In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have unleashed a reign of terror on the US working class. Musk’s DOGE team, who are entirely unelected and apparently accountable to no-one, are defunding or shutting down swathes of the public sector that operate or fund services providing health care, education, housing, social welfare and environmental protection. Tens of thousands of federal public sector workers are being intimidated into resigning from their jobs.
Trump and Musk are gutting workplace health and safety and consumer protection. They have dismembered the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal body tasked with protecting workers’ rights to unionise. Any provisions to promote the interests of oppressed groups, many of which were fought for and won in the 1960s, are being stripped away. 
This is accompanied by a racist offensive to divide and demoralise workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been let loose, with thousands arrested in raids across major US cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. 
Trump’s objective is to slash the public sector (aside from the military and security agencies), reduce oversight of private corporations, deliver fewer services to those in need and bend the state apparatus to his will. That will then free up federal funds that can be funnelled to the military and to subsidise corporations and the rich.
The vigour with which Trump, Musk and their cronies in the cabinet are prosecuting this agenda is matched only by the feebleness of the opposition. 
As compared to 2017, when a number of Democrat-aligned media owners, university administrators, Hollywood studio chiefs and Silicon Valley CEOs, along with judges, senior Republicans and departmental heads and left-sounding Democrats opposed Trump and his hard right agenda, opposition from such quarters is barely visible today. Most of yesterday’s opponents have been purged, converted to Trump’s agenda or stand silent out of fear or political opportunism. 
The right wing of the Democrats support his anti-immigrant measures, while liberal Democrats are in disarray and demoralised. The same holds for the hundreds of NGOs that operate in the orbit of the party. 
So much for the liberal “resistance”.
But what of those organisations that are meant to fight for workers’ rights, the trade unions? Little has been heard from them. The federal public sector union chiefs went to the federal court to prevent Musk sacking tens of thousands of public servants and won a brief reprieve. That lasted one week before the same judge waved the cuts through. The union leaders have made no call for broad resistance by workers and those who depend on government services. In some cases, union leaders are even praising Trump for his supposed support for “working Americans” or imposition of tariffs which, they argue, will save jobs.
The forces of official politics—all of which embody different wings of capitalist politics—are giving Trump a free run. What then can stop him? The US working class must move. 
The working class constitutes by far the majority of the US population. It ranges from farm workers and IT workers in California and Las Vegas hotel cleaners to flight attendants and baggage handlers at Dallas Fort Worth airport, oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico, warehouse workers in the logistics hubs of Atlanta and Chicago, New York City bus drivers and teachers in Boston. Whichever way you measure it, at least 100 million Americans are in working-class jobs. Then there are their dependants, the unemployed and working-class pensioners. All up, the working class is two-thirds of the entire population, a mighty force if mobilised to fight.
Workers’ numerical strength is not the only thing that gives them power. More important is their strategic position in American life: nothing moves—not a container, not a crane, package, bus or aeroplane—unless the working class moves it. Nothing gets built and nobody is treated, taught or fed unless workers do the work. And nothing is dug from the ground unless workers do it. 
In a just world, it would be the working class, the direct producers, who would benefit from their labour. Under capitalism, however, because the bosses own all the factories, mines, warehouses, ports and hotels and workers own nothing, workers must sell their ability to labour to the capitalists, allowing the bosses to cream off the profits. 
It is this theft of workers’ labour that is the source of the capitalists’ profits but also their vulnerability: they depend on workers for everything. This is obvious in any strike: when the workers fold their arms, nothing moves and the flow of profits to the bosses dries up. No matter how high and mighty the bosses think they are, they need us; we don’t need them.
And unlike every other oppressed group, workers have a common interest and a common enemy. Each individual worker can improve their life only in cooperation with other workers, and only insofar as they can collectively wrest control of the wealth of society from their bosses. 
The working class needs to leverage this power to halt Trump and his billionaire buddies. Just think about it. If bank workers refused to process financial transactions handing public money over to billionaires, we could stop them looting the Treasury. If truck drivers refused to deliver the cement and construction workers refused to build the detention centres, Trump’s plans to grab, process and deport millions of migrants could be stopped in its tracks. 
There is something else special about the working class. Karl Marx described the working class as the universal class, in that when it fights it does so in the interests of all humanity. This is clear when it comes to the fight against racism. The working class needs unity if it is to win against its class enemy, the capitalists. Racism divides workers and weakens their collective strength. This is why Amazon bosses, currently confronted by a union organising drive at the company’s big warehouse in North Carolina, are trying to stoke divisions between African-American and Latino workers. It is why Trump and Musk are attacking DEI initiatives, which, although they are mostly tokenistic, are at least recognition that the effects of racism should be countered. Wiping out DEI serves only to intimidate racial minorities, embolden racists and undercut workers’ unity.
Because workers need unity in their ranks, they are often at the forefront in the fight against racism, and that benefits not just workers but every oppressed group. In 2019, the Chicago Teachers Union won a clause in their contract declaring that their employer could not ask about or keep track of the immigration status of students or their families. The contract barred ICE agents from entering school grounds unless they provided their credentials, a reason for their request and a signed warrant. In 2017, two unions, the Teamsters in New York City and the National Union of Healthcare Workers, both pledged to refuse cooperation with federal agents in prosecuting or deporting members.
Going back further, on 1 May 2006, labour unions and Latino Catholic organisations and community groups organised a nationwide Day Without Immigrants. Millions of migrant workers and their supporters boycotted work and shops on the day in protest at an anti-migrant bill then being considered in the US Senate. One to 2 million marched in Los Angeles, half a million in Chicago, and 200,000 in New York, along with tens of thousands in other cities. These protests killed the bill. 
Such acts are only the most dramatic way workers can stop Trump in his tracks. But in most cases, getting to this point will require workers to build their confidence by organising to defend their own jobs, wages and conditions. Right now, this means a determined fight to prevent mass lay-offs in the federal public service. That means service-wide strikes. Musk may want to slash public-sector jobs, but government machinery must still turn if the capitalists are to enjoy the services they require. 
If workers defend their jobs successfully, they are more likely to develop the confidence to act in solidarity with other oppressed groups. This is why, in practice, it is those workers with a record of fighting for their own rights who are likely to lead the way in a broader fight against Trump’s right-wing offensive.
That the workers’ movement in the US is at a low ebb should not make us despair. Unions still represent nearly 15 million workers in the US, and every year tens of thousands of workers—last year these ranged from school employees in Virginia and nurses in Michigan to VW auto workers in Tennessee—joined a trade union. 
Unions can still fight and win. After a seven-week strike at Boeing in Seattle last year, metal workers won a 38 percent pay rise over four years, while a three-day strike of east coast longshore workers (wharfies), the first since the 1970s, yielded a 61percent pay rise over six years. Simply a threat to strike by American Airlines flight attendants secured an immediate 20 percent pay rise.
Trump only has to recall his first term in office, when an illegal teachers’ strike wave swept the country in 2018, disrupting parents’ attendance at work for the duration, to remind himself of the power of workers when they withdraw their labour. Particularly impressive was the fact that these were strikes in conservative, Trump-supporting states, such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, where Republican governors had a battery of anti-strike laws at their disposal. The teachers pressed on regardless and won most of their claims. 
Then there are the actions workers took early in the COVID-19 pandemic. US socialist Lance Selfa noted recently: “Workers in the Alameda County, Calif., public health system conducted a strike that succeeded not only in winning their own demands on pay and working conditions but also stopped the county’s plans for privatizing the public hospital. Autoworkers in Ford and GM plants came off the unemployment line to produce ventilators. Workers in the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania occupied their workplace in March 2020 for a month while they produced tons of materials for use in producing facemasks. Hundreds of smaller, and largely unheralded, actions of working-class self-defense took place, especially in the first year of the pandemic.”
As these examples show, workers have power and an interest in wielding it for the whole of society. Trump and Musk may now seem unstoppable, but that’s because no organisation of any social weight is doing anything to stop them. 
Public opposition may begin to emerge from liberal or union bureaucratic quarters in coming months, especially if Trump’s right-wing coalition splinters or the economy or financial markets tank. But we can’t wait that long. The attacks are coming thick and fast now. 
Even if resistance to the whirlwind of attacks is currently extremely weak, there are glimmers of hope: demonstrations outside federal offices to protest against the gutting of government services; rallies of one or two hundred in big cities to oppose attacks on migrants and ICE raids. These actions, although small, are steps in the right direction. Everyone shocked by the brutality of the right-wing attacks must try to build on them. But to be most effective, the working class must be at the centre of such mobilisations. Unlike the liberal institutions currently lying low, the working class has not just an interest in defeating Trump’s right wing offensive but the power to do so.
Most likely mass working-class resistance won’t suddenly erupt in the next month or two, but all it would take is for a few groups of workers to start to move and the situation could shift quickly. It’s not like Trump and Musk have a solid mandate to carry out their drastic attacks on workers’ rights—Trump did not even win a majority of votes at November’s election.
And to move from token actions to a mobilisation with real weight, workers must prevent their resistance being coopted by the Democrats, the fate of so much of the resistance last time around.
That means socialist politics and socialist organisation, and rebuilding a movement that looks to the strategic power of the working class, and mass grassroots action, to confront Trump’s right-wing agenda.

