The Queensland Teachers’ Union, one of the largest public sector unions in Queensland, took strike action on 6 August for the first time in sixteen years. In the lead-up, the union gained 2,000 new members, and staffrooms were full of discussion and debate. 
Queensland Teachers Fightback, a rank-and-file network of union members, held a gathering before the strike meeting with dozens of teacher activists. We marched into the Brisbane Convention Centre together, picking up teachers on the way. 
The vibe inside was electric. Four thousand teachers filled the meeting hall; hundreds more spilled into the lobby. Another 5,000 packed out more than 30 regional locations to take part in the mass meeting. Unionists from the Electrical Trades Union greeted us on the steps of the Convention Centre along with a crowd featuring the flags of many other unions. 
After the meeting, we marched to the parliament. Students cheered from the sidelines, and it wasn’t hard to convince them to join us. Construction workers downed tools and cheered us on from their job sites as we marched past. 
This is the kind of action that socialists and Queensland Teachers Fightback activists have been advocating for years. Teachers walked away from the rally feeling a foot taller; the confidence we felt on the day will not soon be forgotten.
Strike action tips the scales in favour of workers when it comes to improving our conditions. This strike should not be a one-off event; more will be needed to address our deteriorating conditions.
The latest offer from the state government includes an 8 percent wage increase over three years. Regarding workload, we’ve been offered an insulting single student-free day for the last day of the year, a meaningless concession when most schools run alternative programs for that whole week. The government claims its Red Tape Reduction strategy will reduce workload for teachers, but it’s mostly targeted at school management red tape (not teachers) and includes more than twenty initiatives that begin with words like “investigate” and “consider”. 
We need money for public schools to raise wages and hire more teachers to facilitate smaller classes and more planning time. Instead, it’s being spent on subsidising the mining industry and private schools. Our campaign is up against an intransigent, anti-worker government, and needs to be escalated.
Unfortunately, the union leaders have not proposed any escalation. The mass meeting did little to clarify where to from here, or to meaningfully involve rank-and-file teachers in the process. Four resolutions were put to the meeting, but union members were told there would be no debate and no space to move amendments. One resolved to conduct another 24-hour stoppage “on a date to be determined”. 
One of the union’s few explicit demands is for teachers and principals to be deemed “public officers” within the criminal code. This would mean that students who assault staff would face criminal penalties. 
The LNP may be willing to legislate for more punitive measures rather than create better learning environments. But this would hardly improve teachers’ conditions. The union’s demand will only lead to more funds going to police and prisons, while our schools continue to be underfunded by billions of dollars.
We became teachers because we care about our students. We didn’t become teachers to become cops. Genuine improvements to educational environments—such as significantly reduced class sizes and more specialist teachers, social workers, guidance officers and psychologists—would go a long way to reducing behaviour incidents, protecting teachers and students, and improving workloads. 
Giving us more time would help with the administrative burden of dealing with antisocial behaviour and improve local decision-making regarding abusive behaviour. Having a more confident, combative union movement would be another big step towards addressing student behaviour. 
It’s claimed that “we are already in a teacher shortage”, so we cannot fight for these improvements. But taking this attitude will only mean the problems will never disappear, and it will remain difficult to recruit new teachers. 
Fundamentally, one day of strike action is not going to put the industrial pressure on the Crisafulli government that’s needed. They may budge on some things, but that won’t be enough to address the public education crisis created by successive governments, Labor and Liberal, for more than a decade.
Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek met with the union the day after the strike and has discussed adjusting his paltry offer. Will the union leaders accept a few crumbs? Years of neglect can’t be turned around in 24 hours. We need much more than the government is offering. To win it, we need to escalate the campaign.

