The latest episode of class conflict in the NSW Healthcare system was as impressive as it was unexpected: a three-day strike carried out by public hospital doctors represented by the state branch of the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF). The strike has caused cancellations of non-urgent surgeries, closures of outpatient clinics and hospital wards to be staffed at the bare minimum as junior doctors and supporters, among whom were nurses, midwives and patients, held several angry rallies outside hospitals, the Department of Health and Premier Chris Minns’ office in Kogarah. More than 5,000 doctors took part from 32 sites across the state.
The Minns Labor government was voted into power just over two years ago. It inherited a healthcare system with a workforce recovering from the trauma and disruption of the pandemic and working for pay well below our interstate colleagues due to years of wage suppression. Minns and his health minister Ryan Park have since presented insulting offers to hospital workforces that entrench us as the lowest paid nurses, midwives and doctors in the country. For doctors, the government is trying to <a href="https://www.asmofnsw.org.au/NSW/Content/News/Minns_Award_is_a_step_backwards.aspx">wind back existing protections</a> against exploitative rostering and deployment practices. This ensures that staffing shortages, overwork and burnout will remain unaddressed as healthcare workers pack up and leave to work in states and cities with lower rents, better conditions and higher pay.
The government employed similar anti-strike tactics to those used against nurses and midwives during our industrial action campaigns in recent years. They issued orders through the Industrial Relations Commission banning the strike from taking place, they threatened the involvement of the healthcare regulatory bodies to punish doctors who take part and spread lies in the press in an attempt to temper significant public support—including an egregious untruth that nearly 500 patients had their chemotherapy appointments cancelled (they have since retracted this statement).
This was the first strike action undertaken by doctors in NSW since 1997, when junior doctors supported by the Australian Medical Association undertook a week of industrial action in protest against cuts to the numbers of specialty training positions. With a handful of exceptions (such as the British Medical Association strikes in the UK), junior doctors are not necessarily known for their industrial militancy. ASMOF’s recent reorientation towards industrial action is a welcome break from this tendency. While it remains to be seen how they will follow this action up, beginning the campaign with a three-day strike is an admirable move and shows some understanding of what will be necessary to defend the conditions that they have and win the pay they deserve.
The public sector strikes of the nurses and midwives union, the NSWNMA, never extend beyond 24 hours. While these are no doubt disruptive, the state can wait them out and plan around them. One 24-hour strike every few months can be treated like a Sunday or a public holiday. For a strike to be successful, the employer must conclude that the cost of allowing the campaign to continue (whether that cost be political or economic) is greater than the cost of accepting the campaign’s demands. The employer—particularly an employer as hostile and intransigent as the Minns government—must be forced to concede. He has shown time and time again that he is not interested in good-faith negotiations. 
Unfortunately for the nurses and midwives of NSW, the union’s campaign has sunk us further into the quagmire of dead-end negotiations. Just days after the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nurses-and-midwives-take-historic-strike-action-for-a-15-percent-pay-rise">largest single strike day in NSW healthcare history</a> in November last year, the union officials pivoted towards engaging in an arbitration process through the Industrial Relations Court and agreed to conduct no industrial action in the lead up to or during the case. It will not be heard until September—almost a full year from when it was announced. This was passed by a membership vote in which the Association’s leadership declared that they either vote in favour of the case, or we will walk away with nothing and face hundreds of thousands in fines. The spectre of these fines was used to dismiss any suggestion of further disruptive action and the possibility of refusing to pay the fines was never proposed as an option to the membership.
This is the situation we are in; a strategy that bars us from using our only effective weapon, giving the Minns government no reason to fear us; a strategy that accepts an almost year-long delay on even the possibility of any gains; and a strategy that is non-participatory for the union’s members. For those of us who actually work on the hospital floor, demoralisation about this campaign has evolved for some into open hostility towards the union, especially following a small but poorly timed membership fee increase in late November last year.
Meanwhile, ASMOF reported on 3 April that 1,227 doctors had joined the union in the two days after the strike was announced. There is no amount of legal advice, Woolworths vouchers or free CPD (continuing professional development) classes that will build and maintain an active, fighting membership. The power of a union will always be in the ability of its members to withdraw their labour. For its tests ahead, ASMOF would do well to remember this.

A NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association member

NSW doctors’ strike shows the way forward for healthcare workers

Jerome Small

Socialist Alternative’s record of workplace organising

Macquarie University Palestinian academic Randa Adbel-Fattah has been the victim of a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/academics-under-attack-for-supporting-palestine">vicious smear campaign</a> conducted by the Murdoch press, the Labor Government and the Liberal Party. Under pressure from Labor Minister for Education Jason Clare, the Australian Research Council (ARC) has formally suspended Randa’s $870,000 Future Fellowship Grant. 
Clare wrote to the ARC board on 31 January requesting they investigate her research grant as a “matter of priority”. Ironically, it was Clare himself who <a href="https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/ending-days-political-interference-australian-research-council">celebrated</a> the Albanese government for revising the National Interest Test to supposedly stop politicians from interfering in research grants, saying in March 2024 that he “promised to end the days of ministers using the ARC as a political plaything”.
This stunning backflip shows that Labor is just as happy as the coalition to weaponize research funding for political purposes. 
Abdel-Fattah’s grant, which began in 2023 and aimed to study the history of Arab/Muslim social justice activism in Australia, was targeted by the Australian newspaper after she participated in an anti-racist conference at the Queensland University of Technology, where she said
“The peak of an academic career ... usually means somebody who’s ... written lots of books about genocide but will not sign a statement against [it]. I want no part of that, so I look for ways to bend rules and refuse and subvert them. I challenge the formal circuits of knowledge production and what counts as knowledge.”
In response to this comment, Macquarie University must now prove that the grant has been administered appropriately, otherwise the grant, which also funds Abdel-Fattah’s salary, must be repaid in full.
When pressed by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi in a recent Senate estimates hearing, the ARC claimed that they are just doing their normal due diligence by investigating the grant. This same line was parroted by Macquarie vice-chancellor Bruce Downton in a staff town hall last week, where he, after casually mentioning staff redundancies several times, stated that the investigation does “not have anything to do with academic freedom or freedom of speech”. They must think we are stupid. 
While Macquarie University has recently become the epicentre of academic repression, the suppression of Palestine supporters on campus is systematic. For example, the peak university lobbying organisation, Universities Australia, recently adopted a new definition of antisemitism which has been widely condemned, including by the <a href="https://www.jewishcouncil.com.au/media/jewish-council-of-australia-slams-universities-adoption-of-dangerous-politicised-and-unworkable-antisemitism-definition">Jewish Council of Australia</a>. 
Mohamed Duar of Amnesty International <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.au/australian-universities-decision-to-adopt-contested-definition-of-antisemitism-is-an-attempt-to-stifle-freedom-of-expression-across-campuses-nationwide/">has said that</a> 
“This dangerous definition will be used to silence students and staff alike, suppress protest, and shut down criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the unlawful brutal and unlawful military occupation as well as apartheid that we determined to be a crime against humanity.” 
The vilification of Abdel-Fattah and the targeting of her research grant is a part of this broader trend. 
Labor has effectively found a bureaucratic means to sack an academic for their outspoken support of Palestine, something Liberal Shadow Minister for Education Sarah Henderson has been demanding for months. The ARC is doing the ALP’s dirty work and <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/research-grant-suspension-about-probity-not-politics">openly admitted in the Senate</a> that their investigation stemmed from reporting by the
Australian. This whole rotten affair shows that these liberal institutions that supposedly support freedom of inquiry and democratic values are a sham and cannot be counted on to defend our rights.

