The chant “You’ll always lose in Melbourne!” echoed in the streets of Melbourne on 17 September as another pick and mix of assorted fascists, Nazis and white supremacists was vastly outnumbered by a loud counter-rally.
Between 400 and 500 anti-fascist protesters gathered at the State Library for speeches and chants. Indigenous activists, speakers from the Rohingya community, Jews Against Fascism and longstanding anti-fascist activists spoke about the need for an active and defiant anti-fascist and anti-racist campaign.
The protest, organised by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, spent weeks encouraging organisations and individuals to join a united march through the streets of Melbourne to outnumber the far right. We succeeded.
Protesters marched to the far right rallying point at Parliament. We outnumbered their rally four or five to one, assembling 50 metres away, separated by police barricades. We drowned out the fascists with chants of “Black, Indigenous, Arab, Asian and white – Unite! Unite! Unite to fight the right!” and “Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land!”
The far right rally, “Make Victoria Safe Again”, was organised by the increasingly notorious right wing Zionist and gym owner Avi Yemini. Yemeni was attempting to bring together a broad far right audience using the tried and true politics of racist dog whistling directed at the myth of African and other immigrant crime gangs. In the end, the right wing rally was dominated by existing neo-Nazi and fascist groups, including the Soldiers of Odin, the United Patriots Front and the True Blue Crew.
By counter-rallying, anti-fascists have again blunted one of the most important tools the fascists have. Street rallies are a key method for the far right to meet new recruits and build their confidence. Persistent counter-rallies, ever since the far right started serious attempts at street mobilisations with “Reclaim Australia” in 2015, have been crucial in reducing the far right’s street presence to a tiny rump of already organised fascists.

Simon Barrett

Anti-racist protest dwarfs fascist rally in Melbourne

A group of manufacturing workers ended 2016 by fending off an attack on their wages and conditions. Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union members at a VIP Packaging factory in Truganina, western Melbourne, struck for nine days, late in December. 
It was the first strike at the site, but the workers were confident from the beginning. “Management will bow down to our demands, eventually it’s going to happen”, AMWU delegate Parminder Singh told Red Flag.
The workers manufacture metal packaging and containers – drums, containers and cans – critical for a number of industries including oil and food production. The items they make are used by companies such as Castrol, PPG, AKZO, Goodman Fielder, Frontera and Murray Goulburn. Parminder said the strike would quickly make it very difficult for the company to fill its orders.
The industrial action came during enterprise agreement negotiations, but was in part prompted by the behaviour of new and widely-despised manager. One worker described the manager as “wanting to control everything”, another talked about being threatened with an official warning for speaking a language other than English to a co-worker.
It was reported that the manager had cameras and additional monitoring systems installed in parts of the factory and is trying to impose more strict control of work patterns and break times.
After maintaining their strike camp for more than a week, the workers voted to accept an offer that includes an annual pay rise of 3.5 percent – a 2.9 percent wage increase and a 0.6 percent unconditional bonus.
One worker speculated that the company wanted to carve up the pay rise in that way to help it pressure workers in other VIP factories to accept lower pay rises in upcoming negotiations. He said that Truganina is considered a pace setter for other sites. Workers at another VIP factory in nearby Laverton also <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/packaging-factory-workers-wrap-strike-win">went on strike last year and won</a>.
At the end of the dispute, according to Parminder, “we pretty much got the conditions we wanted”, and people going back to work “are feeling pretty positive”. The hated manager remains in place, but, Parminder said, “We have to show real unity day in day out and we have to stand up as a group to anyone and everyone who tries to be a bully”.