Tom Bramble

Workers have the power to stop Trump

“The great majority of you are fed up to the back teeth with them. The election gives you the chance to make it clear to these people how you feel.” 
Conservative British Prime Minister Edward Heath was muttering, weeks before the 1974 general election. “These people” were striking coal miners—the advance guard of the British working class in those days.
The last few years had shaken capitalism to its core. Massive strikes and unofficial actions were the norm. Conservative attempts to break the unions with new industrial laws and wage-freeze policies had only let loose a torrent of resistance.
In July 1972, the government imprisoned five docker shop stewards for defying a legal injunction. Forty-four thousand dock workers struck to demand their comrades’ release—all this without hesitation or recourse to “official” union authorisation. The call from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to stop work didn’t come until ten days into the national strike.
As rank-and-file stoppages landed blows against Heath’s industrial laws, solidarity action was breaking his policies on wages. Heath insisted that no worker should receive a wage increase above 7 percent. In January 1972, more than 25,000 coalminers struck for a 35 percent rise.
The government tried circumventing the action by hoarding coal at power stations and transport hubs. It wanted to prove to the miners that it could keep fuelling the industry even if every pit stopped digging.
A class-wide battle ensued, as the National Union of Miners (NUM) won solidarity to stop the movement of coal. Wherever the government had stockpiles, miners travelled to convince workers not to burn, refine or transport the material. Broad layers of unionists, students and other sympathisers were drawn into the fight against Heath.
“I was away from home, at college in Enfield”, Jean Spence told Tribune magazine 50 years later. “My dad was a striking miner at Dawdon pit. We hosted striking miners—flying pickets—from Kent in our student flat, and I had my first experience of picketing at Picketts Lock Power Station. An old trade unionist taught us how to deal respectfully with lorry drivers we were trying to turn away.” 
The best-remembered battleground of the 1972 strike was the Saltley fuel plant in Birmingham, where the Conservatives claimed to have 100,000 tonnes of processed coal ready to burn. There, 20,000 engineers struck to support thousands of miners who picketed the gates, pushing back police. This crucible of solidarity forced the government into submission—days later, the miners won their wage increase.
The following year, a global recession emerged. Once again, the NUM led the way by imposing an overtime ban to win higher wages. With energy and steel production impacted, Heath saw a political opportunity. He was determined to push back the militant edge of the labour movement, turn popular opinion against the miners and bury them under a landslide election victory for the Conservatives.
On 13 December 1973, Heath announced nationwide power rationing in response to the miners’ bans. Under a State of Emergency, households were subjected to a rotating schedule of energy stoppages. Electricity would be limited to three days per week for industry—workplaces were directed to shut down operations for the remaining four days. Heath maintained this “three-day week” for the whole northern winter. The government was in effect imposing a lockout against the entire British working class in punishment for the NUM’s action.
Back then, coal accounted for three-quarters of the UK energy supply, and steel remained a core part of Britain’s dwindling manufacturing base. By February 1974, miners had moved from overtime bans to all-out action, and the strikes had reduced steel production to 60 percent of its usual capacity. The miners held immense industrial power—and they were fighting on behalf of all workers facing real wage cuts. 
Barclay’s Bank profits had risen by 75 per cent since 1970, while food prices had increased by one-half. Much like our own “cost-of-living crisis”, the “recession” of the early 1970s was a recession for workers, while bosses prospered. If the miners could break through Heath’s wage policies, they could set a new standard for what other workers could win. 
For my parents and their siblings, images of 1974 still glimmer through murky childhood memories. Before I even knew what a strike was, I learned about the power cuts under Heath and those orangey, incandescent evenings in my Gran’s living room.
Winters in Glasgow are cold and dark. So during the three-day week, it was flickering candles and the buzz of a repurposed camping stove. John Peel’s prog-rock sessions had adolescents transfixed by the radio—television channels went dead by 10pm. My dad watched his older brother pore over Tolkien by candlelight, night after night. I can still find those volumes on my Uncle Jim’s shelf, lovingly dog-eared and worn. 
In the mornings, even by 9 o’clock, daylight would be hours away. The street lamps were knocked out by the power cuts. “We had to wear luminous vests going to school in the pitch black”, my Aunty Jackie explained. These were formative weeks, when the children of the British working class undertook with pride the task of outlasting Heath in his stand-off against the miners. 
The older kids at university found their own creative ways to support the NUM. Student unions were barred from sending direct financial donations. So, instead, striking miners were invited to mass meetings at Norwich, Warwick and Essex universities. Socialist student societies fundraised towards a £250 “speaker’s fee” for each miner—a cunning scheme to deliver solidarity funds to the pit communities.
The Tories employed dirty tactics to try to break the workers’ resolve. As a new ballot on industrial action approached, one Conservative MP growled, “Social security should not be made available to wives and children [of NUM members], because it allowed the enemies of the state to go on strike”.
The Thatcher administration would make good on this threat during the great battles of 1984-5. But for the time being, the Tories were driven back by the very union movement they’d hoped to extinguish.
Heath ran the 1974 election on the now infamous slogan, “Who governs?” Would voters prefer questions of economic policy to be decided by responsible Conservative ministers, or by the trade unions? The British working class at that time answered unswervingly: “Who governs? Not you!” 
Heath lost the election in a hammering defeat. Over the next decade, the Tories geared up for another showdown. These years of humiliation at the hands of the labour movement would not go unavenged. 
As early as 1977, with the party still in opposition, Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley outlined a program for hoarding coal, slashing strikers’ entitlements and training a new army of riot police to attack picketers. The “Ridley Plan” would become widely recognised as the Tories’ blueprint for defeating the NUM.
Four years of Labour rule had curbed the tide of workers’ struggle. With Heath gone, union leaders accepted a shameful compromise—they would forgo wage rises and refuse to authorise strikes in exchange for more government welfare spending. In the winter of 1978-79, a heroic bout of wildcat actions arose over the heads of the officials. But Labour had successfully dulled strike rates and cohered union leaders around a new industrial peace. 
When Margaret Thatcher won the prime ministership in 1979, she tried to enforce this “peace” through open class warfare. Ruling classes around the world were looking to slash social welfare and privatise public services to stabilise profit rates after the recession. The Conservatives wanted to win a final, set-piece confrontation to force unions into total submission and ensure minimum resistance. Thatcher announced the appointment of her new energy minister in 1983 with the menacing words: “We’re going to have a coal strike”. 
The Tories were so determined to break the miners that they were prepared to reorganise totally Britain’s energy infrastructure. A massive expansion of nuclear power and North Sea oil was to displace coal—the mines would be closed down to drive out the country’s most powerful union.
Don Keating, a South Yorkshire miner, remembers the night he learned his pit would close. “I was doing a 6 o’clock evening shift with a mate”, he told the BBC. “I’m walking down Pit Lane and a couple of lads who were coming up off shift said, ‘Don, do you know pit’s shutting?’ A bit of a joke, we thought—more rumours. We got down there and ... they were saying, ‘Yeah, it’s been announced that Cortonwood will be shutting’.”
On 5 March 1984, the government’s National Coal Board declared a wave of closures across England, Scotland and Wales—twenty mines were to be shut and 20,000 miners sacked. Cortonwood miners had recently been assured their jobs were safe for another five years; now, the pit was to close within five weeks. 
South Yorkshire had always been a militant area. They’d been among the first to blockade Saltley Gate in 1972. The Cortonwood NUM sent mobile pickets across the Yorkshire coalfields. Kent, Durham, South Wales and Scotland followed. Pit by pit, day by day, the immense network of mines across Britain was being pulled out on strike.
It was the confrontation Thatcher had been waiting for. Faithful to the Ridley Plan, the government had stockpiled 9 million tonnes of coal over the preceding three years. They now unleashed the hell hounds of the state against picketers. Thousands of police from different branches were drafted to patrol roads and pit villages for the duration of the strike. Mike McKay, a BBC journalist at the time, recalled:
“I remember particularly one very early morning, I was driving up the A1, and on the other side of the road was this endless convoy of police riot vans. It just went on and on ... It was like you were watching an occupying army travelling to the front.”
Many who remember 1984 speak of “civil war”. Dave Creamer from the Yorkshire Silverwood colliery described the atmosphere as flying pickets worked to spread the strike in spite of police: 
 “We were setting off at four o’clock picketing, trying to get through roadblocks ... We went through every back alley you could think of, up farmers’ fields, down through woods—everything—just to get to that picket line.”
“It was quite an adventure at first”, Creamer recalled in a BBC interview. “I was 20-odd-year-old, it was exciting. The adventure became a bit of a nightmare later on.”
The miners fought with everything they had, but the mood darkened towards the middle of the year. On 18 June, a mass picket assembled at Orgreave, where fuel was being supplied to a major steelworks. Miners hoped to recreate the victory of 1972 by hitting industries beyond coal. Despite some hesitation from union leaders, thousands of NUM members were ready to confront the police. 
But nothing could have prepared them for the 6,000 officers, dressed in riot gear, who thrashed, clubbed and beat their way through the picketers on that day. Watching footage of the bloodbath will still turn your stomach, even 40 years later. Yet the British media cruelly doctored the scenes, framing strikers as the instigators of violence. 
From that moment on, the civil war against miners was played out on ideological terrain. Thatcher arraigned them as “the enemy within”—with the full backing of the mainstream press. Miners and union leaders were increasingly described as “thugs” and even likened to fascists. Print workers at the Sun newspaper refused to publish the vicious anti-NUM headlines prepared by their bosses.
Pockets of secondary action opened across the union movement. Dock workers struck for three weeks in August 1984 to stop employers transporting coal to the steelworks in Scunthorpe. In Leicestershire, unionised rail workers did not handle coal for 35 consecutive weeks. 
These exceptional cases needed to be turned into a tide of solidarity to face down Thatcher, the police and the media’s combined forces. After all, the Tories wouldn’t stop at smashing the NUM. Every worker had a stake in this fight.
Mainstream accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike describe a tragic arc; a losing battle against Thatcher’s inevitable victory. It’s true that the NUM couldn’t have won the dispute alone. A class-wide mobilisation against Thatcher was necessary—and possible. But it never materialised. 
After Orgreave, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock encouraged comparisons between the so-called violence of picketers and the tyranny of the state. Some union officials even helped employers circumvent the strike’s impact, hoping they’d be rewarded with better sectional agreements. The TUC itself dealt the death blow, announcing in December 1984 that it would not endorse promised solidarity action after the High Court ruled the NUM’s strike illegal.
It’s difficult to communicate the gravity of this betrayal and the consequences that the British workers’ movement faced for decades afterwards. Unions have only recently begun to recover strike rates and membership numbers after the devastation of the Thatcher years.
Strikers themselves resisted the trajectory—they maintained their action through the Christmas and winter of 1984. In March 1985, miners reluctantly accepted a recommendation from NUM leaders to end the longest mass strike in British history. Dave Creamer recalls: 
“The night they held that branch meeting, when the orders came through from national level to go back to work ... There was almost fighting inside the club with people that wanted to stay out, people who wanted to go back ... It was one of the angriest meetings I’ve ever seen in my life.”
At the beginning of 1984, 170,000 miners worked across 170 collieries in Britain. Twenty years later, those numbers had dwindled to 4,000 workers in only eight pits. Unemployment destroyed whole communities. The economic power of the NUM—a power that had once disrupted heavy industry and toppled a government—was broken. 
Miners alone couldn’t defeat the arrayed powers of the ruling class. But they’d given Thatcher a serious fight. Because of them, the 1970s and 1980s in Britain are remembered not only as decades when the capitalist state attacked trade unions and working-class people. They are also memorialised as an era of defiant, tenacious and bitter class struggle, full of lessons. 
This history is the miners’ gift to every new generation of working-class resistance. For that, we owe them our gratitude.
Let them exhale
in unity
in hope
in disgust
and let them
remember
that shimmering sad yesterday 
when
people screamed no
—Extract from the poem “The unification” by Patrick Jones.