QTU member

‘School’s out!’ Thousands of Queensland teachers strike for better pay and conditions

Queensland teachers are gearing up for a 24-hour strike, and it’s about time! After a rally of 500 teachers and supporters in Brisbane, the action has been backed by an overwhelming majority of Queensland Teachers’ Union members.
Teachers are overworked, underpaid and burnt out. This is hardly surprising when full-time teachers in Australia report working <a href="https://www.aitsl.edu.au/research/australian-teacher-workforce-data/atwd-reports/national-trends-teacher-workforce-jun2025">50 hours a week</a>. Teachers also require a minimum of three years at university, yet on graduation are <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/From-bad-to-worse-to-what-NSW-Teachers-Pay-2020-2022-and-beyond-Buchanan.pdf">paid less</a> than sales representatives, real-estate agents and police, none of whom require a degree.
The strike was called after the state government’s insulting pay offer of 8 percent over three years, after real wages had been driven down in recent years. While the Liberal National Party government is spending $147.9 million on police equipment and $3.8 billion on venues for the Olympics, teachers can’t afford to live in the suburbs where they teach. 
The QTU’s strike action is an excellent step forward. Part of the demand is “nation-leading salaries”, but the union leaders have refused to put a figure on what they’re pursuing in negotiations. A seven-year teacher on the Gold Coast earns $20,000 less than a seven-year teacher 30 minutes away in New South Wales. With all teachers being underpaid across the country relative to other qualified professions, there’s much to fight for. 
This problem didn’t begin with the newly elected LNP state government. Under the previous Labor government, our wages fell 6.5 percent behind the Brisbane Consumer Price Index. 
Workloads have been a feature of every negotiation over the past decade, but they’ve only gotten worse. A key reason has been that the union leaders refused to call strikes against the Labor government despite majority votes of union members favouring action.
Strikes demonstrate how critical workers are to the system. Withholding our labour is our most important weapon to fight bosses and governments. The Education Department is scrambling to pretend like it’s “business-as-usual” at schools this week. But with tens of thousands of union members set to strike, the government will be hard-pressed to keep schools open. 
Premier David Crisafulli is in for a serious showdown with public servants—many workplace agreements are due for renegotiation. Firefighters are balloting for strike action, while nurses are getting ready to <a href="https://www.qnmu.org.au/Web/Media_and_Publications/News/News_items/2025/Are_you_ready_to_strike_for_EB12.aspx">escalate to work stoppage</a> as well. Who’s going to treat the patients? Extinguish the fires? Teach the students? Not David Crisafulli. 
It will take more than one day to challenge the government, but this is a great start.

Queensland public school teachers set to strike

Transport engineers and technical workers across Queensland at the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) walked off the job in a statewide strike on Monday, the first in many decades. Up to 450 workers stopped work for twelve hours in Brisbane, Cairns, the Gold Coast, Mackay, Rockhampton, the Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Toowoomba and elsewhere.
Significant growth in union membership made the strike possible. In just a few months, Professionals Australia membership at TMR has tripled to 450. One engineer in Brisbane spoke of new pride that has developed: “Standing with my colleagues, I’m confident we can make a change through the power of being in a union.”
The action was in defiance of the state Liberal government’s wages policy. Engineers rejected an offer of an 8 percent wage rise over three years—the same at- or below-inflation deal offered to nurses and teachers. At rallies across the state, engineers demanded 20 percent.
Queensland is experiencing a record wave of infrastructure investment as the Brisbane Olympics approach. Major projects rely on public engineers, but low pay is leaving roles vacant. Many at TMR earn 20 to 30 percent less than their counterparts at Queensland Rail and Powerlink, even when working on the same projects.
“This action isn't solely about salary”, one Cairns engineer later told Red Flag via WhatsApp. “It's about fair compensation and preserving the knowledge base within TMR. We used to lead infrastructure design; now we’re becoming a contractor management department.”
That transformation away from in-house expertise and toward privatisation was a recurring theme on the day. “Our jobs are being contracted out at higher rates, and our conditions are well behind those in the industry performing the same work”, said another engineer in Rockhampton to Red Flag via WhatsApp. 
Tensions escalated last week when TMR sent hundreds of engineers home without pay for implementing minor work bans—including bans on working more than 36.25 hours per week, completing introductory training, and submitting or approving timesheets. The retaliation only pushed more workers towards strike action. Engineers also linked their fight to those of others across the public sector. As one Brisbane engineer put it in a speech: 
“Teachers are striking on Wednesday, and nurses have been taking action too. The bosses are watching us. If we settle for less, it tells others they’re worth less — and tells the bosses they can get away with it. But if we fight and win, it shows what union power can achieve.”
These are mostly older, white-collar, relatively well-paid professionals — the kinds of workers many assume would never strike. But with political leadership and ambitious demands, engineers are proving that, like all workers, they can fight back.

