Few things can match the feeling of hope generated by the sight of millions on the streets of Italy demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. With a general strike at its heart, with industry after industry shut down, it gave a glimpse of the usually latent power of the working class. 
While there have not been similar scenes in Australia recently, there is nevertheless a history of mass political strikes against apartheid regimes here. The target was South Africa, an anti-apartheid action reaching a high point in mid-1971, when the all-white South African Springbok rugby team toured Australia.
The tour was fully supported and aided by the Australian government. Initially, 85 percent of the population were in favour of it and only 7 percent opposed.
Yet by the tour’s end, more than one-third had come around to opposing the government maintaining sporting ties with South Africa. The cricket tour of South Africa scheduled for the following year was cancelled, the chair of the cricket board explicitly saying, “We will not play them [South Africa] until they choose a team on a non-racist basis”. That position held right up until apartheid formally ended in 1994. Bold working-class action, with the left taking the lead, was integral to bringing about this shift. 
The campaign against the apartheid team received unprecedented union support. The long campaign against the Vietnam War had legitimated political strikes amongst a wider layer of workers. As a result, more union activists had some experience of working with student radicals and were less likely to dismiss them as “long-haired ratbags”. The level of strike action in general had surged, raising working-class confidence and combativity. 
This shift in mood began to affect even the conservative upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/de8e2d30993e856c/Documents/PC%20Backup/Diane%20Fieldes%20PhD%202002.docx#_ftn1">
</a>While the ACTU had refused to support strike action against the Vietnam War, its moderate leader, Bob Hawke, now initiated action against the Springbok tour, urging unions to “take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”. It took off.
Transport union members, especially Qantas staff, refused to carry the Springboks. Liquor and hospitality workers and Miscellaneous Workers Union members made sure drink supplies were cut off from hotels that allowed them to stay. Laundry workers refused to wash their clothes, and their mail deliveries were stopped. Maritime workers delayed ships carrying South African goods, and the entire Melbourne port was shut down by strike action for a week. 
Union opposition even included a one-day general strike in Queensland on 21 July. Forty unions took part in the action. The issue that galvanised them was the month-long state of emergency declared by the state’s far right Bjelke-Petersen government on 14 July. This was ostensibly to bring in hundreds of extra police and take over the well-fortified Brisbane Exhibition oval for the games. Ballymore Oval, the traditional Brisbane home of rugby union, needed extra facilities built to accommodate the expected crowds, and the unions would not cooperate.
Bob Anderson, an Aboriginal man and a communist, was an organiser in Brisbane with the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) at the time. He gives a wonderful account of persuading building workers not to build facilities for the tour:
“There was a big team of plumbers working, installing temporary urinals, wash troughs and things like that. So I had a discussion with them, and said ‘the union policy is that we’re against apartheid, we’re not supporting the playing of this game here’, and I explained what it is to be black in your own country, and the workers said: ‘Well, if that’s the case, let them piss on the ground’ and walked off.”
The Amalgamated Meat Industry Employees Union banned the transport of police horses to the Brisbane demonstrations. Workers at the Alice Street workshop of the Department of Public Works let the union know they had received an order to make 500 extra-large riot batons for the police. Bob Anderson and BWIU president Hughie Hamilton went to argue with the workers not to make them. Union policy prevailed and the damage the cops could inflict, while still brutal, was somewhat minimised.
Then maintenance workers at the exhibition grounds struck, refusing to work while the police cadets were there putting up barbed wire around the oval. The fence itself then remained in place for a month as unionists refused to take it down. As their letter in response to a request to do so put it: “The coppers put the fucking fence up, the coppers can pull the fucking fence down”.
There was a reinforcing effect between the defiant mood amongst important groups of workers and the militant student protests. Outrage at police violence deployed against a largely student protest outside the Springboks’ motel led to a packed meeting at the University of Queensland the following day. Dan O’Neill, a lecturer in the English department argued: “We can no longer beat the ... tour and fight racism in the streets ... The only way is ... to bring the industrial system to a halt”. To cries of “Strike now!” 3,000 staff and students voted to stop work and turn the campus over to anti-racist agitation. 
When Nelson Mandela visited Australia in 1990, a few months after his release from 27 years of imprisonment, he made special mention of the power of union solidarity:
“It was the labour movement of this country, in the early ’50s, the dockworkers in this country, who refused to unload South African ships ... which gave the people of South Africa in their struggle a lot of strength, and a lot of hope. It was difficult to understand how workers, thousands of miles from our shores, could take the initiative, the lead, among the workers of the world to pledge their solidarity with the people of South Africa. The feeling that we are not alone, that we have millions of workers behind us.” That legacy of working-class internationalism is one we have to continue to build on today.