Ruby Healer

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

The right to freedom of speech and political expression on university campuses is under attack by the media and Labor government. Under the guise of “fighting antisemitism”, student activists and academics are being targeted for their opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank. 
The growing repression of Palestine supporters is demonstrated by the Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities. The joint parliamentary commission, launched in January 2025, has conflated Palestine activism on campuses with a recent spate of genuine acts of antisemitism in Sydney and Melbourne. The commission said in its opening statement that:
“There is an alarming and intensifying nationwide rise in antisemitism including arson attacks on synagogues, a parliamentarian’s office and now a childcare centre ... The focus of this inquiry is on responding to the rise in antisemitism at Australian universities. Antisemitism in universities is connected to broader antisemitism in our communities and neighbourhoods.”
That none of these attacks occurred on campuses or have been linked to campus activists is ignored. The commission is chaired by Labor MP Josh Burns, who opposed a ceasefire deal passed by the UN and supported by Australia in December 2023. 
The media has contributed to the campaign against academics who support Palestine. At Macquarie University, Palestinian researcher and activist Randa Abdel-Fattah has been repeatedly smeared by the press—for instance, the Australian has published more than a dozen articles against her. She was first targeted for co-running an arts and crafts day with kids at the University of Sydney Gaza solidarity encampment last year, being accused by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry of trying to “induct children into racial hatred and religious extremism”. 
Liberal Party Shadow Minister for Education Sarah Henderson has repeatedly called for Abdel-Fattah to be sacked. Labor’s Minister of Education Jason Claire has requested that the Australian Research Council (ARC) formally investigate Abdel-Fattah’s existing research grant. 
The threat from Labor and the Liberals is clear: if you dare support Palestine, then your academic career is in jeopardy. 
Last week, Macquarie University Vice Chancellor Bruce Dowton was hauled in front of the Commission of Inquiry. Any illusions that he would defend free speech, or his staff members, were quickly dashed by his prostrated responses. He reassured the commission of Macquarie’s firm commitment to fighting antisemitism and that academic freedom and free speech should be considered a “privilege”. 
When pressed by Burns on why Abdel-Fattah hadn’t been fired, Dowton suggested he’d be happy to do so if the law allowed, saying that he found it “personally abhorrent”, but lamented the fact that Australian law is “silent” on whether anti-Zionism is considered antisemitic. He repeatedly invoked the staff contract as a legal impediment to sacking Abdel-Fattah or disciplining staff over their support for Palestine. Dowton went so far as to advocate for “industrial law reform” that would effectively annul the existing workplace agreement. 
These hearings are reminiscent of the McCarthyist witch-hunt in the US during the Cold War. In this time, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed and used as a political weapon against the left: thousands were sacked or blacklisted, and hundreds were arrested. While the scale of repression in Australia is currently nowhere near that of the Red Scare, it is incumbent on all progressive university workers and students to fight these attacks on our right to free speech and protest. We must stand in solidarity with Palestine activists.

Steven Hansen

Academics under attack for supporting Palestine

Victorian teachers and school staff face a crisis of unsustainable workloads and inadequate pay. We can address it this year as we negotiate for a new Victorian Government Schools Agreement (VGSA).
Our real wages <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_O83eLz-imC8uYDBNB_hzvXyK9Z4BB2kRMV3bBE8GQ0/edit?usp=drivesdk">have fallen by 11 percent</a> under the current agreement. By the end of this year, graduate teacher pay will be $8,489 per year ($162 per week) less than it would have been if our pay had kept up with inflation. 
Starting teacher salaries in Victoria are now the lowest in Australia and almost $10,000 behind those in New South Wales. We need a crisis catch-up pay rise that makes up for the value we’ve lost—17 percent would mean we’re back in front of inflation—and then future rises to keep us ahead of rising prices. 
It’s not as though the money isn’t there. The wealth of Australia’s billionaires surged by $28 billion last year, <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.au/2025/01/takers-not-makers-how-billionaires-profit-while-billions-struggle/">according to Oxfam</a>. And some state government workers have managed to win significant wage increases recently. Nurses in Victoria <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-nurses-reject-pay-deal">voted to reject</a> the government’s inadequate pay offer and won 28.4 percent over four years. Victorian ambulance workers <a href="https://vau.org.au/in-principal-agreement-reached/">won increases of 24-33 percent</a> for MICA paramedics in their new agreement last year. After a long campaign of strikes and rallies, teachers in NSW <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2023/09/09/historic-boost-nsw-teachers-pay-will-tackle-teachers-shortage/">accepted a deal</a> in late 2023 that immediately boosted graduate salaries by 12 percent.
Teachers are also overworked, causing burnout at record rates. The result, according to <a href="https://www.aeufederal.org.au/news-media/news/2024/filling-critical-teacher-gaps">research</a>
by the education union, is that 83 percent of Australian schools have experienced staffing shortages. The 2022 VGSA included a 90-minute reduction in weekly face-to-face teaching hours. Unfortunately, that reduction came at the cost of three of our four professional practice days included in the 2017 agreement, limiting its effect. 
This modest reduction in face-to-face teaching hours has not solved the workload problem. According to a Monash University report, Victorian school staff continue to work a staggering unpaid 12.5 hours each week. One way to address staff burnout would be to reduce face-to-face teaching hours from 18.5 to 16 hours for both primary and secondary teachers. That would align us with secondary school teachers in Norway and Italy, who, according to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15K2ax5a3Mlbq3_I9mpLsxASAkdJaP0BW9MEmHpmd6rQ/edit?gid=445088422#gid=445088422">Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey</a>, average 15.8 and 16.8 hours, respectively, in the classroom each week. 
Reducing class sizes is also essential for reducing workload. According to 2022 <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/news/how-to-give-teachers-more-time-to-prepare-well-for-class/">research</a>
by the Grattan Institute, 92 percent of teachers report not having enough time to prepare effectively for classroom teaching, many blaming their heavy administrative workload. Capping class sizes at twenty would significantly reduce this burden.
We should also fight for a fully funded agreement. The<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-school-staff-need-fight-workloads-and-wages">
education union’s 2021 demands</a> included that the state government fully fund all its provisions. That would make it harder for school principals to avoid implementing the VGSA by pointing to their limited budgets.
Winning a fully funded VGSA would be a step towards winning the minimum funding levels recommended by the Gonski review more than a decade ago. The recent<a href="https://ministers.education.gov.au/anthony-albanese/putting-all-victorian-public-schools-path-full-and-fair-funding">
announcement</a> by Victorian and federal governments of extra money to meet the Gonski minimums takes full effect only “by 2034”. Meanwhile, education researcher Trevor Cobbold<a href="https://saveourschools.com.au/funding/the-facts-about-school-funding-in-victoria-an-update/">
calculates</a> that government schools in Victoria are short of the Gonski minimums by $1.8 billion annually—an average of $2,750 per student, or a $1 million deficit at a school of 400 students. 
Just as important as our claims is our strategy for winning them. In 2021, union members put forward an ambitious list of claims, but much of it was dropped in the deal eventually agreed to by the union leaders. It’s little wonder that nearly 40 percent of members <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/big-no-vote-step-forward-school-staff">voted no</a>.
This shows the need to apply serious pressure to win our claims. When teachers go on strike, schools close and politicians are forced to take notice. Teachers in NSW went on a series of strikes in 2021-22, eventually winning an immediate pay rise of almost $10,000. 
The last strike of Victorian public-school staff, in 2012, brought 40,000 teachers onto the streets and closed around 400 schools in a show of collective power. If we want to win our claims, we’ll need an even more sustained campaign of strike action. It’s not as if there’s no appetite for this. In 2021, 97 percent of AEU members <a href="https://news.aeuvic.asn.au/aeu-schools-members-vote-yes-to-industrial-action/">voted in favour</a> of industrial action. 
We need to begin preparing for this fight now. The state of our profession, and our schools, depends on it.