Queensland engineers strike for the first time in decades

These days, the usual refrain when it comes to women working topless in bars, in the sex industry or otherwise being sexually objectified at work, is that it’s about a woman’s right to choose this treatment and that it can even be a sign of empowerment. The increasingly extreme objectification of women and the normalisation of violent sexual practices, far from being condemned, are increasingly apologised for, even by supposed anti-sexists, as women “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html">taking ownership</a>” and being “active agents” in their sexual life, or savvy entrepreneurs. 
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a different story. Many young adults had had some experience of fighting to win women’s rights against hostile authorities, or of confronting other social injustices. They were also much more likely to be members of a union—the rate of union membership was much higher than today, and more workers had some experience of industrial action. This demonstrated in practice to many the importance of unity and solidarity, and gave workers a sense of their own power to shape and change the society around them. There was an understanding that something practical could be done about social or economic injustices, and that they weren’t simply moral concerns. This applied to the discriminatory treatment faced by women and included the sexualisation they were subject to in the workplace. 
A particular battleground was the hospitality industry. Denis Evans was a militant and organiser in the industry and recently spoke to Red Flag about this campaign. After doing a variety of jobs, Evans became a shop steward at a winery, after which, around 1969, he went to work at the Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne. It was there that he “soon learned the benefits of militant union action”. 
Between 1975 and 1982, Denis worked as an organiser with the Liquor Trades Union (now United Workers Union). In 1979, the union faced a new scourge—a management push to have more women bar workers and wait staff working topless. As soon as it was notified of this development by some of the bar workers, the union took up the fight. 
The union’s women and men organisers had worked in the hotels before becoming organisers and knew immediately what this would mean for working conditions and occupational health and safety. Denis recalls that the feeling was “someone had to stop it”, or the exploitative practice would only spread. Women who refused to comply with management’s demand to work topless and who objected to working alongside topless co-workers were sacked and quickly replaced by women brought in by the criminal-run employment agencies. 
It was going to take a serious union campaign to defeat the power of the hotel industry, known at the time for its strong criminal links. As Denis explains: “Organisers [including Denis] visiting these shonky premises were routinely threatened with violence, knives held to their throats, or in two incidents two organisers taken out the back of the premises and guns drawn and held to their heads, women organisers threatened with rape or worse”. Despite the threats, the organisers went around the pubs telling hotel bosses to stop their discriminatory practices, which were not only demeaning to the women involved, but made their work more dangerous. 
A problem the union faced was that sexism was so profitable that the bosses were willing to pay women well over the going rate to work topless, “up to five times the rate”, according to Denis. But for the union, it was a matter of principle—higher wages should be won based on industrial power, not by individuals unilaterally giving up important conditions and dignity at work. This, Denis argues, left “other hard-working women to survive on the hard-won wages and conditions fought for by them, and the union”, and undermined solidarity.
Stepping up the campaign, the union went to the brewery workers who supplied the hotels, calling for support. At stop-work meetings in every brewery, the workers passed resolutions of support for the bar workers, promising to take their own industrial action. 
After a negotiation between the union and management at the Tarmac Hotel in Melbourne’s west, the publican refused to stop using topless bar staff and to stop showing pornographic movies in the bar, deriding Denis as a prude. This didn’t worry Denis: “I couldn’t wait to let our members at the brewery know about my failed talks with management at the Tarmac Hotel. The instant reaction was one of solidarity with the female workers, and the passing of a resolution confirming the planned industrial action”.
The union’s motto became, “No porn, no top, no beer!”, Denis says. “All the Sunday papers were on to it, five topless women turned up in the union office the next day organised by the criminal element in the hotel industry and the sensationalist media in tandem. Fronting up at the front desk, I was summoned to face the women with cameras flashing and videos whirring; they were hoping my face would be flushed with embarrassment.” 
But Denis didn’t react in quite the way they were hoping. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a wet tram ticket; they continued the theme in the headlines of the newspapers that I was a 40-year-old prude, with photo, mind you. The shame, the ignominy! How was I going to hold my head up in the trade union movement for attempting to wipe out this insidious practice?” 
Denis exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses’ justifications of the practice by asking them whether they would employ their wives or girlfriends as topless bar staff, or do such work themselves. He described their response: “How dare you even suggest that we would subject our loved ones to such a display of semi nudity in public? Well then, [Denis countered] how about you publicans doing a few hours with your penis hanging out, just make sure it goes nowhere near the drip tray. The reaction was apoplexy!”
The first target of the industrial campaign was the Tarmac Hotel. “I told them to consider filling the cellars with coal, because the brewery workers were not going to supply any beer sourced by their labour from that point, and a cellar full of coal might help them survive the coming winter”, remembers Denis. After that, “The victories came fast and furious. Every hotel employing topless bar attendants or waiters was now on a final warning to cease this practice or answer to union members employed at the brewery. It’s called cap in hand. The cellars were soon running low on the amber liquid, and bosses who previously had refused to take down their pornographic movies or sack the women prepared to break down hard-won union conditions for a price, soon mellowed.” The result was that a conga line of publicans “beat a path to the union office to offer their sincere condolences for putting profit before people in an already lucrative business”.
Denis gives most credit to the tremendous work of the rank-and-file women and men in the industry for shutting down the practice at the time. He also points out that it was a warning shot across the bow to other employers who were thinking of employing topless sandwich makers, hardware assistants, hairdressers and the like, that their businesses would get the same treatment. He quipped “Thankfully we were able to cease the practice before seeing topless parliamentarians or, worse still, half-naked bosses”.
It is, however, an ongoing battle. The action taken by the brewery workers, thanks to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the ACTU-ALP Accord of the 1980s, is now illegal. Known as secondary boycotts, such solidarity action today incurs huge fines, which are a significant deterrent. 
The battle against sexualisation at work likewise is ongoing. In 1991, liquor trades and retail workers, along with bodies such as women’s refuges and legal groups, set up Women Against Sexual Exploitation in Training. It was followed by the inclusion of a statement of condemnation in the ACTU’s Working Women’s policy. Today, the normalisation of the sex industry and associated practices has broken down consciousness of sexism and the need to take it on industrially as well as in broader society. 
Now in his 70s, Denis still believes it should be a priority of the union movement to stand up for women’s rights and end sexualisation at work. Using occupational health and safety provisions is an obvious basis to object to such practices, but, Denis insists, this has to be combined with industrial action to actually shut down this demeaning, unsafe and exploitative practice, which must be understood as a blatant profit grab. 
The rhetoric of “empowerment” to justify appalling sexism, along with a weakening of the unions and with them class consciousness, means sexual exploitation at work is rife today. It is therefore more important than ever that we remember the history of the workers’ movement fighting back against this, and, in this case, winning.