Diane Fieldes

When Australian workers struck against apartheid

Australian history is riddled with strikes. Here are four that don’t get talked about as often as they should.
Rockchoppers’ strike, 1908
Beneath Sydney lie 27,000 kilometres of sewage and water pipes keeping the metropolis from descending into a pigsty. Few know about the hundreds of workers who hewed the sandstone to build this labyrinthine network. Even fewer know about the heroic struggle they undertook to tame Sydney’s underground concrete jungle.
The dangerous nature of this work meant it attracted only the tough and the desperate. Cutting into the sandstone produced a fine—and deadly—dust that caused silicosis. Explosives produced toxic fumes that caused crippling headaches. Most workers were drawn from the poor Irish community. The morality of the employers was summed up by a contractor’s evidence to a 1901 board of inquiry: “A contractor does not take a job to slaughter men but at the same time he has to make a living like other people”.
In 1908, the Rockchoppers Union formed and quickly recruited almost all 500 people working in the sewage network. A series of strikes on individual jobs followed as the rockchoppers pushed for higher pay, shorter hours and, most importantly, workers’ control over workplace conditions. In October, this erupted into a general strike in the sewers. The Water Board quickly moved to prosecute the strikers under new anti-union legislation.
The rockchoppers felt they had nothing to lose. When strike leaders were hauled before the arbitration court, hundreds of sewer workers surrounded the courthouse shouting, “You’ll have to jail the lot of us!” and then marched to the prison to cheer on their comrades. 
Many were influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, which championed independent working-class activity. Labor politicians were banned from speaking at strike meetings, although independent socialists like Harry Holland were welcomed. The workers requested solidarity from other unions but were deeply suspicious of attempts by the NSW Labor Council to take over and moderate their struggle.
After three weeks, the Water Board surrendered to all their demands. The most astonishing victory was securing the six-hour day, the first of its kind in the country and perhaps the world. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/10/22/rockchoppers/#chop49">“Job control for workers’ health: the 1908 Sydney rockchoppers’ strike”, Peter Sheldon, Labor History journal</a>.
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike, 1945
Left-wing accounts of strikes in Australia often look favourably on the Communist Party, which was the major force in the unions outside of the Labor Party for much of the twentieth century. 
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945 shows a different side to the Communists. It took place during the Second World War, which the Communists strongly backed. It was largely a revolt against the Communists’ bureaucratic control over the ironworkers and their attempts to service the war effort by limiting strikes.
While strident anti-war sentiment was isolated, there was a widespread feeling amongst workers that the war effort shouldn’t lead to lower living standards. When the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, the Communist Party campaigned to convince workers that more sacrifices must be made to support the war against fascism. For a period, working-class sentiment converged with the Communist Party’s position due to the rapid advance of the Japanese imperial forces. By 1943, however, the Japanese offensive was declining, and war fatigue amongst workers was setting in.
These issues came to a head in Sydney’s Balmain. The Balmain branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (FIA) was the only one not controlled by the Communists. It organised a motley crew of Old Balmainers, including Labor left socialists, supporters of the ousted Labor Premier Jack Lang, syndicalists and a few Trotskyists. Throughout the war, tensions built up between the Communist leaders of the national Ironworkers and the Balmain branch. 
An unofficial strike of Sydney metalworkers kicked off 1943 when the New Year’s Day public holiday was cancelled. The strike was condemned by the Communists. “[A] day’s production has been lost and the trade union movement has been held up to ridicule for lack of discipline”, argued the Ironworker. “[N]o gain of any form whatsoever will flow from this stoppage.” Much criticism focussed on the Trotskyist Nick Origlass, who had been elected a delegate for the Mort’s Dock boiler shop. 
Further stoppages followed the New Years’ Day strike. Eventually, the federal leadership of the Ironworkers moved to remove the Balmain branch leaders after accusing them of financial irregularities. Hundreds of rank-and-file workers rallied around the local leadership at mass meetings. The Communists won a narrow victory in the branch elections of 1943, although they were accused of stuffing ballots.
With the old Balmain leadership deposed, opposition to the Communists was organised by a small band of Trotskyist agitators led by Origlass, who built a base of support in the metal shops at Mort’s Dock and on Cockatoo Island. 
In March 1945, Origlass was removed from his position as delegate. At a mass meeting to elect new delegates, no-one in the boiler shop nominated, in solidarity with him. The union leaders appointed three new delegates, and the boiler shop workers announced they would stop work unless Origlass was returned. Within two days, most of the ironworkers at Mort’s Dock were on strike. The next union meeting ended in uproar when the chair and 100 supporters of the Communists walked out, declaring the meeting void. Five hundred ironworkers stayed and supported a motion to expand the strike. 
By April, almost 3,000 ironworkers were out on a strike that would last six weeks. By the time the strike ended, not only was Origlass reinstated, but the Communists abandoned Balmain, leaving the opposition in control over the local branch for years to come. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/13/ironworkers/">“The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945”, Daphne Gollan, Labor history journal</a>.
Rubber workers’ strike, 1969 
The jailing of tramway union leader Clarrie O’Shea in May 1969 triggered the largest general strike in postwar Australia. It was a watershed moment that broke the anti-union penal powers and initiated a new strike wave that involved increasing numbers of low-paid and poorly unionised workers.
In October 1969, strikes organised by such workers rocked the rubber industry in South Australia. More than 1,000 workers struck for three weeks in defiance of their employers and the manoeuvres of right-wing trade union leaders. 
These workers were mainly migrants, mostly Greeks, and hundreds were women. A change in the way that wage increases for highly unionised workers flowed on to low-paid workers meant that they were falling far behind. In October 1969, a workplace meeting launched a strike for higher wages. In response, the rubber bosses refused to negotiate with the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (MWU). Instead, they told the workers to talk to the Chamber of Manufactures. 
“At the second strike meeting a call was made for a march of protest to the Chamber of Manufactures”, reported Tribune, the Communist Party’s newspaper. “Almost to a man [and woman] the workers responded and marched fifteen abreast to the Pirie Street Chamber premises.” Once there, the workers invaded the building and sat in the board room’s red leather chairs waiting for the bosses’ negotiators to arrive—they never did. 
Striking workers, police and scabs regularly confronted one another on picket lines outside the rubber factories. “A driver was told to drive over the bastards”, reported Tribune. The bosses threatened to shut down workplaces across the state, leaving thousands without work. Maintenance crews at Rubber Mills then walked out in solidarity. Notably, migrant workers at Ford Broadmeadows in Victoria, who would stage their own strike in 1973, walked off the job in support of the rubber strike.
At this point, the local Trades and Labour Council—controlled by right-wing unions—moved to take control of the dispute. They organised a meeting in which the MWU had the same number of representatives as smaller right-wing unions and pressured the workers to end their strike and wait for a court ruling. 
Rank-and-file rubber workers resisted this takeover, the Greek workers playing an important role. Many of them were connected to Platon, a Greek workers club led by migrant Communists. Platon had created a εργατική επιτροπή (industrial committee) in 1969 that played a key role in encouraging the strike in the first place. Nick Robakis, one of the strike organisers and a local MWU leader, was a Platon member.
Under the influence of these activists, a stormy strike meeting rejected the Labour Council proposal to return to work by 300 votes to 283. However, the pressure from the bosses, the courts and the Labour Council continued to build. A few days later, another strike meeting reluctantly voted to end the strike.
Despite only a partial win on their demands, the strike left an important legacy. For years afterwards, the rubber industry in South Australia was rocked by protests and strikes led by the workers—men and women, migrants and Australian born—who went through the struggle of 1969.
Read more: <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/237504824">“Profile of a strike” by Hal Alexander, Tribune, December</a> 1969
Warilla teachers’ strike, 1976 
It wasn’t just low-paid migrant workers moving into struggle in the wake of the Clarrie O’Shea strike. There was also a growing movement amongst white-collar workers, many of whom previously considered themselves professionals.
In October 1968, the first ever state-wide strike of NSW teachers took place. Eighty percent of teachers took part, and more than 10,000 attended a mass meeting. This opened the space for strike action at particular schools, the most important of which was the Warilla teachers strike of 1976.
This remains the longest teachers strike in Australian history, lasting 28 days. Warilla High School in the steel town of Wollongong educated many children from poor working-class families. The strike began when the Department of Education transferred a science teacher out of the school and refused to provide funding for a replacement. Seventy-five of the 77 staff walked out in protest on 10 February.
The strike quickly raised the wider issue of inadequate staffing for schools in working-class areas, winning community support. At the time, the NSW South Coast was a radical hub. A left-wing rank-and-file group had won the local union leadership of the BHP steelworks and organised large strikes throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Eighteen thousand steelworkers had launched a strike just days before Warilla. Left-wing activists were influential amongst the dockworkers in Port Kembla and the Illawarra coalminers. The South Coast Labour Council was known for supporting left-wing currents in the region’s trade unions.
On 17 February, a mass meeting of 400 parents and students unanimously endorsed the strike, after a left-wing opposition overthrew the local P&amp;C branch leadership. A series of sympathy strikes by students broke out at the Warrawong, Port Kembla and Berkeley high schools. On 25 February, 300 school students marched through the streets of Wollongong. The cleaners at Warilla high walked out on strike. The waterside workers at Port Kembla held a stop-work to hear from the striking teachers and discussed a sympathy strike. High school teachers in Sydney began a series of rolling solidarity strikes. 
At this point, some of the Warilla teachers were drifting back to work, but 40 voted to continue the strike. Victory came when members of the Firemen and Deckhand’s Union walked off the job, shutting down tugboats at Port Kembla. “Driving down Mt Ousley that night”, recalled South Coast teacher Jim Bradley in an interview with Illawarra Unity, “looking at those boats tied up off the Illawarra coast, we stopped the car and screamed in delight and knew we were close to winning”. The Education Department rapidly gave in to most of the strike’s demands. 
Read more: <a href="https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/14203#idx124982">“The Warilla High School Strike—a veritable class struggle” by Anthony Ashbolt, </a>Illawarra Unity, July 2006.

