible for the union to re-establish itself. It avoided total annihilation by amalgamating with the construction union, but has remained under attack from the ruling class ever since.
In the case of the pilots, the government, with the full backing of employers and the ACTU and other transport unions, brought in the air force to break their strike in 1989. The pilots were taken to court and fined millions, scabs took their jobs, and many of the strikers never returned to the industry. The union has rebuilt, though to nothing like its previous power.
One of the most destructive moves was the introduction of enterprise bargaining – former prime minister Paul Keating’s parting “gift” to workers at the end of the Accord years. Enterprise bargaining left workers more casualised, isolated, on lower wages and conditions, de-unionised and weaker overall. Resistance to it was shut down by the officials.
The Accord and its supporters are responsible for the weak state of the union movement today, and its orientation to class collaboration rather than class struggle. Nonetheless, the fact that the government – backed by the bosses and ACTU – was forced to destroy two unions, impose massive fines and bring in more and more anti-worker laws, is an indication of the level of resistance amongst the rank and file, often in defiance of union leaders. For our side, it means that, though battered and bruised, enough class antagonism remains that every time there has been a call to the fight, workers have responded enthusiastically.
Hundreds of thousands hit the streets during the waterfront dispute in 1998 and against WorkChoices towards the end of the Howard years. Class collaboration is on the agenda of the left union leadership and Labor once again, as the federal government plans massive cuts to wages and conditions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We desperately need to reignite a spirit of resistance inside the union movement if we are to fend off the coming attacks.
The resistance by workers during the Accord years was, for me, the education of a lifetime. As well as highlighting the pitfalls of class collaboration, it provided confirmation of the potential for solidarity and struggle and the vital role of the working class in building for a better, socialist future.
 
Stuff the Accord! is published by Interventions. You can buy it online at <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/revolutionary-history/products/stuff-the-accord-pay-up">Red Flag Books</a>

Liz Ross

Roz Ward

When Australia's workers fought back against the Accord

Australian construction unions have joined the National Electrical and Communications Association, the Master Builders Association and other boss’s organisations in demanding that the construction industry be kept running during the coronavirus pandemic. As an electrical worker and union member on a major Melbourne building site, I’ve never been more furious with my own union leadership.
The virus has now spread to every continent on Earth. Much of Europe and China are in complete lockdown, satellite photos are documenting secret mass graves in Iran, and the death toll in Italy is close to 1,000 people per day. (The exact numbers are a bit murky because Italian medical staff have said they are no longer able count the dead.)
The pandemic is the greatest health crisis in a century. Scientists believe that infection rates could exceed 50 percent, causing a collapse in health care systems and many millions of deaths globally. The Australian government’s deputy chief medical officer said the disease will kill up to 150,000 in Australia.
But what have construction workers heard from the leadership of our unions? State and national branches of the CFMMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) are lobbying government and industry bosses to keep construction sites open even if a worker on the site tests positive with COVID-19. They’ve gone so far as to threaten legal action against builders if they unilaterally close construction sites out of safety concerns.
According to Allen Hicks, the national secretary of my union (the Electrical Trades Union), “It’s ludicrous to suggest that because there’s one case of coronavirus, a construction site would need to stop indefinitely”. He reckons that the global pandemic is “just one more risk that needs to be managed” by electrical workers.
This orientation from the leadership has flowed through to the shop floor. Building union officials and delegates are not taking the issue seriously on my job. We’ve had updates every morning at toolbox meetings before work, but the officials and delegates have made it clear that the site can be shut down only by Australia’s chief medical officer. A workmate said it best after one such meeting: “The unions were happy to have mass strikes and rallies to try to get Labor elected, but now their hands are tied when faced with a health and safety crisis as serious as this”.
The idea that our health and safety should be left to the discretion of companies like Grocon, the greed of which resulted in the deaths of three passers-by after a wall at one of its construction sites collapsed in 2013, would be laughable if it wasn’t so horrifying.
Recommendations from medical experts and health care professionals have been clear: the only way to avoid catastrophe is to roll out a massive program of testing and social distancing. Morrison and state premiers, including Daniel Andrews, paid lip service to this by enacting a social distancing policy. They’ve made exceptions for essential services. But exactly why the construction of apartment towers for landlords and property speculators is “essential” remains unclear. What is clear is that they want work to go on as normal for as long as possible, whatever the human cost. 
My jobsite has over 250 workers, all of whom share a break room that is barely large enough for us to sit in and eat at the same time. It is impossible to socially distance while at work, and many of us catch public transport, furthering our exposure to infection. These construction sites are perfect for spreading the viral outbreak.
Many construction workers, especially in the commercial side, are in their 50s and 60s and would be vulnerable to the virus. Their lungs are already compromised by years of exposure to silica dust, asbestos and other pollutants. The fact that we are all exposing ourselves to the virus while at work negates any attempt at social isolation on the part of our families. Our continuing work puts everyone at risk.
If the pandemic is a severe as many experts predict, most major construction projects will be shut down in the coming weeks. But it should be happening now. It remains to be seen exactly how many more construction workers and their families will get sick and potentially die so that the bosses can make a few more million bucks before the economy goes into complete meltdown. As a workmate told me last week, “They don’t give a fuck about us – this is all about money for them. Why else would we still be working?”
All major construction projects other than hospitals (if governments can be bothered building these) should be shut down, with all workers given full pay for the duration of the pandemic. The fact that the construction unions have refused to call for this, or even organise on the job for basic health and safety measures, means they are effectively prioritising the boss’ profits ahead of their own members.
Fuck the buildings – they’re not going anywhere. We can finish them after the coronavirus crisis has ended.

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