Packaging workers end year on a win

More than six months after they were sacked, most of the Carlton United Breweries maintenance workers have walked back into their workplace. They entered through an honour guard of union flags, with chants ringing out and the strains of a Scottish pipe band filling the air.
This capped off a dispute that stretched for 185 days. It was one of the highest profile industrial disputes this year. In early June, CUB sacked all 55 maintenance electricians and fitters at the company’s Abbotsford brewery in Melbourne. The workers were told they could reapply for their jobs at what amounted to a 65 percent pay cut, according to the Electrical Trades Union. They refused and instead <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5546">established a protest camp</a> on the brewery’s gate.
Despite the company bussing scabs in and out of the site, the lack of an experienced maintenance workforce had some impact on production. Company documents leaked in November showed that CUB was dealing with heightened production costs and uncertainties surrounding its ability to produce enough product for spikes in demand.
Over the course of the dispute, donations from tens of thousands of supporters totalled more than $1.1 million, according to Troy Grey, ETU state secretary. Calls for solidarity, however, were limited to requests for financial support and a consumer boycott campaign. The unions involved stopped short of organising serious strike action, including by other unions members still working inside the brewery.
Under the agreement that ended the dispute, everyone in the protest camp who wanted their job back, got their job back, said ETU site organiser Steve Diston. According to the union, the agreement retains the workers’ conditions – even if the maintenance contract changes hands again – and includes an undertaking that the workers will be employed for the length of the agreement (which expires at the end of 2019). Diston said the agreement also includes a 2 percent annual pay rise. One sting in the tail is that fitters will move to rotating shifts. The electricians were already on a rotating roster.
The workers officially started back at work on 19 December. The first two weeks back are inductions and training, which include the company telling workers how to talk to scabs. After Fair Work ordered workers not use the word “scab” on the picket line, some are worried that management will use this as a means of victimising people as they go back to work. One worker said: “They’ve already told us that if we refuse to talk to the scabs it’s bullying and if we talk to them in the wrong way it’s harassment, so what are we meant to do?”
The CUB maintenance workers walked back into work with a win under their belts, having stopped a mass sacking and gutting of their conditions. Speaking at the victory march, Steve Diston said: “They’re your conditions, you’ve won them – they weren’t given to you as charity by anybody in a suit. And you’ve kept them safe”.
In the words of Alan Dinon, a long time worker at CUB, speaking on ABC radio: “If you stick together you can win”.

CUB workers back in the gate

Workers at Carlton United Breweries in Abbotsford are entering their fourth week protesting outside the factory gate.
The electricians and fitters, members of the ETU and AMWU, were called to a meeting on 10 June and told they were sacked, but could reapply for their old jobs on a non-union, individual agreement that would have cut pay by 65 percent, according to the unions. In a move that seems to have caught the company by surprise, all of the workers refused to reapply.
Without the 55 experienced maintenance workers, the company has reportedly had a lot of trouble keeping up production of the high volume brands it produces such as Carlton Dry, VB, Pure Blond, Carlton Draught and Strongbow ciders. It has resorted to employing inexperienced scabs flown in from interstate. They are driven in and out daily in a rental van with curtain-covered windows, past the protesting workers, to collective cries of “Shame!”
The brewery’s machines are large, specialised and hard to maintain, according to one worker on the picket line. He says the scabs are having a lot of trouble keeping them running, which is a difficult job even for the experienced maintenance workers. They are needed daily to help switch the machines between different products; in their absence, the two-hour job has taken up to 16 hours. The machines process high volumes – more than 1,000 cans per minute on one line – so small glitches in production can have a large impact on output.
Sources at a major Melbourne liquor warehouse say that stocks of Carlton Dry, one of the brewery’s biggest selling products, are running lower than usual.
Working conditions at the plant have been built up through decades of hard struggle. They are among the best in the industry. The company has been looking to tear them down for a while – in 2015 it tried to ram through an agreement that would have imposed a three-year wage freeze, but workers stymied the plan. There were short walk-offs by forklift drivers and the threat of a strike in the lead-up to the AFL grand final.
This new attack, if successful, would mean those at the top get their snouts even deeper into an already deep trough – CUB’s parent company, SAB Miller, reported $4.4 billion in profit last year, and CEO Alan Miller was paid $62 million.
The unions are holding a solidarity BBQ on Monday, 4 July, at 12 noon at the brewery, Southampton Crescent, Abbotsford. Workers will be protesting at CUB headquarters at 12 noon the following day at 77-87 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank.
The protest at the brewery gate is ongoing, from 6am to 6pm weekdays. Visits are welcome.