Jordan Humphreys

Four important strikes that you (probably) don’t know about

Italy’s Autumn of mass protests and strikes for Palestine boiled over into four days of rebellion following Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla. This culminated in a general strike and millions on the streets on 3-4 October. The explosion of popular struggle, with the working class and the strike now placed at its centre, accompanied by a mass, militant student movement, is a hugely significant development in the fight for Palestine, and the broader fight against the capitalist and imperialist system.
A rising tide of struggle in Italy has been set in motion since 1 September, when 50,000 people marched in Genoa to accompany the launch of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Genoa hosts one of Europe’s most important ports, and the protest sent off the Flotilla with mass support and a warning: if the Flotilla were attacked, then dockworkers, along with other workers, and backed by a mass movement, would strike and “block everything”—blocchiamo tutto! 
The declaration was initially made by the dockworkers organised in the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP). It was quickly taken up by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), one of Italy’s many so-called base unions which have been set up in recent decades to organise rank-and-file workers into class struggle in opposition to Italy’s traditional trade union federations which, like Australian unions, are dominated by institutionalised, do-nothing bureaucrats. 
The base unions directly organise only a small minority of Italian workers, so their ability to implement serious industrial action without the main union federations is usually very limited. But now, the boldness of the slogan—blocchiamo tutto—combined with rising anger at the situation in Gaza and the Italian government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, sparked a surge of energy, confidence and mobilisation. Along with the base unions and the growing calls for strike action, this has been fuelled by growing mass Palestine rallies, a youth radicalisation centred on high school and university blockades and occupations, and countless smaller actions, including rallies, local blockades, encampments and so on, often organised by Italy’s social centres. At the core of most of this upsurge in spontaneous activity are Italy’s various far-left and communist organisations.
The date was set for a general strike, called by the base unions, on 22 September. To try to undermine this call, and to give itself some much-needed left cover in the face of growing pressure, Italy’s main union federation, the CGIL, called a last-minute strike for 19 September. A cynical manoeuvre, this strike was not intended to be widespread, and indeed it wasn’t, outside of some transport and education workers. Yet, contrary to the wishes of the CGIL leaders, it helped to legitimise the idea of a general strike for Palestine, and helped to lay the basis for the success of the 22 September general strike.
This strike involved many more workers than 19 September and unleashed a confident mass movement prepared to defy the police and new anti-protest laws, to block ports, train stations, highways, schools and universities. Without the backing of the major union federations, many workers did not participate in the strike, or participated as individuals without much economic impact on their workplace. But the momentum was building.
With the attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla on 1 October, a new peak of mobilisation was unleashed. Snap protests drew thousands into the squares of every major city late at night and with no notice. I eventually found the tail-end of the protest in Florence, where hundreds were still in the square at 1am. In some bigger cities, clashes with police and blockades of stations and roads were already beginning and raging through the night.
Crucially, on the night of 1 October, the CGIL now backed the call for a general strike on 3 October. The momentum was such that there was no way they could avoid such a call at this point without losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the working class. Forcing the CGIL into such action was a major victory for the movement and ensured 3 October would be a historic day.
The day before, still in Florence at this point, I headed at 8am towards what I’d been told was going to be a university blockade. On the way, I happened to run into something else—hundreds of high school students standing in the street outside their school in the centre of the CBD. The entrance was being blockaded by a combination of school and uni students. The high school students seemed very happy about this situation, with support for Palestine ubiquitous among their cohort, and any waverers won over by the fact that this was much more exciting than school. They could name at least three other high schools in Florence alone that were also being blockaded that morning.
Half an hour later, and following people wearing keffiyehs, I found my way to the blockade of the University of Florence. The student activists had chosen the via Laura campus due to its ongoing ties with Israel. The entrance was blocked, and protesters chanted and made speeches outside. As more students arrived, many presumably expecting to go to class, they instead overwhelmingly joined the protest. When a critical mass was reached, the blockade became an occupation. Hundreds of students marched into classes to shut them down, chanting, singing and pulling the students out to join the protest. 
One of the songs was clearly a bit new and took a while to catch on, but soon hundreds were singing it on repeat. I was told it was an adaptation of a workers’ song associated with an important strike a few years earlier. Some of the lyrics translate as: “Forward together; united in the struggle; against imperialism; there will be victory!” A mass assembly was held to discuss the politics and organisation of the occupation, before the students then led a march into the city centre, stopping by every blockaded high school along the way, whose students joined the march. At the time of writing, the occupation at via Laura is ongoing.
That night, I joined another mass demonstration in Florence. This time, thousands marched through the city centre before heading to Florence’s main train station, Santa Maria Novella. Everyone knew what was coming: the night before, stations had been stormed and blockaded in Milan and Turin. We faced a line of fully decked-out riot police. As the crowd swelled and surged, a series of explosions rang out—smaller fire crackers thrown by protesters, I think, followed by thunderously loud explosions from police flashbang grenades. But no one was deterred; the crowd grew, the chants grew louder, and soon the police retreated. Thousands stormed in, occupying the train platforms and tracks. These scenes were playing out across Italy. A 24-hour strike on the railways began at 9pm that night.
The 3 October general strike is an incredible and perhaps unprecedented achievement. A purely political strike, and a general strike, carried out with massive, active participation, as a result of a surging movement from below, which was declared illegal by the Italian government, given no real support from any of the entire official opposition of the political establishment; and all for an international cause that does not seemingly directly affect Italian workers. And not just any international cause, but that of the Palestinians—a people systematically demonised and dehumanised as Islamic terrorists.
The general strike and mass mobilisations were a big victory over the far-right Meloni government, which serves the interests of Italian capitalism, the third biggest exporter of arms to Israel after the US and Germany. Like governments around the world, Meloni wants to impose further austerity on the working class to fund obscene increases in military spending. She derided the strikers as people just seeking a “long weekend”, and her government declared the strike illegal, threatening unions and individuals with repercussions. She also recently passed laws to punish protesters who block important infrastructure. This all failed miserably.
The CGIL reported the strike as a widespread success, with 60 percent participation. It was particularly strong in the education, transport and logistics industries, and among metalworkers. Mass demonstrations accompanied the strike, with perhaps 2 million people mobilising across the country, including 300,000 in Rome. Along with this went an enormous wave of blockades, often led by student activists who swarmed past police lines to block, occupy and shut down ports, train stations, major highways, even airports, warehouses and distribution centres, along with schools and universities. The blockades made the strike massively more disruptive. Long-distance trains, for example, were announced by the CGIL as not being affected by the strike. But occupations of the train tracks meant that everything was stopped—something I can attest to, as I was trying to get to Rome for the huge national demonstration the next day. I’ve never been so happy to wait several hours for a train!
It’s incredible to think that after all this frenetic activity, the very next day, 4 October, 1 million people took to the streets of Rome for Italy’s biggest demonstration since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I made it into town the night before, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs greeted me everywhere. The metro on the way to the protest’s starting point was packed with rally-goers—I remember thinking that there were more people on this single train, two hours before the march was even due to start, than I’ve been with at many Palestine protests over the decades.
It felt like the whole world was protesting there in Rome; a never-ending sea of humanity which, despite walking up and down for hours, I never saw the start or the end of. Every side street of the official march route was jam-packed. It was so big you could easily go and line up for a pizza and beer, sit for two hours, rejoin the demonstration and still be nowhere near the end of the march. As we marched past the Colosseum, I couldn’t help but think of the petty attempt of NSW police and Premier Chris Minns to stop us in Sydney from marching to the Opera House on supposed “security” and “safety” grounds. What a joke.
There are a few important points flowing from the events in Italy. First, the global complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has encapsulated so much about the morally bankrupt world we live in. In the last two years, every institution of this system has utterly debased itself in the service of genocide, from the Labor Party to the ABC, and so many more. In Italy, this includes all the so-called opposition parties. I say “encapsulated” and not revealed, because for so many workers and students, this system has already been failing them year after year, while its politicians and ideologues become less and less credible.
This partly explains the explosion of struggle in Italy. The banner of Palestine has become a symbol and a unifying rallying cry for everyone fed up with a system of shameless liars, hypocrites and murderers, who preside over an economic system of inequality which keeps us poor, locked out and with nothing to lose.
Second, while socialists have been saying for some time that Israel’s barbarism is a product of an entire sick system of capitalism and imperialism, and that the road to Palestinian liberation was inseparable from a working-class struggle against that system, nothing makes the case quite like a general strike. Italian workers and students have planted the flag, and it’s now up to the rest of the world to emulate these efforts. Mass, militant class struggle is the way forward for Palestinian liberation, and the liberation of us all.
Third, Italy shows that in circumstances of widespread discontent, a bold minority—in this case comprising relatively embryonic rank-and-file workers’ organisations and a radical student movement—with an orientation to mass action and class struggle, can galvanise millions into struggle and transform the situation, precisely because they called for militant, determined action. They didn’t do it by moderating their demands or sucking up to the likes of the Italian Democratic Party or the CGIL leaders, the rough equivalents of our Labor Party and ACTU. This should be a huge inspiration for us all, as it shows that a movement that is both mass and militant is not only what is needed, but is clearly possible.