Australian Education Union member

Victorian teachers are in crisis. Now’s our chance to fight back

Joe Allen is a Chicago-based socialist, former Teamster and author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. In this piece, <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/">first published at his blog</a>, Joe critically evaluates the Teamsters union’s recent strike at Amazon warehouses in the United States. 
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The Teamsters’ five-day strike against Amazon ended inconclusively, but the union hinted at future actions with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/26/business/amazon-strike-teamsters-warning/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Stay tuned”</a>. Beginning on 19 December, the Teamsters called strikes in response to the failure of Amazon to meet the union’s demand to come to the bargaining table four days earlier. The Teamsters <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/12/teamsters-launch-largest-strike-against-amazon-in-american-history/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">declared</a> that it was “the largest strike in Amazon’s history”. The union’s General President Sean O’Brien said in an official statement:
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it. These greedy executives had every chance to show decency and respect for the people who make their obscene profits possible. Instead, they’ve pushed workers to the limit and now they’re paying the price. This strike is on them.”
The Teamsters called for strike action at eight locations across four states, including Amazon centres in Queens and Staten Island, New York, Atlanta, Southern California, San Francisco, and Skokie, Ill. They claim to represent the drivers or the warehouse workers through elections or card checks.
The Teamsters sent Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) pickets to scores of Amazon locations across the country, mostly made up of local officials and union stewards with little or no connection to Amazon. The union has not publicly stated how many locations were picketed or what the results were. The Teamsters also called upon community supporters to join the picket lines across the country.
On one level, the Teamsters’ actions were a bold move, but their sparse presence, possibly representing one percent of the company’s entire US workforce, has raised some serious questions. Among them are whether there was any tangible goal beyond the Teamsters maintaining their franchise at Amazon, and left hanging what the next steps, if any, were in the organising campaign.
When I spoke to long-time labour lawyer and negotiator Joe Burns, the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Joe-Burns/author/B004B3WZU0?ref=ap_rdr&amp;isDramIntegrated=true&amp;shoppingPortalEnabled=true&amp;ccs_id=faa8abf9-f80c-46e1-8794-2a1bc15bb88f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">author</a> of many important books on strike strategy, about the Teamsters’ actions at Amazon and what his thoughts on it were. He told me:
“While it is hard to tell due to the lack of credible reporting. These ‘strikes’ seem very similar to the approaches in fast food, rideshare and at <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/our-walmart-union-ufcw-black-friday" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Walmart</a> over the last decade or so, where the union would put out press releases claiming a giant corporation had been struck. This would gather publicity and generate some excitement on the left but it did not impact production or even draw out more than a tiny fraction of the workplace.
“The actions are really more informational picketing with a media spin of a strike tacked on to it. The problem is we have over a decade of experience showing such efforts don’t really work. They gather press and at times can help liberal groups or unions pass labour legislation, but have shown little in the way of furthering permanent union organising.”
It’s hard not to agree with Burns’ assessment. But then why are the Teamsters recycling a failed strategy? Or is there something bigger and better coming down the road?
An existential threat
In 2021, at the thirtieth convention of the Teamsters, delegates overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions to combat what then-General President James P. Hoffa called the “existential threat” that Amazon posed to the union. “The Special Resolution: Building Worker Power at Amazon”, which is worth quoting at length, declared:
“Amazon is changing the nature of work in our country and touches many core 
Teamster industries and employers such as UPS, parcel delivery, freight, airline, food distribution and motion picture, and presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries;”
Leaning on its own history, it said:
“Whereas, Teamsters have been building power in the logistics industry since before a meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets;”
And it concluded:
“Finally, be it resolved, that building worker power at Amazon and helping those workers achieve a union contract is a top priority for the Teamsters Union and the Union commits to fully fund and support the Amazon Project, to supply all resources necessary and to ultimately create a special Amazon Division to aid Amazon workers and defend and protect the standards in our industries from the existential threat that is Amazon.”
An <a href="https://teamster.org/divisions/amazon-division/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon division</a> of the Teamsters was created and California Teamster leader Randy Korgan was appointed as its first director by Hoffa, and then reappointed by his successor Sean O’Brien. So, it’s remarkable given that Amazon, which was declared an existential threat three and a half years ago—and probably a decade late at that point—how little the Teamsters have actually done.
The biggest initial breakthrough was accomplished by the independent and financially threadbare Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which made international news and made ALU leader Chris Smalls into a celebrity. Despite an initial burst of interest in the ALU from Amazon workers across the country, it couldn’t reproduce its success at JFK8 elsewhere and soon went into crisis.
Meanwhile, small groups of Amazon workers began to form organising committees in other facilities but faced Amazon’s notorious <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/amazon-trader-joes-starbucks-anti-union-measures" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">union-busting operation</a>. However, faced with the prospect of its victory in Staten Island dying through attrition, the ALU negotiated a merger with the Teamsters as an autonomous unit. I took no position on whether they should join the Teamsters, but cautioned that it wasn’t a silver bullet solution to their challenges. I <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/14/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>:
“Some ALU reformers and supporters argue that for the ALU to succeed at Amazon it needs a big gun to back it up. While you can understand the allure of being affiliated to a larger union after a series of defeats, is this a solution to the existential crisis of ALU? Even recent history at Amazon doesn’t suggest this is a silver bullet solution. Way back in April 2021, when the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), affiliated with the mammoth UFCW, lost two to one in a union election at Amazon in <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2021/04/defeat-in-bessemer/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bessemer, Alabama</a>, despite having a successful record of organizing in the South.”
Now that the big gun has been fired, what were the results?
The big strike?
“Understanding these strikes is made difficult because labor left reporting, including outlets like Labor Notes and Jacobin, does not cover key questions such as level of worker participation in these strikes, which should be a key aspect of labor reporting. However, from accounts online, mainstream sources such as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/amazon-warehouse-staten-island-strike.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a>, it appears that participation is very low in these strikes”, Joe Burns wrote to me. 
“For example, at the main Staten Island facility of thousands of workers, the New York Times estimated 100 workers. Other accounts have been a very small percentage of the workplace and mainly outside Teamster officials or supporters picketing. I have not heard of any facility that had a large percentage of Amazon workers on strike. Good independent labor reporting would zero in on such questions and not merely parrot the official union press releases.”
While the Teamsters made an effort in the major media markets to have a larger number of people protesting at some of Amazon’s facilities, outside of those areas, the lack of Amazon workers on the picket lines was more glaring. I asked several rank-and-file Teamsters and union activists who visited the Amazon picket lines for their observations. Most asked to be quoted anonymously or by a pseudonym. Kat from Florida, who is active with <a href="https://teamstersmobilize.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamsters Mobilize</a>, reported:
“It was very weak and ineffective from the standpoint of actually interrupting Amazon’s production process. In the three hours I was there, we let through two union drivers and one UPS manager without any struggle at all. Apathy on the part of the local officials at the picket. Even short of blocking the road, there were very simple tactics we could have employed to try to talk to every trucker as they were coming in. The officials were utterly disinterested in doing that; they clearly saw this “picket” as a last-minute top-down order that they had to follow formally but not play any substantial role in. Except for myself, the few other workers who showed up basically followed this lead.”
Yet, Kat also reported:
“At one point, a woman who worked inside the warehouse we were stationed at pulled over and was very excited to hear what was happening and to learn whether there were any ongoing efforts to organize her building. Me and the other rank-and-file members were the only ones who spoke with her, which seemed like a huge missed opportunity.”
Alyx reported from Salem, Oregon, on Friday 20 December:
“There were two Teamsters retirees from Local 324 holding the line. From what they said, most shifts were being covered by retirees from their local and another. I don’t know how many current Amazon workers participated. From what I saw, this location didn’t seem to have much impact. The facility is fairly remote, so not a lot of public visibility. The picket spot was set closer to the entrance than the main street, so only drivers and warehouse workers saw us. Since turnout was low, picketers weren’t able to impact access.”
Joe from Southern California wrote to me after visiting the City of Industry picket line. His experiences were more positive, though the number of Amazon workers involved was still small. He wrote:
“Where I was at, I’d say around 45–50 Amazon drivers on the picket line. Some of the striking Amazon workers were well versed on how to talk to their Amazon driving coworkers. I did not see any cards getting signed. The local Teamster union played both a primary and secondary role. Primary role in, they were active in moving striking Amazon workers to the other locations of the picket lines. Some talked to leaving Direct Service Providers (DSP) drivers, but most of the talking was striking Amazon drivers to their fellow DSP Amazon driving coworkers. I have seen many of the striking Amazon workers being interviewed by various online publications, pages and social media accounts. These actions made a difference. It brought publicity to the efforts of the Amazon workers. The public is aware of their efforts. Where I’m at. It was a good start. I would say this was a structure test to really gauge where the IBT Amazon Division is at.”
Karl, a longstanding union steward in Oklahoma City, wrote me:
“We picketed 2 Amazon facilities next to each other. Approximately 20–30 workers talked with us over the course of 48 hours. This, out of a workforce of 4–6 thousand. None participated directly, though strongly indicated that they would be interested in organizing and participating in further union campaigns if the local ​union were to follow up. Many of these provided contact info and requested information on the local. The local’s role seemed to be restricted to one of an informational picket. Little effort had been expended towards contacting workers or establishing any prior inside organization with which an informational picket could reinforce. It remains to be seen whether the local ​union will squander or follow up with new contacts. I think that the actions can make a difference provided the local and international makes a concerted effort to consolidate organization in the picketed plants and follow up with escalating actions that invite increasing numbers of workers to participate.”
Despite Amazon’s insistence that there was <a href="https://www.kwtx.com/2024/12/20/amazon-teamsters-strikes-no-impact-operations-by-unions-attempt-push-false-narrative/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">no interference</a> with their operations, the Christmas actions proved to be a public relations black eye for Amazon. The largely favourable media coverage highlighted the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/newsxofficial/reel/DEC_4mnzuAe/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">poverty wages</a> of drivers, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-injuries.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dangerous</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IT0Jhqr9kI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">humiliating</a> working conditions. Yet, we have been here before. No amount of public shaming has changed Amazon’s ways. With barely 1 percent, and that’s being generous, of Amazon’s workers participating in the union’s action, there is certainly a long way to go to organise a small fraction of Amazon’s workforce.
Missed opportunity
“I certainly would not want to discount the organizing and the efforts of the workers who did go on strike. Hopefully, it will spur some more activity but the history of publicity strikes is not very good. I do think a serious analysis needs to be done of levels of participation. The tendency however, is to simply declare victory and learn nothing. But I also think we need a sober analysis of what kind of labor movement it would take to organize Amazon. I do not think we can talk about organizing giant employers without talking about the structure and ideology of our labor movement. In order to truly take on these giant employers, we would need a labor movement capable of employing picket line militancy and solidarity tactics capable of mobilizing the entire labor movement against corporate giants”, Joe Burns wrote to me.
I do think the Teamsters missed an opportunity last year. The Teamsters raised expectations about last year’s UPS contract, the largest private sector contract in the country. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51p1rWkvddM" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> was expected and could have been the lever to organise a behemoth like Amazon. Yet, the contract campaign ended on a flat note. As I <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/beware-of-teamsters-bearing-gifts-25ee74ffb645" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a> last year:
“[T]he U.S. Left ... repeated continually that we were on the eve of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4e8jI_qzro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">biggest strike</a> in modern U.S. history. This, of course, did not occur leading to the frustration and<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> demoralization</a> of the hundreds of young radicals—many identified with the Democratic Socialists of America, <a href="https://www.dsausa.org/strike-ready-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DSA</a>—who went out and got jobs on some of the worst shifts at UPS to be part of this transformative campaign.”
We operate in the wake of failure of a <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-the-big-ups-strike/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">transformational strike</a> at UPS and its consequences at Amazon. We are also facing a much more difficult political environment with the incoming Trump administration that promises a full-scale assault on trade union rights, including the Teamsters, despite the union being led by Trump-ally Sean O’Brien. The political terrain can shift quickly, but it will require a clear-eyed assessment of the recent events at Amazon and the creation of new left to take advantage of them.