Liz Ross

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

Even before vice-chancellors started <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/religion/australian-universities-free-speech-right-to-protest/105164636?utm_campaign=abc_religion_fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR5PnBd0b7_RLoBzYiWAwBHbdJrEtIP-aAfolH8RTWzk3qFht8aDmd3KU1C6TA_aem_dhGiVX7WxtZwQWBgpTDeww">savagely limiting</a> what students and staff could say, studying or working at a university was nothing like the romantic notion of life in the “ivory tower”.
There are myths that universities are places to pursue knowledge for the joy of it, where students can learn how to help others and make the world a better place, while on the path to great jobs.
The reality is quite different. Unfortunately, students have minimal say about the content of inflexible courses. Progress through units and degrees depends on jumping through assessment hoops, as universities continue the “hidden curriculum” of the school system, which is at least as important as the overt curriculum. The hidden curriculum teaches students that success, measured in marks (a proxy for dollars), depends on doing what you’re told and not challenging what teachers say—excellent training for dictatorial workplaces.
Universities have increasingly geared their offerings to the needs of business and governments, and their own profitability. That does not include learning how the wellbeing of most of the world’s population requires radical social changes, let alone how to make revolution.
Courses—and even whole departments—have been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-05/university-of-wollongong-cuts-academic-jobs-international-cap/104560250">axed</a>
because they don’t satisfy those needs or bring in sufficient money. The jobs that most university graduates go into are overwhelmingly white-collar, working-class positions, in which employees, like other workers, have very limited or no control over what they do. Such jobs are subject to the vagaries of the labour market, capitalism’s boom-bust cycles and governments’ whims.
Unis are increasingly just glorified high schools. Students are sausages in its digestive tract, chewed up, dissolved in acid and shat out at the end with a degree, while the funding they bring is sucked out into the universities’ profits.
Outside the ranks of management, the situation of the roughly two-thirds of <a href="https://www.education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/staff-data/selected-higher-education-statistics-2024-staff-data/key-findings-2024-higher-education-staff-statistics">university employees</a> who are not academics is equally gloomy. They are blue- and white-collar workers subjected to inadequate pay, attacks on their working conditions and frequent restructures. 
What about academics? Such jobs appear to offer scope to read and write about things you’re interested in, to tell others about those things, and lots of autonomy. The jobs are rewards for having a big brain and a way to get a public profile (for your big brain). And the jobs have “tenure”—they are secure—and you get to work in your own office.
The academic life is very different. The workloads of most academics today are punishing. Time to conduct and write up research is restricted. Career progress, and even keeping your job, depends on publishing in prestigious—that is conservative—journals. There’s pressure to do research that is “outside funded”, overwhelmingly by businesses or governments and according to their priorities.
Over the past twenty years, university bosses have dramatically tightened their control over academics’ research and teaching. Courses must go through time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, through which managers shape content and assessment methods and can even veto them. Anyone involved in teaching can tell you that marking is a horrible aspect of the job, humiliating for the marker and the markee. Teachers and students alike are subject to stressful time pressures. Most students are inadequately prepared for university. A teacher reading an essay whose first two sentences are clear and grammatical will think, “Wow! This should be much better than most of the others”.
To get an academic job, you must jump through many educational hoops and therefore go through a very sustained hidden curriculum: at school and in undergraduate and postgraduate study. Then, you must anticipate what the people who interview you want. Interview panels are dominated by universities’ most senior members, who are managers.
This promotes the “big brain syndrome”: the idea that your own unique talents are the key to your wellbeing at work and career advancement. That’s why academics tend to be poor unionists, compared with other university employees. They are even more prone than most workers to the illusion that their individual merit rather than collective action is the most important route to improve pay and conditions.
The “big brain syndrome” also affects some academic unionists who think of themselves as left wing, leading them to believe that sophisticated tactics in dealing with university bosses (and top union officials) can substitute for the unglamorous effort of detailed workplace organising or the crudity of strike action.
A public profile for you and your research? Only if the mainstream media are interested.
As for job security, most academic jobs are now casual, low paid and not paid for all hours actually worked. As a casual, you don’t even get the cubbyhole individual office that is increasingly standard for other academics.
Even continuing academic jobs are no more secure than continuing jobs anywhere else. Tenure is ancient history.
Initially, thanks to a disastrous policy of the National Tertiary Education Union, universities created “teaching-focussed” jobs, which allow no or laughably little time for research. Yet career progression is very difficult without an extensive publishing record. There are more and more of these jobs.
Academics who don’t supervise anyone or for whom that is a very small part of their duties (the majority) are just workers, gut flora in universities’ digestive tracts.
Why is there such a gap between the myths and realities of university life?