Josh Lees

Italy’s general strike shows the way forward

You’ve just got a great new job, or so you think. You sign on for work from home, log in and log out when you want and, over the day, you get call-ins for any number of ten-minute mini-tasks. Welcome to the gig economy—in this case, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. 
Classed as independent contractors, workers who sign on to Mechanical Turk have no guaranteed wages or conditions or other workplace protections. They bid against thousands worldwide for each task, and often stay logged in all day, even into the night, to get a bare minimum wage. The boss can block them at will—in effect sack them—and the pay rate per job keeps falling. Amazon may well have created the most unregulated labour marketplace that has ever existed, what former ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver called a “liquid workforce” in which “workers bid for parcels of work where the lowest bid wins”.
Another technological innovation has been the extensive use of robots in many industries. In warehouses, they’re increasingly used to lift heavy packages and speed up goods collection and distribution. A bonus for workers, you’d think. But as a recent dispute over wages and conditions at Woolworth’s NSW and Victorian distribution centres illustrates, it’s anything but a bonus. Workers are still needed—but fewer of them. And those who keep their jobs are treated as if they were robots too. Workers’ every action is measured by an algorithmic program; through individual headsets, they receive barking orders. Anyone who’s seconds behind scheduled performance goals is reminded immediately by the machine. 
Over the centuries, our society has been transformed for the better by new technologies. Millions more people are working in thousands of new areas, many with higher wages, higher-level skills and the possibility of shorter hours. Some of the massive and positive changes from technology include the thousands of new jobs involved in life-saving medical research, such as mRNA vaccines, 3-D printing, amazing possibilities in film and music and previously unimagined social connectivity through the internet. Robotics have saved workers from repetitive, dead-end jobs on production lines or dangerous mining jobs, such as in Australia’s Pilbara region, where driverless trucks and trains are controlled from a comfortable office command centre in Perth thousands of kilometres away. 
Yet, despite the new openings, thousands of jobs, such as those of car workers or truck and train drivers in the Pilbara, have disappeared, with many workers unable to find equivalent employment or facing long-term unemployment. And many of the new jobs are just as repetitive. Even if they might be physically less taxing, they can still be mind numbing, stressful and exhausting. Often, technology that enables easier work is used to police the workers. John Pane from Electronic Frontiers Australia compares the latest workplace digitisation to a panopticon: “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware”. 
Social scientist David Graeber recalls an optimistic time in the twentieth century: “[W]hen people imagined the future, they imagined flying cars, teleportation devices and robots who would free them from the need to work”. But his exposé of today’s workplaces, Bullshit Jobs: The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it, shows that technology has often been marshalled to find ways to make us work more, not less, and often in roles that people experience as pointless “make-work” jobs. 
The transition process during major technological innovation can be brutal. Karl Marx pointed out nearly 200 years ago that the loss of jobs in one sector and the creation of jobs in another is no seamless process. In the Grundrisse, he wrote, “[T]he effect of machinery, which has been represented as a compensation for the working class, is, on the contrary, a most frightful scourge”. He added that during the transition period, those thrown out of work have few options, rarely having the skills necessary for the newer technology, except for “a few inferior and therefore oversupplied and underpaid” jobs. 
So why aren’t workers seeing the full benefits of new technologies? 
It’s all about our economic system, capitalism. From the game-changing industrial revolution of the 1800s with its mechanised factories, railways and electricity to today’s predicted equally transformative “fourth” artificial intelligence-led revolution, there’s been a debate over the pros and cons of each new technological change. More importantly, the question has been who controls their introduction and use and who benefits. 
It's not a question decided by what’s fair and reasonable. The economy is not simply a mechanical composite of individual parts such as labour, land, technology and machinery; it is fundamentally about the social relations between the people involved in producing, distributing and consuming things. Within capitalism, it’s about the competing interests of the two main classes in society: the ruling class, which owns and controls the productive processes to reap the profits and other benefits of each innovation, and the working class, which produces, but does not own or control, the goods and services.
It’s an economic system that sets employers and workers at odds over the control of production (what we do on the job): whether profit or human need will determine its goals.
As Marx explained, capitalism is focused on making profits in a system where each capitalist competes against others to be more profitable or go out of business. This dynamic encourages constant technological advances aimed at driving up productivity and delivering more profit. But each development of new machinery also intensifies exploitation and discipline of the workforce—increasing management control, deskilling labour, and increasing alienation for the majority. 
Crucial to capitalism’s wresting control of the work process from the earlier skilled guilds of feudal society was redesigning workplaces to be independent of the talents workers brought with them. In the 1800s, economist Frederick Taylor’s “time and motion” studies provided the underlying redesign template by splitting tasks into small, discrete steps to be repetitively operated by a single worker. As Taylor explained in The Principles of Scientific Management: “Our original objective was that of taking control of the machine shop out of the hands of the many workmen and placing it completely in the hands of management”. 
But in the end, the bosses can’t completely deskill or fire all workers. Initially, as each technological advance is introduced, employers can be even more reliant on workers’ skills or numbers. For example, Victoria is reportedly facing a shortage of 64,000 financial services and IT professionals, as well as blue-collar trades jobs.
Workers are often portrayed as anti-technology in their battles with employers over the introduction of automated systems. But the 2023 US screenwriters dispute tells a different story. The screenwriters didn’t oppose the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT in script writing. Instead, they secured an <a href="https://www.wgacontract2023.org/wgacontract/files/memorandum-of-agreement-for-the-2023-wga-theatrical-and-television-basic-agreement.pdf">agreement</a>
that such AI scripts can’t be recognised as producers of the text and that human writers get the credit and payment for any studio AI-produced drafts, along with other protections. In Australia, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is fighting for similar conditions and protections on the use of AI.
Under the first Trump administration, Google workers forced management to withdraw from the $10 billion Project Maven military project and agree not to take on other such work. Google’s boss dumped the agreement within days of the 2025 Trump ascendancy, and now the workers face another fight.
Ultimately, workers retain enormous potential power because they produce the value that underpins company profits. There can never be a completely robotised, AI-driven society: human labour and ingenuity are foundational to human society. It’s just a question of who controls the labour and ingenuity and to what ends. Workers will have to continue their long tradition of organising against the encroachment of capitalist destruction and build the forces necessary to finally win society over to one in which human need, not profit, is the deciding factor.