Brewery workers face 65 percent pay cut

Breaking your back for 18 hours a day on $11 an hour. Going home every night to a house your boss forced you into, crammed with 20 other people sharing a single bathroom. That’s the life of hundreds of migrant workers in Baiada’s poultry processing plants, according to an investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO).
“We will work our way up and down the supply chain in pursuit of those who are flouting workplace laws, to ensure workers are being paid properly and treated fairly”, said a FWO spokesperson after the release of the report.
Baiada is one of Australia’s largest chicken producers and one of the country’s biggest privately owned companies.
Did FWO barge through the front door of its corporate office and demand answers? Did inspectors storm into Baiada plants and slam down closure orders? Did the Ombudsman issue a solitary fine to the company’s owners, the 24th richest family in Australia? No.
The only doors opened in the wake of the report were those into the homes of migrant workers. In what was dubbed Operation Cloudburst, a team of Border Protection officers and Fair Work inspectors raided and arrested 38 “illegal” migrant workers, accusing two of them of being labour hire contractors. All 38 now face deportation, the latest victims of a strategy to deflect outrage at the crimes of the powerful onto the powerless.
In a small flurry of public statements immediately after the report was released, the FWO threatened to pursue Baiada with “all the legal action we are able to”. So far, it has been unable specify any action planned against the company. When Red Flag contacted it for details, a representative said that “ongoing commentary is not appropriate”.
One thing it has done is unleash some punishing invitations. As part of its report, the FWO invited Baiada to “work with us to improve compliance on its sites”. It followed that up with a request that Baiada declare three types of non-legally binding responsibility: “We ask Baiada to publicly declare that it has an ethical, moral and social responsibility to join with the FWO to stamp out exploitation of vulnerable workers at its work sites”.
Both Baiada and the FWO blame the abhorrent working conditions on labour hire contractors. Investigators discovered a labyrinthine structure of companies engaged by Baiada to staff its operations. Many of these companies refused to meet FWO inspectors or folded days before scheduled meetings.
Some of the blame certainly lies with this parasitic layer, which profits from the hyper-exploitation of Baiada workers, and others. But they are small fish and exist to let the real culprits off the hook.
Crucially, labour hire contracting affords companies like Baiada the protection of deniability. Explaining the difficulty in taking enforcement action, deputy ombudsman Michael Campbell said that owing to the prevalence of labour hire arrangements, “it’s very hard to pin down an individual to hold accountable”. He went on to describe the layers of fly-by-night contractors as “like syndicated crime”.
This is a neat way of avoiding blaming the bosses at Baiada, who can be pinned down five days a week at their corporate headquarters at 625 Great Western Highway, Pendle Hill in NSW.
While Baiada is in the spotlight at the moment, complex and shady labour hire arrangements, like the ones detailed in the FWO report, are not an aberration.
The Recruitment and Consulting Services Association (RSCA), an employers’ association, admits that illegal and “unscrupulous” labour hire practices are common in the accommodation and food services, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting and construction industries.
However, it says that a “regulatory regime that focuses on labour hire restriction and enforcement would be a step backwards for business and on-hire companies”. RCSA’s concerns are unfounded. There is little prospect of any such regulations being imposed.
The real organised criminals, ensconced in the boardrooms of Baiada, Woolworths and Cobino Farms, will remain free to profit from the miserable conditions imposed on the people who staff their farms, factories and warehouses.
In late 2011, workers at Baiada’s Laverton North processing plant in Melbourne’s west decided they wouldn’t let the boardroom have it their way any longer. They went on strike and picketed the plant for 13 days, standing up to repeated court injunctions and a police attempt to break the picket.
Their action came about a year after labour hire worker Sarel Singh was decapitated while hosing down a chicken processing line that was left running.
One of the workers’ key demands was conversion to direct employment by the company after six months of employment by one of Baiada’s web of labour hire contractors. They won it. They also won a pay rise for workers still employed by labour hire companies.
Their actions, more than anything on offer from regulators, show the kind of fight that is needed.