Universities have always been institutions that help to maintain, defend and develop systems of class rule. Initially, they provided administrators, clergy and lawyers who maintained the feudal order. Those graduates justified the hierarchy of feudalism as divinely ordained or in accord with “natural law” or assisted its smooth operation by overseeing its legal system and state.
With the rise of capitalism, through to the Second World War, universities remained elite institutions, whose graduates generally went on to be managers in business and government, increasingly with scientific and engineering expertise, as well as middle class professionals, especially lawyers and doctors.
Universities became mass institutions after the war. Today, most people who get degrees become skilled workers who can generally be relied on to do what they’re told.
The spread and production of ideas that serve capitalist interests are still significant university functions. Thomas Müntzer was a priest in the sixteenth century who took the side of peasants and artisans in the massive uprising against the old feudal order in Germany, known as the “Peasants’ War”. His observation in July 1524 is still a pretty good description of an aspect of universities’ ideological roles today: 
“[In biblical times] clever soothsayers and interpreters of dreams ... said only what the lords wanted to hear, just as our academic scribblers do nowadays, for they have a taste for the choicest morsels at court.”
Contemporary lords of capital don’t want to hear only tried and trusted apologies for the way things are, but also more up-to-date variations and even innovations around that fundamental theme. When an academic or journalist hits the right note, they can count on politicians, spokesthings for the state or business and the mass media to amplify it and boost their career. Think of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who promotes far-right ideas, including racism and sexism.
University research generates genuine insights into how people behave, societies function and the nature of the material world: science. These can improve our lives and understanding of reality.
But the lens of class politics tends to affect all aspects of the production of ideas, including sciences. It shapes universities as workplaces and biases research priorities. Scientific advances can often be used by corporations and state institutions to improve their control and manipulations of consumers, workers and citizens. They can help businesses develop new products or production processes that improve profitability, <a href="https://www.techtransfer.org.au/news-item/17346/finalists-announced-for-the-2024-kca-awards">from</a>
controlling fires to lithium refining, disinfection technologies to “<a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/03/31/sydney-spinout-deteqt-secures-backing-for-diamond-on-silicon-sen.html">quantum sensing</a>”.
The creation of new ideas depends on academics having some autonomy, not just parroting dogmas. The degree of this autonomy can vary dramatically. In some cases, it has even allowed Marxists to get jobs in social sciences or arts. But the structures of universities and career paths in them mean that academics often produce ideas and analyses without attention to the contexts of the phenomena they are trying to grasp. There is a wonderful word in German for this: Fachidiotismus. Literally it means the idiocy of academic disciplines: knowing more and more about less and less.
Universities are bureaucratic organisations like corporations or public service agencies. As capitalist enterprises, universities are there to make profits for themselves and their <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/highest-university-executive-pay-packets-revealed-as-crackdown-looms-20250101-p5l1i1.html">top managers</a>. They make profits by producing workers and developing ideas that are useful for the state and other capitalists, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism.
Although universities make profits through educating workers and developing ideas that are useful to the state and other capitals, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism, their senior managers can act in ways that contradict interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The dumbing down of courses over recent decades, and the consequent decline in the average abilities of graduates, is an example. But such conflicts, in which universities pursue their own sectoral interests, do not make them different from any other section of capital.
In some places, the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to some reforms that included students and non-professorial staff in the decision-making processes of the whole university, faculties, schools and departments, to a limited extent. Since then, managers, encouraged by politicians and businesspeople, have either eliminated this representation or rendered it purely tokenistic. Appointed managers have replaced elected heads of departments or schools and deans of faculties. The powers of appointed top managers have increased.
Most members of university councils or senates—their boards of directors—are appointed by governments or existing members and are thoroughly reliable servants of capitalist interests.
Although there are profound myths about the nature of universities, they can be sites of resistance against capitalism. That’s true of all workplaces but there’s an additional element that leads to this possibility in universities.
The main raw material that goes into its production process is students. They come to universities with an optimism about the world that hasn’t been worn down by years of wage labour, and they generally have more free time to engage in political activity than people with full-time jobs and families. They have more scope to explore ideas and engage in political activity, if they want to.
While socialists regard the working class as the only force that can bring down capitalism and create a new society, winning more people to active socialist politics is important, especially workers but also workers-in-the-making at schools and universities.
Rick Kuhn worked in academic jobs for 28 years and is a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.

