In 1890, Australia and New Zealand were paralyzed by a strike. 50,000 workers in Australia and a further 10,000 in New Zealand shut down ports, mines, and railways. While the unions were defeated, for the first time the ruling class stood face to face with a new social force which […]
Trade Unions
11 posts
The especifist tendency’s retreat from class analysis is not just a theoretical mistake – it in fact cuts them off from understanding the only thing that might actually realise anarchism.
Back in December, Woolworths distribution workers took a deal after 17 days of strike which cost the company upwards of $140 million dollars. The strategy of organising undertaken by the United Workers Union (UWU) demonstrates what it means to walk the daggers edge between exercising workers power by fighting bosses […]
The Albanese Labor government has done a deal with the Liberals to pass legislation aimed at destroying the CFMEU. Make no mistake, the government’s CFMEU Act is a plan to kill a union. The strongest argument against this law is this: take a look at what is in it. The […]
As the government decides how best to cut down the union, it’s essential that workers stand with the CFMEU and defend it against government intervention. Any proposed administrators should be rejected, and the rank and file organised to take control of what's theirs.
Angry Workers of the World (AWW) are a small communist collective based in London, influenced by Italian workerism and a wider array of socialist groups, like the original Solidarity (not to be confused with the Trotskyist Australian Solidarity), the women’s group Feminist Fightback and the German group Wildcat. For the […]
Michael Heinrich’s introduction to Capital offhandedly deals with a point popular among leftist academics: “The difference between services and physical objects consists of a distinction of the material content; the question as to whether they are commodities pertains to their social form, and that depends upon whether objects and services […]
A couple of days ago, a post went up in my union’s online forum: “Serious question here. Is there anyone who has worked in hospo for more than a year, who -HAS NOT- experienced some form of wage theft / underpayment / non payment of penalty rates/ non payment of […]
In order for anarchists to win the majority of working people over to the ideas of anarchism, it is sensible that they organise and propagandise in the most viable mass political organisations of the class: unions. This is not only because unions provide an immediate platform to conduct these arguments. […]
Since the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, there has been renewed discussion about police brutality around the world. Here in Australia, much of that conversation and activism has rightly focused on the abysmal record of racist policing and deaths in custody inflicted upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait […]