Liz Ross

Technology makes work easier. Why is it used as a weapon against workers?

Jerome Small

Fair Work Commission plans giant pay cut for community sector workers

On 22 September, half a million workers, students and solidarity activists mobilised in more than 80 cities across Italy under the slogan “Blocchiamo Tutto” (Let’s block everything). The Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), which initiated the action, has called for “the immediate break-off of relations with the terrorist state of Israel”.
Major ports across the country were shut down from Genoa, Palermo, Livorno, Ancona, Trieste, Salerno, and Venice, where strikers braved police water cannons. Train stations were blockaded in Naples, Turin, Rome, and Milan, while strikes of railway staff paralysed transport networks. 
Protests took place on a truly national scale, including in regional centres with little living memory of struggle, demonstrating the depth of support for Palestine and indignation at the government’s inaction. 
At Rome’s La Sapienza University, students launched an occupation of the arts faculty, while campuses in Bologna and Torino were blockaded. Many schools were shut as students and staff walked out.
Demonstrators also took to highways, shutting main roads in Pisa, Florence, Turin, Bologna and Rome. In doing so, they were defying the Meloni government’s Security Decree passed in June, which makes blocking traffic and major infrastructure a serious criminal offense. This will be an early test of strength between protesters and the government over the enforcement of these laws. 
The strike wave even reached the Vatican, where members of the Association of Vatican Lay Employees joined a march to parliament as part of the Priests Against Genocide network. 
Italy’s solidarity movement has been galvanised by the Global Sumud Flotilla currently sailing to Gaza, the largest-scale attempt to break Israel’s siege and deliver vital aid thus far. One of the Flotilla’s departure points was the northern Italian port city of Genoa, and it was there that the Block Everything movement began last August. 
As the convoy prepared to launch, a campaign to collect food aid for Gaza revived the city’s dormant but deeply-rooted activist traditions. Unions, neighbourhood committees and charities collected more than 300 tons of materials. On 30 August, 40,000 marched to see off the flotilla singing Bella Ciao, out of a population of 564,000. 
The call to action was taken up early on by the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP), a Genoan dock workers’ collective affiliated to the USB, one of the country’s many “grassroots” or “base” unions, which operate separately from the mainstream federations. 
In a widely shared video, CALP member Riccardo Rudino pledged at the demonstration: “If, even for 20 minutes, we lose contact with our comrades on the flotilla, we will block all of Europe: from Genoa’s docks, not a single nail will leave, it will be a global strike”.
Under the slogan “Lets close the ports to war”, CALP has previously blocked arms shipments intended for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, and on 7 August refused to load arms onto a Saudi ship allegedly bound for Israel. Last Thursday, dockworkers in the port city of Ravenna also took action, blocking two trucks suspected of carrying weapons. 
Coming off the back of these actions, the impressive response to USB’s call for a strike on 22 September represents a significant leap forward for the movement. The call to block everything has been taken up in workplaces from ports to logistics centres, but also drawn huge sections of civil society behind it, from Trieste in the northeast to Sicily in the south. 
The main union federation, the CGIL, which represents the majority of organised labour, has dragged its feet in mobilising its membership for Gaza, and didn’t participate in 22 September. CGIL instead organised its own four-hour strike three days before, which was strongly observed in some workplaces. But the more significant action on 22 September emerged from below. The hope is that this mobilisation can put pressure on larger, more conservative federations like CGIL to organise serious strikes. 
The size of the demonstrations is an expression of a rising tide of struggle in Europe, fuelled by disgust at Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a continent-wide turn to austerity and militarism. 
In France, hostility to the government’s proposed austerity budget generated the first “Bloquons tout” (“Let’s block everything”) movement on 10 September, forcing the resignation of one prime minister, and pressuring the unions to call mass strikes against his replacement. This provided a clear model for Italy to follow. 
In Spain last week, protesters forced the abrupt ending of the Vuelta, Spain’s Tour de France equivalent, in opposition to the inclusion of the Israeli team. Spain’s centre-left government, which has long traded on rhetorical opposition to Israel’s genocide, has been forced to cancel a €700 million deal to acquire Israeli-designed rocket launchers. 
While governments across Europe attempt to cover their complicity in genocide and placate the movement for Gaza with meaningless gestures, Italy’s governing far-right coalition has refused even this concession. 
Days before the strike, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Lega, went on Israeli channel <a href="https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2025/09/19/salvini-intervista-israele-palestina-hamas-news/8132274/">i24news</a> to denounce the Palestine movement, saying “I don’t think they know what they’re protesting about. Islamic terrorism is the main problem in the world today.”
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of the fascist-rooted Brothers of Italy, seized on small clashes in Milan provoked by police to demonise what she characterises as the “violence and destruction” of “hooligans”. The government’s attacks are not limited to words. Palestine protests, including those of high school students, are routinely met with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/reel/910031973922530">brutal police repression</a>. 
Meloni’s highly authoritarian party is committed to ruling as the “party of order”, and to repressing any manifestation of left-wing opposition. It sees the militarised Israeli ethno-state as a model to be emulated. 
But the government’s opposition to the movement is about more than ideology. It’s also about defending the nexus between the Italian state, the US-led NATO military alliance, and Italy’s highly profitable weapons industry. Meloni has committed to raise defence spending to meet NATO targets of 5 percent of GDP in the next decade. This will mean a massive windfall for companies like Leonardo, currently valued at €29.45 billion, which rely heavily on contracts with Israel. 
The cost of this new arms race will be borne by workers already reeling after years of one-sided class war. In Italy, real wages have fallen 7.5 percent since 2021, precarity is rife and, on average, three people die at work every day. 
Against this world of austerity and war, 22 September is another flicker of hope. It shows the possibility of a political response based on working class power and solidarity. As the USB said in a statement on the day of the strike: “Workers have returned to centre stage and are calling on citizens, all citizens, to stand up. They are not doing so for a contract renewal but to demand justice for a distant and tormented people. In this age of selfishness and individualism, this seems unthinkable. But no, solidarity between peoples and brotherhood beyond borders are not dead and buried values; on the contrary, they are alive and kicking.”