Rick Kuhn

Life in the cardboard tower: the university experience today

Workers at the Star Brisbane made history on 4 July, striking for the first time in the casino’s history and for the first time in an Australian casino in sixteen years. Star employees are the worst-paid casino workers in the country. They walked out after the company offered a new contract that would leave them even worse off and cut their Sunday penalty rates. 
During the strike, workers voted to strike again during the State of Origin decider on 9 July and again during a poker tournament later that week. The State of Origin strike was a huge success, and the tournament was subsequently cancelled, a big win for the workers.
Workers walked off the job at 6pm on 4 July and were met by hundreds of cheering supporters. 
“This is a company that always manages to find millions and millions of dollars in bonuses for the executives, but when it comes to paying us, they’re suddenly going broke. Well, I think they’re full of it”, said Kaine Kennedy, a delegate with the United Workers Union, addressing the assembled workers and supporters. 
A group of women who have been with the company for many years as cleaners and cashiers were the angriest, waving their union flags and breaking out into chants: “Sunday rates! Sunday rates!”
One made a speech: “I’ve been here for 30 years, and this is the worst agreement that we’ve ever had. We need to keep our Sunday rates due to the cost of living and for our wellbeing and mental health. We work twice as hard on the weekends”.
Another told Red Flag: “All the tables and pits are closed! They’re going to lose so much!”
Workers say the cleaners have to do the work of two or three people and are denied a sewage allowance after cleaning up shit. Apparently, it’s too hard for the Star to pay fair wages to the workers—but the CEO of Star Entertainment gets a $10 million salary package.
It’s not just Star workers getting a crap deal. It’s a similar story all across Australia. Bosses have unchecked power at work and do whatever they think they can get away with, all to make more money. 
But when workers strike, that begins to change. As Kaine put it:
“Everywhere you look in Australia, there’s a boss trying to save a couple bucks by screwing over their workers. That’s why we need more of this. We need more workers standing together, fighting back and saying we’re not going to take it. We’re not going to let you make another cent until you pay us what we deserve.”