Baiada avoids sanction for illegal practices

When Winnie cut open her finger working on a processing line at Covino Farms in Gippsland, her boss was eating an apple. Winnie had severed her nerves and come close to the bone. Her boss made her wait, bleeding, until he finished his apple before he drove her to the hospital. 
“I’m only one person, so my boss doesn’t care about me”, Winnie says, speaking to Red Flag with the assistance of an interpreter. “His attitude is ‘If you die, I don’t care’ … You’re just like a machine for them.” A few days later, according to a report by ABC’s Four Corners, Winnie went to the home of Covino’s labour hire contractor Samnang Huor (Sam) to collect her pay. There, Sam pinned her wounded hand down on his bed so hard that he opened her stitches.
“I tried my hardest to push him away but my hand was injured. I knew my hand was bleeding because I used all my strength to push him away. But he’s very tall, so even though I tried with all my strength, I couldn’t push him away. Then he put his hands into my clothes and touched my breasts.”
Known as Australia’s Salad King, Covino produces lettuce and other vegetables for major supermarkets and fast food chains including KFC.
Winnie’s is one of many stories of abuse at the company. Four Corners reported that Covino has been issued with 30 improvement notices for safety breaches in the last seven years. It aired allegations of 22-hour shifts and $2 million stolen wages each year. Winnie stopped working at Covino in April, but she hasn’t left. Instead, she’s taking up the task of organising workers there with the National Union of Workers.
“I’m worried that next time it’ll be my friend cutting their finger”, she says. “I want to help not only myself but others as well so that others don’t have to be subject to the same treatment.”
Shortly after the Four Corners story went to air, Winnie and other short-term workers discussed a one-day strike, “to show Covino we’re important”, she says. “Striking is a very effective way for workers to demonstrate if there’s anything happening at the workplace that’s not fair or if you have any issue that’s not being heard. Protest, strike and occupation are very effective ways to do it collectively.”
Covino Farms is made up of a number of different sections, each with about 100 workers, which she says is a challenge for coordination. There are also divisions based on job and visa classifications. Winnie says that there are short-term workers (she calls them “backpackers”, though a production line in regional Victoria will be most of the Australia they’ll see), longer term workers on student visas and people who live permanently in the area. She says the latter are more worried about long-term job security. 
When workers discussed the idea of a strike, Winnie argued for a course of action to make it happen: a petition to get every worker to commit and a decision on the day to do it. In the end, she says, it didn’t eventuate because of a lack of organisation. 
Winnie still thinks a strike is possible at Covino.
“It would affect the company in the bottom line. Also it would put pressure on them to really listen to what the backpackers and even the locals’ issues are and to try to fix them.”
Accounting for where the idea to strike came from, Winnie said that she and other short-term workers were student activists in Taiwan and learnt the power of collective action during large anti-government protests in 2014 that shut down the central business district of the capital Taipei.
Since the Four Corners story aired, the workers have made gains, Winnie says. The company now pays workers the award rate of $21 an hour instead of the $14 they received before. Workers are no longer forced to pay $11 each per day for a 10-minute bus ride to and from work; instead they are nominally allowed to use their own transport.
There is still much to win, according to Winnie. The company makes short-term workers feel like criminals, she says. Even if they hold valid visas, Covino makes them feel like they are illegal, through a combination of threats and information control – isolating workers in houses owned by labour hire contractors.
Winnie says there are spies planted in some of these houses, assisting the company to monitor and intimidate the workers in them. Adequate housing is one of the next things that Covino workers need to fight for, she says.
Soon after the Four Corners report, Covino issued a statement saying that it had severed ties with Sam Huor’s labour hire company. “It’s bullshit”, says Winnie. What it did was set up a new contracting company with a different name. Huor is registered as co-director and equal shareholder of the new company. Covino later claimed this was a mistake. It doesn’t deny that Huor still works at Covino. Management defends him on the basis that police didn’t find enough evidence to substantiate the claims against him.
For Winnie, fighting Covino is about more than winning better housing or striking at the power of labour hire contractors. She says organising is a step towards gaining respect. She believes that life can be better for workers.
Winnie’s got a lot of fight in her. “I think one day we can change anything”, she says, “because we’re already together”.