Luca Tavan

‘Block everything with Palestine in our hearts’: Italy paralysed by Gaza actions

If someone took $20,000 from you, you’d probably want it back. In fact, you’d probably think it’s worth quite a bit of effort to get it back. That sort of money can mean a lot of extra security, comfort and dignity for most workers. 
And if you and every single one of your workmates had that kind of money taken out of your pay packets, with most of this missing cash flowing to the already filthy rich, it’s pretty likely you’d expect your union to try to organise to win it back.
The reality, however, is that most unions in this country have done very little to organise a fight to reverse the massive hit to our incomes due to inflation over the past four years. Before looking at why this is the case, it’s worth exploring just how much we’ve gone backwards over that time.
Writing in the Guardian in May, economist Greg Jericho <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/may/15/australia-wage-growth-remains-solid-but-now-the-recovery-needs-to-be-sustained">pointed out</a> that a worker on the average wage is 4.4 percent behind where they would be if wages had kept up with inflation over the past four years, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. This means that someone earning the average wage ($93,000 per year in 2021) is around $4,000 per year worse off, in 2021 dollars. Adjusted for inflation (CPI), that’s the equivalent of around $90 per week in today’s money, or $180 missing from each fortnightly pay packet.
But even this is a significant understatement of the financial pain many wage earners are experiencing.
Jericho points out that the CPI is designed to exclude changes in average mortgage costs, which have been a massive burden for many workers over the past four years. These mortgage costs are included in another measure of inflation compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics—the Employee Living Cost Index (ELCI).
Using this measure, Jericho calculates that the average wage earner in Australia is not 4.4 percent behind inflation, but double that: on average each of us is a staggering 8.9 percent behind where we would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021. Put in dollar terms, this amounts to nearly $180 per week or $360 per fortnight.
What if we add up all these weekly losses? How much have we lost in total during the inflationary surge since 2021? <a href="https://github.com/jimb0w/Inflation/blob/master/Inflation.pdf">Detailed statistical modelling</a> carried out for Red Flag quantifies this loss:
<ul>
 <li>Someone on the average wage ($93,898 in 2021) has lost a total of $23,374 since July 2021, compared to if they’d kept up with the Consumer Price Index.</li>
 <li>This figure rises to a staggering $33,919 in wages lost to inflation since 2021 if we use the Employee Living Cost Index instead of CPI.</li>
 <li>Average wages are skewed upwards by a minority of very highly paid wage earners like senior managers. The median wage is $20,000 lower, and is more representative of what most of us earn: half of us earn less than the median, and half earn more. Still, someone on the median female full-time wage ($71,666 in 2021) has lost $12,767 over four years compared to inflation measured by the CPI—or $20,815 if we use the ELCI.</li>
</ul>
Wages set by enterprise agreements will vary from this average, but the big majority will give a similarly bleak picture.
Of course, all of these are average figures. Many of us will have been impacted less than this, others more. But they give us a general picture of the staggering degree to which wages have gone backwards over the past four years.
This money has not simply disappeared. Much of it has been redistributed from wage earners to corporations and the super-rich. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/corporate-profits-increase-inflation-fact-sheet/">study</a> by the Australia Institute in 2023 found that surging corporate profits accounted for more than half of the price increase since 2021.
There’s no austerity for the corporate elite and their super-rich pals. Since 2021, while wages have fallen behind prices by 4.4 percent (CPI) or 8.9 percent (ELCI), the total value of companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange has jumped from $2,500 billion to $3,155 billion. This is an increase of 26 percent, well ahead of the inflation rate. And the combined wealth of the annual Rich 200 list published by the Australian Financial Review has soared from $480 billion in 2021 to $668 billion this year—a jump of 39 percent in just four years.
Companies fattening their profits and their balance sheets while the rest of us go backwards isn’t some law of nature. It’s a policy choice by the rich, by the capitalists, and by the governments that serve them—both Liberal and (mainly) Labor over the past four years.
In the face of this onslaught, our unions have been largely passive. So much so that it no longer goes without saying that it is actually possible to win pay rises: they can be achieved through industrial action, and unions are supposed to play a role in making this happen.
A small number of unions showed this back when inflation was lifting off in late 2021, winning <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/thousands-of-workers-to-get-5pc-pay-rises-off-inflation-spike-20220320-p5a672">a sprinkling of enterprise agreements</a> that included CPI-linked pay clauses at major companies including Toll Global Express, Teys meatworks and STC trucking. These clauses ensured that workers at these companies at least didn’t go backwards relative to CPI. The Australian Financial Review spent plenty of words <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/inflation-guarantees-in-union-deals-trigger-7pc-plus-wage-bumps-20230621-p5di8v">sooking</a> about these results in the months and years that followed; anything that moves the burden of inflation from workers to employers is a scandal, according to them.
But as inflation increased, the union movement actually retreated from pursuing claims along these lines. In 2022 and 2023, there were very few examples of pay rises being won that matched or exceeded inflation. Some of the few in the private sector were from the offshore gas industry in Western Australia. The Offshore Alliance (the MUA and AWU) demonstrated that going <a href="https://awu.net.au/national/news/2022/09/17897/76-days-230-workers-and-15-billion-how-oa-members-won-a-landmark-ea-on-the-shell-prelude/">straight for the jugular</a> of major corporations can still win <a href="https://offshorealliance.org.au/news/phi-offshore-alliance-keeps-moving-up/">spectacular results</a>.
The largest-scale recent example of a union winning an above-inflation wage result is the Victorian branch of the ANMF. Last May, a mass meeting of 3,000 union members employed in public hospitals unexpectedly rejected the government offer of 3 percent per year, along with the nebulous promise of a Fair Work Commission gender equity adjustment at some point.
Faced with the plausible threat of an industrial campaign waged by a large and very popular group of workers willing to defy their own leadership, the government caved in, granting the nurses a pay rise of 28.4 percent over four years. Shortly after, Ambulance Victoria staff won <a href="https://vau.org.au/in-principal-agreement-reached/">increases of 24-33 percent</a> over four years, after a six-month industrial and political campaign.
It’s important to note that the real increase in nurses’ base rate of pay between 2021 and 2028 will total only a little more than 3 percent above inflation, if Reserve Bank inflation forecasts are correct. If we include increased allowances, this figure rises to between 6 and 8 percent ahead of inflation, over seven years. Many senior grades have the largest pay increases concentrated in the last year of the agreement, meaning they will stay behind inflation for most of the period up to 2028. And this is meant to include a historic fix for more than a century of gendered underpayment of nurses too. Despite these limitations, the nurses’ 28.4 percent result has understandably become a benchmark for public sector wage claims more broadly.
But while Victoria’s Labor government may have crumbled at the plausible threat of a prolonged industrial campaign from rebellious nurses, it has refused to move far from its wages policy of 3 percent per year for other groups of workers, preferring to tough out prolonged but low-intensity industrial campaigns. 
Last month, public mental health workers voted to accept a union leadership recommendation to settle for a deal far short of the initial claims rather than escalating the industrial campaign. Thirty-eight percent voted against acceptance, but to win against a government digging in its heels will need a much more vigorous industrial campaign, one capable of creating a crisis for the government.
Outside of Victoria, one of the few other high-profile examples of a successful fight for above-inflation pay rises is government teachers in NSW, who in late 2023 won <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2023/09/20/government-puts-pen-to-paper-inking-pay-rises-for-teachers/">an immediate pay rise</a> of between 8 percent (for top of scale teachers) and 12 percent (for graduate teachers). This followed a lengthy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/26/nsw-teachers-to-strike-next-week-over-pay-and-conditions">industrial campaign</a> under the previous Liberal government, and the teachers’ <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/nsw-teachers-wage-negotiations-stall-after-government-offer/102683528">rejection</a> of a pathetic 2.5 percent offer from the incoming Minns government. This is a significant result, though the NSW teachers’ 2024 <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2024/12/12/significant-gains-for-school-members/">pay deal</a> was only 3 percent per year over three years.
The failure of most unions to pursue wage rises aggressively is painfully squeezing household finances. Added to this, many essential industries—including health care, education and community services—struggle to retain experienced workers because of punishing workloads and low wages, which jeopardises and threatens the many services working-class people rely on. Winning back the money lost to inflation matters: it can be the difference between thousands of experienced staff staying in a vital industry, or being forced to look elsewhere for a living wage, intensifying the spiralling crisis in many essential services.
And whatever industry we’re in, the benchmark we set—by either accepting a massive hit to our pay or by fighting for a real pay rise—has the potential to demoralise or inspire others. Fighting is therefore not just about winning something for ourselves, but for every worker who deserves a pay rise.
A determined fight over wages can also be an important step to rebuilding the sort of unionism we need: the sort of unionism that used industrial action to win breakthroughs in pay, shorter hours, life-saving health and safety—and which didn’t stop there.
Historically strong unions like the Builders Labourers’ Federation, the metalworkers and the maritime unions all developed into powerful industrial units through fights over wages—and then used that industrial strength to fight for a better society, in dozens of different ways.
So why are there so few unions following this path today?
We know from ballooning corporate profits that the money is there. The precious few examples we have of workers fighting show that governments and corporations can be compelled to fund decent wages. We know from these same examples that to shake this money loose requires a serious industrial campaign, sometimes combined with the political pressure that strikes by groups like nurses, teachers and ambulance workers can create.
So the reason this is not being pursued on a wider scale is not that it is impossible. Rather, it’s a political choice. To put it simply: the majority of the leadership of the unions in Australia have a decades-long track record of pursuing a policy of class collaboration rather than conflict. The most notorious example of this is the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7336">Prices and Incomes Accord</a> of the 1980s. 
Under this policy, union leaderships teamed up with a federal Labor government to impose industrial peace and wage restraint. Profit share rose while wages share declined—not by chance but as a matter of state policy, with the union leadership as active partners. With the active or passive assistance of almost all of the top union leaders, it was Labor that imposed the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation and booming corporate wealth that still plagues us today.
This important fork in the road for the Australian union movement wasn’t just a matter of industrial strategy. It was a political choice, one of prioritising the supposed “national interest” rather than the uncompromising pursuit of workers’ interests.
The politics of the union movement’s leadership hasn’t improved since that time. It’s notable that in countries where neoliberalism was imposed by conservative forces such as Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, this produced a somewhat more combative and oppositional legacy in some unions. Both of those countries had a notably <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkstp.pdf">higher level</a> of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave">strikes</a> over the peak of the inflationary wave in 2022 and 2023—the UK <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/bbfw/lms">recording</a> ten times the decade-long average of strikes in those years—whereas the strikes over pay in Australia, while welcome, <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/industrial-disputes-australia/latest-release">barely moved</a> the statistical dial. The legacy of the class-collaborationist approach of the Accord is still entrenched in Australian unions.
There’s an obvious consequence of this for those who want our unions to take a different course: building a more combative union movement is a political project, not simply an industrial one. Of course we should be pushing our unions to fight to win back those missing tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, we need a political strategy: one that rejects the politics of class collaboration, and instead sets out to rebuild the politics of class struggle. Pushing for higher wages has to be one part of this wider project.

Higher pay: a serious fight is still needed

The Interim vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, Rebekah Brown, has announced that there will be no more job cuts as part of sweeping restructures that began in 2024.
This comes as a relief to the remaining 105 staff whose positions were slated to be cut under the proposal to “Renew ANU”. The announcement, made in an all-staff town hall meeting on Thursday, is a testament to the sustained pressure by members of the National Tertiary Education Union and students involved in the “No Cuts at ANU” campaign. It follows the resignation of the former vice-chancellor, Genevieve Bell, last week.
The cuts have left no part of the university unscathed. Renew ANU aimed to slash $250 million in spending across the university, including $150 million on salaries. But five areas still face major overhauls, including the College of Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Science and Medicine. These include substantial cuts to the world-renowned School of Music, which would end the teaching of performance and composition.
According to the latest figures from the union, nearly 1,100 staff have been forced out since last year. Academics who relocated to Canberra for their dream jobs have found themselves competing with their colleagues for a smaller number of positions in Hunger Games-like spill and fill processes. In backing down from further job cuts, Rebekah Brown confirmed that they are no longer needed for the ANU to meet its “savings” target. 
This is partly due to the university’s voluntary redundancy scheme. Touted as a win by the union, the scheme allowed the university to cut jobs on the cheap. Those expressing interest in it have fewer entitlements than those who are made redundant and must have their application approved by senior management. If their position is deemed necessary, it will be rejected. The fact that 175 staff have taken a voluntary separation package rather than wait to be made redundant speaks to the depth of resentment towards the ANU and the desire by many to leave.
The cuts have generated significant opposition from staff, students and the wider Canberra community. More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling on the ANU Council to stop the cuts and terminate the employment of the chancellor, Julie Bishop (and the now departed Genevieve Bell). This follows staff resoundingly rejecting a proposal to forgo their scheduled pay rise in December last year, and more than 800 supporting a motion of no confidence in the chancellor and vice-chancellor earlier this year.
Students involved in the No Cuts campaign have protested and organised forums against the cuts, including a Special General Meeting of the Australian National University Students’ Association earlier this week. The meeting voted to sack Julie Bishop, reverse Renew ANU, open the ANU’s financial books and fully fund free education.
Although many are understandably celebrating the end of Bell’s reign and the wave of job cuts, there is no indication that the restructures will be completely scrapped. In fact, Brown was clear in her town hall address that she intends to “complete the Renew ANU strategy”, including the decision not to embed performance into the curriculum of the new Bachelor of Music.
This comes as no surprise. As the former provost, Brown, like Bishop, is part of the same management team overseeing the cuts. For her part, Bishop remains chancellor despite allegations in a Senate enquiry that she bullied an academic on ANU Council to “near suicide”.
Forcing a widely hated vice-chancellor to resign in disgrace and ending forced redundancies should give hope and confidence to those facing similar attacks at universities around the country. While it remains to be seen exactly how much of the original plan to disestablish, amalgamate and centralise various parts of the ANU will be implemented, the fight for a university that puts staff and students before profit continues.