Jessica Abbo

Historic strikes at Brisbane’s Star Casino

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

Ryan Stanton

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

Hundreds of teacher unionists rallied outside the Queensland parliament on 24 June to demand a decent pay rise from the state government. 
Teachers’ real wages have gone backwards by more than 6 percent in the last three years, but the government is offering an insulting 8 percent pay increase over the next three years, while annual inflation sits at 2.4 percent.
The teachers also want workloads to be reduced. High school teachers’ planning time has not increased since the 1970s, but there has been a dramatic increase in the required work—assessing, marking and writing new unit plans. All of this work is unpaid and unacknowledged by the government. 
“I don’t feel like there’s much time to get everything done”, Danielle, a secondary school teacher, told Red Flag at the rally. 
Mina, a primary public school teacher, said she thinks teachers deserve a 30 percent pay rise—the rate that rank-and-file network Queensland Teachers Fightback <a href="https://qldteachersfightback.org/our-wages-vs-inflation-vs-state-gov-wages-policy.html">is arguing for</a>. 
Mina told Red Flag that she supports taking strike action next term, “to get the point across that change is needed, a pay rise is needed, and we need to be acknowledged for the role we play in young kids’ lives”. Queensland public school teachers haven’t taken statewide industrial action in sixteen years. 
If teachers struck, they’d receive support. Construction workers from different job sites rallied alongside the teachers outside parliament. They agreed that teachers deserve the solidarity of other trade unions as they fight for their pay and conditions. 
One construction union member said attending the rally was important “to show the QTU [Queensland Teachers’ Union] is not alone. It’s a symbiotic relationship we have with all trade unions”. 
The QTU voted last year to support construction workers, whose union has been put into administration by the federal Labor government. Rank-and-file activists in both unions believe that, when one section of the workforce stands up to the bosses, they show all workers the power they have. 
Public sector workers are being left behind. Queensland teachers, nurses and firefighters are due to negotiate new contracts this year. But the Crisafulli state government has made it clear that, while there’s money for Olympic stadiums and cops, there’s little to nothing for the working class. 
Teachers will have to fight, and take industrial action, to win what they and their students deserve.

Isabella Foley

Queensland teachers fight back against insulting pay offer

“We are here today because we are fighting for what is right!”
Striking Grill’d workers and their supporters protested in front of the burger chain’s Rundle Street store in Adelaide on 28 June, handing out flyers explaining why they were taking action against the company. They argued to people who tried to enter the store that they should boycott Grill’d while workers struck. Would-be customers were cheered when they walked away from the restaurant’s entrance.
After a few hours of protesting, the picketers took to the streets of Adelaide. “Support Grill’d workers—don’t eat the burgers!” they chanted as they spread the word throughout the city. Many of the workers have never taken industrial action before, and were buoyed by the experience. “Look, it’s our street—Union Street”!, one quipped while marching back to the store. 
The founder and CEO of Grill’d, Simon Crowe, wants <a href="https://thewest.com.au/business/retail/grilld-chief-executive-simon-crowe-says-the-burger-group-can-more-than-double-its-size-in-the-next-five-years-c-13698323">to double the company’s size by 2029</a>. Crowe, with a reported net worth of more than <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/they-slowly-strangled-me-grill-d-store-owner-lost-shop-days-before-christmas-20191206-p53hir.html">$450 million</a>, has grown rich off the backs of his workers.
Meanwhile, Grill’d workers struggle to make ends meet. The current agreement increases wages by just 1 percent per year. Once inflation is factored in, staff have gone backwards at a rate of knots.
An analysis from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA, the union covering the workers) has found that those on the current enterprise agreement are up to <a href="https://grilldworkersunited.org/terminate2020">37 percent worse off than if they had been on the award wage</a> instead.
So, across South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, Grill’d workers were out for better pay and conditions. Some of their demands include wage increases that account for inflation, appropriate pay for staff with more responsibilities, and guaranteed hours for permanent contracts.
Many of the workers reported to Red Flag that they are overworked and understaffed, and often unable to call in sick or take breaks.
Outside the Rundle Steet Grill’d, a supporter remarked: “See how ridiculously priced [the] burgers are? Surely, they can spare a few extra dollars for the workers here ... We all deserve fair living wages, so why not?”
One young worker said she was earning $600 working 50 hours a week, having just turned 18. “I didn’t know any better. This was my first job, and I took it because I was desperate”, she said, adding that while working at Grill’d and studying at university, she collects bottles to help pay for groceries and does DoorDash on the side.
At a time when strike rates are at a historic low and wealth inequality is soaring, these workers are showing what needs to happen. As one said defiantly, “Our efforts today will help the higher-ups see we are not to be taken advantage of, and we deserve to have an agreement where we are actually better off!”