Joe Allen

The Teamsters’ ‘strikes’ at Amazon: a critical assessment

The <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/hope-on-the-picket-line">Woolworths strikers</a> gave a huge gift to the whole working class. By standing up for themselves against one of the most hated companies in the country, they set an example for the rest of us—and sparked discussions about union issues in workplaces around the country. 
With union membership and industrial action at historically low levels, it can be hard to push against the tide. But we can train ourselves as union activists to take every opportunity we can, small as they might be, to rebuild our unions. Red Flag spoke to four socialists about how organising solidarity activities with the distribution centre strikers added some spark to their workplace organising and discussions.
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Emma is a librarian in Melbourne. Her workplace is stratified, with workers rotating daily across five different sites. “This really limits the opportunities to build workplace solidarity and relationships, hold mass meetings or organise collective actions”, she says. 
So when Emma heard that workers from all the libraries were coming together for a professional development day, she took the opportunity. The week before, she spoke with sympathetic workmates about the Woolies strike and suggested they take a solidarity photo together. 
“Once I had some people on board, we posted the idea in our workplace union members’ chat, with examples of what other comrades were doing at their workplaces”, she says. Immediately, one worker took the initiative to print some signs containing slogans of support.
In one of the professional development sessions, Emma went table to table, inviting people to join the solidarity photo and telling them about the strike, the threats against the workers and Woolies’ Fair Work Commission application to stop the industrial action.
“Every single coworker of mine joined the photo—except for senior leadership and HR consultants, of course”, she says. 
They chanted solidarity slogans and raised their fists. 
“It was an incredibly powerful experience for all involved”, she says. Over the next few days, three workmates asked her for union membership forms.
“The following week was filled with conversations about the strike, and the treachery of Woolworths and the Fair Work Commission”, she says. “People debated what the Woolies workers had won and lost in the final agreement. This moved on to discussions about our own EA [enterprise agreement] and how important it will be to understand and debate clauses and loopholes during bargaining.”
Along with recruiting people to the union, the action and the associated conversations have contributed to a stronger culture of solidarity at her workplace. “It’s raised people’s knowledge of workers’ power and normalised the idea of taking industrial action”, she says. “And I think people have a stronger sense of the importance of strikes and not accepting crummy agreements.”
Emma’s workplace will start negotiations for a new contract next year, and will have the option to join a multi-enterprise bargaining campaign. 
“These lessons about workers’ solidarity and the importance of industrial action are timely. And the new recruits are precious”, she says.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Library-workers.jpg" alt="Melbourne library workers, members of the Australian Services Union, show solidarity with striking Woolies workers." /><figcaption>Melbourne library workers, members of the Australian Services Union, show solidarity with striking Woolies workers.</figcaption></figure>
Zac is a high school teacher in Melbourne’s western suburbs. When the Woolworths strike started, he put out a call to active members of his Australian Education Union sub-branch and any coworkers who had previously shown interest in union or other activist events, inviting them to visit the picket with him the next morning. 
“I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond”, he says. “But two colleagues got in touch and joined me the next day. It was uplifting to visit the picket together and see workers pushing back against declining wages and unsafe working conditions—problems very relevant to school staff.” 
Being at the picket together allowed Zak and his workmates a rare opportunity to discuss politics and ways to address the issues at their school. They decided to raise strike funds for the picket and collected around $200. 
“On top of this practical support for the strikers”, he explains, “it allowed us to talk to other colleagues about the power of strikes and pushing back against the cost-of-living pressures and working conditions affecting them all—a particularly important conversation because we go into bargaining with the state government for a new agreement next year”. 
“We’ve generated a bit of buzz among staff; it was a great experience.”<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Zac-and-colleagues-at-the-Laverton-North-picket-21-Nov-2024.jpg" alt="Zac and colleagues at the Laverton North picket, 21 November 2024." /><figcaption>Zac (R) with colleagues at the Laverton North picket, 21 November 2024.</figcaption></figure>
Alma is a university administration worker in Sydney. “I mostly did what I normally do, which is talk to people”, she says of her reaction to hearing about the Woolies strike. 
“I spoke to 30 or so people who work in my building—some of them I was talking to for the first time. I just fronted up to them and asked if they’d heard about what Woolies was doing”, she says. “Everyone had an excellent reply. And we had long conversations about the cost-of-living crisis, outrageous performance targets, work health and safety and generally hating bosses.”
“The picket was a fair drive away from where we worked and hard for full-time workers to get to”, she says. “But I brought back a placard from the picket and plonked it in the middle of the office. I also walked around with it. It struck up more great conversations.”
Alma regularly shared information in the work group-chats—articles and updates on the strike, as well as a supportive petition and link to the strike fundraiser. “People started to follow the strike themselves through other sources”, she says. “It was clear how many people supported the strike and appreciated the importance of what these workers were doing.”
“I raised the strike in my NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union] branch committee and we passed a motion of solidarity”, she says. “I also got people to take photos with the strike placard, encouraging them to share them on social media and start conversations with their friends. A bunch of them shared articles too.”
April is a train driver. “I have hundreds of colleagues, so I try to spend time in breaks getting to know more of them. Part of that is asking them what they think about different political issues and sharing my own opinions, too”, she says. 
She recently spent a week talking to colleagues about a potential strike after the NSW government opposed the union’s wage claim, among other things. The strike did not eventuate, but the Woolies strike began on the same day. “I saw the Woolies strike as a perfect example of what we could do too”, she recounts. “So I wanted to build solidarity with the striking Woolies workers and start some more political conversations, even if I could only make a small contribution.”
She approached about 30 people and got more than twenty to take solidarity photos to send to the Woolworths strikers. Around half the people who took photos also donated to the strike fund on the spot. She sent the pictures to United Workers Union organisers, who shared them with the workers. 
Many of her coworkers were reluctant to appear in a photo. “Solidarity with strikes just isn’t the norm nowadays. But I spent five to ten minutes with most people, discussing the strike and the workplace conditions they were fighting for”, she says. 
“It was the conversations about what the workers were sacrificing and fighting for that changed their minds. People also saw the links between this strike and broader social and political issues”, she adds. 
“Some people had really long discussions with me, analysing everything from the US elections, abortion legislation, and the ridiculousness of the social media ban being pushed through against young people. Some people had worked for Coles or Woolies or similar warehouses previously, and some of the stories they had to tell about safety issues were pretty frightening.”
“I’ve definitely got to know more people on site as a result of this”, she says. “I bumped into one of them a week later, and they asked how the strike ended. So we chatted for a while about the deal and what we thought about it. I think opening up these kinds of conversations, and taking action where we can, is important for building solidarity into the culture of our workplaces.”<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Alma-and-her-colleague-at-her-workplace-5-Dec-2024.jpg" alt="Alma (L) with a colleague at her workplace, 5 December 2024." /><figcaption>Alma (L) with a colleague at her workplace, 5 December 2024.</figcaption></figure>

