Taking on Peter Reith and Eric Abetz Pty Ltd

It looks like the IR nut-jobs in the Coalition are refining their political strategy to keep working people down. Peter Reith has called for a broad-based inquiry into union behaviour and governance. The IR nut-jobs have clearly learned from the WorkChoices but it was clearly not the message that a majority of Australians were attempting to teach (you know the one about taking rights at work seriously). Instead, the idea is to use an inquiry of some description such as a Royal Commission to fundamentally weaken the independent organising capacity of the union movement. All with the added sweetener of ensuring complete corporate dominance of the hundreds of billions of dollars of workers’ capital in industry superannuation funds.

An Indestructible Union (Part 5)

If you’re like me the stinking mess wafting up from the HSU East Branch makes you want to vomit. What pains me most is the gap between the reality of that Branch and what it could be. Their membership base is a range of allied health professionals and blue collar workers in the wider sector, i.e. a membership base intrinsically working around a key anchor institution in our society that cannot be either outsourced or shut down; hospitals. This should be a fighting union that wages huge campaigns and inspires other workers around Australia. But then again the strategic nature of the membership in building genuine people power in this country combined with what immediate difficulties that might cause for State (read Labor) governments probably provides a potent push for an (un)representative swill to take over to keep things ticking along (so to speak). The whole putrid affair shows up the mortality and limitations of the representative  Union. The tale of the credit card and the prostitutes provides the media fodder but the wider story really is what appears to be the systemic fraud and large salaries of a few key operators combined with the lack of meaningful results/power that the membership exercised.