Wendy Harper is a 22-year-old working class student from The Basin, who is studying first year humanities at Latrobe University. “One of the impacts of the education cuts is day… Read more »
workers
WorkCover Uncovered: Adding Poverty to Injury
WorkCover terrorises injured workers. The Kennett government’s WorkCover legislation strips away any lingering illusions about how far capitalism will go to secure profit by sacrificing the workers who produce it.
Filling the Glass of Struggle
Much has been said already about the record 6% swing against the Australian Labor Party in the October 3 Victorian state elections, resulting in the election of Kennett and his… Read more »
Workers Demand More, Not Less
The connection between workers and users of public and community sector services is a natural alliance. The demands of the More, Not Less campaign, adopted at its public meeting in August 1991, reflects the diversity of support and the unity of our struggles.
Public Transport Attacks Must Be Defeated
This dispute must be widened, now, if it is to succeed. ARU members must ignore the union’s Executive Officers’ sellout policy and take industrial action, both in support of the workers and for their own jobs and conditions. This government is out to get all of us and if we don’t hang together, we’ll be hung separately.
Footplate Classics
I am a lesbian feminist. Between 1979 and 1984 I worked as a locomotive assistant training to be a train driver for the Victorian Railways in Australia. At one time six women were training at South Dynon Loco and four women in country areas. Dianne Brown became qualified as a train driver in 1985. Unfortunately the other women left. The attitudes of many of the men working in the railways added to on the job pressure. I have put some of these attitudes into poetic form.
‘Equal Opportunity’ in 1988 – A Balance Sheet
The limitations of seeking employment equality within the existing structures are clear. Equal opportunity programs only provide the option for some to get nearer to the top of an unequal system. We need to defend and extend such reforms by using them as tools to protect existing rights and gains. But reforms cannot finally redress the inequitable position of women and other oppressed groups in the labour market, let alone society as a whole.
Bosses’ court cuts pay again, but demands “work harder!”
For more than 80 years the working class in this country has been shackled to the capitalists through the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. This has held workers back, kept them impoverished, derailed their attempts to break the chains. The Accord, which is the parent of the new wage system is the latest attempt to clothe the emperor.
Launching the Public Sector Fightback
We must all encourage and build the leadership of the most oppressed within the struggle. This task is all to clear in the public sector where, in many industries, women are a clear majority yet, almost without exception, we are, as a group, at the bottom of the heap.