Vanessa Rae

How solidarity with Woolworths strikers helped build union strength

Laverton, in Melbourne’s industrial outer west, is an endless sprawl of grey warehouses and industrial plants. Billions of dollars’ worth of products are made or handled in an array of workplaces. Yet occasionally, one (or a few) of these places stop. A strike is on—a reminder that this industrial parkland relies on its workers to run. Lineage, the world’s largest cold storage operator and cold and frozen product supplier for Woolworths, was one of the latest to get the rude awakening. 
A picket line in good spirits, with homemade chop suey, children’s face painting and a small degree of boredom (largely thanks to the success of shutting the place down) made it an easy place to become acquainted with people. The warmth of the picket stood in stark contrast to its corporate, concrete surrounds—and the sub-zero temperatures the workers labour in. While many on the picket line were full-timers (only 20 percent of the team), all were quick to point out that the struggle was also about solidarity with their casual workmates. 
Three of the people responsible for this familial atmosphere are the delegates: Peter “the troublemaker”, Lyndon “the health and safety general” and Bruce “the litigation expert and people person”. Red Flag sat down with them while the strike continued to discuss how they built a union against the world’s largest cold storage operator.
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What are some of the challenges of working here day-to-day? 
Lyndon: There’s a lot. To start off, the place is divided into two main sections: one chilled and one frozen section. The chilled section is between one and three degrees, with the frozen section at negative 23. Working at these temperatures every day can take a real toll on your body. Safety here is a constant problem.
Bruce: The work is physically taxing, many of the boxes you carry can be around 20kg. Add that into the cold temperatures, and it wears you down. 
Peter: We have had ambulances called three times in one week, twice on the same shift. One of the cases looked to be pneumonia. Management said it was just dehydration, but one of the initial signs of pneumonia is severe dehydration. One guy was found literally collapsed over his manual handling equipment in the freezer. 
The high-reach work, which means picking pallets up to ten meters in the air, can be very dangerous. Management makes it so by the constant pressure to speed up, causing corner cutting, and increasing the likelihood of injuries, or even deaths. 
Lyndon: To give you an idea of how the company views safety, the company’s health and safety advisor has said to us on more than one occasion that “the law is not prescriptive, it’s more of a guide”. So in his words, literally, he’s only going to do the bare minimum that is required by law. They more or less refuse to communicate safety issues with us on site. We have had pickers almost killed by falling pallets and not been notified properly.
On another note, this place messes with your life a lot. It is running 24/7, and people need to work a lot. Don’t even worry about having a social life and going out and enjoying yourself, just the basic things of life. A basic work-life balance is out the window. 
Another major issue is favouritism. Management chooses who they pull up for KPIs and other disciplinary issues. People can almost kill others and not be seriously penalised, because management likes them, while people can get targeted and sacked for uttering the word union.
Bruce: Yeah, like we have a guy who has been in this shed over sixteen years, trained many of the managers but never been promoted. What is that? It is simple favouritism. 
Peter: Usually, management is linked via bloodline or chromosomes. Literally, you could nearly put a couple of family names up on this building and that would cover the management team. Management seriously monster people. They target, intimidate and bully people here. 
Bruce: The casuals cop it the worst and that is why so much of our fight is for them. Doing eleven-hour shifts almost every day. I’ve heard of people who work over twenty days straight. They have to accept shifts. You lose future shifts if you call in sick. So heaps of the casuals work sick.
Management does not follow any proper procedures for discipline. They handed a guy a written warning in the middle of his shift, in front of his workmates, accusing him of 50-60 absences. Only seven of those ended up unapproved.
When we pressed them on why it was handled in this way, and why so much of the evidence was illegitimate, they said: “We were gonna give him a warning anyway”. It was deliberate targeting. The warning ended up getting turfed. 
Peter: When Lineage took over in 2020, management went berserk with intimidation and sackings, leading to a serious turnover problem. They went through 1,200 employees in about eighteen months. Often, HR would hire a temp to do the sacking. This place was seriously out of control. 
One of their sadistic discipline strategies is when they start people at seven. It could start with disagreement with a manager, getting sick or carrying an ache or a strain. You ask for less hours, or ask to start at five. They refuse you, so you take it off sick; now you are on a seven. Every morning, they have a toolbox at five o’clock, where everybody greets each other. You are ostracised from your team. 
This is how management bleeds you out. You are starting when everyone else is on their first break. So they miss out on both of those interactions. Finally, they might get sent home at eleven o’clock when everybody else is going to break at twelve. So they’re completely segregated from the rest of the community here. Management says that they don’t know what’s going on. That is a lie. It is deliberate.
Peter mentioned that the union dropped to about 40 or so members when Lineage took over. You now report close to 300 only a few years later. How did you get into the union side of things here, and what were the initial challenges you faced trying to establish it?
Peter: Our strength was really low at the start. At our lowest, coverage dropped to below 20 percent. The workplace ballooned in size from 80 something to over 420 people, and a number of the delegates got promoted and other people left. It was impossible to get a union organiser on the site. 
So it was a slog. For the first nine months, I would stay here for extra hours, doing ten hours a day, six days a week. I would use the shift changeover to interact with all the different shifts. In the first nine months, we moved to about 70-80 members. 
Management were like hawks when it came to discussing the union on the floor. If casuals mentioned union during their first weeks, they would get blacklisted. One manager recently said to me, “I don’t know why you go around and sign up casuals when we can just get rid of them whenever we want” and smiled at me with this massive grin on his face, like he was the Joker or something. This is the mentality management has. So I just had to persist. 
Along the way, I had been promising all these people that when they sign up we’d be getting mass meetings soon. After eleven months, we still did not have mass meetings, and I was getting pressured by the members. I ran a petition to get the mass meeting. I came in early to get the guys on their changeovers. I would just say, “Support your fellow workers, sign the petition”, we union bashed the whole shed and got like 270 signatures. Then we pushed to have our non-paid mass meeting. This was all over two years back.
It ran across the three shifts. We introduced another eight union delegates on the site and with our membership numbers pushing closer to 150, management began to accommodate. In our clause, it states that all employees can be invited to mass meetings, so that was our window to just invite everyone, and we shut down the whole shed. Virtually anyone that wasn’t a manager or an admin was invited—we now try to include the admin staff in the union. The message was “everyone please come learn about union”. It was a huge success.
So after the union was allowed to come down for the mass meetings, organisers were granted right-of-entry more frequently, which helped us build. Then it became my mission to find a strong delegate team. 
Being more established, management would still target delegates. Our leading arvo shift delegate was stood down in the lead-up to the strike. They targeted him because he is one of the most present and vocal on the afternoon shift. Being a delegate, you get the target on you—you certainly make sacrifices here to make this place better.
Lyndon: The reason why we have all these people out here strong and together is entirely down to Peter and the work he’s put in ... it is just phenomenal. He’s been escorted out of toolbox meetings because management don’t want him to talk and he has been told he can’t come into things, but he keeps going back. He has inspired me to go and become a delegate and do the same things he does because he can’t fight it alone—he is exhausting himself. So the rest of us are following his footsteps to continue the fight. [Lyndon was not the first delegate to recount that Peter had been decisive in them becoming a delegate or had trained them to be a strong one—ML.]
Peter: In terms of sacrifices, management took away my overtime in July this year to deter me from union bashing the place. I said, “I don’t care if I lose overtime, I’m still going to show up and do the hours”. Matter of fact, my wife didn’t even know that I was not getting paid OT until I got on the picket because I didn’t tell her. So my sacrifice is everyone else’s reward.
Reflecting on all the work and building you have done, what do you think were some of the factors that helped?
Bruce: Our delegate team. Our strength is we all add something into the mix. For example, Lyndon is the General of Health and Safety and Peter is the “problem child” to management. I love litigation, I love making sure things are fair, and the rest of our team adds something too. It makes us a strong, united force.
Lyndon: I think the main thing that helped us build the union was management’s behaviour. It made it easy to say to people, “This is why we need to stand together”, when they are treating everyone so unfairly. 
The conversations were really important too. You see how big the warehouse is, so there are lots of people. Peter is always walking back and forth, during breaks going around talking to different groups in the different lunch rooms in different areas of the warehouse.
Bruce: When we win a case, word spreads. We’ve got a few people who can’t really understand English properly but then we get a win, word spreads and suddenly we have them joining the union. I know for me I had to win at least two to three cases for people to believe in me to represent them. Now every time there is anything to do with litigation, they say, “Go see Bruce”. Every time we go to the office there’s that fear right away in management. They often say, “Oh Bruce, what are you doing here?”
Peter: The wins are so important. Safety is often the issue we fight around. The issues could be really small, but winning was what helped. Nearly one-third of the delegates are HSRs as well, so we can push back through the safety angle and that really gets them on the back foot. 
Sticking at it is important. They try to scare me, but I do not care. I’ve been in this game too long. I just keep pushing on. My persistence will beat them because I show up every day. 
Building a union team was crucial though. I could not do this alone. I would continue to go around every day to the morning toolboxes and spread union. I was always talking union with as many people as possible, always planting the seed. Amidst that, I was also keeping an eye out for potential delegates. I eventually got Lyndon to come on board. Lyndon would toolbox on his toolbox, Bruce would toolbox on his toolbox—and then I would be toolboxing as well. The three of us work different days, so we have coverage seven days a week. I started taking the afternoon shift delegates with me on tour to toolbox the teams. 
We would use these toolboxes to announce mass meetings, too. So whenever management made an offer during the past couple of months of bargaining, I would announce a mass meeting to discuss it in the toolbox. Meanwhile, I am showing the newer delegates, do not be shy, be brave, be bold and stand up there. At first, they were like, “Can I even make an announcement?” and I told them, “Don’t ask them, tell them. Tell them you’re there today to make an announcement”. 
The three of you have done something that cuts against the grain of the modern union movement, which is to rebuild its strength. It took a lot of time, work and bravery. What have been some of the highlights and lowlights of your times organising the union here?
Lyndon: The toughest part is just the managers either ignoring you or doing nothing at all. The highlight for me is when they call you into the office and tell you to stop doing what you’re doing because you are scaring them. 
Bruce: We now have all these union ambassadors out there, guys who aren’t delegates but who are spreading union around the place too. I hear them talking to people, trying to convince people to join the union or take a stand. My highlight definitely, though, is one of the guys in the freezer who has become a real leader. When he first started here, he always kept to himself, kept his head down. But now he’s totally different. I’ve seen him arguing with management when they’re trying to get out of the gate. I see him in the freezer aisles telling people to join the union. I love seeing how he has transformed. What changed for him was seeing how management actually behaved—how they treated him, his friends and his workmates. Now, people look up to that guy, see him as a leader. 
Peter: For me, it has been a little bit of a different journey. At times, I was very isolated. One of my delegates openly said he did not want to challenge management because he hoped to get promoted. At one point, I was the only delegate on the day shift. I just kept pushing, and my nickname here is “the troublemaker”.
Lyndon: I have actually heard management call him that. If he is coming to a toolbox, as he walks in management will say, “Here comes the troublemaker”. Literally.
Peter: I walk into the office and they say, “Oh, the troublemaker is here”, “Oh, the troublemaker, what do you want?” My reputation surpasses me. They have tried to pull me into meetings with managers on my own—but after ten years in the saddle, I am prepared for that shit. I always have a wingman. I simply cannot afford to drop my guard because I’ve got too many members that rely on me. 
A highlight for me was getting permission from the then-operations manager to have our fortnightly meetings. They’ve been happening for three years now, and helped build the union. 
Do you have anything else to add about what you are doing here on strike? 
Lyndon: The picket is an amazing experience—just seeing people coming together to fight for a common cause and all the bonding. We are doing more than just saying no to Lineage; we are building our community, too. My hope, which I keep trying to remind people, is we need to keep the attitude and whatever we’ve got built out here when we go back. That’s how we make things better.
Bruce: This strike must be hurting them. On the picket line, we find it very funny that management now comes up to us, offers us water, asks how our day is. We never get that inside. It’s always bossing us around, KPIs and discipline. Suddenly, they have a heart. 
Management did not see this strike coming. And then, when they realised it was, they just went, “Oh no, they’re gonna break”. Are we breaking? No we are not—we’re having parties out here. Someone brought a PlayStation. People have been bringing their kids. I’m laughing because we have such a great culture here. It’s so positive. We’re one big family. 
We never knew we were going to be out here. But us coming together now kind of really strengthened our team. I love this team, they become your second family basically. We can create that if we work as a team. We stick up for each other. That’s what it’s all about. Make the stand. Have your voice heard.
Peter: Persistence, persistence, persistence makes you win. I have had, at times, five managers trying to bully me out of attending a toolbox. But I just push through. You can just never give up.
Being a delegate is challenging. You have to tell people that you can make this place better—and make them believe it. You start with some small wins and people start believing. Eventually you can demand change, and that’s what we’re out here doing now: demanding change.

