Worker’s unite in rallies around the country.
Today’s rally against Howard’s ‘WorkChoices’ laws, yet again gave us a taste of what working class power is like. Despite attempts by union bureaucracy to keep the movement controlled and focussed on electoral strategies that will mean nothing, the mainstream media conservatively estimated the 40,000 worker’s rallied in Sydney’s outer suburb of Blacktown, but it could have been as high as 50,000. The choice of rally location was based on the union leadership’s dead-end strategy of getting Labor elected at the next election, but if we had had a central Sydney rally, like Melbourne did, the numbers could have been much bigger. In Melbourne, 100,000 packed the streets to oppose Howard’s attacks on workers. Also, they were on strike, adding a much more militant atmosphere to the demonstration.
Socialist Alternative ran a petition calling on the ACTU to call a nationwide general strike. The rank and file of the union are behind this idea and many people we talked to agreed with us that the union leadership was weak and that more militant actioned needed to be taken. Two rallies a year just doesn’t hurt the bosses enough to make the government turn back these ‘reforms.’ Mass strikes however shut down production, halts capitalist profits and shows the bosses that workers have the real power in society and we make the world go around. This kind of action is the solution to Howard’s draconian laws.
SA’s plan would be hard to organise. General strikes are illegal – the trade unions, or anybody else directly involved in coordinating the strike, could be sued for the damage they cause the corporations. Seeing how poor the unions are, it would be hard to imagine them managing last very long before leadership was lost and the strike effort collapsed.
Who believes that the lying rodent REALLY, TRULY, has the Australian people’s best interests at heart here? All these changes are simply a consequence of his ideology.