News from the Colonies

by Jason Phelan

05/04/06 (RINF) — In the 1850s English Workers won the right to a 60 hour work week, earlier in the 1830s child labor had been abolished. In both cases management saw these laws as infractions on their managerial prerogatives and as such would mark the end of ‘free enterprise’. By world war one most industries had adopted a 48 hour working week. In 1927 the governments of New South Wales and Queensland granted workers a 44 hour week. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), through diligent campaigning and industrial action won Aussie workers the 40 hour working week in 1947. Ten year later and individual unions were successfully securing a 35 hour week for their members. The ACTU was involved in further arbitration to make these changes uniform when in 1974 the council dropped the campaign, a campaign that had the full support of the federal government of the day. [Whitlam]. A compromise was adopted by the Hawk labor government, giving ‘us’ the 38 hour week that we were, until quite recently, using.

The current conservative Howard government has, in one foul swoop, forced Australian workers back to the 1850s. Sounds far fetched? Workers that have recently been retrenched and rehired under new ‘enterprise agreements’ will quite possibly have to work 7 days and longer hours to receive the same income as pre ‘industrial relations reform’ collective agreements. Today working more than 8 hours a day is no longer payable as a ‘penalty rate’ so the word and the ideal of overtime seems to be redundant in Australia.

Aussie workers are expected to cheerfully accept these new conditions, while witnessing a government of corruption and lies. Every week we learn of new corruption with in John Howard’s government. Members of his own cabinet have been complicit in covering up and playing down the AWB / Saddam Husein affair.

What will be ‘the straw that broke the donkeys back’ and how will the Aussie worker react? The government has put workers in a situation where the only recourse available to them is militant industrial action. Will what our government is doing lead to actions like those taking place in France over IR ‘reform’?, Should we be Uniting and demanding a roll back aspects of the industrial reform package to prevent violent industrial action?