Matt Laidlaw

Building a union against a warehouse giant

Jerome Small

Woolworths workers strike a blow against corporate power

It’s a sight for sore eyes. 
For the past two weeks, a news cycle usually dominated by trivia, tragedy and paid talking heads has featured an unusual sight: striking workers. The people whose labour makes society function, who are most of the time ignored and invisible, are walking out of their workplaces, into the streets and onto the nightly news. 
There have been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-27/thousands-rally-queensland-against-qld-governmnet-suspend-bpic/104652842">construction workers</a> in Brisbane and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nurses-took-to-the-streets-after-insulting-pay-offer-next-stop-court-20241113-p5kq80.html">nurses</a> in New South Wales taking action. But, more than anyone else, it’s the 1,800 warehouse workers striking in Victoria and NSW who have pushed working conditions, corporate greed—and, crucially, workers’ power—onto the political agenda. Organised by the United Workers Union, these workers have seriously disrupted the super-profitable “business as usual” of Woolworths supermarkets—one of the biggest, most ruthless, and fiercely <a href="https://thenightly.com.au/business/coles-woolworths-continues-fall-from-grace-to-now-be-among-nations-top-three-distrusted-brands-c-16973063">hated</a> companies in the country. 
Two weeks into the strike, the outcome still hangs in the balance. But win lose or draw, the warehouse workers’ strike is likely to be the most significant industrial dispute in Australia this year. As Red Flag has <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/woolies-distribution-workers-strike-for-everyone">argued</a>, every worker in the country has a stake in its outcome. 
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the strike so far came on Monday 2 December. Up until that point, management’s policy seemed to be one of sucking the energy and momentum out of the dispute. Management locked the gates of the strikebound facilities on day one, ramped up alternative supply chains, harassed workers by phone and text, and waited for demoralisation to set in. But faced with significant and growing gaps in supermarkets, and gaping holes in the stock at Dan Murphys, management decided to take a chance. 
On Sunday 1 December, Woolworths CEO Amanda Bardwell put out a statement claiming that only a minority of workers at the giant Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre in Dandenong South were union members; that the vast majority of workers were keen to scab on the strike; that management had reached a deal with the Shop Distributive and Allied union (which is notorious for undercutting other unions, and even <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5320">legal minimums</a>, in their enterprise agreements); and that as a result, full production would resume at South Dandenong from 6am Monday morning. 
Anyone aware of Woolworths management’s commercial practices, such as allegedly <a href="https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-woolworths-and-coles-to-court-over-alleged-misleading-prices-dropped-and-down-down-claims">lying about their own prices</a>, will not be surprised to learn that this statement was, to put it mildly, a little shy of the truth. Out of slightly more than 300 workers at the Dandenong centre, the UWU have a membership of more than 240 (and growing). The SDA, by contrast, have seven members at the facility. Unsurprisingly, Bardwell’s statement neglected to mention this relevant fact.
Perhaps Bardwell and team believed their own bullshit. Perhaps they thought that one day of transparent PR spin would be enough to demoralise the workers and their supporters. If so, management were in for a shock. By 5am on Monday, a crowd of around 100 workers and more than 200 community supporters—a large number of them mobilised by Victorian Socialists—were assembled, ready to turn back any scabs. 
An hour passed. Then another. And then another. 
Spirits were high on the picket as workers, students and well-wishers chatted, chanted, and practiced our picket drills. Rumour was that the would-be strike breakers had been put on a bus, then taken off, then put back on, then taken off. 
It wasn’t until 12 hours after management’s supposed start time that a tiny crew of would-be scabs turned up, only to be turned away from the facility with no great drama. Management’s grand reopening turned out to be just another Woolworths fake news story. 
As word of the victory spread, workers on other pickets celebrated. Rhys, a worker at the Erskine Park distribution centre in Sydney, told Red Flag, “Hearing about this big Melbourne story on Monday. They [management] failed, you know, this morning they failed. And today they’re trying to get an injunction through Fair Work to open that site. And it just makes you laugh. You know, it’s not scary. It’s just funny.”
Workers mercilessly mocking their management as the company flail around looking for a way to neutralise worker power and worker solidarity, is an unparalleled, and much too rare, joy. 
Of course, the future is unwritten and so far, though the company has moved on some issues, the strikers are yet to fully win their main demands. It’s encouraging though that some heavy artillery of the union movement is taking an interest, with the Victorian Building Industry Group of unions <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Do4MDWWWU/">declaring</a> that they will support the striking warehouse workers “industrially, politically, and financially until these workers win this dispute”. But with pressure increasing on all sides, it’s impossible to tell how the dispute will resolve. 
Even at this stage though, the strike—as with any serious dispute—has shone a revealing light on politics and society. 
Predictably, the Liberals, though willing to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-to-supermarkets-rein-in-prices-or-we-ll-force-you-to-sell-off-stores-20240702-p5jqh1.html">mouth off</a> once in a while about a “big stick” approach to taking on the big supermarket companies, have not uttered a single word to support the people actually taking on these same companies—the striking workers. 
Labor politicians have barely been more visible, with Cabinet ministers’ <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-04/woolworths-union-dispute-government-uwu-woolies-shelf-dan-murphy/104682096">reported comments</a> falling well short of any actual support for the workers’ demands. The Victorian Greens have finally crept out of witness protection on the issue, posting two Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/victoriangreens/">reels</a> in support of the strike in the past day or so. 
By far the most prominent political party supporting the strike has been Victorian Socialists. The party’s support extends not just to social media <a href="https://www.instagram.com/vic_socialists/?hl=en">posts</a>, but to party members and supporters doing one of the most important things in politics: turning up. The Melbourne Age (in a rare <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20241202092230/https:/www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/protesters-block-entry-to-woolworths-warehouse-as-grocery-shortages-continue-20241202-p5kv0m.html">sympathetic report</a>) noted the presence of many VS supporters at Monday’s early morning picket: 
“Activist and Victorian Socialists federal Senate candidate <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20241202092230mp_/https:/www.theage.com.au/link/follow-20170101-p5k5fq">Jordan van den Lamb</a>—known as purplepingers online—issued a call-out to followers on social media on Sunday, urging them to attend Monday’s action in Dandenong South. Party member Ryan Stanton said activists, students and trade union members were among those who turned out with the party to support Monday’s protest. ‘Woolworths is one of the main drivers behind the cost-of-living crisis,’ Stanton said. ‘They’ve been price gouging...but what a lot of people don’t know is that they’re also doing their best to make working lives harder for the workers who actually pick the stock that goes to the stores.’”
It’s no surprise that socialists, for whom workers’ struggles are at the centre of social change and the vision of a new world, are also some of the most active supporters of those struggles when they erupt. 
But the strike reveals much more than the real values of political parties. Like any major dispute, the strike makes it obvious who does all the goddam work around here—and who doesn’t. Without workers’ labour, it turns out, none of us have toilet paper, pasta, frozen goods, chilled goods, beer—or anything else. Anyone who doubts this can wander through one of hundreds of Woolworths supermarkets or liquor stores in Australia’s most populous states. The strike shows anyone who cares to look that even in this automated age, workers and our labour underpin everything. 
What a contrast to Woolworths management. 
Throughout the strike, Bardwell and her extensive team of executives, HR goons, lawyers and spin doctors are no doubt working as hard as they ever do. The stream of dishonest press releases, legal threats and fake-welfare harassing phone calls to striking workers is testament to that. But nothing at all of any value to human beings results. The billable hours rack up, but not one extra roll of toilet paper gets to the stores.
To put it plainly: this layer of CEOs and executives and their well-paid flunkies is parasitical. They contribute nothing of value to society, but feed off the rest of us. In even simpler terms: they need us, but we don’t need them. 
The Brad Banduccis, the Amanda Bardwells and their bought-and-sold servants in politics and the media can wander around as if they’re the most important people on the planet. A major strike, however, makes it abundantly clear whose labour really matters—and who would have nothing without it. 
The essential nature of the work millions of workers do every day, to society and to the capitalists’ profit-based “business as usual” set-up, gives workers enormous power. But it’s obvious that this power can only be exercised collectively. 
This mundane fact has important consequences. Any strike points in the direction of solidarity and collective action, and an ethos directly at odds with the dog-eat-dog individualism fostered by the system. Even a quick look at the scope of the warehouse strike, and its demands, shows this. 
Everyone on strike knows that warehouses commonly shut after 20 years, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each time this happens, Australia’s current system of enterprise-by-enterprise bargaining (introduced by Labor in the early 1990s) allows a company like Woolworths to set up a new shelf company, and dictate a new enterprise agreement on favourable terms. The gains won by previous rounds of struggle are largely wiped out, and workers in the new facility (many of whom have come from an older facility) have to start on lower pay. 
This is why one of the strike’s main demands is for a national agreement or at least for a series of nationally applied minimums, which Woolworths has to meet for existing and new sections of its supply chain. A minimum pay rate of $38 per hour is one key part of this. 
In other words, each of the Woolworths strikers knows that the only way to secure their own long-term interests in having decent wages, is by fighting for many thousands of workers they have never met to get a minimum pay rate of $38 an hour. A secure victory for one, it turns out, can only be achieved by a victory for all.
Not just the demands of the strike, but also its scope, show the same dynamic of expanding solidarity. If one warehouse goes on strike, it’s a major hassle for Woolworths management. But this impact is multiplied, and multiplied again, with each warehouse that joins in the action. 
This is why the elected officials, organisers, delegates and members of the UWU have put years of effort into lining up the expiry dates of the enterprise agreements covering the distribution networks of the major supermarkets. “United we stand, divided we fall” is not just a pleasant-sounding slogan. It reflects a class logic: the logic of working-class people in struggle for their own interests is to fight in ever-widening circles of solidarity. 
And this logic intensifies once the actual strike starts. Ask a striking worker about their experience of the strike. You’ll get an answer about how great it is to see and feel their own power in the flow-on effects from their strike. You’ll get an answer about the joy of forming a bond with people who share the same workplace and the same task but who have never had a chance to meet and talk, let alone establish a connection in common struggle. 
And you’ll get an answer about overcoming the sort of “divide and conquer” between shifts and job roles that management thrives on and promotes. Rhys, one of the strikers at Sydney’s Erskine Park distribution centre, explained to Red Flag how significant it is to see one of the main divisions in the shed—between day shift and afternoon—simply dissolve during the strike. “To see how together we are, it’s like it’s not two shifts, there’s just one shift” he said, “There’s just one way out—and it’s great to see that it’s everyone supporting everyone”.
This logic of working-class struggle, the logic of “everyone supporting everyone”, can extend beyond shifts, and beyond sheds. Far beyond, in fact.
One of the most generous and moving acts of solidarity with the warehouse strikers comes from refugees, a group of people who have been vilified and demonised in Australia for decades. A large group of refugees recently held an epic 100-day protest camp outside the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne’s Docklands area, demanding the dignity and security that Labor promised them ahead of the 2022 election. 
This extraordinary protest received invaluable support from the UWU, whose Victorian office is located nearby. Many of the refugees involved are now returning that solidarity in the most practical way imaginable: by assisting the strike kitchen. As the refugees explain on their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RefugeeWAVE">Facebook page</a>:
“Striking workers are heroes. They challenge the divisions created by bosses and prove that unity can overcome the barriers keeping us apart. Their struggle inspires us all to fight for a more equal and just society. In solidarity with these workers, Rathy and Maki have decided to start a Strike Kitchen called Meals for Equality. Starting Monday, they will prepare meals for the striking workers, showing that refugees and migrants stand united with the workers. When politicians like Dutton and Albo blame refugees and migrants for problems they created, we must counter this divisive narrative.” 
This is not just a gift to the striking workers. It’s a concrete example of solidarity that in months and years to come we can throw back in the face of anyone who buys into the lie that migrants and refugees are a threat to workers in this country. This example proves the exact opposite: while one of the biggest companies in the country was trying to starve and bully striking workers back to work, refugees were on the pickets, helping to keep the strikers fed. 
This sort of industrial action, and the solidarity it inspires, is far too rare in Australia today. In the 1970s, Australian workers had one of the highest strike rates in the world. Millions of workers struck to win decent wages and conditions, and an important minority of militant, political unionists led industrial campaigns to support other workers, to preserve low-cost housing, to win equal rights for women, against the Vietnam War, for Aboriginal Land Rights and against Apartheid in South Africa. 
This tradition of industrial action was deliberately <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-7266">broken</a> by the Labor governments of the 1980s. The result of this defeat has been the decline in union density and living standards. Along with that, the low level of strikes had led to a breakdown in the sense of solidarity and common interest on display at the picket lines outside distribution centres right now.
It is this solidarity that, when able to develop fully, points to a new and different sort of society, one which puts ordinary people in the driver’s seat. Workers can become so used to accepting society’s injustices and atrocities because they feel deprived of the power to change it. Strikes, and the solidarity they spark, can lead in the other direction, by demonstrating in practice that workers actually do have power, and that there is an alternative to this resignation. Any serious strike shows this potential power of our side. And once conscious of this power, workers are not necessarily content to stop at a wage rise or better conditions. 
The outcome of the warehouse strikes is still in play. But it’s clear that the warehouse workers and their struggle are an inspiration, and an education, to us all.