Jordan Armstrong

Grill’d workers turn heat on boss

Roughly two dozen construction union (CFMEU) members, crane operators and riggers, are on indefinite strike at the Port of Brisbane. They’ve been out for nearly a month now and don’t show any sign of giving in. One delegate told Red Flag that they are “committed to being here as long as we need”. Workers have set up a television, cooking equipment and decorations, as well as a couch—important comforts for a long fight. 
Their employer is Qube, Australia’s largest logistics company. Qube owns part of Patrick Corporation, an infamously anti-worker outfit. In 1998, in an attempt to cripple the Maritime Union of Australia, Patrick fired its entire wharfie workforce. This kicked off the famous <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/waterfront-war-shook-australia">war on the waterfront</a> dispute. 
True to form, the Brisbane strike kicked off after Qube sacked workers, including a union delegate, who took part in an initial two-day strike in early May. They were laid off using a dodgy “restructuring”: boss language for union busting. One of the workers quit in protest but is still down at the picket line each day: “These boys are in for a fight; I’ve got to stand alongside them”, he told Red Flag. 
Along with the right to strike, the workers are fighting for better pay and conditions. They say their enterprise bargaining agreement was “substandard” even when it was signed in 2019. Their wage currently sits $4 an hour below the industry standard, which they are fighting to meet. They’re also demanding proper redundancy pay, income protection and travel pay. The small amount of travel pay they are owed is often unpaid; one worker is still waiting on a claim he made a year ago. Another demand is for a meal allowance, which is standard in the industry but not paid here. 
Not everyone experiences this poor treatment at Qube. “They look after their corporate people very well”, said one of the workers. Qube’s managing director, Paul Digney, made $4.14 million in the 2023-24 financial year. Digney recently complained in an interview with the Australian that when his workers “don’t turn up for work, the economy stops”. Too right. According to the workers, their frustrated managers often drive past the picket, occasionally giving them the middle finger. Taking these arrogant fat cats down a peg won’t go in a log of claims, but it is a worthy reason to keep fighting. 
The CFMEU members aren’t up against only their own bosses, but also a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-set-to-impose-dictatorial-powers-over-construction-union">government-appointed administrator</a>. The administrator has <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/attack-on-democracy-in-the-act-cfmeu">sacked officials</a> and destroyed democracy in the union. In response to a High Court ruling that gave the go-ahead to this undemocratic disgrace, hundreds of CFMEU workers walked off the job last week. Queensland Socialists secretary and teacher unionist Bec Barrigos spoke at their rally, arguing for more strike action to take on the administration. She also pointed out the connection between the fights of workers in every industry. 
The workers at Qube are similarly keen to point out this connection. “If we just leave it and they get away with screwing us over, other workers will have to deal with it”, one of the delegates said. But “if we win here, it's a win for the next worker”. Touch one, touch all, as the old union saying goes. Another saying is well worn among these workers: “If you don’t fight, you lose”. Amid a generational cost-of-living crisis, attacks on unions, growing inequality and stagnant wages, theirs is a message worth remembering. 
Contribute to the Qube workers’ strike fund:
QUBE financial hardship fund
BSB: 064 000
ACC: 165 702 38

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