Migrant workers organising for a better life

Bosses in the supermarket warehousing industry are on the attack. “Woolworths are certainly going hard right across the nation, targeting all the sites. Trying to make that few extra dollars”, said Ron Marx, who worked at the company’s Barnawartha distribution centre (DC) near Wodonga until he was sacked in February.
Ron was a union delegate and health and safety representative. He had worked in the warehouse for nine years. “I’ve been a pain in their side for a long time, so they’ve wanted to get rid of me for ages and they've tried a few times”, he told Red Flag. Ron was sacked after raising a workplace safety issue with Woolworths managers. He says the company has been ignoring a Worksafe direction that workers not stack pallets above shoulder height. Worksafe has advised that working above shoulder height is an injury risk.
Ron says that pallet heights are “out of control” at the Barnawartha DC. “They actually gagged us”, he said. Management told workers that they weren’t allowed to talk about the issue because a case about it was being heard at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. When Ron rang Worksafe, he found out that this was a lie.
According to Ron, the company is deliberately eroding safety standards. “Woolworths made the statement that safety is one of the core values of our business. I nearly choked on that!”
He says that the bosses are targeting some to intimidate the rest. “They’re just trying to scare everyone into being like sheep”, he said. “There’s a lot of people who’ve said to delegates they don't want to raise any safety issues because of what happened to me.”
While workers wreck their bodies, Woolworths rakes in the profits – $2.45 billion in 2014. “To me, safety costs money, and they're taking shortcuts through it”, he said. “We’re going back a hundred years. They just want us all to be slaves … Everyone talks about sweatshops in Malaysia and China, but the truth is it happens here too. There’s no difference.”
Pressuring workers to meet high “pick rates” – a measure of how quickly a worker loads goods on a pallet – is another way for companies to maximise profits. Warehouse managers often say that “no one is pressured for performance”, but out on the floor it’s always a different story. Casual workers are pressured to pick at 100 percent, in other words total compliance with the nominated pick rate, or face the sack. Now, long time permanent workers are also being targeted.
“A lot of the newbies, they come in and they end up injured because they push ’em so hard”, Ron explained. “They treat you like kids. They stand over you and try to push you as hard as they can.” If that doesn’t work, he says that the company will sack a few workers to “get people moving again”.
In early February, Matthew Kors was stood down by management at the Woolworths’ Melbourne liquor distribution centre in Laverton. He wasn’t meeting the pick rate. He was sacked a few days later. A few weeks after that, management issued a notice telling workers that the average work rate in the warehouse had jumped. They would be rewarded with a barbeque. The rate of injury spiked, with workers at the Laverton DC reporting that 30 out of 400 workers are injured.
Across the Woolworths distribution network, workers’ injuries go unrecorded as a matter of course. Many haven’t seen a doctor even weeks after their injury because they’re afraid of being targeted.
As a result of this kind of treatment at Barnawartha, there is an intense dislike of the managers there. Ron related an example from the last enterprise agreement campaign. “I had a group of 25 people come up to me. They asked me a question. They said, ‘Ron, can we make one of our claims that we’ll forgo a pay rise for the next two years as long as they sack all the managers in the place?’”
Ron described how he feels about the people behind his sacking: “At least I know when I go to bed at night I can sleep properly. Not like some of the managers; they look in the mirror and they don't like what they see. They sell their souls.”
Linfox, which runs a DC for Coles in Truganina in Melbourne’s outer west, is also on the offensive. Its tactics are the same but employed on a larger scale. In the last year, Coles/Linfox has effectively sacked about 100 workers.
The story was recently reported in the Age, which spoke with one affected worker, John Russell. He had worked for Linfox for 37 years. After a bit of time off because of a shoulder injury he sustained at work, he was deemed fit to return. Before he got back in, he was stood down by the company. Its doctor claimed he was unable to use a hand-held scanning device.
This is despite his own doctor saying he could work at the DC, where there is a range of other jobs that he could be assigned. According to the National Union of Workers, this is part of a policy to get rid of older permanent workers who can be replaced with younger casuals. Linfox admits that the policy is part of a plan to boost productivity in its warehouse. While Linfox bullies its workers until their bodies break, the company has made a complaint about “union intimidation” because organisers have leafleted workers in the car park.
 The NUW has organised a number of serious strikes in supermarket warehouses in the last few years – the Woolworths Hume DC in October 2010, Coles in Somerton in July 2012 and Barnawartha Woolworths in October 2013. Now, the clear pattern of attacks from the bosses poses an obvious challenge – the need for a concerted industrial response outside of EBA negotiating periods.
Ron said that Woolworths management is afraid of the potential of a snap response from workers. “One of these days they’ll turn around, walk out the door for four hours and say ‘Improve it.’”

