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.

Workers find it hard to engage in conversations about the future – and this includes talking about climate change – if they are being forced to only ever focus on their lives from minute to minute, day to day. This is one of the impacts of insecure work. Climate change needs action and we need to create affordable renewable options for ordinary people.

Having workers’ representatives monitoring safety matters. Last month, when a concrete slab crushed two men to death on an East Perth worksite, it transpired that the CFMEU had been refused entry to the site sixteen times. As the national security crusaders tell us: if you’re doing nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to hide. Yet it’s one rule for the employers and it’s another for everyone else.

The Accord gutted the union movement. The social peace and real wages decline so craved by the business community in the 1980s was achieved by demobilising the movement, removing any control at the workplace level over union decision-making, disciplining those who took exception to the strategy of real wage cuts embodied in the Accord, and demolishing the political basis for fighting unions.

In 2011, I left Perth for Houston Texas to begin the internationally prestigious Masters of Fine Arts in poetry. As part of my funding arrangement I was offered a teaching assistantship, and at the time I thought this was a great deal.

On 16 May 2012 there was a reunion at the Australian Council of Trade Unions congress gala dinner. The crucial players involved in the development of the ACTU and ALP Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s – and Bill Kelty, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Laurie Carmichael – were all there. The keynote addresses were from Kelty and Keating, with the latter asked to commemorate the former’s work in the labour movement.

Something is rotten at the heart of Sydney University. On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. […]

If it achieves nothing else, by locking out all its staff, Qantas has shown why the Occupy movement matters. Naturally, the usual performing seals will bark and clap their fins in the Murdoch press about how Alan Joyce had no option. He had to crush the union, you see – it’s that old Vietnam logic […]

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. – Emma Goldman NSW voters can be forgiven for taking an axe to the ALP government that held state power for sixteen years. Last Saturday’s election gave voters the opportunity they had been waiting for and the ALP was dumped with enough conviction to keep them out […]

Many years ago, I worked as a community worker in a drop-in centre. One day, a wonderful young man – who struggled physically and mentally in life – collapsed. A violent incident had shattered his fragile sense of peace and security in the world. Two female colleagues and I went to tell his parents he […]

Non-fiction review Betrayal: The Underbelly of Australian Labor Simon Benson PanteraPress Paul Keating famously said, ‘where goes NSW, so goes federal Labor’. I read Betrayal: The Underbelly of Australian Labor before the federal election, and watching the drama unfold I have to say it was a prescient read. Simon Benson, Chief political reporter for the […]

I believe fundamentally in the importance of the unions. But I’m not a union member. In my first week as a fifteen year old check-out chick, I signed up as a member of the SDA. As a casual working the registers at Christmas time, it was only because of the the union presence in the […]

Overnight the face of contemporary Australian politics – that lacklustre, bureaucratic, increasingly-resembling-a-trainwreck Rudd – was met with a leadership challenge. This comes on the back of a downward plummet in the polls [debatable] and numerous backflips on the ETS, refugees, Afghanistan and recent confrontations over the RSPT – ‘that great, big fat tax’ the mining […]

International Day of Mourning on 28 April each year is a good time to be thinking about the workers. Mid morning at No. 4 Jetty Port Kembla, Wollongong workers gathered to think about the devastation that comes for the families and communities of the more than a million workers who are killed at work each […]

You may be a member of a union. But have you ever been approached by some other union – approached as a member of the community – and invited to join a campaign or activity broader than wages and conditions? For example, have you been encouraged to attend meetings about the closure of local services, […]