Workers’ Rights and Industrial

Aged care homes need to be nationalised now to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and to give residents their health, safety and dignity back.

Victim blaming helps deflect from a focus on the need for systemic changes. It is intentional on the part of the corporate media and governments that are looking for cover.

Several days before Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg waxed lyrical about the good old days of early neoliberalism under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Australian Council of Trade Unions launched its under-reported National Economic Reconstruction plan.

The JobMaker plan, announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on May 26 at the National Press Club, is an attempt to get us to accept a post-COVID-19 return to the neoliberal regime that made jobs precarious, ran down hospitals and other public services, and made housing and education unaffordable.

This year May Day, takes place in the midst of the global COVID-19 crisis, which reminds the working class across the world that the fight for a just, safer and better world for all is impossible without the solidarity, organisation and mobilisation of the working people to demand for genuine social change.  

We are calling on unions to campaign around the following 10-point plan to ensure that any lifting of restrictions protects lives and livelihoods and not just a return to business as usual

How can lives be saved? How can people’s livelihoods be protected? Here is what has to be done so that we can protect our health and livelihoods in the face of this immense challenge.

The battle remains for working and unemployed people to push for a response that puts public health first, without making them pay for the crisis.

Union leaderships are still falling in behind the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ “re-elect Labour at all costs” strategy, which effectively ignores the seismic shift in public opinion around needing to take action on climate change. The planet, and communities being affected by climate change now, cannot wait while Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Party get their act together.

The ALP's recently released federal election post-mortem has a giant invisible elephant in the room: the party's own culpability for its defeat through its embrace of neo-liberalism and its abandonment of progressive “traditional Labor values” over decades.

The fight for women’s rights and against gendered violence is union business.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison currently earns $538,460 a year and in a few weeks time will earn an additional $10,000 a year.