anti-mining repression in peru

joanna@tni.org to climate09-int
show details 4:45 AM (3 hours ago)

 

ABAJO EN CASTELANO…

Hi all,
I know this is not a list to post news but Im really concerned about the
situation that hundreds of indigenous peoples and peasants in peru are
being criminalized and murdered just for "defending their rights to their
land, environment and to decide their own development model".
Not only the president is pursuing an on-going militarization of the whole
county, specially outside the capital, but also continues to give lands to
corporations even though the communities have organized to do their own
popular consultations and are struggling for years.

Below is the Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations statement of
what just happened yesterday (translated by me so bear the mistakes)
against a peasant community of the north of Peru in their already long
struggle to throw out a mining company.

This is one case of the thousands of cases that are happening in
communities all over the world…

With this I want to propose for the January CJA meeting (post-Copenhagen)
to have a discussion on our possibilities for solidarity actions with the
struggles of social movements, mostly from the global south.

…Just feel that I should share that with you in our strong global
struggle for climate and social justice!

In solidarity,
Joanna.

 

Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations - CAOI
Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú, Colombia, Chile, Argentina

We condemn the criminal repression in the peasant community in Piura (Peru)

A violent police incursion left two dead, nine wounded and four arrested.
We demand an investigation and sanction to the responsible ones. And a
Stop to the criminalization of the indigenous rights.

Again, the Alan García Pérez government has his hands full of blood. The
massacre at Bagua last 5th of June was not an ‘excess’, is part of his
systematic politic to criminalize the rights of the indigenous peoples and
the social movements in general. On Wednesday, 02 of December, at 4pm,
dozens of police burst in with bullets in the peasant community of Segunda
y Cajas, Cajas Canchaque sector (province of Huancabamba, region of
Piura), leaving two dead, nine wounded and four arrested.

The murdered peasants are the ex governor of the Segunda y Cajas Peasant
Community, Castro Correa Huayama, and Vicente Ramírez Martínez, a 50
year-old father.

The wounded are Simón Tocto, Joaquín Ramírez, Eulalia Romero, José Ramírez,
Nérida Correa Meléndez, Elita Correa Meléndez, Apolinaria Correa Meléndez,
Merli Correa Meléndez y Reina Meléndez. The arrested are José Servando
Quinde Alberca, from the little town of Rosarios Bajos and Porfirio
Clemente Huamán of another little town called Pan de Azúcar, who were
taken to the Chulucanas police station.

The police excuse was that they had to take the peasants that were
appointed as witnesses by the Mixed Fiscal of Huncabamba, as part of the
investigation for the violent actions that happened the 1st of November of
this year at the mining camping Henry Hill’s, action that were carried out
by the same mining company that has under its charge the mining project of
Rio Blanco with the purpose of incriminating the peasants.

The mining Project Rio Blanco was rejected with more than 90 percent of
the votes of the population at a citizen consultation organized by the
local municipalities in September 2007. Instead of respecting and give a
binding character to the consultation results, the Garcia Perez government
has since then intensified the police and judicial persecution to these
communities. To this date, there are dozens of peasants of the area being
penalty processed, only for defending their rights to their land,
environment and to decide their own development model.

The Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations, CAOI, condemn the
criminal repression against peasant communities of Piura and ll over Peru,
demands investigation and sanction for the responsible ones, and a stop to
the criminalization of the indigenous rights. We call the social
movements, independent human rights organisms, the OEA and the UN and the
international community in general to pronounce so that the García Pérez
government respects the human rights and collective rights in Peru

Lima, December 03rd, 2009

Miguel Palacín Quispe

General Coordinator of CAOI

——–

Hola a tod@s,

Yo sé que esta no es una lista para enviar noticias pero estoy muy
preocupada por la situación que cientos de pueblos indígenas y comunidades
en el Perú están siendo criminalizadas y asesinadas sólo por "defender sus
derechos sobre sus territorios, medio ambiente y la decisión sobre su
propio modelo de desarrollo".

No solo el presidente y compañía estan persiguiendo una continua
militarización de todo el país, espacialmente fuera de la capital, pero
también continúa entregando tierras a corporaciones a pesar que las
comunidades se han organizado para realizar sus propias consultas
populares y están luchando por años.

Abajo está el comunicado de la Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones
Indígenas sobre lo que acaba de suceder ayer en contra de los comuneros
del norte del Perú y su ya larga lucha para sacar a una compañía minera.

Este es uno de los miles de casos que están sucediendo en comunidades
alrededor del mundo…

Con esto quiero proponer que para la reunión de CJA en enero
(post-Copenhage) tener una discusión sobre nuestras posibilidades de
realizar acciones de solidaridad con las luchas de los movimientos
sociales, principalmente del sur global.

… Sólo quería compartir esto para nuestra fuerte lucha global por la
justicia climática y social!

En solidaridad,
Joanna.

 

COORDINADORA ANDINA DE ORGANIZACIONES INDÍGENAS – CAOI

Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú, Colombia, Chile, Argentina

 

Condenamos la represión criminal en comunidad campesina de Piura (Perú)

Violenta incursión policial dejó dos muertos, nueve heridos y cuatro
detenidos.
Exigimos investigación y sanción a los responsables. Y que cese la
criminalización de los derechos indígenas.

 

Nuevamente el gobierno de Alan García Pérez se mancha las manos de sangre. La
Masacre de Bagua del 5 de junio pasado no fue un “exceso”, es parte de su
política sistemática de criminalización de los derechos de los pueblos
indígenas y del movimiento social en general. El miércoles 2 de diciembre, a
las cuatro de la tarde, decenas de policías irrumpieron a balazos en la
Comunidad Campesina de Segunda y Cajas, Sector Cajas Canchaque (provincia de
Huancabamba, región Piura), dejando el saldo de dos muertos, nueve heridos y
cuatro detenidos.

 

Los comuneros asesinados son el ex teniente gobernador de la Comunidad
Campesina
de Segunda y Cajas, Castro Correa Huayama, y Vicente Ramírez Martínez,
padre de
familia de 50 años.

 

Los heridos son Simón Tocto, Joaquín Ramírez, Eulalia Romero, José Ramírez,
Nérida Correa Meléndez, Elita Correa Meléndez, Apolinaria Correa Meléndez,
Merli Correa Meléndez y Reina Meléndez. Los detenidos son José Servando
Quinde
Alberca, del caserío de Rosarios Bajos y Porfirio Clemente Huamán del caserío
Pan de Azúcar, quienes fueron conducidos a la comisaría de Chulucanas.

 

El pretexto de la policía fue que tenían que llevar a los comuneros que
habían
sido citados en calidad de testigos por la Fiscalía Mixta de Huancabamba,
como
parte de la investigación por los hechos violentos registrados el 1 de
noviembre de este año en el campamento minero Henry Hill’s, hechos que
habrían
sido perpetrados por la propia compañía que tiene a su cargo el proyecto
minero
Río Blanco con el propósito de incriminar a los comuneros.

 

El Proyecto Minero Río Blanco fue rechazado con más de 90 por ciento de los
votos de la población en una Consulta Ciudadana convocada por las
municipalidades locales realizada en setiembre del 2007. En lugar de
respetar y
dar carácter vinculante a los resultados de esta consulta, el gobierno de
García
Pérez ha recrudecido desde entonces la persecución policial y judicial a las
comunidades y a la fecha hay decenas de comuneros de la zona procesados
penalmente, solo por defender sus derechos territoriales, ambientales y a
decidir su propio modelo de desarrollo.

 

La Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas, CAOI, condena la
represión
criminal contra las comunidades campesinas de Piura y de todo el Perú, exige
investigación y sanción a los responsables, y que cese la criminalización de
los derechos indígenas. Llama a los movimientos sociales, organismos de
derechos humanos independientes, de la OEA y la ONU, y a la comunidad
internacional en su conjunto a pronunciarse para que el gobierno de García
Pérez respete los derechos humanos y los derechos colectivos en el Perú.

 

Lima, 03 de diciembre de 2009.

Miguel Palacín Quispe

Coordinador General CAOI

contraception offsetting

From: kevin smith Date: Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:03 PM Subject: [climate09-int] contraception offsetting To: cjn@lists.riseup.net, climate09-int@lists.riseup.net you know there was a mini ‘frisson’ on one of these lists about a paper proposing contraception measures to deal with climate change, and someone made a joke about developing a ridiculous cdm methodology around it? well.. we weren’t far off wrong. it’s worth noting that the Optimum Population Trust has a really respectable veneer around them in the uk and include in their patrons david attenborough, james lovelock, jonathan porritt and jane goodall. we really need to make some strong statements and actions against this BS in CPH and beyond. cheers now kev http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8392193.stm Website appeal to fund family planning ‘to cut CO2′ Meeting the demand for family planning in poor nations is a cheap and effective way to cut CO2 emissions, a new website initiative claims. The UK-based Optimum Population Trust says fast-rising population levels lead to growing emissions. The website is urging wealthy people to offset their own CO2 emissions by funding contraception programmes. It says taking such action is better value than spending money on wind turbines, solar power or hybrid cars. Critics would argue the analysis is too simplistic, a BBC correspondent says. The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin says they could contend that reducing the number of people born in the US would make a big difference in achieving reductions in CO2 levels. Our correspondent added that carbon emissions from people in most of sub-Saharan Africa are so low that they can barely be counted. According to the OPT, every £4 spent on family planning saves one tonne of CO2. It estimates that a similar reduction would require an £8 investment in tree planting, £15 in wind power, £31 in solar energy and £56 in hybrid vehicle technology. It is promoting a scheme in which wealthy people can offset their own carbon emissions by funding contraceptive programmes in the developing world.

updated - Reclaim Power call

A Call to Action - Reclaim Power!

On the 16th of December, at the start of the high-level "ministerial"
phase of the two-week summit, we, the movements for global justice, will
take over the conference for one day and transform it into a Peoples
Assembly
Our goal is to disrupt the sessions and open a space inside the UN area to
hold the Assembly. The assembly will give a voice to those who are not
being heard, it will be an opportunity to change the agenda, to discuss
the real solutions, to send a clear message to the world calling for
climate justice.

There will be a legalized starting point, which will be announced to the
media and the police. From there, the climate justice bloc will move on
towards the Bella Center. Affinity groups will make their way to the
border of the conference area from various directions. The aim is for all
groups coming from the outside to start entering the UN Area at 10am. At
the same time, groups inside the Summit will start to disrupt the sessions
and mobilize people to leave the negotiations and participate in the
Peoples Assembly. The assembly will start at 12pm at the main entrance to
the Bella Center inside the UN Area.

Reclaim Power! is a confrontational mass action of non-violent civil
disobedience. We will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way
- but we will not respond with violence if the police try to escalate the
situation, nor create unsafe situations; we will be there to make our
voices heard!

The Peoples Assembly, in opposition to the false solutions being
negotiated at the Climate Summits, will highlight alternatives that
provide real and just solutions: leaving fossil fuels in the ground;
reasserting peoples’ and community control over resources; relocalising
food production; massively reducing overconsumption, particularly in the
North; recognising the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of
the South and making reparations; and respecting indigenous and forest
peoples’ rights.

After 15 years of negotiations and no real solutions to the climate
crisis, we say enough! No more markets based solutions, no to corporate
greed and short term politics deciding our future! No to colonialism and
the land-grabs taking place in local and indigenous communities!

In December, we, from our many different backgrounds and movements,
experiences and struggles, will come together. We are indigenous peoples
and farmers, workers and environmentalists, feminists and anticapitalists.
Now, our diverse struggles for social and ecological justice are finding
common ground in the struggle for climate justice, and in our desire to
reclaim power over our own future.

See you on the streets!

To plan further the action in Copenhagen with as many of you as possible,
there will be Action Councils from the 11th until the 17th of december.
There will be short introductions of the action, updates of the situation,
legal debriefings, space for affinity groups coordination, action planning
and preparation, among others.
However… start now! Organize with your friends in affinity groups, plan
creatively, mobilize in your area, come before to Copenhagen to help
out…
If you want to concretely get involved in the process, write to
ReclaimPower@riseup.net

Reclaim Power! is organised by "Climate Justice Action" and "Climate
Justice Now!". For more information, regular updates on meetings and
actions, and for news about the global struggles for climate justice, go
to http://www.climate-justice-action.org

mass media non ntac at copenhagen

 

translation

By Niels Holst There may be more than normal hustle and bustle in Copenhagen in December. A network of autonomous militants calls in a video on YouTube to put Copenhagen on fire during the major UN climate conference COP15. The video shows a pictures of previous clashes between police and stone-throwing autonomous in the streets of Copenhagen, while the text of the music tells us that the city will be burned. Politicians will only capitalism While it becomes established that politicians do not come to Copenhagen to save the climate but just capitalism back on track. "Capitalism is willing to betray us all. We will go to Copenhagen to show a dead system, how it dies’, states, inter alia in the video that the network Never trust a cop (NTAC) is behind. Read also the citizens must be the police’s eyes during summit Copenhagen Police is aware of the network. "We have always been aware that there are factions who want to set a different agenda and only come to Copenhagen to make trouble," said police inspector Mogens Lauridsen, who is in charge of Econ effort during the climate conference, taking place from 7. to 18 December. Autonomous actions will in the City Conference held at the Bella Center on Amager, where the 12th December planned a large, peaceful demonstration. But here they will not be autonomous. On its website calls NTAC to be in Copenhagen’s inner city. "You have a choice. Let your voice be heard. Let yourself be guided by the flock. Stay in the city. Find your place and your own form of action. We need all forms of action if we are to achieve tural changes, "writes NTAC on its website. According NTAC network consists of autonomous from countries including Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and France. In a number of countries have previously been violent demonstrations in the summit. This applies notably in Gothenburg in 2001 and in Rostock in 2007, where it primarily in the German town went heavily for it. READ OGSÅ500 injured after violent street clashes G8 in Rostock Several hundred officers and several demonstrators were injured in the regular street battles for a G8 summit in Rostock, and just the riots have been nærstuderet of the Danish police. "We have obviously seen what happened in Rostock. We will do everything we can to avoid regular street fighting, but completely prevent the trouble is we can not be enough if the agenda you wish to make, "said Mogens Lauridsen. An advantage for police Mogens Lauridsen, however, believes that it will be good for police if troublemakers are away from the big demonstration in front of the Bella Center 12th December. "If they stand out and stay inside the city, it is easier for us to keep track of them. It is simply much harder to handle if they are hiding in a large group of peaceful demonstrators, which we must enter and take hold of them, "said Mogens Lauridsen. He also stressed that the police feel well equipped for the task, because, inter alia, has purchased new equipment and borrowed specific Dutchman cars abroad and trained intensively to handle civil disobedience and street fighting. "We have mastered our concept, and everything is in place," said Mogens Lauridsen. We have not managed to get a comment from the Climate Justice Action, which is behind several non-violent action during the climate conference. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n62BhmVGdPs

NEW PUBLICATIONS ON CLIMATE AND FINANCE FROM THE CORNER HOUSE AND

Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:50:11 +0000
From: Larry Lohmann 
Subject: 

21 September 2008
NEW PUBLICATIONS ON CLIMATE AND FINANCE FROM THE CORNER HOUSE AND FRIENDS

The climate crisis and the financial crisis highlight the need to organise for social change — and also open unprecedented opportunities for doing so. But to prevent a destructive return to business as usual, the roots of both crises need to be understood, together with the nature and limitations of elite responses to them. As a contribution to this discussion, 10 new documents have recently been added to The Corner House’s extensive collection of free books and articles on climate change and finance at

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/climate

and

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/economics.

– please circulate –
– apologies for cross-postings –

(1)
Corner House Briefing Paper No. 40
When Markets are Poison:
Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/briefing/40poisonmarkets.pdf

Around the world, progressive groups have linked the unfolding financial crisis with concurrent crises of climate, food, energy, health care and militarism, and have called for integrated popular movements to assert greater democratic control over financial and economic institutions so that economic recession and global warming can be tackled together.

But governments and business elites also claim to be tackling global warming and economic reversal. Talk of ‘Green New Deals’ is constantly in the air; investments are being made in agrofuels, geoengineering, carbon sequestration and synthetic biology; and Wall Street is looking forward to seeing global carbon markets expand to a multi-trillion dollar scale following the Copenhagen climate conference in December and promised new US legislation.

This briefing paper critiques one of these elite responses by detailing the close parallels between the financial innovations behind the current financial crisis and the marketing innovations associated with carbon trading — the dominant official approach to climate change.

Both the new financial markets and the new carbon markets involve the construction of similar abstract commodities. Both heighten systemic dangers, necessitating movements of societal self-protection. Both involve regressive redistribution and the erosion of crucial knowledge. Both are vulnerable to bubbles and crashes. Both erode notions of transparency and conflict of interest. And both call into question the easy assumption that all markets can be successfully regulated, no matter what type.

Drawing on the insights of grassroots communities on the receiving end of the new trade arrangements as well as financial and carbon market practitioners and theorists, the paper urges that failures of both markets need to be investigated and understood before a coherent and effective response can be formulated to the problems that both were supposed to have tackled.

A first section describes the enormous growth in financial derivatives markets since the 1970s — a process involving the increased commodification of certainty and uncertainty, security and risk, safety and danger, determinacy and indeterminacy — and the associated huge expansion of credit. It is highly misleading, the paper argues, to describe the new financial practices as ‘casino capitalism’: they were so hazardous that no casino could have followed them and stayed in business.

A second section analyses the concurrent invention of carbon markets, which involved the increased commodification of the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity. Some of the same theorists and practitioners responsible for the new financial markets helped create the carbon markets and, unsurprisingly, carbon markets rely on the same sort of abstractions and faith in quantification that brought down the financial markets. In particular, carbon markets abstract fatally from the question of how industrialised countries can eliminate their dependence on fossil fuels.

With all its acronyms, calculations, credits, monitoring and legal requirements, carbon trading rivals the trade in financial derivatives in its obscurity — and in its dangers. As one carbon trader has said, ‘I guess in many ways it’s akin to sub-prime. You keep layering on crap until you say, ‘We can’t do this anymore’.’ This briefing paper attempts to bring into the open the ways in which the complexity of both carbon and uncertainty markets have hidden their hazards, both from many market players and from the general public.

(2) Climate as Investment

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Climate%20as%20Investment.pdf

Proposals for Green New Deals aimed at tackling both global warming and global recession are streaming forth worldwide. Yet, as this article forthcoming in the journal /Development & Change/ argues, many such proposals are incoherent in that they overlook the need for an immediate start to a programme of phasing out both fossil fuels and purported fossil fuel substitutes such as nuclear power and industrial-scale agrofuels. They also tend to rely on Northern-biased conceptions of technology transfer and intellectual property that the climate crisis has helped make obsolete. To overcome these problems, future climate movements will have to focus increasingly on the democratization of research, planning and finance.

(3) Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Neolib&Calc.pdf

Carbon permit prices flashing on electronic screens in Wall Street trading rooms reflect a complex political movement to reorganize and redistribute power and knowledge. The carbon markets associated with the Kyoto Protocol, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the US’s Waxman-Markey Act constitute perhaps the last great class project of a waning neoliberal regime — the ill-fated attempt to privatize the climate itself.

Carbon trading resembles other neoliberal movements of recent decades that have invented new possibilities of accumulation through the creation of fresh objects of calculation and intensified commodification. Such movements include the hugely expanded derivatives markets responsible for the financial crisis, global intellectual property rights regimes, and attempts to transform health, health care and even biological species into measurable, tradeable commodities. Generating both profits and crisis, the ambitious abstraction and commensuration that are vital to such schemes can never be completed. This draft chapter for a forthcoming book on the rise and fall of neoliberalism outlines the contradictions inherent in the attempt to form a viable climate commodity.

(4) Unregulatability in Financial and Carbon Markets

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Unregulatability.pdf

Can the financial derivatives markets be regulated? Can the carbon markets be regulated? The questions are parallel, according to this article from the June 2009 issue of /Carbon & Climate Law Review/. Both markets have involved new attempts at commodification: in the case of the financial markets, commodification of an unprecedented range of uncertainties, and in the case of the carbon markets, commodification of climate benefits or the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity. Regulatory responses inspired by neoclassical economics, which assume that any problems can be handled by ‘internalizing externalities’, are unlikely to succeed. A more pragmatic approach looks to decommodification in both markets. Both approaches, interestingly, have attracted supporters from wide ranges of the political spectrum.

(5) Regulation as Corruption in the Carbon Offset Markets: Cowboys and Choirboys United

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Athens%2010.pdf

The civics-class formula ‘no matter what the market, it will always be possible to regulate it’ is not a useful principle for constructive social action in the real world. In markets that cannot distinguish between fraud and non-fraud, that undermine the rule of law, and that are based on conflict of interest, attempts at regulation can be worse than useless. ‘Governance’ itself becomes part of corruption.

The carbon offset market is one such market; the market for certain complex credit derivatives is another. Both these markets, argues this draft chapter for a forthcoming book on carbon trading in Africa, should teach us the need for new, more nuanced and practical approaches to issues of corruption and regulation.

(6) /Mausam/: Issues 2-5 of the Indian Climate Change Magazine

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/Mausam2-5.pdf

This is the long-awaited latest issue of a magazine aimed at returning the dialogue about climate change and its solutions to the ‘public space.’ Featured are pathbreaking articles uncovering the reality of UN-sanctioned ‘carbon saving’ projects in the metals, hydroelectric, wind power, chemicals, waste management and electricity generating sectors, as well as analyses of the political economy of the scientific controversies over the monsoon and over Asia’s so-called ‘brown cloud’ of pollution.

(7) Uncertainty Markets and Carbon Markets: Variations on Polanyian Themes

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/NPE2high.pdf

New markets in uncertainty and in carbon are advertised as making both finance and climate action more cost-effective. Both fail to do so, argues this article forthcoming in the journal /New Political Economy/. Creating the commodity framework necessary to make sense of the notion of ‘cost-effectiveness’ causes both markets to lose touch with what was supposedly being costed. One consequence is systemic crisis.

The new financial markets expanded credit and multiplied leverage by isolating, quantifying, slicing, dicing and circulating diverse types of uncertainty; an unchecked pursuit of liquidity led to a catastrophic drying up of liquidity. The carbon markets, meanwhile, by identifying global warming solutions with reductions in an abstract pool of tradable emission rights and commensurating them with ‘offsets’ manufactured by ‘quants’, ended up blocking prospective historical pathways toward less fossil fuel dependence and thus exacerbated the climate problem. Unsurprisingly, both markets have provoked strong, if diverse and confused, movements of societal self-defence. This pattern of action and reaction is similar to the one seen in movements to commodify land and labour.

(8) Imagining Climate Solutions

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/CanDimension.pdf

These days, being a climate activist can easily get you arrested — or worse. But the bigger danger — especially for activists in industrialised countries — may be that of being seduced into expending your imagination on ’solutions’ that turn out to be bogus.

(9) The Trouble with Carbon Trading: A Short Debate

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/MerrillLynchvsCH.pdf

In this brief exchange from ClimateChangeCorp’s website, The Corner House rebuts claims from a Wall Street carbon trader that: (a) the climate problem is a problem of quantity of emissions; (b) carbon trading lowers costs; (c) putting a price on carbon in Europe helps Southern countries reduce emissions; and (d) carbon markets can work in concert with other policies and measures.

(10) Hold the Applause: A Critical Look at Recent EU Climate Claims

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/HoldtheApplause.pdf

The European Union has recently congratulated itself for being ‘on track’ to meet its Kyoto Protocol emissions targets. But is it? And, more importantly, is the EU ‘on track’ in the effort to wean itself off fossil fuels — which is the point of the Kyoto Protocol and other climate change mitigation efforts? The answer to both questions is no. Misleading accounting has produced an illusion of effective action; the reality, as a careful examination of the figures shows, is more complicated and disturbing.

Open letter from Via Campesina : (small) Farmers cool the earth

Copenhagen: La Via Campesina joins the mobilisations

Small farmers – women and men - from around the world will gather in Copenhagen in December to defend their proposal for solving the climate crisis. Sustainable farming and local food production are actually cooling down the earth. Peasant agriculture allows carbon to be sequestrated in soils and uses less fossil fuel-based machines and chemical inputs. Moreover if we eat local, less energy is used to ship food around the planet. Given the huge impact of industrial agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions, a massive conversion from industrial monocultures to small-scale sustainable agriculture and the development of local markets would actually allow a massive reduction of all greenhouse gases. (1)

Combined with a serious programme to reduce consumption, such a plan would actually make irrelevant any discussion on carbon trading, bioengineering and other technological fixes and trade mechanisms currently discussed in the UNFCCC.

We believe that these points have to made in Copenhagen. We believe that the people’s voices from around the world have to be heard. The growing global democratic movement for justice of many social movements preparing for COP 15 shows the importance of these issues..

People’s voices make many tunes, they can whisper or shout, they sing or play, they talk or debate. The history of social movements shows that protests take many shapes too. In La Via Campesina, civil disobedience has always been part of the strategies carried out to support food sovereignty, along with debates, political work, and the promotion of real alternatives in our fields. When hundreds of farmers occupy a piece of land grabbed by a transnational company, when thousands of them gather in front of the WTO to ask for an end to the liberalisation of agriculture markets, we defend our right to live. Our right to feed the world and to feed ourselves. Our right to be respected and to get out of poverty.

La Via Campesina supports and takes part in non-violent actions of civil disobedience when it is justified politically in order to develop a society with more justice and dignity. We clearly reject violence as a means of action as we reject the violence of the policies discussed behind closed doors. Policies allowing companies to get carbon credits to develop monoculture plantations are violent policies. In remote villages, they lead to land evictions, farmers’ resistance, repression and environmental devastation.

We strongly condemn the repressive laws that are being passed in Denmark to muzzle dissent. In the run up of the UNFCCC, we call for mobilisation and unity among all social movements in our large and rich diversity. We believe that a confident democracy can only be strengthened by allowing people from around the world to defend and implement climate justice, food justice and social justice.

Josie Riffaud,

Member of the La Via Campesina International Coordinating Committee and co-responsible for the Climate Change issue

Henry Saragih

General Coordinator of La Via Campesina

Jakarta, 6 November 2009

(1) Explenatory data to be published in Copenhagen – Dec 2009.

-

bigger social-war-energy-climate-war blurb

Climate change is a fact. This list is a place to discuss responses from below, those of the exploited and those involved in struggles against capitalism and state against climate change. The interconnection of the work/energy/climate crisis : Many ruling class responses to capitalist crisis are used against the exploited, how is this the case with Climate Change ?

One of it’s main goals of this list is to collate information and discussion around the capitalist and military use of climate change, from NATO statements, CIA projects, military drives built around fear of climate migration and ‘energy-national-security’ to the potential of emerging false technological-solutions such as Geo-engineering. How do we resist, the potential of these strategies to make life worse for poor and exploited, those least responsible for climate chaos.

In terms of anti-capitalism we are also against the state and for autonomy, the maintenance and creation of commons, grassroots, horizontal organising a position of no-borders and critical of political parties, union bureacracies and NGO hierachies.

Other areas of possible discussion:

- Will geo-engineering being used in warfare, or at least to the benefit of competing capitalist interests to our detriment ?

- Displacement via ‘development’ of capitalist projects continues, or as the zapatistas call it the 4th world war, as previously this is often done in the name of ‘ecology’ reserves, now adding carbon offsetting forests via REDD, and even windfarms pushing the poor off the land.

Possible discussion areas
 
- the work/energy crisis and the anti-nuke movement’s and its relevance in the wake of the crisis of neo-liberalism, the war on terror and Climate-War ? http://www.midnightnotes.org/PDFnofuture.pdf

- global civil war/social-war/class-war, 4th world war, climate-war? How useful are these terms, have we got a useful vocab to understand and inform struggles ?

- climate hysteria and its use, critique of the greening of hate of the far right and other existing or emergent capitalist trends.

-     class composition and just-transitions/revolutionary transformations or the ‘ green ‘ recovery of capitalism ? What kind of class subjects are being prioritised around this discussion and organising of a just transition movement ? Discussion around what Ariel Salleh calls the ‘meta-industrial class’ consisting of some indigenous, peasants, housewives, subsistance living especially women in this analysis ? Contrasting with a critique of reformist trade-unionism with green edges, shit green jobs as the continuation of work ? Precarity and Climate change ? 

-     Green capitalism or the greening of neo-liberalism ?
 
- Wages/class conflict and the energy crunch or Geo-economic peak oil ?
A critical interrogation of the peak energy/energy crunch debates from autonomist and other    perspectives of the anti-authoritarian left and possibly marxist decadence theory.

- How much if any effect do groups like MEND and the oil
pirates off the coast of Nigeria, the zapatistas, or indigenous protests in the Americas have on oil prices ? Are these struggles ‘ working class ? ’

-     US Imperialism in the form of forest protection pushed on 3rd world countries.

- The coming green boom, bust and meltdown? Carbon markets, green capitalist policy ?

- Green austerity, How will the poor be made to pay for capitalist climate policy ?

- Can alternative energy markets boost capital markets to a point of
recovery ? Can green policy from above form a new-new deal ?

-     Will the current growing talk on many levels of
      geo-engineering solutions, actually come to be ?

wildcat on oil, iran etc

Wildcat no.85 - Autumn 2009 - www.wildcat-www.de

Iran: A new attempt?

Globally the left is engaged in a controversial debate about the mobilisations in Iran which took place before and after the elections. Only rarely are these mobilisations related to the global crisis and the severe economic and governmental crisis in Iran itself - although their inter-relatedness is blatant.

Oil Rent

The history of the ‘Iranian capitalism’ starts with the constitutional movement of 1906 - taking place at the same time as the Russian revolution of 1905 - after the English started searching for oil in 1901. Through crude oil exploitation and trading, capitalist development in Iran has been integrated into the world market right from the start. Since the 1960s, and after the ‘White Revolution’ of 1963 in particular, Iran has been a modern capitalist country, yet dependent on export of crude oil. The oil boom - and the explosion of the oil price after 1973 and 2005 - enabled the respective regimes to pursue a dictatorship of development: the public sector is about as important in economic terms as the private. (1) Development and the huge state apparatus are financed by oil rents: through oil exports part of the surplus value produced by workers in other regions of the globe, particularly in the oil importing countries, flows into the banks of the state in Iran. (2) As early
 as the 1970s this mixture of dependency on oil exports and forced development led to a dramatic economic crisis, which finally led to the Iranian revolution of 1979. STRUCTURALLY the regime of Ahmadinedjad faces the same problems today.

Crisis

Between 2005 and 2008 the increasing oil revenue resulted in a threefold increase of the volume of money and an increase in the inflation rate from 10.4 to 25.4 per cent. The regime tries to mitigate the effects of inflation by offering cheap credit and subsidies, but despite this homelessness and poverty worsen. The slump of the oil price from US$148 to 40 a barrel in summer 2008 created black holes in the state’s budget: in 2009 the state deficit stood at $25 to 30 billion, and $6 billion had to be re-designated in order to be able to pay the wages of the public sector employees. Iran needs credit, but, due to the global crunch along with other factors, has difficulty in obtaining it. Inflation continues to grow (food prices have increased by 40 per cent since the beginning of 2009) and manufacturing shrinks. In spring 2009 2.7 million people were officially unemployed, and it must be noted that anyone who had worked a single hour during the days predating the survey has be
 en counted as ‘employed’, so that the actual figures are much higher.
   In addition to decreasing oil revenues, Iran has experienced a drought since 2008. The breakdown of hydroelectric power plants results in power shortages, but most importantly the decline of water reserves leads to a dramatic slump in agricultural production: about a third of the cultivated area in Iran is irrigated. Just four years ago Iran became independent from wheat imports; in 2008 six million tonnes of wheat had to be imported again. Already before the outbreak of the current crisis the state had to draw $4.5 billion from the so-called "future fund" (a foreign exchange reserves fund introduced under Khatami) in order to pay for additional food imports. Despite the huge oil reserves the petrol crisis continues. In summer 2008 the state budget for petrol imports was depleted and the government had to use further US dollar reserves from oil exports for buying petrol from abroad, and had to push this through against the wishes of the parliament.

‘Oil Elections’

Before the elections workers had started a campaign against inflation and for a fourfold increase of the minimum wage. In the end the minimum wage was hiked by mere 20 per cent, which is below the rate of inflation. On 1st of May 150 workers’ activists and unionists were arrested while demonstrating for an increase of the minimum wage. They were only released on bail. In general the elections in 2009 were very much dominated by the economic crisis. The question of how to distribute the oil rent was the crucial matter of all debate: how much will be invested, how much will be distributed and in which form? In recent years a government crisis resulting in continual dismissals of ministers and recomposition of the Cabinet has developed at the  this front-line. The finance minister, the head of the central bank and the minister for employment argue about the question whether inflation or unemployment poses the bigger danger, and whether the main harm is caused by the ever-growing
 volume of money or the increase of interest rates.
After the coming into power of Khomeini in 1979, poverty actually declined due to the revolutionary struggles and movements. Higher wages, the reinstating of the unemployed through workers’ councils, the occupation of derelict houses, the appropriation of land for house construction and for cultivation by peasants led to a significant improvement in living standards. After the islamist state power gained strength, and in particular after the Iran-Iraq War and the liberalisation of the economy by Rafsanjani, poverty was back on the increase.
   Ahmadinejad’s propaganda of redistribution aimed at reversing this trend. In mid-2006, for example, he promised: "In three or four years time we won’t have an employment problem anymore". This was supposed to be achieved by a package of  "fast-acting projects", such as credit for small enterprises and subsidies for the start-up companies of self-employed individuals. On top of that cheap credit was offered to pensioners, farmers, students, newly married couples and house owners. The economic preconditions seemed beneficial given that during his first four years in office oil revenues had increased to $266 billion, which was about as much as the total figure for the previous 16 years together (based on OPEC figures).
   Thanks to this boom the regime was able to respond to the worsening political isolation of the time and the beginning of economic sanctions by extending state-run economic policies. But according to a parliamentary survey only 38 per cent of the $19 billion spent on "fast-acting projects" actually created new jobs, the rest was siphoned off into different channels, mainly into real estate speculation. Due to the very high inflation, the strata of society which excluded from such public subsidies were further impoverished. The real estate bubble burst in spring 2008 when the government forbade the whole banking system to issue new real estate loans. This resulted in a drastic decline in demand for new houses – with the consequence that not only real estate dealers, but also public institutions and the state were left with a huge volume of bad debts. The banks have accumulated $27 billion of outstanding debt which is not paid back to them, and they themselves do not settl
 e their debts with the central bank. The central bank’s debts and therefore the debts of the state grew by 106 per cent in the period between September 2007 and September 2008. This led to the state being unable to pay - or to pay only with delays - the wages of public employees and the bills for companies contracted by the state. In addition banks issue much less credit to companies: this credit crunch reduces demand for consumer and investment goods and aggravates the crisis.

Even according to Ahmadinedjad’s own central bank statistics, the numbers of poor people has increased under his government: already during his first two years in office rising from 18 to 19 per cent (14 million). In quantitative terms poverty is worse in the countryside compared to the towns, with young people particularly heavily affected. We can assume that nowadays more than 15 million people live below the poverty line, particularly single women, urban unemployed…
   The government under Ahmadinedjad also failed on another important front, the reform of state expenditure and subsidies. Iran imports close to 40 per cent of the petrol it needs, paying world market prices. There is a lack of refinery capacity and pipelines. Cuts in the subsidies for oil products, energy and water have been on the agenda for years. In June 2007 an attempt to ration subsidised petrol to 100 litres per passenger car and to increase the price per litre from $0.08 to 0.10 triggered the so-called "petrol revolt". Iran pays about $0.40 per litre. (3)
  The 2009 national budget aimed to cutting subsidies for petrol, diesel, gas and energy, and to pay a part of the sum (about $20 billion) directly to low income households - and to the companies affected! -  instead. About $8,5 billion was supposed to be diverted to ‘boost the economy’.  After hot debates in the parliament this project was put on hold shortly before the elections, due to the government’s fear that a further increase in inflation would fuel unrest within wide sections of society, in particular among the youth.

The Ahmadinedjad regime has failed in the most important fields of economic and social policy. In order to obtain an easing of the economic embargo, the regime in crisis was compelled - against its own propaganda - to harmonise its relations with the US, e.g. by giving logistical support for the US war effort in Afghanistan. Nevertheless the re-election of the regime had been assumed a sure thing, so the dynamic of events during the election campaign took many by surprise. There are two main reasons for the assumption that the government would surely confirmed.
The first reason has its role in any election process, and not only in Iran: the distribution of money. Before election pensions were increased significantly, about 2,000 automobile workers were given permanent contracts, and dividends - about EUR 80 - on the so-called "justice shares" were paid out…
  The second reason plays a particular role for Ahmedinedjad: he is strongly rooted in the system of power, meaning within the Pasdaran and Basij. In factories, administrations, urban communities, villages etc. there are said to be 36,000 bases (Payghah) of the paramilitary Basij force. In 2008 their budget was increased by 200 per cent. To a certain extend these structures allow the regime ‘direct control’ of elections.

Problems of closing a vacuum of repression

In the midst of the crisis the elections were supposed to relegitimize the regime. Ahmadinedjad presented himself in his campaign as the representative of the poor against the rich elite, and at first the security forces allowed the protest assemblies of the youth to happen. There were even election debates between the opposing candidates staged on television. But from the beginning of June onwards these debates got verbally out of hand and the assemblies on the streets turned into huge protest demonstrations. It became clear that a protest vote was about to take place. People started to use the election campaign or the emerging public spaces increasingly for their own issues. They were joined by people who would not participate in the election and by the poorer sections of society. People debated in public, raised slogans and the followers of the opposing candidates swore at each other. But when somebody from the surrounding crowd shouted: "Guys, let’s discuss things in a pr
 oper manner, we have only these two weeks on our hands!", he received applause from both sides - it was obvious that everybody shared his opinion. A temporary vacuum of repression had emerged which would be closed again after the elections, no matter who won.
   But then protests grew to such a mass level that they could not be stopped so easily after elections took place. The protests increasingly focussed on the social and economic grievances such as inflation, and finally questioned the existing system itself.
  Encouraged by the rising oil price and better relations with the US, the regime attacked the demonstrations heavy-handedly. Despite this the state was neither able to break their drive nor to gloss over the visible cracks within the regime: quite the contrary! Even after Khamenei’s open warning during the Friday prayer ("The election has been decided at the ballot box, it will not be decided on the streets", from now on reactions will get tougher) the protests became stronger and more radical once more. The composition of the protests changed - and many started to compare them to the revolution of 1979. This is justified in relation to the dictatorial character of the regime and to the long government crisis against a background of severe economic downturn. But the society in Iran has changed a lot since 1979: Teheran has grown from 5 million to 12 million inhabitants; the middle-class is not dominated by tradtional Bazaaris, but by modern professions (shop-owners, lawyers
 , professors…); the numbers of workers has increased significantly during the last decade.
  In many aspects the current movement differs from the movement at the end of the 1970s: women play a much more active role; the nightly "Allahu Akhbar"-calls are not always expression of religious hope, but are first of all meant to provoke the regime, and there are many other slogans shouted, e.g. "Down with the dictator". Although more and more factory and office workers take part in demonstrations and street fights, they turn up in the evening after work has finished. For the workers it seemed difficult to imagine putting an end to the regime through widespread strike action. Only the bus drivers’ union - which had previously boycotted the elections - publicly denounced any form of repression.

About the character of the movement

When it comes to an assessment of the movement the Iranian exile left is hopelessly at odds with itself. The debate is dominated by two different factions. Each of these factions focus on a certain element of the movement and declares it to be the essence of the movement itself.
   One faction perceive the movement as a reactionary mobilisation of the upper strata of society against the underclasses. Some people with an ‘anti-imperialist’ outlook went so far as to adopt the position of Hugo Chavez and to denounce the movement as a "green wave" in the sense of the "colour revolutions". (4) When it comes to colour schemes we can see that the Moussavi camp did not choose the green colour, it was assigned by lot by the official election commission.  The protests were not instigated by foreign forces, and nor is it true that only followers of Mussawi were taking the streets.
   The other faction perceives the mobilisations as an imminent revolutionary movement, which is rather wishful thinking than a reflection of reality. It is true that the movement has been based on the four social groups which have been hit the most by the current crisis – workers, youth, women and students – but (so far?) they have not articulated their own social situation. Repression still had the upper hand. The factories are situated outside the actual urban centres, and at workers are subjected to the control of company guards at work. Anyone leaving his job and taking part in demonstrations will face the sack the next day. For those 148 activists  released after being arrested on the 1st of May, it was too dangerous to be seen at the demonstrations. And political groups can not act in the open: that would also be too dangerous.

Nevertheless, during the summer very different ways of taking to the streets could be seen. After Khamenei’s threats during the Friday prayers, Moussavi told his followers to stay at home. Despite this, Iran was shaken the next day by the heaviest mass protests since the Iranian Revolution. Demonstrators fought riots with the special police forces, the Pasdaran ("Revolutionary Guards") and the Basij militias. Banks were demolished. On that day more than ten people were killed. A worker activist saw that company buses did not drive back into the workers’ residential areas, but into town centre - to the demonstrations.

The Youth

Under Moussavi’s government (1981-89), with Rafasanjani as president, about 5000 political prisoners who had already been sentenced to prison terms where executed within three months in 1988 (today the names of 4486 of these are known). When the mass executions were mentioned at a press conference during the then representative foreign minister Laridshani’s Bonn visit, he cynically compared the high birth rates in Iran to the few thousand dead: "We get two million new people every year." Those thousands are not there anymore but the millions of teenagers who today make up a third of the population are on the streets - and are a ticking bomb for the regime.
  In the last 30 years the population has almost doubled from about 37 to 73 million people. Today there are 14 million pupils (1979 it was about 5 million), and around 700,000 teenagers a year are attempting to enter the labour market, with bad prospects: in the spring of 2009 the official unemployment rate was 11.2 percent, youth unemployment 17.8 percent and unemployment amongst young women 29%. Amongst urban teenagers it was 23.7%. Many try to make ends meet by working two or three jobs.

According to official UN statistics, about 2.8% of Iran’s population consume opiates. That’s the highest figure in drug addicts worldwide and ten times more than in England - which has about the same population size. But drug consumption is not confined to teenagers. According to a survey, 20 000 of 60 000 workers on the largest gas fields in the world take drugs. In 2002 the state had to change its strategy for dealing with addicts and methadone programmes were approved in a Fatwa.

The young people in the protests are fed up - be it students who have no prospects as unemployed academics, or proletarians whose living and working conditions continue to deteriorate under "reformists" just as much as under "conservatives". They see no new perspective and will not legitimise the system: they mistrust institutions on all levels and they refuse the influence of religious authorities on society.

Workers

The ratio of workers to the overall population  has remained constant since 1979, i.e. their number has doubled within about 30 years; today around 1 million industrial workers work in businesses employing more than 10 workers. They can be roughly assigned to three categories: textiles and processing of agricultural products; oil industry; new industries, especially cars. The importance of the first, traditional category is diminishing. Oil workers took a decisive part in the revolution of 1979 with their strike. Their number has remained about the same since but the structure of the oil industry has changed considerably with part-privatisation and outsourcing. Thus the oil workers’ organisational ability has been subverted. It used to be a compact unity, passing on experience to new workers. Skilled workers all came to new refineries from the oldest refinery in Abadan. They established connections between all the refineries involved in the strike of 1978-79. During the Iran-
 Iraq war the refinery in Abadan was destroyed, many workers became war refugees, the politically active among them often left the country. The remaining ones have retired by now (or went into early retirement).
  The electrical/household appliances industry is gaining importance. But the central industry by now is the car industry. It employs 118,000 workers, i.e. four times the number of 1979. Here we also find the most significant dynamics of the last ten years: in 1996 203,000 cars were produced in Iran, 2006 it was already 917,000 and in 2008 it was 1.2 million. This puts Iran in 16th place in the world. The state has a 40% share in the largest car producer of the Middle East, Iran Khodro (the largest competitor by far is Saipa with a market share of 35% in Iran). Iran Khodro is infamous for stressful work conditions, long working hours and its powerful plant security. A large part of its workforce are temporary workers. Iran Khodro has also been hit by the crisis and made a loss of $120 million during the last business year. But already before the crisis the sale of cars had to be generously subsidised with credit handouts.
  On the 2nd of May 2009 there was a strike at Iran Khodro. The workers had received a record bonus of $1000 in 2006, which had was reduced to $300 in 2007 and 2008 and was not going to be paid at all in 2009. After protests by the workers $150 were paid. Only after the short strike the company raised the bonus back up to $300.

A future prospect?

Since the summer the economic crisis has further intensified. After a 60% decline in the building industry the crisis has now reached other sectors. 600 factories are threatened with insolvency. Ahmadinedjad’s job-creation measures have failed.
  Wildcat has featured several reports about workers’ protests in Iran over the last few years. Despite repression and a ban on organising there continue to be strikes and workers’ actions. The teachers’ and especially the bus drivers’ strikes were a qualitative step. There was an uprising at the sugar factory Hafttappeh in 2008. If, from a carrot and stick approach, only the stick remains, if the daily protests of workers continue to be repressed, as happened some weeks ago with the 5-day strike at Wagon Pars, previously the largest manufacturer of railway cars in the Middle East, then much stronger workers’ protests are to be expected.
  Even though protests have been met with massive repression and even though the events around the power struggle between two ruling factions were reinterpreted, those with knowledge about the Iranian economy are asking by now whether "after the green wave, a wave of blue collars might not be on the way" - and a much tougher one at that.

(1) Iranian official statistics show a working population of 20.47 million, comprising 5.48 million employees in the private sector, 5 million employees in the public sector, 1.53 million ‘employers’ and 7.36 million self-employed. The public sector ranges from state militias (the Pasdaran) to the employees of the state-owned automobile industries. The total population is 73 million.

(2) Iran is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world and has the third-largest reserves of crude oil (10 to 11 per cent of known global reserves). Iran produces about 4 million barrels per day, of which 1.42 million is for domestic use (domestic demand has trebled since 1980); the rest is exported. Due to insufficient refinery capacities Iran has to import about 170,000 barrel of petrol per day, which cost the government $4 billion in 2006. State subsidies for petrol amount to 12 per cent of  GDP. Iran is world’s seventh-largest gas producer, and holds the world’s second-largest gas reserves, although currently Iran still imports more gas than it exports.

(3) Pictures of the petrol revolts:  www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2007/06/070627_ag-petrol-rationing-pics.shtml

(4) The term "colour revolutions" refers to what were often US -sponsored social movements, intended to weaken or overthrow an unwanted government. An example is the "Orange revolution" in Ukraine.

(5) Wagon Pars, which formerly employed 1700 workers, has met with financial trouble during its privatisation. After non-contracted workers had been fired the company intended to send the remaining workers into early retirement under bad conditions, and had not been paying wages for months. The workers smashed windows in protest and destroyed the company’s canteen. On the 25th of August they started a sitting protest in front of the factory door. Because of the tense situation (two important factories nearby are also just about to become insolvent) Pasdaran and police anti-uprising units were positioned close to Wagon Pars, in order to prevent a march of the workers into town. After five days the strike was ended through a combination of part-payment of the unpaid wages, repression by the plant security and the propaganda of the Basij base inside the factory

noii - enviro/migration statement

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND THE CASE AGAINST IMMIGRATION CONTROLS

The spectre of mass immigration

A spectre haunts the rich countries of the West, or at least some of those
who currently live in them. This is that climate change will create many
millions of ‘environmental refugees’, who will wish to migrate to the rich
countries which, through their excessive consumption and their greed, are
themselves responsible for their plight.

The environmental degradation of the planet by capitalism has led to the
displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods throughout
capitalism’s history. Currently, the vast majority of the people who are
forced to migrate do so because of wars and invasion by the West,
persecution by repressive right-wing regimes (supported by the West
because they serve its interests), and cuts in public expenditure,
privatisation and other poverty-inducing measures enforced by the World
Bank and other agencies of the West (partly as a means of extracting
inflated interest payments on an unjust foreign debt).

But global warming and climate change, mainly brought about by the massive
generation of greenhouse gases by the rich, are adding to the pressures on
people to migrate. Global warming is contributing to desertification and
droughts. In combination with the scramble by Western corporations for the
wealth of the Third World this has created massive deforestation, and in
other places has driven people off their land or made it uninhabitable,
creating deserts where there was once cultivated land, plains where
animals could graze and people could live. Rising sea levels may force
many millions off their land, most notably in Bangladesh. According to the
World Development Movement a 4 degree centrigrade rise in global
temperature could lead to up to 300 million more people suffering from
coastal flooding each year. Most of them are in the global South.  Cities
at risk include Banjul in the Gambia, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Manila in
the Phillipines. A May 2009 report by the United Nations Global
Humanitarian Forum says that:

The findings of the report indicate that every year climate change leaves
over 300,000 people dead, 325 million people seriously affected, and
economic losses of US$125 billion. 4 billion pople are vulnerable, and 500
milion people are at extreme risk…
It is a grave global justice concern that those who suffer most from
climate change have done the least to cause it.

Shockingly, the reaction of some people, and even of some
environmentalists, to the terrible threat of climate change is to worry
about the possible impacts of mass migration on the wellbeing of the
current inhabitants of the rich countries. There is something astonishing
in the assumption, apparently made by so many of those who argue for
cutting immigration, that it is morally correct to argue entirely in terms
of the self-interest of the current inhabitants of their particular bit of
territory. To claim that immigration must be stopped or limited in order
to protect the British environment is no different from arguing that it
should be stopped, or increased, in order to protect the jobs, wages and
prosperity of British capitalists and/or workers. There is an
extraordinary failure to pay attention to the needs of humanity as a
whole, or even the planet as a whole.

The response of the British and their governments to potential
environmental disaster is likely, unless we campaign successfully to
persuade them otherwise, to be to try and close their borders. If so, this
will mean a huge increase in suffering. There will be more repression,
more destruction of civil liberties than already exists in the viciously
cruel and arbitrary system of ‘tough’immigration controls, and more
suffering, destitution and criminalisation of migrants and refugees.
Already, for reasons probably more connected with internal racist
pressures than any actual increases in attempts to migrate, the ruling
class in Europe and North America are trying make their borders more
impregnable. Governments not only cruelly mistreat the migrants and
refugees who manage to reach this country, but, contrary to international
law and their treaty obligations, they try to stop them getting here at
all.  Hundreds of migrants are drowned or die in other ways every year in
their attempt to flee from wars and repression. Governments are
patrolling the sea to try and stop them, forcing them into more and more
dangerous routes. They make deals with regimes on other continents to get
them to cooperate in preventing migration, and bribe them with ‘aid’.
There are new immigration prisons in most of the countries surrounding
Europe, funded by the European Union, to prevent migration. The USA is
building a wall along its border with Mexico.

NOII is of course utterly opposed to any such response. It would be
obscene if the rich countries tried to stop people fleeing the tragedies
thay have themselves largely created. As Betsy Hartman points out in her
‘10 Reasons why Population Control isn’t the Solution for Global Warming’
(Different Takes, Climate Change Series, No 57, Winter 2009):

The industrialised countries, with 20% of the world’s population, are
responsible for 80% of the accumulated carbon dioxide build-up in the
atmosphere.  The US is the worst offender.  In 2002 the US was responsible
for 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person compard to on 0.2 tons
in Bangladesh, 0.3 in Kenya and 3.9 in Mexico.

Why should people living in the ‘developed world’ have all the ‘gain’ of
the unfettered industries that create climate change while many millions
elsewhere have to suffer the pain?  This is totally unjust. Immigration
controls try to protect the unjust privilege of those destroying the
planet.  The richer countries should not be allowed to destroy other parts
of the planet whilst sitting pretty behind borders against the people
displaced by their greed.  The fight against immigration controls is, in
part, a fight against this global injustice.

Convincing people that immigration controls are cruel, unnecessary,
unworkable without massive increases in repression (and perhaps not even
then), an abuse of human rights and should be got rid of, would of course
reduce suffering. It would also be one way to counter racism, which is fed
and legitimised by immigration controls, and to prevent employers from
using divisions in the working class to make all workers, and not just
migrants, more vulnerable to exploitation.

Supposing large numbers of people succeeded in escaping poverty, wars and
climate change and finding safety in the rich countries, and supposing
even that this, unlike previous immigrations, was damaging to the economic
self-interest of the current inhabitants of the rich countries, it would
still be utterly wrong to try to stop them. In fact we believe that more
people, rather than fewer, should be able to migrate.

Talk of flooding by immigration is a distraction from the real tragedy of
climate change.

In addition, getting rid of controls might mean that people would be more
able to concentrate on the real problems in this world, and the real
causes of climate change. As most environmentalists well know, it is far
more important to campaign for policies to end the potential tragedy of
climate change in the world as a whole than it is to campaign against
immigration to Britain, or the USA, or anywhere else. It is essential for
all of humanity, and especially for the poorest in the world, for climate
change to be stopped, for the economic exploitation of the poorest
countries to stop, for the arrangements of the markets to suit the rich
and starve the poor in the world to end.

Already the governments of the rich countries spend many billions of
pounds on immigration controls, while failing to deal with homelessness
and other problems which make people suffer. Their peoples are encouraged
to blame the problems of homelessness, unemployment and failings in public
services on immigrants. But if there has been a ’strain on resources’ this
has, at least up to now, had nothing to do with immigrants, who are merely
made into scapegoats useful to the survival of privilege.  It is the
result, on the contrary, of inequality and the failures of capitalism.  To
take the example of  housing: social housing is privatised, huge numbers
of properties are left dilapidated while building workers are left idle.
Blaming the problems of capitalism and climate change on immigration plays
to a sense of powerlessness, paralyzing effort when we still have the
power to transform and rescue the situation, and put the world on a
sounder, happier and more sustainable path than before.

Dubious statistics, or scaremongering.

There is, moreover, an element of scaremongering  in the assertion that
climate change will lead to mass immigration to Britain and other rich
countries. While it is clear that climate change will cause massive
problems and displacement, it is far less clear that the displaced people
will want, or be able, to cross continents, deserts and oceans to reach,
for example, Northern Europe. The assertion that many millions of people
from the global South will migrate to the rich North may simply be wrong,
as many of the predictions about rising levels of immigration and
population growth have notoriously been in the past. The figures on
‘predicted’ levels of immigration bandied around by Woolas, Kingsnorth and
others (see below), for example, are figures produced by the far right
anti-immigration lobby group Migration Watch, which have been shown to be
full of holes and false claims. In any case the scares about population
growth, and its potential effects on the environment and well-being, are
frequently false. Britain is not in any meaningful sense an ‘overpopulated
island’; if there are problems, they are caused by the over-consumption of
the rich, rather than the existence of the many (see our pamphlet on
population).

Even in the rich countries climate change, as well as the havoc wrought by
the disasters of neo-liberalism, are likely to make life more difficult,
which would make them less attractive to migrate to; Danny Dorling,
professor of geography at Sheffield University, for example, thinks that
Britain’s problem in the future may be too few rather than too many
migrants. London and its surroundings are threatened, like other coastal
areas, by rising sea levels. Already there are accounts of British
citizens leaving the UK in order to take advantage of what they hope will
be the greater environmental safety of New Zealand.

The effects on particular areas of the world are not well understood,
researched or quantified.  As Dr Camillo Boano, Professor Roger Zetter and
Dr Tim Morris say in their briefing paper no. 1 on ‘Environmentally
displaced people’ for the Oxford University Refugee Studies Programme,
there is wide divergence in the estimates of the numbers likely to be
displaced by climate change, let alone where they might try to migrate to.
In particular, there has been little attempt to work out how many people
are actually likely to migrate North. The theories about how climate
change may affect particular areas, including Britain, are much contested.
And powerful forces induce people, if they can, to stay where they are,
and to adapt.

Above all, the sad reality is that people are likely to find it much
harder to migrate than the talk of ‘flooding’ implies. The tragedy is, not
at all that they will flood in their millions to Europe, but that they
will die in their attempt to move, or perhaps succeed in migrating to
nearby, perhaps equally poor, countries (as the vast majority of refugees
now do). There is a great deal of historical evidence, from previous
disasters in Brazil, Ireland and elsewhere, that this is the case.
Supposing, for example, that sea level rises in Bangladesh displace, as
some predict, 5.5 million people. They will stay as near to their homes
and support networks as they can. Some, possibly millions, will try to
find security in neighbouring East Bengal. Perhaps several thousands will
make it to more prosperous urban centres in India and elsewhere in Asia.
Only, as now, will the exceptional few make it across continents and seas
to Europe and other richer areas. They would require, as now, unusual
strength, enterprise, and some money, to do so.

The greening of hate.

Those who raise the spectre of mass immigration have a variety of motives
for doing so. Some are more reputable than others. It is unclear what
causes the respected environmentalist Professor Norman Myers, who has
written about environmental change and population displacement for many
years, to conjecture that global warming could potentially displace 200
million people, and moreover to state that:

Already there are sizeable numbers of environmental refugees who have made
their way, usually illegally, into OSCE [i.e. rich] countries and today’s
stream will surely come to be regarded as a trickle when compared to the
floods that will ensue in decades ahead. (brackets added).

Nor is it clear how his, highly conjectural, figures found their way into
the Stern report, and thence into the mainstream of environmental thinking
– although Stern himself mainly talks about migration from rural areas to
cities within the Third World [CHECK].
It is, however, very clear that there have been several attempts by
racists and fascists to infiltrate the green movement in the USA and
Britain in order to gain its support for policies against immigration.
Such people have not merely embraced the arguments about flooding and
swamping by mass immigration to the rich countries. They have also, more
subtly, argued (in case it is pointed out that for the environment in the
world as a whole it does not matter where people live) that if poor people
migrate to rich countries, they might become better off and this would
increase their carbon footprint. This point has been made, for example, by
the Centre for Immigration, an extreme anti-immigration group in the USA.
The Sierra Club, a mainstream environmental lobby in the USA, was
infiltrated by right-wingers who pushed to get them to adopt an
anti-immigration position, but were thwarted by a mobilisation of existing
members of the Sierra Club. Some members of the anti-immigration faction
were influential and respected environmental activists like Paul Watson,
Captain of the Sea Shepherd, who said:
People in the liberal camp are becoming more aware that ecological
concerns are beginning to take priority over social justice issues.
People are trying to advocate unlimited immigration, which is ecologically
 unsound.
In Britain, John Redwood, Conservative MP and ex-Minister asked in
Parliament:
Does the Home Secretary accept that there must be some limit on the
overall number of economic migrants every year because of the pressure on
water resources, transport capacity, housing and land, or will he tell us
how those problems can be solved so that we can have unlimited economic
migration?
Perhaps we would expect this from a Tory but David Topple of Friends of
the Earth says:
[Immigration] leads – obviously - to even more destruction of the
countryside and pressure on resources of all kinds… If we have millions of
people of many different races and cultures diluting each other’s
identities (and that on each continent of the planet and in each country)
what sort of biodiversity is that? Who gains from all of this? Well, the
globalisers as usual.
And Paul Kingsnorth, a prominent environmentalist, broadcaster,  writer of
articles for all the major newspapers and of books, arrested at Twyford
Down protests, peace observer in the rebel Zapatista villages of Mexico,
‘honorary member’ of the Lali tribe in Papua New Guinea, who thus has a
dangerous credibility, comes out backing New Labour immigration minister
Woolas. In his blog of October 19 2008 he says for example:
Here’s the news: new immigration minister Phil Woolas has, for the first
time since Labour came to power, publicly declared that immigration levels
are too high. He has linked this to the economic downturn - because there
will be fewer jobs, he says, the government should make sure more of them
go to British people. Also, and significantly in my view, he has linked
immigration, again for the first time, to our rapidly rising population.
The UK’s population is currently almost 61 million. But it’s predicted to
rise to a staggering 77 million by 2051 if current levels of immigration
continue. Immigration is the main cause of population increase in the UK;
nearly two thirds of a million people arrived here last year alone.
Therefore, say Kingsnorth and Woolas (as well as the Tories, the BNP,
UKIP, Migration Watch and others), immigration (and population growth)
should be stopped (or only allowed if immigration is ‘balanced’ by
emigration). Kingsnorth et al do not specify by what brutal means these
goals might be achieved.

James Lovelock (famous for his early forecasts of climate change), on the
other hand, does come clean on the implications of stopping immigration.
He now apparently believes that it is too late to prevent the effects of
climate change making most of the world uninhabitable, and that Britain
will be one of the few remaining  ‘lifeboat islands’ where human life can
be sustained. Even in Britain, he says in an article in the Sunday Times
of  8 February 2009, sea level rise may cause the loss of cities and
energy resources, but:

These dangers will be aggravated  by the ever-growing flux of climate
refugees, to which will be added returning expatriates who left the
crowded United Kingdom for what they thought would be a pleasant life in
Europe. Our gravest dangers are not from climate change itself but
indirectly from starvation, competition for space and resources – and
tribal war.

He concludes:

We need  another Churchill now to lead us from the clinging, flabby,
consensual thinking of the late 20th century and bind the nation into a
single-minded effort to wage a difficult war…  For island havens, an
effective defence force  will be as important as our own immune systems.
Like it or not, we may have to increase the size of and spending on our
armed forces.

Suspect motivations

While it is not always clear what motivates environmentalists to raise the
spectre of mass immigration by climate refugees, it is very obvious that
it suits the purposes of the fascist  British National Party. Thus the BNP
(which uses the term ‘population growth’ interchangably with immigration)
says on its website:

The impact of population growth is already manifesting itself  in many
undesirable ways.  Quite apart from the growing pressure on homes,
education, health services, employment, social welfare, water
availability, policing, energy demand, traffic congestion and the
environment in general, is landfill sourcing.  In the final analysis
Britain’s capacity for creating rubbish is directly linked to
overpopulation.

The lobbying of the small, but much quoted, pressure group Migration Watch
against immigration seems to be based primarily on the argument that it
will cause too great an increase in population (they recognise that
immigration is in the economic interests of the British population, while
claiming that the benefits are less than the government claims). Yet both
the BNP and Professor David Coleman, Migration Watch’s chief researcher,
argue that the solution to potential problems of declining  population in
Britain is for white British women to have more babies (see article by
Coleman on ‘Replacement Migration’, published in the Galton Institute
Newsletter, March 2001). Their motivation for scaremongering about mass
immigration is based primarily on racist, eugenicist notions (see NOII’s
pamphlets on population and on eugenics), rather than on any threats to
the British environment. But they are not averse to making use of ‘green’
arguments. The BNP, indeed, claims to be ‘the only genuine green party’.

In the United States the Pentagon commissioned work by Peter Schwartz and
Doug Randall on the threat supposedly posed by environmental refugees,
entitled ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for
United States National Security’ (October 2003).  Its conclusion is:

It is quite plausible that within a decade the evidence of an imminent
abrupt climate shift may become clear and reliable…  the United States
will need to take urgent action to prevent and mitigate some of the most
significant impacts… large population movements in this scenario are
inevitable. Learning how to manage those populations, border tensions that
arise and the resulting refugees will be critical. New forms of security
agreements dealing specifically with energy, food and water will also be
needed. In short, while the US itself will be relatively better off and
with more adaptive capacity, it will find itself in a world where Europe
will be struggling internally, large number of refugees washing up on its
shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water…

It is (similarly) plausible that the motivations of the Pentagon for
publishing this report were its desire to make the case for more weaponry
and more armed enforcement of borders.

Resisting the politics of hate

The Green Party in Britain, not without some difficulty, has so far
resisted such pressures. Although it does not call for the immediate
abolition of immigration controls, and it seeks to define fair and
non-discriminationary controls (which we believe to be impossible), it
does have the abolition of controls as a long-term goal. Its policies on
migration are far in advance of the positions of the mainstream political
parties in the UK, and indeed are better than much that can be found in
many of the groups to the left of the Labour Party. The party’s manifesto
states that its vision is of a world in which conditions are such that
there is less pressure to migrate, and it states that:

The existing economic order and colonialism have both been major causes of
migration through direct and indirect violence, disruption of traditional
economies, the use of migrants as cheap labour, uneven patterns of
development and global division of labour.

The Green Party’s highest priority is the creation of a just and
ecological world order in which environmental devastation is minimised and
needs can be met without recourse to migration.

Many, probably most, environmental activists have been very supportive of
migrants and refugees, and thoroughly sympathetic towards their struggles
and suffering and those of other deprived and vulnerable people. But they
have a battle to fight. And we believe it is problematic that some
environmentalists have lent their voice to the scaremongering about
millions of potential climate change migrants. They may do so not at all
because they approve of immigration controls or want more of them, but
because they believe that this could be a ‘wake up call’ to the ruling
classes of the world – or in other words that the threat of mass
immigration would bring the impact of climate change home to where it is
being caused, and make governments do something about it. Such arguments,
we believe, although they are often well meaning, are dangerous. They give
comfort to the racists who, like the BNP, Migration Watch, Professor
Coleman, their supporters in the tabloid press and even the BBC, and
apparently also David Topple of Friends of the Earth, see immigration not
in reality as a threat to the environment, but primarily as a threat to
something called ‘British identity’. The arguments reinforce the notion
that immigration is some kind of threat, rather than something to be
welcomed and supported. And, of course,  if governments came to accept
that climate change was forcing many millions of people to flee from areas
that became uninhabitable, their response, in current circumstances, would
almost certainly be merely to intensify the brutality of their immigration
controls.

The need for radical change

We believe that climate change will only be stopped if there are radical
changes in the way society is organised. We have argued in our pamphlet on
‘socialism and immigration controls’ that to get rid of immigration
controls probably requires the overthrow of capitalism. Much the same, or
more, applies to saving large areas of the planet from becoming
uninhabitable. It would involve changing the nature of production, getting
rid of the multi-national corporations and replacing them with socially
useful and planet-friendly activity. It would mean organising production
on the basis of democratic decisions about what people need and want,
rather than on the basis of making profits for private corporations and
creating  markets for their products (through advertising and through
making  products which have deliberately short lives and need to be thrown
away at frequent intervals, and so on). It would involve a dramatic
reduction in the consumption of the rich, so as to protect and enhance the
interests of the poor in the rich countries as well as in the rest of the
world. It is inequality not migration which is the problem. Matthew
Connelly, professor at Cornell university, suggested on the BBC’s Today
programme that if the British are worried about ‘overpopulation’ in their
country, they should export the bankers and the rest of the rich, and
import subsistence farmers. Getting rid of capitalism would not only be
good for the environment, but has the potential to create a far superior
society, one in which poverty and exploitation are eliminated and people
are free to lead fulfilled and happy lives. There is an internationalist
common cause to be fought for, between workers across the world.

Finally, it would of course be better if people were not forced, by the
actions of the rich and their governments and corporations, to take the
drastic and often painful step of migrating. There is perhaps one humane
way to reduce the need to migrate. This is for the rich countries to stop
making wars, to stop stealing the wealth of the rest of the world and to
stop destroying the climate through their excessive consumption and greed.
But all of us should have the basic human right of free movement, the
freedom to decide for ourselves where we wish to live and to work, and
equal rights wherever we live and whatever our national origins.

There is one atmosphere.  It knows no borders. Weather, climatic changes,
toxins are not governed by immigration controls. We all breath from this
one atmosphere but borders keep us apart and stop us addressing our common
global human problems.

essay: Green is the New Spectacle, climate change the new Shock and Awe!]

I will begin this article by saying i am not a scientist or specialist on climate change science at all.  And for the most part would not be involved in the mobilization against the COP 15 Summit in Copenhagen if it wasn´t for the whole climate change spectacle being the complete reconstruction and revitalization of capitalism and all of its domination, hierarchies, exploitation, racism, sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, commodifications, privatizations, oppressions, repressions, murders, lies, and greed.  In september of last year, globally, capitalism started to crumble, but not from the roots.  From a symptom of its own making, and that is where the problem lies.  If it gets sick because of something it has done, it will be easier to handle the situation.  But, if the people bring it down from the roots, in all the different and diverse ways, with all the different and diverse people and methods, then it will not be able to handle it so well.   You might ask, You think climate change solutions from the governments will strengthen oppression? Why bring down capitalism? Well, this why!!!


 

In this article, i will be trying to connect the dots a little bit.  Some issues directly related to climate change, and some not, but relate to natural resources.  The reason for many of the problems that exist because of climate change is directly because of capitalist neoliberal expansion, commodification and privatization.  Now, in present times with peak oil and limited resources to keep production going, climate change is the perfect opportunity to use the crisis that was started long ago by the same people who are pushing us for ’sustainable energy’ that is just being seeked because without finding an alternative source for continuing production and consumption at the same rate and more, continuing world domination. Then, new energy sources have to be made, and they have to be justified by the concerned public, so manipulating names are given to energy sources which have just as much or more damage to the environment and oppression of people as oil.  Their advanced media, marketing, promotion and design tools, are once again used to drown us in their propaganda, using slogans like ‘clean coal’, ‘green energy’, ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘organic’, ‘carbon offset’, ‘carbon neutral’, and worst of all ´climate change will feed terrorist activity.’  This is being done to control our every thought once again.  
 
The media of course represents an important tool to all of this.  They control all information coming and going.  And if you want to be heard through these mediums, you have to censor yourself or be censored.  They have the power to rewrite and display history as they want it to be displayed.  Erase our memory of the past, and all of its diverseness and lessons.  And sterilize them and make them ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moments. We live in an era of amnesia!  And the present climate change issue is no different.  It is the new media spectacle!  And it encompasses every aspect of life!  Once again the powers are making decisions that are finalized, then, the media tells us about them, and they use their specialists to explain why they are being passed.  And before we can question it, it is on to the next topic, not allowing for any debate. 
 
In Guy Dubord´s ´society of the Spectacle´he says "The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification." "The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life…" " It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory." 


 

And now the light of that sun is green."  Yesterday it was big cars, fast food, and money money money. Today it is hybrids, ‘organic’ food, and ´green´ money money money.  


 

The rich and elite of the world have our gazes turning ´green´. The new motivation is to "save the planet". They use the goodwill in man and turn it against us.  and use their technological and media tools to push and hypnotize us with the word ‘green’ and ‘ecological’ until we can be nothing but convinced that we are saving the planet by buying their lies.  At the core is this new "green" and "enviromentaly friendly" way of production. It is the commodification of nature, the fetishization of capitalist organic production, the lies of green energy, and the increasing of the military state because of security threats of climate change, all to continue and increase production to increase profit and control over us. 
  

The green spectacle, is now confronting the reality of our current climate crisis with hollow images of solutions presented to us in a pleasant premade factory package that can now be sold to us if we want or can afford them. and pollute in good conscience.   But now, if we are poor, or resist these schemes, to society, not only are we disgusting for society, we are also destroying our planet by not taking part in their false solutions.  The environmentally friendly capitalist system inverts the real problem we have and produces and manufactures advertisements and fabricated information at such a rate that it is spoon fed to us passively and aggressıvely through every second continuously, and this is the absorbing of the spectacular order.  Then the climate crisis becomes one moment in the spectacle which created the crisis and now uses its name as a business.  The powers best weapon is time.  It has at this point, complete control of time.  Since most people have to continue to make money to survive, we are locked within it structural constraints of just having enough time to consume its propaganda of false solutions. 
 
 

All green propaganda is produced to ensure the continuation of development as before, but now there is a new invisible commodity, which is more profitable than ever, and that is air.  Specifically carbon offsets and trading. Also water and food.  So, oil will soon be the oppressor of yesterday and the basic needs of society will be the resource of oppression today.  ‘Green’ is the indespensible and also required adjustment to capitlalism and the spectacle of it. 
 
Through medias and advertisements, the green spectacle´s social appearance is of a ´healthy´, órganic´, bourgious that sits in city organized green spaces, uses energy saving light bulbs, uses alternative agro fuels, uses hybrid or electric cars, plants trees for its carbon emissions, etc etc.  And,  is viewed as providing these suggestions that places the blame on individuals instead of corporations and governments.  convincing people that they can buy their way out of this crisis and not think about it.  If they work a little harder for their company´s and bosses, they can save the planet by buying the best products.  And the one´s who can´t are criminalized. The producers or the proletariet are confined to look for ‘green’ jobs or  producing green products.   The fact is, also, that ‘green´energy is cheaper, so these big corporations can keep factories and production open longer to produce more. This means more resource extraction, and more long miserable hours for workers.    So, the workers are forced to now slave away for low income to produce more for less.  Then they must spend the money earned to buy new things for the house, that will save more energy, which in turn will increase consumption, which will increase extraction, which will increase production, which will lead to more lies by advertising and media, then repeat over and over. Climate change deepens the abuse of inequalities of gender relations.  Poor women’s limited access to resources, restricted rights, limited mobility and muted voice in shaping decisions make them highly vulnerable to climate change.  The nature of that vulnerability varies widely, cautioning against that generalization, but climate change will magnify existing patterns of inequality, including gender inequality!

For an example of labor and gender inequality together, recently at a talk I attended with Dr. R. K. Pachauri from the IPCC, Pachauri said that because of cheaper sustainable energy, women in a factory in South Africa would be able to work longer hours.  Like they want to work these long hours.  Either they are forced or have to make money to pay for increasing rents, inflation, and the necessities of life.  


 

The green spectacle is the image of a greener more natural society by market solutions by marketing the solutions as such. Its formation happens because of the undeniable urgency of our climate crisis, and the spectacles motivation to reinvent itself, and knowing that the real soutions to the problem would inevitably rule out capitalism.  So, its function is to present in a spectacular and repetitious cycle that these false solutions are real solutions.  And the forces that tend to dissolve or destroy it lives also within the spectacle and uses similar methods and language from the spectacle to go against it, because they get their information from the media.  So even people fighting against the system, get caught up in a designed maze of never attacking the root systemic causes of our issues.  But attacking symptoms of the problem, which inevitably come back after time.  And then, the people who do fight the roots are displayed as radical and extremists, and are cast out to the fringes of society.  In this way they divide and conquer us once again into the ´good protester´, ´bad protester´scenario.  So, activists become part of the spectacle.  So we need to understand the problems that exist, and always confront the problem from the root.  And not say one big industry is better than the other.  We need to make our messages clear or else we play directly into the strategy of this ‘green spectacle’, and confusing the public.  If their is to be a message, it should be down with it all. 


 

Since this climate change green spectacle, environmental activists have lost its deep ecology ethics of fighting nature for natures sake, and that every living organism on this planet survives from it.  Environmental activists have become lost in the science.  Its almost as if we think that we have to be fair with the powers. This is how the power of the current system wants us to think.  They want to get our attention on coal and focus on that, and then they can trick enough people into saying hydropower is ok.  Then bam, they have a green light to harness a river and get even cheaper energy.  We are giving in to their strategies!  They can deal with the loss of a leaf from their tree, as long as you don´t pull it up from the roots.  


 

The climate change spectacle is now in my opinion the ULTIMATE Shock and Awe.  ´Shock and awe´ are actions that create fears, dangers, and destruction that are incomprehensible to the people at large, specific elements-sectors of the threat society, or the leadership.  Nature in the form of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, uncontrolled fires, famine, and disease can engender Shock and Awe.´(from Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, the military doctrine for the U.S. war on Iraq).  From military coups to natural disasters happening one after another, the past 30 or more years using fear to push through policies that would not have ever been agreed upon otherwise.  But now, with the issue of climate change in everyone´s head, it will be used to terrorize us in every way we have been terrorized before, but encompassing all the single factors into one. In the name of security, Everything that living things depend is on its way to being commodified and privatised, to push us even further and possibly completely into pure Milton Friedman ´Chicago School´ of fundamental capitalist corporatism. 


For example, there is the endless privatisation of water. One, water is being privatised and harnessed for hydro electric dams, to produce ‘clean energy’ for multinational corporations, in which the water or energy does not reach the public and in the process is changing the ecosystem, and making the once alive nature into a stagnant cess pool, displacing whole communities kicking them off the land.  Dams release methane from decomposing vegetation which it flooded, which can be worse for the atmosphere than CO2.  Water is also the new oil for global financial powerhouses and water is being commoditized and traded in global stock exchanges.Today, in the USA, in addition to being able to buy water rights and purchase lakes on private land, an individual or a corporation can invest in watertargeted hedge funds, index funds and exchangetraded funds (EFTs), water certificates, shares of water engineering and technology companies, shares of multinational private water utilities, shares of multinational banks and investment banks that own water companies, and a host of other newfangled water investments in this U.S.$425 billion industry which is expected to become a U.S.$1 trillion industry within five years. And if one happens to be a tycoon, one can also create his or her own private water districts and water utilities.  Often, the picture painted by mainstream media and water-rights activists is too simple — that of a single corporation (such as Coca-Cola in India or Bechtel in Bolivia) "corporatizing water;" the real story is not just of flamboyant tycoons (such as U.S.’s billionaire and former oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, or more recently, Hong Kong’s real-estate billionaire Li Kai-shing, or Britain’s magnate Vincent Tchenguiz) singlehandedly grabbing water rights or individual corporations (e.g., Coca-Cola and Nestlé) sucking dry springs and groundwater to the detriment of poor subsistence farmers or slum-dwellers, but vastly complex global networks and partnerships of investment banks and private-equity firms linking together with other institutions (such as public-sector pension funds in Australia, Canada, and Europe; and sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia) and multinational corporations elsewhere to buy up and control water worldwide.
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are also pushing for the privatization of water services. 
 
Not only are individual corporations buying up water but a deluge of globalized capital are also rapidly buying up water and consolidating their foothold in the water sector; these capital entities are investment powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch (before it was sold to Bank of America), Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Allianz SE, UBS AG, HSBC Bank, Alinda Capital, The Carlyle Group, Barclays Bank, Nomura Holdings, and many others. In fact, Wall Street and their global banking and corporate partners are aggressively buying up water all over the world. Wall Street and multinational banks are seeing water, food, energy, and public infrastructure as safe investment havens with stable returns and financially liquid assets. Simultaneously, they are waking up to the golden opportunity presented by the current reality of a thirstier, water-scarcer world, rapidly depleting groundwater and aquifers, increasing water pollution, soaring water demand exerted by population increases, fast-rising agricultural and industrial uses. Like 
 
Only 2.5 percent of the earth’s water is freshwater — and of that 2.5 percent, 70 percent is locked in the glaciers, ice caps, and aquifers, 
Almost all the rest is deep underground, or locked in soils as moisture or permafrost. Only 0.3 per cent of the world’s freshwater is found in rivers or lakes.  so less than 1 percent of world’s freshwater (or 0.007 percent of world’s water) is accessible and potable for humanity, to be shared by the world’s 6.7 billion people, the myriads of wildlife and ecosystems, and humans’ agriculture and industries.So when governments want to intervene in places like the middle east because they predict conflicts will arise or even they do arise because of water shortage,  it obviously is a problem that was started by the same authorities that are acting against a people because of consequences of them taking these essential resources.  In McCloud California, the local and federal gov´t decided not to recognize a certain indigenous tribe, because its native land has a river which Nestle wanted to privatise for a bottled water company.  So obviously these crises of food and water shortages are started by commodification and privatisation. 


 

Agrofuel(biofuels) monocultures are liquid fuels produced from agricultural crops, linked to accelerated climate change, deforestation, the impoverishment and dispossession of local communities, bio-diversity losses, human rights abuses, water and soil degradation, loss of food sovereignty and food security.  Industrial agriculture, industrial logging and industrial tree plantations are major causes of greenhouse gas emissions and of the destruction of natural ecosystems and biodiversity, which are essential for regulating the climate. They also drive the destruction of sustainable agriculture, displacing small farmers, indigenous peoples, forest and other communities. They are inherently unsustainable and can never be part of the solution to climate change.  Food riots have already broken out in Mexico(And many more are to come), where prices rose on corn, because of ethanol production to fuel cars.  With over 865 million hungry people in this world, and the number always rising, it is very puzzling why we would be growing food for hungry cars and not hungry people. 
 
Now the organic industry. In the past 10 years more organic food is now sold by chain stores like Whole Foods.  Eight of the top food corporations own the 38 largest organic businesses. Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dean Foods, Dole, General Mills, Groupe Danone, H.J. Heinz, Kellogg, Mars, Parmalat Fianziana, Kraft, Sara Lee, and Tyson Foods have formed partnerships with organic companies or developed their own organic lines and no longer synonymous with small farms, rural communities, social justice and humane treatment of workers and animals. Institutions like the USDA(United States Department of Agriculture) is permitting private, for-profit organic certification firms to create their own standards, which means corporate interests can shop around for the most lenient certifiers. 
 
Then we come to carbon trading. Carbon trading is essentially a way for the biggest polluters to look like they are doing something about climate change and make a fortune inthe process.  Governments arbitrariliy give out carbon credits, usually to the biggest polluters, and they are normally traded as a commodity.  Schemes like REDD(Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), CDM´s(clean development mechanisms), and joint implementation are  ways of privatising, selling, and profiting more off of our natural resources.  
 
REDD reforestation, takes land rights and responsibilty away from the local people, and in the hands of corporations.  And also, in many cases like the planting of eucalyptus trees in brazil, which are monoculture forests and not indigenous to the local; change the ecosystem, are drying up the land and affecting important medicinal plants that the locals use to survive.


Clean Development Mechanisms is allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse gass reduction commitment (called Annex A countries) to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.  CDM projects, for example, allow company´s to privatise whole rivers for damming to produce ‘renewable’ energy for multinationals in developing countries, which give them carbon credits to pollute more in other places, but as a added bonus the energy is most of the time really cheap, so there gross income skyrockets. Wow, climate change, can pay off huh!  No wonder there is more talk about climate change by multinationals. 
 
All this privatising also means more surveilance, because of ownership.  There is already cases of satellite surveilance on forests which have been bought under REDD in the name of reducing emission,  where local indigenous people, small farmers, and locals which use these lands either can´t at all or have to ask permission to use this land.  And with all this new green technology comes new mean hi tech surveilance to watch over and make sure nothing happens to it. 
 
Now the most disturbing bit of all!!!  The icing on the cake that makes climate change the next SHOCK AND AWE! 


 

The debate over climate change and global warming management at the UN is a struggle among the national ruling establishments for their own interests on the international diplomatic stage. While there is concern that climate change can have unforeseen political and economic consequences, these competing capitalist states have no means of seriously addressing the issue, other than making preparations for cracking down on social unrest.  

The US, for its part, defends the short-term interests of its ruling elite by seizing natural energy resources through both privatization and war.  Sections of the political and military establishment are planning for the consequences of this warming and are developing military strategies to deal with it.  In a new report released one day before the Security Council meeting, US military experts described the dire situation facing world powers. 
 
It was said in the New York times recently that ´the changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of 

military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.´´Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.´ 


 

A growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.  Drawing upon peer-reviewed climate studies, the report warns that within three to four decades, climate change will spawn wars over water, increasing famine and disease outbreaks, inundation of populous coastal cities, and mass human migration. “The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,” it states, urging US military preparedness. The report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, was undertaken by the government-funded national security think tank, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)(made startling innovations in the art of using technology to listen in on, read, decode or otherwise intercept messages from anyone),  and co-authored by a military advisory board comprised of retired top-level brass, including six Navy admirals and five generals.  There is also a similar document by the American Security Project.


 

In particular, military experts say that the potential scale of catastrophe could trigger revolution and political upheaval.  They say, “Many developing nations do not have the government and social infrastructures in place to cope with the type of stressors that could be brought about by global climate change,” the report states. “When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation’s borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum.”

While developing nation states with large populations are seen as especially vulnerable to such social unrest, the report also notes that all regions of the world may experience profound upheavals, including the developed countries of Europe. The report advocates bolstering US military bases and key allied governments in unstable regions of the world.


 

They say, "Mass migration from coastal and poor regions into richer countries is seen as a likely result, exacerbating social strife. The US and EU uses large numbers of likely climate refugees in order to use it in their own right wing propaganda, to create fear against these people and use it as a means to strengthen borders.  

Military experts in the US have said, “A changing and uncertain climate will demand we adapt to new conditions affecting: Why we apply our nation’s power (in all its forms), around the world; How and where specifically our military is likely to have to fight: And the issues driving alliance relationships (and whom are we likely to find on our side on the battlefield).”  This is just straight fascism!  They go on further to 

also say that, “Climate change will force changes in “why” the United States gives aid, supports governments, provides assistance, and anticipates natural and man made disasters, or goes to war. It will do so because climate change threatens unrest and extremism as competition for dwindling resources, especially water, spreads." So why is all of our resources being privatized if you don´t want unrest. There will definately be unrest when people now have everything taken away, even water and air. the most basic of human need.  Military experts have also said  "Weak or poorly functioning governments will lose credibility and the support of their citizens. Under these conditions, extremists will increasingly find willing recruits.” In addition, they say “regions most at risk from climate change are also those regions with the highest incidents of interstate conflict, radicalism, and terrorism."  So really, they are just talking about the average person, who has been pushed of their land and all their livable resources taken, and any and everything else they could do. Then be called a terrorist for resisting and trying to take back.  Then they say, "Climate change will increase demands for our military to carry out ‘relief’ and ‘disaster’ assistance missions."  And we all know how these operations are carried out! with brutal militaristic precision.  Disaster relief is a military occupation! 


 

Since writing this article, on sept 25, the CIA has opened a center on climate change and national security.  " Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels,   population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources." from cia home page.  Also,recently the General Assembly of the United Nations, expressed deep concern, and invited major United Nations organs to intensify efforts in addressing security implications of climate change. So this process is already happening and underway.  The Shock and Awe is working!  They are passing legislation through left and right, and if we don´t react on it, more of our freedoms will be taken away.  


 

Also recently there was news that Some U.S. senators are calling for bipartisan action in Congress on climate change, ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.  It said in this article that, "Retired Air Force General Charles Wald, former deputy commander of United States European Command, said climate change has also become a national security issue, because it increases competition for scarce resources and could trigger new waves of refugees. What we are recommending is that we, the United States military, start putting climate change in our national security planning, that we, the United States demonstrate leadership in the world," he said. "In my travels around the world it is very apparent that hardly anything major in the world is ever going to happen without U.S. leadership, and the world is begging for that."


 


 

Then of course the prison industrial complex plays a big role in this.  The mass privatization of the prison system allows for private funding of course and more jails,  to imprison more people!  They are going to need them to be able to make use of the new high tech surveilance and security systems they have in place, to be sure nothing happens to the physical infrastructure of the system.  Peoples every little move will be watched, and spotted for signs of resistance and will be confronted with.  Everyone who is not wealthy will be considered a terrorist. 


 

So, in closing.  If we don´t start attacking climate change from its roots, and seeing that the system we are in cannot and never intended to solve climate change, then we will be doomed to even more repressive and oppressive regimes, and even a rollback on the rights that were worked so hard for by our comrades in the past and it is already happening!  They have divided and conquered us for a long time, and they have alot of tools to keep it this way.  But they are all man made tools.  If we can build up our hearts and realize the root causes and that pacifism does not imply love.  Love has emotion, and emotions are not passive and flatlining.  So to topple this system and create horizontal communities, we must fight with this love for ourselves, love for our families, friends and comrades.  This is not a passive love, this is an emotional burning love.  True love is radical, and dangerous to this sterile system.  

I will end this with a quote from Sun Tzu, the art of war.   ´However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair.  When there is everything to fear, be unafraid.  When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them.  When without resources, depend on resourcefulness.  When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise.´ 


 


 

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Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the
Transition to a Post-Petrol World (Paperback)
by Kolya Abramsky (Editor)
Price: $14.93 US$
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
As the earth’s carrying capacity continues to be stressed, the
question of renewable energies is no longer whether, but when and by
whom. Climate change and peak oil have hit the mainstream. Kolya
Abramsky’s collection maps the world’s energy sector and shows how
addressing these challenges necessitates an analysis of our economic
priorities. Solutions must include massive shifts in our use of
technologies and, most importantly, a democratization of the economic
landscape based on broad new coalitions.
With four distinct sections—Oil Makes the World Go ‘Round; From Petrol
to Renewable Energies; Struggle Over Choice of Energy Sources and
Technologies; and Possible Futures—and over fifty essays from
approximately twenty countries, there’s nothing like Sparking a
Worldwide Energy Revolution to address our global energy crisis.
The different chapters bring together a wealth of organizational and
analytical experience from across the different branches of the energy
sector, both conventional and renewable. Contributors include the
following organizations and individuals: China Labour Bulletin (Hong
Kong/China), Energy Watch Group (Germany), Focus on the Global South
(Thailand), Integrated Sustainable Energy and Ecological Development
(India), Public Services International Research Unit (United Kingdom),
World Information Service on Energy (Netherlands), Preben Maegaard,
and Hermann Scheer.
Kolya Abramsky is a former secretariat of the World Wind Energy
Institute, based in Denmark, a pioneering country in renewable energy.
He is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies on Science, Technology and Society in Austria, and is pursuing
a PhD in sociology at State University of New York, Binghamton.

Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity
Authored by: Vandana Shiva
9781876756727
Website: http://www.vandanashiva.org/
A must-read for anyone who takes the future of the planet seriously,
Soil Not Oil dares us to imagine a world where people matter more than
profits.

Vandana Shiva brilliantly reveals what connects humanity’s most urgent
crises—food insecurity, peak oil, and climate change—and why any
attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us
nowhere. Condemning industrial biofuels and agriculture as recipes for
ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small
independent farm instead. What we need most in a time of changing
climates and millions hungry, she argues, are sustainable,
biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease,
drought, and flood.

Bold and visionary, Soil Not Oil calls for a return to sound
agricultural principles and a world based on self-organisation,
community, and environmental justice.
AUTHOR DETAILS
Vandana Shiva is one of world’s best known speakers and writers on
environmental issues. Soil Not Oil, like her previous books, points
the direction for future discussion. Shiva has been invited to
Australia on a number of occasions and has participated in the World
Economic Forums in Davos, Switzerland and Melbourne. She is the author
of numerous books and monographs including Staying Alive (1989),
Monocultures of the Mind (1993) and Water Wars (2002).

…More ›
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Intro: Triple Crisis, Triple Opportunity
1. Politics of Climate Change
2. Sacred Cow or Sacred Car
3. Food for Cars or People
4. Soil Not Oil
Conclusion: Unleashing Shakti: Our Power to Transform
REVIEWS
‘Irrepressible environmentalist Vandana Shiva is back, this time with
less of a clarion call and more of a war cry. Soil not oil begins
where a flood of recent books also start - how the global crises of
peak oil, climate change and rising food prices are symptomatic of
humankind’s spiritual malaise and both economic and ecological
bankruptcy’.
From New Agriculturist: http://www.new-ag.info/09/02/books.php

Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology
Edited by Ariel Salleh
9781876756710
Website: http://www.ArielSalleh.net
As the twenty-first century faces a crisis of democracy and
sustainability, this book brings academics and alternative
globalisation activists into discussion.
Through studies of global neoliberalism, ecological debt, climate
change, and the ongoing devaluation of reproductive and subsistence
labour, these uncompromising essays by internationally distinguished
women thinkers expose the limits of current scholarship in political
economy, ecological economics, and sustainability science.
With in-depth analyses of climate change, MDGs, financial meltdown,
and new theoretical concepts for understanding humanity-nature links,
this books is essential reading for students of political economy,
ethics, global studies, sociology, women’s studies, geography and
environmental science.
"Inspired by the diversity and pluralism of ecofeminism [this book] is
a must read for anyone committed to building alternatives." –VANDANA
SHIVA, Director of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology,
New Delhi; author, activist, and winner of the Alternative Nobel
Prize.
"By far and away the best collection of ecological feminist writing I
have found." –RICHARD NORGAARD, Professor of Energy and Resources,
University of California, Berkeley
"The lessons from this outstanding book are clear. Economic and
ecological practices conducted by women and other marginalised
groupings must be recognised as a source of new theoretical
understandings, critical for social and environmental justice to be
achieved." –PETER DICKENS, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences,
University of Cambridge
"These new and incisive perspectives put forth a transformative agenda
for global justice. And in doing so, the collection draws all of us –
activists and academics – closer to a common political denominator in
the search for a true alternative to globalisation." –LIM LI CHING,
leading international biodiversity activist, Third World Network,
Kuala Lumpur
AUTHOR DETAILS
Ariel Salleh is a researcher in Political Science at the University of
Sydney, author of Ecofeminism as Politics (1997) and co-editor of the
influential international journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. Her
writings on ecology, feminism, development and ecology are widely
debated. She helped found The Greens in Australia and in 1992 worked
on the Earth Summit with Women’s and Environmental and Development
Organisation.
…More ›
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
1 - Ecological Debt : Embodied Debt
Ariel Salleh
Triangulating political ecology
The meta-industrial labour class

PART I - HISTORIES
Extract: Veronika Bennholdt Thomsen and Maria Mies,
The Subsistence Perspective

2 - The Devaluation of Women’s Labour
Silvia Federici
Population and the disciplining of women
Reproductive labour is natural and historical
Women’s productive labour as ‘non-work’
The invention of ‘femininity’ and the ‘housewife’
Sex, race, and class in the colonies

3 - Who is the ‘He’ of He Who Decides in Economic Discourse?
Ewa Charkiewicz
Economics as a seriality of truth games
How to train a wife to manage an estate
Sovereignty and patriarchy as dispositif
A national familial household
Sovereign capital and abandonment
Patria potestas, cura materna

4 - The Diversity Matrix: Relationship and Complexity
Susan Hawthorne
Living as part of the whole
Indigenous, feminist, and ecological economics
Particularity, concreteness, and place
Eco-social systems and ‘life’
Towards a wild economics

PART II - MATTER
Extract: Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare

5 - Development for Some is Violence for Others
Nalini Nayak
Fishing for export or livelihood?
Technologies of abandonment
Patriarchal cultures old and new

6 - Nuclearised Bodies and Militarised Space
Zohl de Ishtar
One bomb vapourised an entire island
Radioactive ecosystem: human guinea pigs
Nuclear pollution and cancer deaths
Economic, social, and cultural fallout
Crimes against humanity

7 - Women and Deliberative Water Management
Andrea Moraes and Ellie Perkins
Women, feminism, and NGOs
Ecofeminist and transformative leadership
Deliberative democracy in practice

PART III - GOVERNANCE
Extract: Hilkka Pietila, ‘Ontological Presuppositions’

8 - Mainstreaming Trade and Millennium Development Goals?
Gig Francisco and Peggy Antrobus
Engendering neoliberal policies
Between religious and economic fundamentalism
Equality and women’s empowerment
Poverty is embedded in gender relations

9 - Policy and the Measure of Woman
Marilyn Waring
Do women count for nothing?
Real life: alternative models
The Index of Sustainable Welfare (ISEW)
The Human Development Index (HDI)
The Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI)
People setting their own indicators
Interpreting data in non-monetary terms
The Alberta GPI

10 - Feminist Ecological Economics in Theory and Practice
Sabine U. O’Hara
Reclaiming neglected contexts
Making the invisible visible
Methods reflect power structures
Feminist ecological economics

PART IV - ENERGY
Extract: Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity

11 - Who Pays for Kyoto Protocol? Selling Oxygen and Selling Sex
Ana Isla
Enclosing the forest to sell oxygen
Natural capital or superorganism?
The crisis of gatherers and small farmers
The crisis of women and children
Resisting narrow environmentalism

12 - How Global Warming is Gendered
Meike Spitzner
Common but differentiated responsibilities?
From procedural to substantive change
A chance for gender post 2012?

13 - Women and the Abuja Declaration for Energy Sovereignty
Leigh Brownhill and Terisa E. Turner
Neoliberal approaches to women and climate change
Gendered, ethnicised, class struggle
Women’s ‘gift’ to humanity
Big Oil and state violence
The Abuja Declaration

PART V - MOVEMENT
Extract: Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy

14 Ecofeminist Political Economy and the Politics of Money
Mary Mellor
Dualist economics
The precarity of global capitalism
Why growth is made ‘an imperative’
Challenging the money system

15 - Saving Women: Saving the Commons
Leo Podlashuc
The semantics of savings
Community and autonomy
Savings as praxis
International mobilisation
Saving women
Conscientisation and empowerment

16 - From Eco-Sufficiency to Global Justice
Ariel Salleh
Reproductive labour as leverage
An embodied materialism
Capacity building for the global North

Direct Action: An Ethnography (Paperback)
by David Graeber (Author)
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List Price:     $25.95
Price:  $17.13

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed
ethnographic study of the global justice movement. The case study at
the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to
the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent
years-against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Written in a
clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this
study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed
the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal
conversations in coffee shops to large "spokescouncil" planning
meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid
and fascinating picture.
Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to
anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism
and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much
more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with
possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a
disinterested, "objective" perspective is impossible, Graeber writes
as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the
application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political
events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of
anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political
implications.
David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who teaches at the
University of London. Active in numerous direct-action political
organizations, he has written for Harper’s Magazine and is the author
of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological
Theory of Value, and Possibilities.

About the Author
David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who currently teaches
at the University of London and has been active in direct-action
groups, including the Direct Action Network, People’s Global Action,
and Anti-Capitalist Convergence. He is the author of Fragments of an
Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value,
and Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.

Product Details
 Paperback: 600 pages
 Publisher: AK Press (September 1, 2009)
 Language: English
 ISBN-10: 1904859798
 ISBN-13: 978-1904859796
 Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.6 inches

AK Press to Publish the Team Colors Collection ‘Uses of a Whirlwind’
in June 2010! Friends, Team Colors is pleased to announce that AK
Press will be publishing the collective’s first book, Uses of a
Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in
the United States. The volume will be released June 2010 to coincide
with the US Social Forum in Detroit. “Will you join us in the middle
of a whirlwind?” This is the question Team Colors has asked
organizers, activists, artists, and theorists as we have sought to
understand the current composition and strength of radical movements
in the United States. In utilizing the metaphor of a whirlwind to
describe the myriad of struggles that are taking place currently and
those that have been blowing across the planet over the past decade,
Team Colors has conducted an inquiry and examination of movements in
the United States, which has resulted in the collection Uses of a
Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in
the United States (Whirlwinds). Whirlwinds provides case studies,
movement strategies, theoretical analysis and interviews on radical
community organizing—toward making social change possible!
Contributors to Whirlwinds include Malav Kanuga | Bluestockings Books
& Activism Center, Direct Action to Stop the War, Roadblock Earth
First!, Industrial Workers of the World - Starbucks Workers Union,
Marina Karides | United States Social Forum Documentation Committee,
Student/Farmworker Alliance, Harmony Goldberg | Domestic Workers
United & Right to the City Alliance, Basav Sen, John Peck | Family
Farm Defenders, Brian Tokar, Benjamin Shepard, Julie Perini, Jen
Angel, Daniel Tucker | AREA Chicago, Maribel Casas-Cortes & Sebastian
Cobarrubias | Producciones Translocales, Michael Hardt & El Kilombo
Intergaláctico, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh,
Chris Carlsson & others; interviews with Robin D.G. Kelley, Ashanti
Omowali Alston & Grace Lee Boggs; artwork by Kristine Virsis |
Justseeds Artists Cooperative. Team Colors, AK Press and many of the
Whirlwinds contributors will be present at the US Social Forum in
Detroit. Team Colors will also be visiting a number of cities across
the US in the summer of 2010 to speak about the collection and current
radical community organizing. Please contact teamcolors at
warmachines.info to bring the collective to your area. Survey: Making
the Collection Useful In seeking to construct a collection that is
useful to and utilized in radical community organizing efforts, Team
Colors has a short survey of questions to help shape Whirlwinds.
Please fill out the questionnaire below, return it to info at
whirlwinds.info, and share the survey with others involved in radical
community organizing and community-building work. Name: Organizational
Affiliation (if any): Email Address: City, State / Region: 1. What
organizations or projects do you participate in? How would you
characterize the work that you do? 2. What sources of information do
you use to find out about current radical movements? What books,
magazines, blogs, and other media do you access to understand power
relationships in society and how to overcome them? 3. What is missing
from current accounts of radical organizing and politics that you
would like to see in a collection such as Whirlwinds? 4. What
struggles and movements do you see as important to focus on in
Whirlwinds? 5. What role should a collection such as Whirlwinds play
in your organizing efforts? What would be useful for your own
organizing, and what is needed to strengthen radical community
organizing efforts in the United States?
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of
Everyday Life Stevphen Shukaitis All power to the imagination? Over
the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for radical
politics has become a cliché: a rhetorical utilization of ideas
already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this
self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is radical
imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition
analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the
emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms
of radical imagination. What does it mean to invoke the power of the
imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized
power through the power of the spectacle? Does any subversive
potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a
temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal
machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is
only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening
the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the
power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the
state, we create possibilities for a politics continually
reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation: to
keep open an antagonism without closure. “Imaginal Machines explores
with humor and wit the condition of art and politics in contemporary
capitalism. It reviews the potentials and limits of liberatory art
(from surrealism to Tom Waits) while charting the always-resurgent
creations of the collective imagination. Shukaitis exhibits a
remarkable theoretical breadth, bringing together the work of
Castoriadis, the Situationists, and autonomous Marxism to define a new
task for militant research: constructing imaginal machines that escape
capitalism. Imaginal Machines is truly a book that makes a path by
walking.” – Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women
the Body and Primitive Accumulation “If you have ever had someone say
to you, ‘okay it’s fine to criticize but what would you do?’ this is
the book for you. Shukaitis takes us on a raucous ride through
actually existing alternative organizations that are anarchic, loving,
fun, and best of all they work. We meet people and organizations who
imagine a completely different way of being together in the world. And
we are never far from a sophisticated theoretical travelogue as we
walk these roads with the author. What would you do? Try this, and
this, and this!” – Stefano Harney, Chair in Strategy, Culture, and
Organization, University of London Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at
Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor
(with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007).
His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in
social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and
artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see
http://stevphen.mahost.org. 256 pages, 6 x 9 US: $16 / UK: 12 ISBN
978-1-57027-208-0 Release date October 29th, 2009 Released by Minor
Compositions, London / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a
series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous
politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday
life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
(http://www.autonomedia.org ) www.minorcompositions.info |info at
minorcompositions.info

Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization
(Experimental Futures) (Paperback)
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(Author), Michael M. J.Fischer (Series Editor), Joseph Dumit (Series Editor)
Price: $23.95

Editorial Reviews
Review
"Networking Futures is a terrific, deeply informed ethnographic
account of the origins and activities of the anti-corporate
globalization movement. Jeffrey S. Juris’s identity is as much that of
an activist who happens to be doing first-rate anthropology as vice
versa, and there is much for anthropologists to reflect on in the way
that this work is set up and narrated through these dual identities."
George Marcus, University of California, Irvine "Networking Futures is
one of the very first books to map in detail the multiple networks
that are challenging corporate globalization. Taking as a point of
departure an exemplary case–the Catalan anti-globalization movements
of the past decade–Jeffrey S. Juris moves on to chronicle the
collective struggles to construct not only an alternative vision of
possible worlds but the means to bring them about. Networking Futures
is a compelling portrait of the spirit of innovation that lies behind
an array of progressive mobilizations, from anarchist movements and
street protests to the World Social Forum. Based on a well-developed
notion of collaborative ethnography, it is also a wonderful example of
engaged scholarship: a much-needed alternative to academic work as
usual."–Arturo Escobar, author of Territories of Difference: Place,
Movements, Life, Redes "Jeffrey S. Juris gives us an illuminating
model for how to study networks from below using the tools of
ethnography. And in the process he reveals the extraordinary power (as
well as the challenges) of network organizing for social movements
today."–Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude "Networking
Futures is a terrific, deeply informed ethnographic account of the
origins and activities of the anti-corporate globalization movement.
Jeffrey S. Juris’s identity is as much that of an activist who happens
to be doing first-rate anthropology as vice versa, and there is much
for anthropologists to reflect on in the way that this work is set up
and narrated through these dual identities."–George E. Marcus,
co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Product Description
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action
(PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade
Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization
activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral
institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun.
Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key
roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social
Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris
participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance,
one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in
Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political
engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings,
protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of
Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational
activist networking within the movements against corporate
globalization.
In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris
provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an
examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and
an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and
decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in
Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist
networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He
further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and
free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a
distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a
powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have
become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly
democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing
poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also
building social laboratories for the production of alternative values,
discourses, and practices.
See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details
 Paperback: 400 pages
 Publisher: Duke University Press (June 30, 2008)
 Language: English
 ISBN-10: 0822342693
 ISBN-13: 978-0822342694
 Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
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International No Border - COP15 call out

This is a call out to action to international no borders groups during the
 COP 15 in Copenhagen!

Starting December 7, 2009

Climate change is now the ULTIMATE Shock and Awe.   It encompasses all of
life now, and is the new spectacle.   The climate change spectacle is the
complete reconstruction and revitalization of capitalism and all of its
domination, hierarchies, exploitation, racism, sexism, patriarchy,
heteronormativity, commodifications, privatizations, oppressions,
repressions, murders, lies, and greed.  Climate change will be used to
terrorize us in every way we have been terrorized before, but encompassing
all the single factors into one. In the name of security, Everything that
living things depend is on its way to being commodified and privatized, to
push us even further and possibly completely into pure Milton Friedman
´Chicago School´ of fundamental capitalist corporatism.

We cant not just think of this as a climate issue, it is much much more.
Water, air, food, and genetic life is being privatized before our eyes.
And these human rights are and will be used under the climate change
banner to put up borders and go to war.  Complex surveilance systems are
being put in place to keep the people from below away from its privatized
riches.  Indigenous, small farmers and people from below are being pushed
off their lands by corporations, and massive natural disasters that are
making people escape to safer regions.  Also, their is the prospect of
military intervention in the future to deal with the effects of violent
storms,

drought, mass migration and pandemics. Military experts are saying that
climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements
or destabilize entire regions.   Sections of the political and military
establishment are planning for the consequences of climate change and are
developing military strategies to deal with it.

The debate over climate change and global warming management at the UN is
a struggle among the national ruling establishments for their own
interests on the international diplomatic stage. While there is concern
that climate change can have unforeseen political and economic
consequences, these competing capitalist states have no means of seriously
addressing the issue, other than making preparations for cracking down on
social unrest.

So, in closing.  If we don´t start attacking climate change from its
roots, and seeing that the system we are in cannot and never intended to
solve climate change, then we will be doomed to even more repressive and
oppressive regimes, and even a rollback on the rights that were worked so
hard for by our comrades in the past and it is already happening!  They
have divided and conquered us for a long time!  But now we have a chance
to come together and fight this under the same banner to stop the
revitalisation of capitalism and the borders in which it creates.

See You On The Barricades!
climate_no-borders09@lists.riseup.net

wilcat strike activity in australia - various medias

The problem of the mortgage

Although the Rioght to Strike is a human right that Australian govenrment agreed to years ago, the  liberal democractic institution of the UN and the volunteerism that underpins it, means there are little consequences when Workchoices and Fair Work effectively outlaw the right to strike.

Wild cat strikes should not be unlawful

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2009/03/wild-cat-strikes-should-not-be-unlawful/

In today’s press are reports of a so-called ‘wild-cat strike’ at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues. The term ‘wildcat’ is used derogatively against the workforce. Yet from the workers view they are not ‘wild-cats’ . They “did not take the decision to stop work lightly” and such a response is proper and legitimate when threatened with being made unemployed by a powerful corporation Qantas. OK, there is disruption to passengers.

I have argued strongly on this blog (see right to strike) that the workers and their union, here the TWU should not be subject to penal powers and fined with Qantas lawyers going to Court…rather the issues in dispute have to be resolved around the negotiating table.

WorkChoices IS NOT REPEALED. The DPM’s FAIR WORK ACT KEEPS THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME TO CRUSH STRIKES!

AND IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU WALK OFF FOR ONE HOUR FOR A PROTEST MEETING YOU ARE DOCKED FOUR HOURS! AND THIS IS KEPT BY THE DPM.

The TWU members concerns are reasonable and cannot be solved by arbitration as the Industrial Commission (unlike earlier years) is compelled to order the stoppage to cease. Arbitration of the issues is severely restricted under the ALP!

The concers are about the outsourcing of Qantas and Jetstar jobs and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

TWU federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks, reported in the Age today.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein said: “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The easy public game for corporations is to say the stoppage is un-lawful and to be penalised. Qantas has already enormous power…yet the ALP ensures that workers rights to protest are not protected!

Wild Cat Strikes Affect Qantas Passengers

31st March 2009

Published by Lis Sowerbutts at 3:43 pm under Australia News Edit This

http://australia.today.com/2009/03/31/wild-cat-strikes-affect-qantas-passengers/

The flying kangaroo as Qantas is sometimes known as, is more than a little embarassed by the chaos in airports around the country yesterday. In Perth passengers were locked out the Qantas terminal for hours after baggage handlers and other ground staff walked off the job with no notice. 

The union seems unclear on what their problem was- in the end its become clear that the issue is that JetStar, Qantas’s low-cost arm, had given their ground-handling contract to another group and thus put the Qantas staff out of a job and the union out of joint.

Already rated as the least reliable airline by Australian travellers you have to say that the union is doing themselves no favours - having just persuaded several thousand more passengers that hell will freeze over before they fly Qantas again. Virgin Blue and other operaters were unaffected.  Although the union may like to say that they are all about safety - the reality is that they appear to be all about protecting their members in the short-term and to hell with the big picture- like does Qantas even have a chance of surviving the current economic crises which has seen travel cut back significantly.

Qantas likes to pitch itself to the business traveller - but those are the ones’ who want a good chance of getting to their destination  on time -regardless of how nice the inflight service is concerned.  They may well be booking with Virgin Blue next time!

Qantas strike causes major delays

Monday 30 March 2009 11:18  
James Thomson

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-travel/20090330-qantas-strike-causes-major-delays.html

An unexpected strike by Qantas baggage handlers has caused major delays to passengers travelling to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.  

Qantas baggage handlers, cleaners and caterers went on strike at 9.20 AESDT, apparently over the company’s plans to outsource jobs to a cheaper company.  

According to reports, up to 300 Qantas workers walked off the job, refusing to unload arriving planes but servicing aircraft due to depart.  

The striking workers said they would continue the protest until 1:00 (AESDT) because Qantas was docking their pay until then. 

Qantas strike slugs airports with delays

BEN SCHNEIDERS

March 31, 2009

WILDCAT strikes have led to extensive delays for passengers at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues.

A Qantas spokesman said most of the airline’s domestic flights were delayed yesterday after the unexpected industrial action at Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane airports.

The spokesman said Melbourne Airport also suffered disruptions — though less serious than elsewhere — because of the unlawful strike.

In one case a Melbourne flight was delayed by 90 minutes, but the more typical delays at Melbourne were less than half an hour.

In other parts of the country, thousands of passengers were affected by the industrial action, for which staff will be docked four hours’ pay.

The snap strike comes amid concerns from the Transport Workers Union about the outsourcing of jobs at Qantas and its subsidiary Jetstar, and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

Union federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein strongly rejected the union’s claims.

“If Mr Sheldon chooses to make that claim, all he is doing is cynically exploiting a tragedy that occurred in the T3 terminal last weekend,” he told reporters.

He defended the docking of pay. “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The union, in a statement yesterday afternoon, said its members “did not take the decision to stop work this morning lightly” and would remain “vigilant” about the safety of employees and passengers.

A Qantas spokesman later also denied union claims that hundreds of jobs were under threat after Jetstar moved to outsource work to a new contractor in Sydney, Hobart and Launceston. That contract begins in the next few months.

Air NZ may sue Qantas over strike

MATT O’SULLIVAN

June 29, 2009

AIR NEW ZEALAND is threatening to sue Qantas to recover millions of dollars of costs incurred last year when the Australian carrier’s engineers went on wild-cat strikes.

The 10-week-long stand-off between Qantas and its licensed aircraft engineers ended last July but its impact was felt for months afterwards because of the backlog of work it created. The industrial dispute was hugely damaging for Qantas’s reputation, causing a many flight cancellations and other scheduling problems over several months.

Air New Zealand, one of Qantas’s biggest customers, had to relocate some of its own engineers to Australia for more than eight months to work on its aircraft because of the dispute. The last remaining engineers returned home only two months ago.

Air New Zealand’s Australian general manager, John Harrison, said the airline would make a final decision on whether to take legal action against Qantas within the next week. “We are considering what to do with Qantas [in the recovery of costs] and that includes the option of legal action.”

Although Air New Zealand was exempt from paying some of the charges under its engineering contract with Qantas, the savings did not cover the total cost of relocating engineers, which included paying allowances and accommodating them here.

Mr Harrison declined to reveal the cost of the dispute but said it was “fairly substantial”. The Herald understands the costs reached into millions of dollars.

Air New Zealand and other airlines also bore the brunt of a wild-cat strike by Qantas baggage handlers at Australian airports in March to protest at the loss of at least 120 jobs through outsourcing. Air New Zealand had to accommodate hundreds of passengers who missed connecting flights and had to deal with mishandled bags.

TWU congratulates Qantas on $117m profit

August 19, 2009

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-business/twu-congratulates-qantas-on-117m-profit-20090819-eq9v.html

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) has congratulated Qantas on posting a $117 million profit, after agreeing to mediation with the airline on legal action over a snap strike in March.

The union praised the Qantas hierarchy and workers for turning a profit in a difficult year, but wants the company to talk to workers about $1.5 billion in proposed cuts.

“While we can take some comfort in Qantas saying they will not make further job cuts across the airline, we are still concerned over the way the company could be looking to save money,” TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said in a statement.

Lower costs “will put further pressure on safety and security, so we will be engaging with Qantas and the workforce over their plans for the future,” he said.

Mr Sheldon praised Qantas chief Alan Joyce, who took over from Geoff Dixon last year.

“Alan Joyce should also be congratulated on his performance,” Mr Sheldon said.

“To his credit he has managed to keep the ship afloat.”

He said the fact Qantas was able to post a profit in a year when the entire airline industry internationally was suffering was a credit to the airline’s staff.

Qantas announced a net profit for 2008/09 of $117 million, down from $969 million the previous year.

The airline and TWU have agreed to mediation after the case was listed for directions in the Federal Court in Sydney on Wednesday.

Qantas is suing the union and some officials over the March 30 strike which caused major delays across Australia and grounded all international flights out of Sydney for up to four hours.

At the time, the TWU accused Qantas of compromising safety and potentially risking a terrorist attack by failing to properly screen contractors before they began work.

Justice Michael Moore noted the Workplace Ombudsman was said to be investigating the case and that other legal proceedings were possibly being contemplated. 
 
 

Welcome to Infoshop News 
Wednesday, September 16 2009 @ 06:04 PM CDT

Australia: Sydney bus drivers defy union and take wildcat action

Sunday, August 30 2009 @ 10:54 PM CDT

Contributed by: WorkerFreedom

Views: 143

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Australia buses strikes Sydney unions wildcat strikes 
 
A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. 
 
Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible. 
 
Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies. 
 
The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area. 
 
Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions. 
 
The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables. 
 
What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”. 
 
In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable. 
 
The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business. 
 
During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions. 
 
The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards. 
 
Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year. 
 
By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy. 
 
Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers said they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks. 
 
One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, said: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship. 
 
“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better. 
 
“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way. 
 
“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.” 
 
The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services. 
 
“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times. 
 
“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.” 
 
Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues. 
 
“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.” 
 
A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 
 
http://libcom.org/news/sydney-bus-dri…n-27082009

Australia: Bus drivers strike in defiance of union

By Mike Head  
26 August 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/wild-a26.shtml

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes.

Drivers told the WSWS that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit.

Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible.

Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies.

The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area.

Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions.

The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables.

What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”.

In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable.

The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business.

During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions.

The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards.

Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year.

By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy.

Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers told the WSWS they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks.

One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, told the WSWS: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship.

“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better.

“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way.

“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.”

The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services.

“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times.

“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.”

Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues.

“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.”

A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 

Mudgee Guardian – The Weekly

Industry whiplash over jockey strike

BY DON MAHONEY

13/09/2009 9:09:00 PM

Locally based participants in the racing industry sympathise with jockeys’ concerns over the new whip rules, but also feel there could have been a better way of making their point.

Wild cat strike action last Thursday created havoc within the industry and caused the cancellation of many races.

Mudgee’s only locally based jockey Andrew Woods said country based jockeys could be forced out of the industry if strike action extends to country meetings.

“We do not get the big money that jockeys in the major centres get and we need to ride every week just to make ends meet,” Mr Woods said.

“However I totally understand where the jockeys are going on whip use. The padded whips that are now to be used do not damage the horse, they make noise more than anything.

“The new rules mean that jockeys have to change their riding styles when in a tight finish and that was always going to be hard for a jockey who has been riding for more than 20 years. However, we have to change with the times.”

Woods has ridden three winners since the new rules came into play and said he was able to win with just two hits with the whip and hands and heels riding.

On jockeys’  side

Andrew Baddock, thoroughbred manager for prominent owners Gooree Pastoral Company said he agrees that the jockeys have cause to take action.

“They (the jockeys) asked for a compromise and it wasn’t an unreasonable request,” Mr Baddock said.

“My opinion on the whole thing is they say the whips are padded now and don’t hurt the horses so I can’t see why there is any restriction on using the whip anyway because of this. I am totally behind the jockeys, it’s very tough on them.”

Mr Baddock said he felt racing authorities had over-reacted to the cries from the RSPCA.

“Racing has been going for over 100 years quite successfully,” he said.

“I’ve never known any of our horses to be harmed or hurt by whip use. I do think they (Australian Racing Bureau) has rolled over a bit and now I just wonder what will be next.

“Will there be calls to restrict the frequency of breeding mares or will they now try to ban two-year-old racing?

“The thoroughbred industry looks after their animals better than anyone, they are well cared for.

“I can’t see why the jockeys can’t use these padded whips to their discretion.”

New rules are too onerous

Gulgong Turf Club president Percy Thompson, who is also a trainer, said he believes that the new whip rules are too onerous.

“Jockeys only have a split second to make decisions and at the same time have to consider as well as safety concerns,” Mr Thompson said.

“They have a lot on their mind without having to count how many strides and how many times they have hit the horse with the whip.

“However, the jockeys should have set a date in advance of any strike so that owners and trainers weren’t disadvantaged in taking their horses to the track only to have strike action see their horse not start.”

However, Mr Thompson said the jockey’s actions came after the racing authorities refused to budge on a widely called for review of the new whip rules.

Jockeys right, strike wrong

Legendary trainer and horse breaker Max Crockett said he believed the jockeys are right in their call for an early review of the new whip rules.

“However, I was disappointed to see on Thursday that some trainers were abused after the strike was called,” Mr Crockett said.

“The way it was done was wrong and by acting this way they will get the battling jockeys who can’t afford to lose the income off side.

“The rules need change - jockeys should be allowed to use the whip at their discretion over the last 100 metres of a race.

“Some horses don’t need the whip while others think the race is over if the whip isn’t used and I estimate that is the case with 75 per cent of horses. Racing authorities are between a rock and a hard place with the RSPCA who would be better served to look at what happens to horses who aren’t breeding propositions in retirement.

Strike could destroy races

Mudgee Race Club chairman Max Walker said a strike like Thursday’s action at Hawkesbury, Ballarat and Ipswich at Mudgee’s race meeting last Sunday would have done untold damage.

“It would have turned our second best day on record to our worst ever,” Mr Walker said.

“It would have left the many new patrons who were on course that day with a bad taste in their mouth and maybe lose them to racing.

“I believe the issue should be able to be sorted out without taking industrial action.

“The whip dispute has the potential to damage the grass roots of race clubs and bring the whole racing industry down.”

Racing will not go forward

Speaking from Hong Kong, former leading country and now Mudgee trainer Tracey Bartley said he was glad to see jockeys sticking together on the issue of whip use.

“The new rules are ridiculous,” he said.

“I don’t want to see horses hurt, but under these new rules racing won’t go forward.”  
 

May 2007

AIRC orders Fairfax journalists to end wildcat strike

The AIRC has ordered Fairfax journalists and photographers in Sydney to end an unprotected wildcat strike that began yesterday, and return to work at 1pm. If they return, he has ordered the company to meet with union representatives at 4pm this afternoon..  

Fairfax workers to return to work

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,24270806-5005962,00.html

Article from: AAP

By Michelle Draper

August 31, 2008 06:33pm

STRIKING Fairfax Media journalists in Victoria and NSW will return to work tomorrow morning after threats to lock staff out were withdrawn.

Staff at Fairfax mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age walked off the job on Thursday over job cuts and pay negotiations.  
 
The employees met with union representatives today in Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra to discuss changes to pay and conditions offered by Fairfax.  
 
The meetings followed intense negotiations at the weekend between the journalists’ union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) - and Fairfax management.  
 
MEAA spokesman Mike Dobbie said the company had threatened legal action and to lock out employees on Monday morning unless union members agreed to accept the company’s revised enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) offer at today’s meetings.  
 
“They have all resolved, as they did back on Thursday, to return to work tomorrow, commencing at first shift Monday morning,” Mr Dobbie told AAP.  
 
“We await to see the formal offer for an EBA.”  
 
Mr Dobbie said the company withdrew its threats to lock out members and to sue the union and individuals for damages arising from the strike action.  
 
Fairfax Media chief executive David Kirk did not deny the threats had been made.  
 
“It is true to say we reserved all our rights legally and, while no final decisions have been taken, we would clearly have acted in what we thought were in the best interests of the mastheads and of the business as the situation evolved,” he told AAP.  
 
Locking out staff was part of a range of plans the company considered, he said, because the illegal “wildcat” strike placed Fairfax in a difficult position.  
 
Mr Kirk said members at today’s meetings had voted to accept the proposed EBA, which would need to be formalised by a full vote of members during the week, but Mr Dobbie denied any agreement had been reached.  
 
“There were no votes taken for anything because there is no formal offer from the company,” Mr Dobbie said.  
 
“We are awaiting a formal offer from the company in writing that we can put to the members for their consideration.”  
 
He said it was unlawful for the union to put anything to members today.  
 
The three-day strike action followed the announcement last week that Fairfax would slash 550 jobs, in Australia and New Zealand, saving the company $50 million.  
 
The cuts will include 165 editorial jobs across the two countries.  
 
Staff walked off the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald, The Age and Fairfax’s Sunday publications, the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.  
 
The dispute drew the concern today of Federal Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard.  
 
“I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market,” Ms Gillard told Network Ten.  
 
The first high-profile victim of the 550 job cuts came on Wednesday when Age editor Andrew Jaspan was sacked after four years at the paper’s helm.  
 
Fairfax also sacked columnist Mike Carlton from the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, after he refused to cross the picket line to write his weekly column for the Herald’s Saturday edition.  
 
Fairfax, which merged with Rural Press in 2007, recorded a net profit of $386.9 million for 2007-08, up from $263.51 million the previous year.
 

AWU and delegate fined over illegal strike action

http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/blogs/top_stories/archive/2009/03/30/awu-and-delegate-fined-over-illegal-strike-action.aspx 
 
 
Posted
Mar 30 2009, 09:50 PM by Lawyers Weekly

Illegal industrial action at the Lake Cowal gold mine has proven costly for the Australian Workers Union, resulting in fines totalling $55,000.

In a judgement handed down by the Federal Court on Friday 27 March, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was fined $28,000, the AWU New South Wales branch $18,000, and its delegate, Joseph O’Connor, $9000 for two unlawful strikes in October and November 2005.

Holding Redlich partner and workplace relations specialist Charles Power said the decision was a product of its time, and not necessarily relevant to current industry practice.

“This case involved something that took place in NSW about the time the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was established. I think you will find that industry parties in the construction sector have significantly changed their practices since then,” he said.

“Indeed the most recent report of published by the ABCC shows that its compliance activities in NSW have been negligible of late.”

Acting ABCC Commissioner Ross Dalgleish said the penalties reflected the seriousness of the unlawful industrial action that had occurred.

Justice Jagot found that industrial action in October and November 2005 contravened s.38 of the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (BCII Act), s.170MN of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WR Act) and the relevant Certified Agreement.   

- Laura MacIntyre

wilcat strike activity in australia - various medias

The problem of the mortgage

Although the Rioght to Strike is a human right that Australian govenrment agreed to years ago, the  liberal democractic institution of the UN and the volunteerism that underpins it, means there are little consequences when Workchoices and Fair Work effectively outlaw the right to strike.

Wild cat strikes should not be unlawful

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2009/03/wild-cat-strikes-should-not-be-unlawful/

In today’s press are reports of a so-called ‘wild-cat strike’ at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues. The term ‘wildcat’ is used derogatively against the workforce. Yet from the workers view they are not ‘wild-cats’ . They “did not take the decision to stop work lightly” and such a response is proper and legitimate when threatened with being made unemployed by a powerful corporation Qantas. OK, there is disruption to passengers.

I have argued strongly on this blog (see right to strike) that the workers and their union, here the TWU should not be subject to penal powers and fined with Qantas lawyers going to Court…rather the issues in dispute have to be resolved around the negotiating table.

WorkChoices IS NOT REPEALED. The DPM’s FAIR WORK ACT KEEPS THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME TO CRUSH STRIKES!

AND IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU WALK OFF FOR ONE HOUR FOR A PROTEST MEETING YOU ARE DOCKED FOUR HOURS! AND THIS IS KEPT BY THE DPM.

The TWU members concerns are reasonable and cannot be solved by arbitration as the Industrial Commission (unlike earlier years) is compelled to order the stoppage to cease. Arbitration of the issues is severely restricted under the ALP!

The concers are about the outsourcing of Qantas and Jetstar jobs and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

TWU federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks, reported in the Age today.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein said: “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The easy public game for corporations is to say the stoppage is un-lawful and to be penalised. Qantas has already enormous power…yet the ALP ensures that workers rights to protest are not protected!

Wild Cat Strikes Affect Qantas Passengers

31st March 2009

Published by Lis Sowerbutts at 3:43 pm under Australia News Edit This

http://australia.today.com/2009/03/31/wild-cat-strikes-affect-qantas-passengers/

The flying kangaroo as Qantas is sometimes known as, is more than a little embarassed by the chaos in airports around the country yesterday. In Perth passengers were locked out the Qantas terminal for hours after baggage handlers and other ground staff walked off the job with no notice. 

The union seems unclear on what their problem was- in the end its become clear that the issue is that JetStar, Qantas’s low-cost arm, had given their ground-handling contract to another group and thus put the Qantas staff out of a job and the union out of joint.

Already rated as the least reliable airline by Australian travellers you have to say that the union is doing themselves no favours - having just persuaded several thousand more passengers that hell will freeze over before they fly Qantas again. Virgin Blue and other operaters were unaffected.  Although the union may like to say that they are all about safety - the reality is that they appear to be all about protecting their members in the short-term and to hell with the big picture- like does Qantas even have a chance of surviving the current economic crises which has seen travel cut back significantly.

Qantas likes to pitch itself to the business traveller - but those are the ones’ who want a good chance of getting to their destination  on time -regardless of how nice the inflight service is concerned.  They may well be booking with Virgin Blue next time!

Qantas strike causes major delays

Monday 30 March 2009 11:18  
James Thomson

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-travel/20090330-qantas-strike-causes-major-delays.html

An unexpected strike by Qantas baggage handlers has caused major delays to passengers travelling to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.  

Qantas baggage handlers, cleaners and caterers went on strike at 9.20 AESDT, apparently over the company’s plans to outsource jobs to a cheaper company.  

According to reports, up to 300 Qantas workers walked off the job, refusing to unload arriving planes but servicing aircraft due to depart.  

The striking workers said they would continue the protest until 1:00 (AESDT) because Qantas was docking their pay until then. 

Qantas strike slugs airports with delays

BEN SCHNEIDERS

March 31, 2009

WILDCAT strikes have led to extensive delays for passengers at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues.

A Qantas spokesman said most of the airline’s domestic flights were delayed yesterday after the unexpected industrial action at Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane airports.

The spokesman said Melbourne Airport also suffered disruptions — though less serious than elsewhere — because of the unlawful strike.

In one case a Melbourne flight was delayed by 90 minutes, but the more typical delays at Melbourne were less than half an hour.

In other parts of the country, thousands of passengers were affected by the industrial action, for which staff will be docked four hours’ pay.

The snap strike comes amid concerns from the Transport Workers Union about the outsourcing of jobs at Qantas and its subsidiary Jetstar, and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

Union federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein strongly rejected the union’s claims.

“If Mr Sheldon chooses to make that claim, all he is doing is cynically exploiting a tragedy that occurred in the T3 terminal last weekend,” he told reporters.

He defended the docking of pay. “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The union, in a statement yesterday afternoon, said its members “did not take the decision to stop work this morning lightly” and would remain “vigilant” about the safety of employees and passengers.

A Qantas spokesman later also denied union claims that hundreds of jobs were under threat after Jetstar moved to outsource work to a new contractor in Sydney, Hobart and Launceston. That contract begins in the next few months.

Air NZ may sue Qantas over strike

MATT O’SULLIVAN

June 29, 2009

AIR NEW ZEALAND is threatening to sue Qantas to recover millions of dollars of costs incurred last year when the Australian carrier’s engineers went on wild-cat strikes.

The 10-week-long stand-off between Qantas and its licensed aircraft engineers ended last July but its impact was felt for months afterwards because of the backlog of work it created. The industrial dispute was hugely damaging for Qantas’s reputation, causing a many flight cancellations and other scheduling problems over several months.

Air New Zealand, one of Qantas’s biggest customers, had to relocate some of its own engineers to Australia for more than eight months to work on its aircraft because of the dispute. The last remaining engineers returned home only two months ago.

Air New Zealand’s Australian general manager, John Harrison, said the airline would make a final decision on whether to take legal action against Qantas within the next week. “We are considering what to do with Qantas [in the recovery of costs] and that includes the option of legal action.”

Although Air New Zealand was exempt from paying some of the charges under its engineering contract with Qantas, the savings did not cover the total cost of relocating engineers, which included paying allowances and accommodating them here.

Mr Harrison declined to reveal the cost of the dispute but said it was “fairly substantial”. The Herald understands the costs reached into millions of dollars.

Air New Zealand and other airlines also bore the brunt of a wild-cat strike by Qantas baggage handlers at Australian airports in March to protest at the loss of at least 120 jobs through outsourcing. Air New Zealand had to accommodate hundreds of passengers who missed connecting flights and had to deal with mishandled bags.

TWU congratulates Qantas on $117m profit

August 19, 2009

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-business/twu-congratulates-qantas-on-117m-profit-20090819-eq9v.html

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) has congratulated Qantas on posting a $117 million profit, after agreeing to mediation with the airline on legal action over a snap strike in March.

The union praised the Qantas hierarchy and workers for turning a profit in a difficult year, but wants the company to talk to workers about $1.5 billion in proposed cuts.

“While we can take some comfort in Qantas saying they will not make further job cuts across the airline, we are still concerned over the way the company could be looking to save money,” TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said in a statement.

Lower costs “will put further pressure on safety and security, so we will be engaging with Qantas and the workforce over their plans for the future,” he said.

Mr Sheldon praised Qantas chief Alan Joyce, who took over from Geoff Dixon last year.

“Alan Joyce should also be congratulated on his performance,” Mr Sheldon said.

“To his credit he has managed to keep the ship afloat.”

He said the fact Qantas was able to post a profit in a year when the entire airline industry internationally was suffering was a credit to the airline’s staff.

Qantas announced a net profit for 2008/09 of $117 million, down from $969 million the previous year.

The airline and TWU have agreed to mediation after the case was listed for directions in the Federal Court in Sydney on Wednesday.

Qantas is suing the union and some officials over the March 30 strike which caused major delays across Australia and grounded all international flights out of Sydney for up to four hours.

At the time, the TWU accused Qantas of compromising safety and potentially risking a terrorist attack by failing to properly screen contractors before they began work.

Justice Michael Moore noted the Workplace Ombudsman was said to be investigating the case and that other legal proceedings were possibly being contemplated. 
 
 

Welcome to Infoshop News 
Wednesday, September 16 2009 @ 06:04 PM CDT

Australia: Sydney bus drivers defy union and take wildcat action

Sunday, August 30 2009 @ 10:54 PM CDT

Contributed by: WorkerFreedom

Views: 143

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Australia buses strikes Sydney unions wildcat strikes 
 
A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. 
 
Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible. 
 
Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies. 
 
The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area. 
 
Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions. 
 
The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables. 
 
What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”. 
 
In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable. 
 
The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business. 
 
During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions. 
 
The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards. 
 
Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year. 
 
By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy. 
 
Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers said they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks. 
 
One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, said: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship. 
 
“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better. 
 
“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way. 
 
“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.” 
 
The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services. 
 
“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times. 
 
“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.” 
 
Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues. 
 
“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.” 
 
A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 
 
http://libcom.org/news/sydney-bus-dri…n-27082009

Australia: Bus drivers strike in defiance of union

By Mike Head  
26 August 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/wild-a26.shtml

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes.

Drivers told the WSWS that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit.

Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible.

Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies.

The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area.

Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions.

The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables.

What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”.

In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable.

The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business.

During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions.

The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards.

Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year.

By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy.

Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers told the WSWS they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks.

One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, told the WSWS: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship.

“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better.

“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way.

“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.”

The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services.

“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times.

“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.”

Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues.

“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.”

A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 

Mudgee Guardian – The Weekly

Industry whiplash over jockey strike

BY DON MAHONEY

13/09/2009 9:09:00 PM

Locally based participants in the racing industry sympathise with jockeys’ concerns over the new whip rules, but also feel there could have been a better way of making their point.

Wild cat strike action last Thursday created havoc within the industry and caused the cancellation of many races.

Mudgee’s only locally based jockey Andrew Woods said country based jockeys could be forced out of the industry if strike action extends to country meetings.

“We do not get the big money that jockeys in the major centres get and we need to ride every week just to make ends meet,” Mr Woods said.

“However I totally understand where the jockeys are going on whip use. The padded whips that are now to be used do not damage the horse, they make noise more than anything.

“The new rules mean that jockeys have to change their riding styles when in a tight finish and that was always going to be hard for a jockey who has been riding for more than 20 years. However, we have to change with the times.”

Woods has ridden three winners since the new rules came into play and said he was able to win with just two hits with the whip and hands and heels riding.

On jockeys’  side

Andrew Baddock, thoroughbred manager for prominent owners Gooree Pastoral Company said he agrees that the jockeys have cause to take action.

“They (the jockeys) asked for a compromise and it wasn’t an unreasonable request,” Mr Baddock said.

“My opinion on the whole thing is they say the whips are padded now and don’t hurt the horses so I can’t see why there is any restriction on using the whip anyway because of this. I am totally behind the jockeys, it’s very tough on them.”

Mr Baddock said he felt racing authorities had over-reacted to the cries from the RSPCA.

“Racing has been going for over 100 years quite successfully,” he said.

“I’ve never known any of our horses to be harmed or hurt by whip use. I do think they (Australian Racing Bureau) has rolled over a bit and now I just wonder what will be next.

“Will there be calls to restrict the frequency of breeding mares or will they now try to ban two-year-old racing?

“The thoroughbred industry looks after their animals better than anyone, they are well cared for.

“I can’t see why the jockeys can’t use these padded whips to their discretion.”

New rules are too onerous

Gulgong Turf Club president Percy Thompson, who is also a trainer, said he believes that the new whip rules are too onerous.

“Jockeys only have a split second to make decisions and at the same time have to consider as well as safety concerns,” Mr Thompson said.

“They have a lot on their mind without having to count how many strides and how many times they have hit the horse with the whip.

“However, the jockeys should have set a date in advance of any strike so that owners and trainers weren’t disadvantaged in taking their horses to the track only to have strike action see their horse not start.”

However, Mr Thompson said the jockey’s actions came after the racing authorities refused to budge on a widely called for review of the new whip rules.

Jockeys right, strike wrong

Legendary trainer and horse breaker Max Crockett said he believed the jockeys are right in their call for an early review of the new whip rules.

“However, I was disappointed to see on Thursday that some trainers were abused after the strike was called,” Mr Crockett said.

“The way it was done was wrong and by acting this way they will get the battling jockeys who can’t afford to lose the income off side.

“The rules need change - jockeys should be allowed to use the whip at their discretion over the last 100 metres of a race.

“Some horses don’t need the whip while others think the race is over if the whip isn’t used and I estimate that is the case with 75 per cent of horses. Racing authorities are between a rock and a hard place with the RSPCA who would be better served to look at what happens to horses who aren’t breeding propositions in retirement.

Strike could destroy races

Mudgee Race Club chairman Max Walker said a strike like Thursday’s action at Hawkesbury, Ballarat and Ipswich at Mudgee’s race meeting last Sunday would have done untold damage.

“It would have turned our second best day on record to our worst ever,” Mr Walker said.

“It would have left the many new patrons who were on course that day with a bad taste in their mouth and maybe lose them to racing.

“I believe the issue should be able to be sorted out without taking industrial action.

“The whip dispute has the potential to damage the grass roots of race clubs and bring the whole racing industry down.”

Racing will not go forward

Speaking from Hong Kong, former leading country and now Mudgee trainer Tracey Bartley said he was glad to see jockeys sticking together on the issue of whip use.

“The new rules are ridiculous,” he said.

“I don’t want to see horses hurt, but under these new rules racing won’t go forward.”  
 

May 2007

AIRC orders Fairfax journalists to end wildcat strike

The AIRC has ordered Fairfax journalists and photographers in Sydney to end an unprotected wildcat strike that began yesterday, and return to work at 1pm. If they return, he has ordered the company to meet with union representatives at 4pm this afternoon..  

Fairfax workers to return to work

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,24270806-5005962,00.html

Article from: AAP

By Michelle Draper

August 31, 2008 06:33pm

STRIKING Fairfax Media journalists in Victoria and NSW will return to work tomorrow morning after threats to lock staff out were withdrawn.

Staff at Fairfax mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age walked off the job on Thursday over job cuts and pay negotiations.  
 
The employees met with union representatives today in Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra to discuss changes to pay and conditions offered by Fairfax.  
 
The meetings followed intense negotiations at the weekend between the journalists’ union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) - and Fairfax management.  
 
MEAA spokesman Mike Dobbie said the company had threatened legal action and to lock out employees on Monday morning unless union members agreed to accept the company’s revised enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) offer at today’s meetings.  
 
“They have all resolved, as they did back on Thursday, to return to work tomorrow, commencing at first shift Monday morning,” Mr Dobbie told AAP.  
 
“We await to see the formal offer for an EBA.”  
 
Mr Dobbie said the company withdrew its threats to lock out members and to sue the union and individuals for damages arising from the strike action.  
 
Fairfax Media chief executive David Kirk did not deny the threats had been made.  
 
“It is true to say we reserved all our rights legally and, while no final decisions have been taken, we would clearly have acted in what we thought were in the best interests of the mastheads and of the business as the situation evolved,” he told AAP.  
 
Locking out staff was part of a range of plans the company considered, he said, because the illegal “wildcat” strike placed Fairfax in a difficult position.  
 
Mr Kirk said members at today’s meetings had voted to accept the proposed EBA, which would need to be formalised by a full vote of members during the week, but Mr Dobbie denied any agreement had been reached.  
 
“There were no votes taken for anything because there is no formal offer from the company,” Mr Dobbie said.  
 
“We are awaiting a formal offer from the company in writing that we can put to the members for their consideration.”  
 
He said it was unlawful for the union to put anything to members today.  
 
The three-day strike action followed the announcement last week that Fairfax would slash 550 jobs, in Australia and New Zealand, saving the company $50 million.  
 
The cuts will include 165 editorial jobs across the two countries.  
 
Staff walked off the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald, The Age and Fairfax’s Sunday publications, the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.  
 
The dispute drew the concern today of Federal Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard.  
 
“I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market,” Ms Gillard told Network Ten.  
 
The first high-profile victim of the 550 job cuts came on Wednesday when Age editor Andrew Jaspan was sacked after four years at the paper’s helm.  
 
Fairfax also sacked columnist Mike Carlton from the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, after he refused to cross the picket line to write his weekly column for the Herald’s Saturday edition.  
 
Fairfax, which merged with Rural Press in 2007, recorded a net profit of $386.9 million for 2007-08, up from $263.51 million the previous year.
 

AWU and delegate fined over illegal strike action

http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/blogs/top_stories/archive/2009/03/30/awu-and-delegate-fined-over-illegal-strike-action.aspx 
 
 
Posted
Mar 30 2009, 09:50 PM by Lawyers Weekly

Illegal industrial action at the Lake Cowal gold mine has proven costly for the Australian Workers Union, resulting in fines totalling $55,000.

In a judgement handed down by the Federal Court on Friday 27 March, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was fined $28,000, the AWU New South Wales branch $18,000, and its delegate, Joseph O’Connor, $9000 for two unlawful strikes in October and November 2005.

Holding Redlich partner and workplace relations specialist Charles Power said the decision was a product of its time, and not necessarily relevant to current industry practice.

“This case involved something that took place in NSW about the time the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was established. I think you will find that industry parties in the construction sector have significantly changed their practices since then,” he said.

“Indeed the most recent report of published by the ABCC shows that its compliance activities in NSW have been negligible of late.”

Acting ABCC Commissioner Ross Dalgleish said the penalties reflected the seriousness of the unlawful industrial action that had occurred.

Justice Jagot found that industrial action in October and November 2005 contravened s.38 of the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (BCII Act), s.170MN of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WR Act) and the relevant Certified Agreement.   

- Laura MacIntyre

wilcat strike activity in australia - various medias

The problem of the mortgage

Although the Rioght to Strike is a human right that Australian govenrment agreed to years ago, the  liberal democractic institution of the UN and the volunteerism that underpins it, means there are little consequences when Workchoices and Fair Work effectively outlaw the right to strike.

Wild cat strikes should not be unlawful

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2009/03/wild-cat-strikes-should-not-be-unlawful/

In today’s press are reports of a so-called ‘wild-cat strike’ at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues. The term ