Every unionist should mark down 1 April 2022 as an historic day. Amazon warehouse workers at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York, voted 55 per cent in favour of union recognition at their 8,000-worker strong warehouse. It has been decades since workers have won contested recognition at such a significant facility for one of the United States’ leading corporations. It is a sign that, in North America at least, early spring has returned for the labour movement. These victories has echoed through the world, and have implications for the movement in Australia.

COVID-19 is one crisis among many, along with those that invest the climate, democracy and capitalism. Even as it subsides, those others will remain and intensify. If COVID-19 can have any lasting, constructive impact, it will be in teaching the working classes how to handle a crisis. The pandemic’s most significant legacy is the lessons workers globally take from this experience.

True security and safety only comes through people acting together. Legal rights and entitlements are the shadows, the remnants and echoes of the great motor of history: workers uniting in the struggle for safety, dignity and democracy.

For every extra day of lockdown, for every extra quarantine measure, and for every additional restriction placed on Victorians, it is the corporations pushing insecure work and forcing workers to turn up to work who must bear ultimate responsibility.

Australia’s case of Dutch disease has real political dimensions. The Australian state has represents what we might call in vulgar Marxist terms an executive committee for the mining industry.

Moralising about how people should behave in a labour market, especially at a time when even the market for basic hygiene products, like toilet paper, is breaking down will not solve anything. We face a stark choice between social solidarity or the barbarism of the status quo. We can either have a personal leave system that protects everyone or a system where we are all at risk. The old union chant of ‘touch one, touch all’ has never been more relevant.

Social relationships are breaking down. According to an OmniPoll survey from July 2018, the number of close friends Australians have has declined from an average of 6.4 in 2005 to only 3.9 today. In other words, the rate at which relationships break down no longer keeps up with the rate at which they form. In turn, more and more Australians are becoming ghosts in their own communities.

There is no reason why Australia cannot build up a worker cooperative sector employing tens of thousands of people in well-paid secure jobs over the next decade. These are just the sort of jobs that anchor communities and provide hope for those who would overwise depend on sectors such as the fossil fuel extraction industry.

By highlighting the movement’s role in actively constructing neoliberal society, Humphrys points to a future in which labour can unmake neoliberal society. If the complicity of the working-class was required to make Australia what it is today, then those same agents of history can withdraw their consent.

On 1 May 2017, May Day – International Workers’ Day – Australian dairy giant Murray Goulburn announced that they were shutting factories across Victoria and Tasmania, slashing jobs and devastating communities. Faye and Julie, two National Union of Workers delegates working at the Edith Creek site in North-West Tasmania, shared their responses to the closure.

Rezoning decisions are easy money if you have the right connections. A rezoning windfall profits tax, a form of betterment tax, would ensure the uplift in property values from government zoning decisions be diverted towards services and infrastructure, which would in turn benefit every Victorian.

The Liberal Party’s Labor-union attacks are focused on further reinforcing the narrative that ordinary people have lost control. When it comes to pro-worker legislation, the Liberal Opposition will say the usual words and take their normal positions but they will not keep at it as a persistent talking point. Instead, Guy has focused in on the relationship between the leadership of the United Firefighters Union (UFU) and the Premier.

On 21 December 2017, I was having a few drinks at the office Christmas party at a Docklands bar. The venue lies opposite a stadium whose old name is forgotten every few years, depending on which bunch of corporate executives are prepared to pay the most for naming rights. On any given Friday afternoon, the bar is full of cheap suits, overpriced drinks and office workers ritually forgetting another working week in their lives.

The penalty rates decision can’t be seen in isolation: it is a symptom of an economy and society in flux, and the product of a system that has valued parliamentary and institutional power at the expense of organised labour.

It’s the largest document leak in history: 11.5 million files and 2.6 terabytes of information detailing how our global elite avoid their responsibility to the rest of us. The Panama Papers have allowed us to peek behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and glimpse the very mortal old men pulling the levers of state. But we already know they play by different rules. We have long known, for instance, that the global elite use tax havens. Yet, what’s truly damaging about these leaks is that they demystify the process.

Think about your own life. What would you do if the full-time working week was reduced to 30 hours?

Recent news out of Finland that has caught the attention of global commentators. The small Nordic country is currently drafting plans to replace their welfare system with a UBI, which would see every citizen get an allowance of €800 (AU$1125) per month without restriction.

Corbyn’s election sets up a real-world challenge to a central belief of Australian Labor’s political class – that shifting to the left will not win elections. This betrays a two-dimensional sort of thinking that belongs to the analogue age: we only have to move the marker rightwards until we reach the magical point of electability. The social base, which made this sort of strategy a viable way of winning in the 1980s and 1990s, has changed. Trying to win more elections on this basis is most certainly madness.

Even if Labor can increase its primary vote at the next federal election (and this is not necessarily a given) it will likely only gain a share similar to 2010 – hardly a paragon of achievement. A projection of the current trend gives us a date when Labor can no longer claim to be the major party in any progressive coalition-forming government, let alone attempt to govern in its own right. That date is 2032.

In truth, this was yet another example of the trading away of workplace rights and conditions in return for pay (whether that’s increasing real pay, maintaining pay or attempting to slow its decline). It’s called concession bargaining and every union has engaged in it. Enterprise-based bargaining has been the dominant feature our IR system since 1993.

The Left in this country can learn from the example of Syriza’s rise and the difficulties it has encountered. Syriza did not come to power because of a few powerful individuals or a charismatic leader. They came to power because disparate groups within the Left in Greece were able to set aside their differences and organise together.

Inequality kills. The growing imbalance in the distribution of our wealth has a death toll. In late 2014, two individuals in different circumstances took violent and homicidal action, only a few days apart. Aside from timing, there isn’t, at first glance, much that links the actions of Man Haron Monis and Mersane Warria, the Cairns mother charged with the deaths of eight children.

We live in a time of madness. A form of insanity rules our lives. As the world becomes more productive, some of us work longer hours, some of us are no longer needed in paid labour at all, and all of us are encouraged to spend, borrow and buy more and more. We keep pressing harder on the accelerator, pushing more people off the vehicle and expecting the driver to stay longer at the wheel. Can we imagine a more insane system?

As the news of Edward Snowden’s actions and their implications were first blowing through the world, I happened, by chance, to pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s essay Lying in Politics. It’s a short treatise on the delusional nature of imperial decision-making during the Vietnam War years, based on her reading of the Pentagon Papers.

I once worked in a call centre where a few of the interviewers would be regularly rostered to do phone surveys about female incontinence products. Asking strangers whether they lost a teaspoon, a tablespoon or more in volume per occasion is a tough gig.