Warehouse safety wars

Workers at a factory in Melbourne’s south-east have voted to end a dispute with their employer, International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF), after the company made an improved offer in enterprise agreement negotiations.
For four days, 27 of the workers had occupied the canteen of IFF’s Dandenong factory, shutting down production and bringing the Australian operation of an $8.65 billion multinational to its knees. The occupation ended on 30 January, but the workforce and supporters maintained a picket of the site until an agreement was secured on 1 February.
According to Matt Oldenhof, who has worked at the factory for more than eight years and was one of the occupying workers, the agreement is a “big win”.
Prior to the sit-in, the company had offered workers a flat 55 cents an hour pay rise while pushing to strip a number of key conditions, including a 10-minute paid break and the accrual and payout of unused sick leave. It had also proposed the introduction of a “productivity bonus” system that was widely opposed by workers for being unsafe and divisive.
Speaking of the growing tension that led to the decision to take action, Matt told Red Flag: “It’s sickening the amount of money they [management] get. The divide just gets larger between us and them. They get their third house down at the beach, and some of these guys struggle to pay their bills.”
The final agreement on wages will make paying the bills a bit easier. The workers won 6.3 percent over three years, which – though hovering around the inflation rate – is a significant advance on the company’s previous “final” offer. Paid breaks will remain the same, and workers with unused sick leave will receive payouts at the end of the year, before the system is abolished. The agreement will also not include a “productivity bonus” system.
Matt explains that the canteen occupation was a response to management’s decision to escalate the dispute by locking out the entire workforce. Negotiations for a new agreement started in September and were marked, he says, by management’s “smug” attitude. “They were prepared to test us and push us”, he said.
On the Tuesday morning after Australia Day the workers, National Union of Workers members, arrived at the factory to find lockout notices pinned to the gates. The decision to charge through them when they were opened to let a car in was their “only opportunity”, according to Matt. Otherwise, he explained, they could have been sitting outside the gates for weeks. The occupation caught the company off guard, paralysing the site. Matt said that the shutdown of two departments with particularly low production volumes and high margins had the company’s customers “screaming”.
IFF refused entry to all other workers throughout the occupation, so it was up to the same group of 27 to hold out. “It was a roller coaster. Emotions were high, spirits were high”, said Matt. Joking about sleeping on the canteen floor, he said that they found out who the snorers were.
He said there was also some stress about being away from home. “A lot of guys have never spent a night away from their family, let alone four nights”, he said. One had a newborn baby. Some missed their kids’ first day at school. Andy, another occupier, recounted the response by one worker to his family’s over the phone pleas for him to come home: “I’ve got to stay here, it’s what we’ve got to do”, he told them.
There was a sense of camaraderie that pulled workers through, according to Andy. “If someone was looking under stress, you’d walk up and give them a pat on the back … there’s people I might have said two words to since they’ve been here, and I know them quite well now”, he said.
“I think that’s going to make a big difference when we go back in there”, said Andy. Matt’s optimistic about the IFF workers’ prospects in the future. “What we did in here has made us so much stronger … this has set a standard now”, he said. “We’re fighting not only for ourselves but for every worker in Australia, every worker and their families.”

‘We’re stronger now’: Dandenong factory occupation ends

There is a growing crisis in aged care. In the last three-and-a-half years, 835 Victorian beds have disappeared due to closure and privatisation. This includes 138 beds in homes where staff provide specialised care to residents with mental illnesses.
The closures continue. In early October, a mentally ill elderly woman was dragged kicking and screaming from her home in South Stone Lodge aged mental health facility in Werribee, 30 minutes west of Melbourne. Melbourne Health, the facility’s owner, plans to close the 30-bed residence.
“She knew that she was being removed from her home”, said Jaimie Taunoa, a volunteer bus driver at the facility, speaking to Red Flag at a union rally against the closures. “Two days afterwards, that lady suffered from a stroke. I strongly believe it was from total anxiety, total stress.”
The closure of South Stone would be devastating for its residents, forcing them into public facilities where their needs cannot be met. Alternatively, they will be in limbo, unable to afford the specialised care that, often, only the private sector has the resources to provide.
Jaimie’s father lives at South Stone. He was removed from regular aged care facilities as a result of problems with aggression caused by an illness.
Melbourne Health says that residents like Jaimie’s father will receive adequate care in the mainstream system. This is a lie designed to cover their real motive – the pursuit of profit.
“I had a psychiatric assessment with my dad with [Melbourne Health] eight weeks ago. I was told ‘There is no way your father is going to be ready for mainstream for a long while yet.’ All of a sudden, we’re selling [South Stone] and my dad’s fine to go into mainstream.”
Melbourne Health’s stated vision, according to Robert Doyle, Liberal Melbourne mayor and chairman of the company’s board, is “Passion for caring – achieving the extraordinary”. If it is profitable, this clearly becomes a “passion” for throwing the most sick and vulnerable people to the dogs.

Elderly being thrown to the dogs

Serial corporate welfare bludger Philip Bart is at it again. Nearly 60 workers from the Wangaratta mill of his textiles company (Bruck Textile Technologies) have been sacked, while Bart and his associates refuse to pay the $3.8 million these workers are owed in redundancy pay, annual and long service leave.
Instead they’ve handballed the responsibility to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee (FEG) scheme. The FEG is a corporate welfare fund which pays workers’ employment entitlements from public funds so that bosses don’t have to when their ventures sink.
Bart, who hails from the mansion-studded Sydney harbourside suburb of Point Piper, was also the principal shareholder in National Textiles when it collapsed in 2000. Stan Howard, brother of then Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, was its chairman. That company refused to pay all $11 million in entitlements its 340 workers had accrued. The federal government stepped in to provide $4.2 million to cover the shortfall.
This time, Bart and his fellow directors have pulled off a particularly shady piece of corporate gymnastics to get out of paying the entitlements altogether.
On 10 July, Bart and other directors sold Bruck Textile to a new company that they had created a month previously – Australian Textile Mills (ATM). The price? One dollar. For that, ATM – also owned by Bart – took 130 of Bruck Textile’s workers (leaving about 60 with the shell company) as well as most of Bruck’s assets and liabilities.
Bruck’s directors liquidated the company the next day, leaving 60 workers without jobs, and the company, stripped of all assets, with no obligation to pay the millions in entitlements it owes.
According to a Bruck spokesman, however, the company still owes Bart $8 million. The largest debt listed in the liquidator’s report is an $8 million liability to Sisely Properties. Sisely Properties owns the mill compound out of which Bruck Textiles operated.
Known as Bruck Properties until just months before Bruck Textiles went into liquidation, Sisely Properties shares the same board as Bruck, including principal shareholder Bart. Despite the connection, Sisely Properties will not be liquidated. Instead it retains a claim on the debt owed to it.
It appears that the land will not be sold either. Bruck representatives have signalled that after liquidation they intend to proceed with a residential redevelopment of the mill compound. 
All these manoeuvres are part of an attempt to mask the fact that the people who worked for decades to produce the profits for Bart and Co. are being done over by their bosses. They are forced to rely on the FEG for their entitlements while the bosses who should be paying those entitlements use that money and more to line their own pockets.
Shop steward Dianne Baker, sacked after working at the mill for 25 years, says the workers are angry at the job losses and so is the entire town, in Victoria’s northeast. “We’ve just been tossed and they’re carrying on as if everything is fine”, Dianne told Red Flag.
Among those sacked are five of the mill’s six union shop stewards. “They’re culling off the ones who would fight them the most”, as well as union members or workers who have spoken out in the past, says Reg, another of the mill’s shop stewards to get the sack. He says the move is an attack on the unions, designed to weaken them for the next round of attacks.
Responding to questions in 2000 about whether he’d considered selling his million dollar yacht to pay some of the company’s debts to National Textile workers instead of using government money, Bart blustered: “Not really. At the end of the day, I don’t apologise for working hard.”
Reg told Red Flag he thinks it should be Bart who pays, not the government. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I’m getting my money, but he’s the one who’s done this. He’s the one who should foot the bill”.

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