Steven Hansen

Solidarity with Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah

Maurice Blackburn Lawyers prides itself on its connection to the trade union movement. But it’s fighting the union that represents its own staff. 
On 6 March, about 100 lawyers instituted a historic ban on time recording, which means not charging for their work. In response, Maurice Blackburn issued non-payment notices, effectively preventing us from working or being paid for the duration of the ban. Legal assistants, paralegals and other staff stopped work in solidarity for up to three hours, shutting down teams and offices around the country. 
We are fighting for wage increases that keep up with the cost of living and address a 6.4 percent decline in real wages over the life of the last agreement due to high inflation. We are also fighting for ten days of paid reproductive leave for all staff—a condition the firm boasted it helped win for workers in other workplaces, only to turn around and tell its own staff that they do not deserve the same entitlement. 
Maurice Blackburn Lawyers represents many of the biggest trade unions in Australia. Its brand emphasises a commitment to the values of the workers’ movement, but apparently, those values don’t apply internally.
Since December, union members have engaged in three one- to two-hour stop works and other industrial action as part of the campaign, but this latest action was an escalation. 
The ban on time recording is a first for unionised lawyers in Australia. By recording the time they spend performing work for clients, lawyers allow the firm to recover legal fees. Stopping the practice costs the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. 
The lawyers were willing to work—just without recording the time. This is a lawyer’s equivalent of a bus driver refusing to check tickets. The firm responded by saying that if we would not charge for our work, they preferred we didn’t work at all, revealing that they care more about their profits than their clients.
At Thursday’s rally, union members enjoyed the solidarity of various unions (including Maurice Blackburn clients) and others from around the legal industry—including barristers and unionists in community legal centres and other plaintiff firms. 
Meanwhile, management received the solidarity of business lobbyists such as Steve Knott from the notoriously anti-union Australian Resources and Energy Employers Association. Knott was quoted in the Australian Financial Review, revelling in Maurice Blackburn’s use of tactics that are so anti-worker that the ACTU recently called for them to be outlawed. 
A law firm is not just a bunch of lawyers. It requires the work of many support staff, especially legal assistants. These highly skilled professionals work under the pressure of deadlines and deal with traumatised clients every day. Yet most are paid an annual salary of between $55,000 and $70,000. 
Maurice Blackburn also has a gender pay gap problem. This year’s <a href="https://www.wgea.gov.au/">Gender Equality Report</a> notes a 33 percent gap between the median base salary of men and women at the firm. This reflects that 90 percent of the legal assistants are women whose work is grossly undervalued, which is even more of a reason to fight together to win the highest possible wage increases for the next three years. 
The firm is offering 5.5 percent for workers earning less than $100,000 per year in the first year of the agreement, 3.75 percent for those above that, and 3.5 percent and 3.25 percent for everyone during the second and third years. This does not make up for the ground lost during the high inflation over the last three years. 
An explosive leaked email from someone seemingly in the know about last year’s enterprise agreement at Slater and Gordon—another firm that boasts of its representation of unions—alluded to the firm’s CEO squeezing the lowest-paid workers in their recent pay negotiations. 
Maurice Blackburn also claims that it cannot afford higher pay increases. However, managers have repeatedly refused to provide modelling of projected profits over the life of the agreement to substantiate this claim. 
Maurice Blackburn has the strongest union membership of any private firm in Australia. We are the only law firm to take industrial action in recent years and pride ourselves on setting conditions (such as health and wellbeing days) that have then been adopted in other firms. We hope that our campaign will set a new benchmark for pay and conditions for current and future workers, especially with respecting women workers. 
Union members will meet next week to discuss the next steps in their campaign.
Colleen Bolger is an Australian Services Union delegate at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers.

Colleen Bolger

Union law firm attacks union members

Hundreds of manufacturing workers at a Nestlé factory in Campbellfield, Melbourne, are striking to defend and improve their pay and conditions. After months of negotiations with a management team that seems determined to attack them, the workers have resorted to industrial action. 
Led by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, they take a one-hour stop-work at the start of each of the factory’s three shifts. The strikes are the first industrial action at the factory for nearly 30 years.
As the action started on Thursday, well over 100 workers from the afternoon shift gathered in groups outside the gate. Dozens of AMWU flags and banners greeted cars and trucks driving past on Sydney Road, with plenty of beeps and waves in solidarity. Another group of workers gathered near the main entrance, ready to argue with those refusing to participate in the strike and to greet their comrades finishing their day shift. Managers hid in the office behind tinted glass, monitoring the scene but powerless to intervene.
The industrial campaign is focused on three issues. First is the attempt by the company to rewrite existing rostering arrangements, introducing compulsory twelve-hour and weekend shifts for all workers. One maintenance worker explained that the proposal includes the possibility of working five twelve-hour shifts in a row! This would be gruelling in any work, let alone blue-collar labour. Many railed against the compulsory weekend overtime: “Sometimes we take the overtime shifts for the extra cash”, one of the factory’s twelve union delegates told Red Flag. “But it needs to be our choice—we gotta have time to spend with our families.”
Second is the issue of pay. The rising cost of living hits these workers hard, just like everyone else. Many workers said that supermarket prices, mortgages and bills keep them up at night. Management is offering a 3.5 percent pay rise, but the union is fighting for “substantially more”, according to AMWU organiser Chris Spindler.
The final issue concerns the union being consulted about workplace changes before they’re introduced. The current agreement basically allows the company to implement changes first and ask for permission later. Workers want more of a say.
Spirits were high on the first day of what looks to be a serious fight against a multinational corporation that makes squillions each year. Yet this strike shows that without the efforts of workers in factories and farms across the world, Nestlé would be nothing. 
Show your support for the Nestlé workers by turning up to the strike on weekdays at 6:30am, 2:30pm or 10.30pm: 1585 Hume Highway, Campbellfield.

Omar Hassan

Nestlé workers deserve the cream

Whyalla, four hours’ drive north of Adelaide, is a working-class town dominated by steel. The 60-year-old steelworks commands the skyline and underpins the local economy. Just under half of Whyalla’s workforce is dependent on the steelworks and the plant produces three-quarters of Australian structural steel.
Yet the industry is in trouble. Last week, the operation was placed under administration for the second time in less than a decade. British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, the current owner, owes at least $300 million to creditors, including local contractors and the South Australian government.
The crisis in Whyalla reveals catastrophic failures of the market and of successive governments’ embrace of partnerships with the private sector.
In 2017, GFG purchased the steelworks from its then owner, Arrium. To much fanfare, Gupta marched alongside politicians and union leaders to mark the handover. He promised over $1 billion to expand the plant, decarbonise operations and repair aging infrastructure. Gupta was feted by the corporate press as the “saviour of steel”. Adelaide’s Advertiser predicted “the most exciting time in Whyalla history”.
Gupta returned the plant to profitability, but none of the desperately needed investments materialised. Like Arrium, GFG was unprepared to forego revenue to upgrade the plant. Last year, despite <a href="https://www.amwu.org.au/correction_on_misreporting_of_a_deal_with_whyalla_steelworks">warnings by union members</a>, the blast furnace responsible for smelting was damaged during a botched repair operation. When operations were forced to shut down for many months, GFG responded by axing 56 jobs and slashing wages by 30 percent.
As workers’ pay packets shrunk and contractors were left unpaid, Gupta refused to subject himself to such fiscal restraint. Instead, he announced plans to renovate his $35 million harbourside mansion in Sydney’s Potts Point, including installing a cinema and whiskey tasting room.
Many of the steelworks that comprise Gupta’s debt-ridden global empire are idle, bankrupt or for sale. GFG has pursued a dramatic restructuring program following the collapse of its primary financier, Greensill Capital, in 2021. Falling commodity prices have also hit company profits. 
Europe’s IndustriAll trade union federation <a href="https://news.industriall-europe.eu/Article/1122">warns</a> that thousands of steel jobs in Czechia, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere have been lost at plants owned by GFG. Workers in Whyalla and abroad are being asked to pay for a crisis of their bosses’ making.
To guarantee jobs and ensure the long-term viability of manufacturing, the steelworks should immediately be placed in public hands and run to benefit workers. Despite pledging $2.4 billion to help entice a private buyer, Labor has ruled out nationalisation. Such a course of action would mean breaking with corporate interests and the public-private partnerships that have been so devastating for Whyalla’s workers.
Whyalla, the largest of three towns in South Australia’s once-powerful “Iron Triangle”, is in long-term decline. A former industrial centre of steelmaking and shipbuilding, today the region is burdened by high unemployment and economic disadvantage.
In 2016, government support to keep the steelworks open was contingent on cutting wages. A 10 percent pay cut was <a href="http://redflag.org.au/node/5535">accepted by union officials</a>, who have been more than ready to go along with the slashing of wages and conditions with no guarantee of job retention in return. 
It’s a familiar story. In 2018, Port Pirie’s Nyrstar lead smelter shed more than 100 jobs despite a $291 million state government guarantee. Nor did wage freezes and billions of dollars of public subsidies prevent the automotive industry pulling out of Australia.
While the government’s latest promise of funding has been greeted with understandable relief, many locals are right to remain cynical about their future. With more public money being thrown at private investors ahead of a possible sale of the steelworks, the promise of well-paid, long-term jobs remains elusive.

Nix Herriot

Trouble at the Whyalla steelworks

Canberra Airport security staff have begun a campaign against their new employer, MSS Security, as they try to negotiate a new workplace agreement.
Two years ago, United Workers Union (UWU) members at the airport won improved conditions from employment contractor Certis Security, winning above-award conditions through threats of industrial action over Christmas. 
But their new employer, MSS, wants to roll back these gains once the current enterprise agreement ends on 1 March. The company intends to cut sick leave balances (abolishing accruals) and income protection insurance and, crucially, undermine delegates’ rights and other conditions to weaken the union. 
There is also talk of “unspecified conditions” that could be cut in the future. The UWU has called out MSS for its lack of dialogue and failure to disclose potential job losses, which could also occur from 1 March. 
Staff are frustrated, stressed and worried about these developments, and many are unsure if they will still have a job in a few weeks. At a demonstration on 3 February, 30 UWU members—some airport staff and others from the union—protested against the attacks outside the airport entrance. 
A second demonstration was held on 14 February after MSS Security and the Canberra Airport Group refused to communicate with the union. The rally was similar in size, but anger and frustration had grown as the deadline approached for a new deal and potential cuts to staffing and conditions.
With strong union coverage at the airport, there is hope that industrial action may go ahead in a few weeks if MSS remains silent.
It is not just airport workers under attack. Many of the other UWU members at the protests were cleaning staff at the Canberra Hospital, where the union is in drawn-out and seemingly unsuccessful negotiations with the ACT government. The Labor Territory government wants to cut cleaning staff and burden those who remain with greater workloads and responsibilities. 
Readers can show support by attending future actions and by signing the <a href="https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/there-is-no-place-for-mss-in-airport-security">UWU’s petition</a>.

Chris Morris

Canberra Airport workers protest against potential cuts

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

Tom Bramble

Workers have the power to stop Trump

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

Ruby Healer

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

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

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