Elliot Downes

No more job cuts, but the fight continues at ANU

“Can I see with a show of hands—who here has walked out from work today?” A cheer ripples across the growing crowd outside the State Library of Victoria on 10 September as dozens of people, maybe a hundred, put up their hands. Somewhere around ten times that number have skipped work, used a day off, extended a lunch break or otherwise made time in our day to stand with these striking workers. 
Some strikers hold giant letters, spelling it out in red, green and black: ON STRIKE FOR GAZA. For the second time since Israel’s latest genocidal onslaught started on Gaza, community sector workers in Melbourne workplaces have done something that the whole union movement should be doing—used workers’ industrial muscle to disrupt business as usual, by going on strike and rallying in the streets. 
As one of the strike organisers, Louisa Bassini, told Red Flag: “We know we have the power as workers to do more to stop the genocide. This action has helped prove that we can use that power, and will hopefully encourage others do the same in other industries”.
The rally is a sight for sore eyes. 
Tasnim Sammak, a member of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), addresses the crowd on behalf of the Free Palestine Coalition: “We can’t look at the images of the rubble and destruction and think it’s over. No. What we should think is: we need to act now, with urgency. And urgency needs to fuel us”.
A series of striking workers take the microphone. A striking worker from Inner Melbourne Community Legal points out the hypocrisy of community sector employers and peak bodies:
“Despite standing for so called justice and human rights, our peak bodies have refused to speak out—and have said ‘it’s not our core business’. Shame! That’s why we’re here today. It’s time to do the most powerful thing we can do as workers, and that’s to withdraw our labour.” 
“We’re a union shop—we’re all here!”, announces a speaker from Flat Out, an advocacy organisation for women in prison: “What’s the point of having civil society, a community sector, if it won’t stand up to the government. I know the government funds us, but at some point you’ve just got to say: stop the genocide, free Palestine!”
“We’re sick of seeing parents holding dead children in their arms”, says another striker. “We’re sick of seeing plastic bags full of body parts. And we’re also sick of seeing children playing funerals because they see people on stretchers all the time. Israel bombs Qatar and our government and media are silent, because they’re part of a genocidal machine which is hungry for profit. But we’re not silent. We’re on strike today. We’re using our power as workers to shut things down, saying we’re not going to work as usual during a genocide, and calling on other workers to strike too.”
Another striking worker puts it in the most straightforward way: “We have to strike because nothing else is working”. 
The rally features banners and flags from the NTEU, and from the Australian Services Union which covers most of the striking workers. Some at the rally are members of the Australian Education Union, others the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation. Many have been active in the various Unionists for Palestine groups over the past two years.
 It is living proof that despite the crushing consensus among politicians and media commentators, large numbers of workers recognise and oppose a genocide when they see one. One attendee, social worker Louie, tells Red Flag: “Today is a real demonstration of the fact that workers support Palestine and oppose genocide and they want to build forces so that their voices are heard”. Another social worker, Rachel, explains: “I’m here because I’m sick of seeing children starving, and seeing people blown up”. 
“I want to put pressure on the government to put sanctions on Israel”, says another. 
Easily the largest and most visible political group on the day is Victorian Socialists, which includes several strike leaders and rally organisers among its members. Veteran journalist Marty Hirst gives an impassioned speech about the importance of fighting for free speech on Palestine, announcing the launch of a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/media-workers-to-launch-free-speech-campaign-for-palestine">major campaign</a> on the issue on 20 September. There are references to the current important fight to stop the Fair Work Commission from imposing massive pay cuts on community sector workers.
Some recall the proud history of workers in this country acting in solidarity with workers worldwide, connecting that to an argument that <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-palestine-union-business">Palestine is union business</a>. There are cheers for the dock workers of Genoa, Italy, who have <a href="https://x.com/usbsindacato/status/1962085329575313604">pledged</a> to blockade the port—and to call out other ports in solidarity—if Israel intercepts the Global Sumud Flotilla, which is currently sailing to Gaza. A pledge to rally (and if possible, strike) in support of the Genoa dock workers if and when they take action in defence of the solidarity flotilla is greeted by loud applause. 
But it’s rally co-chair Monica Campo who really brings the house down by talking about the importance of fighting for the right to strike—by striking. 
“The Fair Work Act deliberately limits our ability to organise, and to use the power that we have as workers, as a class”, Campo explains. “It limits our ability to continue that long tradition of standing in solidarity with international struggles. We should and must continue to fight these limitations in the Fair Work Act, and we’re pleased to hear that the ASU has committed to keep challenging these limitations on our right to strike. But one way to challenge the law is to break it!” The applause building through the crowd erupts into cheers. 
This is more than a propaganda point—it should be a call to action. 
Though it is right to emphasise the repressive and anti-democratic nature of Labor’s Fair Work Act, it is also the case that the sort of “demonstration strikes” that community sector workers have now taken twice against the genocide have rarely, if ever, resulted in sackings or even serious disciplinary action. Of course, the level of support in individual workplaces and within union structures, and a concrete assessment of how management are likely to respond are all important factors. But this form of industrial action can and should be much more widespread. 
Every unionist in the country owes a debt to the community sector Palestine strikers. They are showing us that we don’t have to resign ourselves to the unspeakable horror unfolding in Gaza today. And the strikers are continuing a living, breathing, organising, fighting current of solidarity—one that has played a crucial role in the history of the working-class movement. 
The official, Labor-aligned leadership of our movement have spent decades smothering the political radicalism and industrial militancy that kept this tradition of struggle and solidarity alive. But the strikers are reminding everyone of the obvious truths: that workers still have the power, that more of us need to use it, and that we still have a world to win.

‘One way to challenge the law is to break it!’: Community sector workers strike for Palestine again

The decision by Australian Services Union (ASU) members in the community sector to walk off the job for the second time in support of Palestine is an important moment in Australian labour history. In a country where industrial action is tightly policed and the right to protest under threat, taking strike action against genocide is an act of courage and principle. 
The workers’ defiance stands in stark contrast to the complicity of political leaders. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s appointment of Jillian Segal as “antisemitism envoy” is a smokescreen—her role is to suppress Palestine solidarity. Albanese also refuses to impose sanctions on Israel. NSW Premier Chris Minns has repeatedly tried to ban pro-Palestine marches in Sydney. These are not security measures—they are political censorship.
In February 2025, the NSW parliament passed the Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) Bill, criminalising protests near places of worship with penalties of up to $22,000 or two years’ imprisonment. The law expands police powers and exempts protests only if approved by police or part of industrial action—ironically, the very loophole ASU workers are now using to strike for Palestine. Across Australia, 49 anti-protest laws have been introduced in the past two decades, disproportionately targeting environmental and human rights activists.
Repression is happening everywhere. In the UK, protesters have been arrested for holding signs supporting the activist group Palestine Action. US students have been expelled for standing in solidarity with Palestine. Journalists have been sacked and, like Mary Kostakidis here in Australia, dragged through the courts for the crime of criticising Israel. Google and Microsoft workers have been fired for protesting against the companies’ military contracts with Israel. 
But defiance matters. The case of Antoinette Lattouf, sacked by the ABC for reposting a Human Rights Watch statement, was a small but vital win. Her legal fight exposed institutional cowardice. More powerful still was the sight of tens of thousands of Australians taking to the streets in support of Palestine, despite official efforts to stop them.
Free speech is a lofty notion, but the reality is that some voices are much louder than others. The rich speak through their control of media empires and lobbyists. The poor and the oppressed can only make themselves heard through protest, disruption, and refusal—actions they are all too often punished for. Defending free speech means defending the right to resist, to strike, and to organise. The ASU workers have shown us what that looks like.
Our side needs to be organised to defend freedom to speak out about genocide and the apartheid state of Israel. This is why Victorian Socialists members in the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have initiated a coalition to defend freedom of speech on Palestine.
The first meeting of the coalition is on Saturday 20 September, 2pm at Brunswick Town Hall. Speakers include journalists Amy Remeikis, Antoun Issa, and Mary Kostakidis. <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/civicrm-event/1652">Tickets are $10 and available here</a>.

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