Hope on the picket line

The Woolworths warehouse strike in Sydney’s west continued to heat up through its fifth and sixth days as the city’s temperatures rose in tandem.
The United Workers Union (UWU) coordinated and organised the indefinite strike at Erskine Park distribution centre and four other warehouses in Victoria. Another warehouse in Queensland took action last Friday, 22 November. The 1,500 strikers nationwide appear more determined than ever to win above-inflation pay rises and terminate the company’s “coaching and productivity framework”—a new system that disciplines anyone falling short of a management-defined “100 percent” target.
Monday, day five at Erskine Park, was stinking hot. The sun lashed the backs of necks and boiled the bitumen. The liquid soap in the portaloos was half-scalding. Those who stood at the barbeque over sizzling onions to keep everyone fed deserved a 21-gun salute. 
The sight of 100 members in UWU-branded hi-vis on the main driveway at the peak of the day’s heat discussing their next steps was a sign of unity and commitment. UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings, reporting on Woolworths’ offer of a “reduced framework”, had barely finished her sentence when workers erupted in cries of “No framework!” to the bangs of a big drum. “Put your hand up if you want to stick to no framework”, Sharon said. One hundred hands went up.
Next order of business: the bosses only want a handful of delegates at negotiations. Cries, drums and one hundred hands: all delegates must be at the talks for maximum democracy and opposition.
The union also demands that all six warehouse agreements expire simultaneously and be negotiated together. This is an effort to counter a fragmented system of “enterprise bargaining” introduced by the Hawke-Keating ALP government of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced industry-wide bargaining and weakened our side’s collective strength.
By now, striking workers have been getting calls from supervisors and managers. 
“‘Just doing a welfare check’, they say”, one reported. “I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fantastic mate’. It’s intimidation and mind games.”
“Welfare” didn’t cross management’s collective mind until profits started going down the drain. 
After the meeting, Roger* and Jay* spoke about a case a few years earlier, when a Pakistani employee had his fingertips on both hands crushed by a closing van door.
“You know what [management] did?” Jay asked. “They said it was his own fault, and gave him a warning”. Two warnings and you’re out of a job. Later, they say, the man tried to cover up a mistake to avoid a second warning and dismissal. Management found out and sacked him on the spot.
According to picketers, the top manager at the time (“the biggest psychopath ever met on the job”, Roger said) is now overseeing the rollout of a new 66,000 square metre semi-automated facility in the southwest Sydney suburb of Moorebank.
Warehousing must be some of “the lucky country’s” most sweated and unsafe labour. The parallels with Amazon seem striking. As with the American logistics giant, very high turnover is part of the Woolworths business model: employing casuals through labour hire, working them to the bone, and then moving on to another batch. 
“When you’re casual, it’s non-stop”, Roger said. “The last intake was 100 people over a couple of weeks, and by the end of it, there were probably five to fifteen left.”
The “framework” is yet another attempt to intensify the labour process, after everything companies like Coles and Woolworths have already done to make this work more dangerous, exhausting and dehumanising. That’s why the workers say they won’t stop until it’s dead.
And it’s why Janet*, one of the oldest workers here with 26 years’ experience, stayed all through the night on Saturday to guard the picket and was back again Monday.
“Myself, maybe I’ve not got too many more years here. But I’m fighting for the young people”, she said as we caught some shade under a gazebo. “They’ve got young families—[management] shouldn’t be pushing them so much, getting injuries to their back and shoulders.”
Sitting next to her was one of those young workers, Lisa*. In her home country, trade unions aren’t even legal. The pace of work is severe and workers have no right to speak out. Yet it’s only after moving to Australia and working at Woolies that she suffered her first workplace injury.
A workmate interrupted to ask Janet for some of the sweet dessert drink she made for the picketers. He wanted to take some home to his kids. After sampling some, I could see why. I sampled continuously as she talked me through the recipe. 
Janet says she’ll stay out “as long as it takes” because she’s confident they can starve Woolies out. “In the next few days, there’s gonna be empty shelves for sure”, she said. “Because we move a million cartons a week and this is day five.”
Another mass meeting on Tuesday reported back from Monday’s negotiations.
Stonewalling and condescending, Woolworths insisted the meeting was only to “educate” workers about the framework. “They’ve never picked a box and they’re trying to educate us”, someone cried out. 
Management offered a 75 or 85 percent target instead of 100 percent, which delegates roundly rejected.
“If we agree with a number, they can change it; they always have things [to get] around it”, one delegate argued at the meeting. “Version 2.0 involves following you around like puppets. Meetings every few weeks to monitor performance. If you’re not picking what they think you should, then they’ll still get rid of you. We want to come here, work and go home. Fuck their framework.”
With negotiations going nowhere, UWU organiser Sharon proposed an escalation. Hoxton Park Distribution Centre, which supplies Woolworths’ Big W stores, is fifteen minutes away. Did workers want to go there and stop trucks from getting in and out?
“At first, not a lot of people jumped [at this prospect] because they'd never done it before. This is the first strike for many workers”, said Cherish Kuehlmann, a student activist organising carloads of young socialists to come to show support every day. “Then one worker asked, ‘Are the uni students coming too?’ And of course we were like, ‘Yeah!’”
Convinced, dozens of workers and supporters drove over to shut down Hoxton Park DC. The strike at Erskine Park is so solid that active picketing is usually unnecessary. So this was the first opportunity many workers had to block the movement of goods physically. Waving big red union flags and chanting in a line blocking the entry, the workers stopped ten trucks in an hour. “One day longer! One day stronger!” 
Managers came trotting out but, failing to scare off the strikers, slunk back into the warehouse as the picket line jeered: “Go back to the aircon!” 
One manager, Dylan, has moved from Erskine Park to Hoxton Park while the strike continues. Workers heckled and taunted, advising him to get back inside before the sun charred the top of his shiny head. 
Meetings with management were held again on Wednesday. If they went the way of Monday’s dead-end discussions, then surely Woolworths deserves many more escalations such as this.
But even this first small escalation showed how a strike can begin turning things the right way up in our topsy-turvy rich man’s world. 
Harassed, bullied and demeaned by managers day in and out, workers can finally get a serve back. 
Trucks arriving at a remorseless pace, hungry for stacked pallets, can be turned away.
Decisions, usually made only by managers in air-conditioned offices, are made in the blazing heat, discussed and voted on by union members. 
The isolation of the headsets, the unknowable efficiency targets and a fragmented warehouse floor—forklift driver pitted against pallet stacker, permanent against casual, morning shift against day shift—can be undone for a while by the workers’ unity. 
And the people called replaceable, disposable, a number or a cog, show that they are in fact indispensable.
A colleague of mine, with almost 50 years’ experience in our transport industry, reminded me of this as we chatted in the lunchroom. After I described the conditions in the warehouse, he paused, turned and said:
“You know, we go about our everyday lives and we totally forget how the food gets on the shelves, and who is putting in what kind of backbreaking labour to get it there.”
It’s only because of the strike that we are talking about it at all. And if Janet is right and Woolies shelves soon start running empty, then many more people might begin pondering the same question: who’s really creating all the wealth in this country?
One thing’s for sure: it’s not Dylan and his toasted scalp.
* Names have been changed at the interviewee’s request. Except Dylan’s.

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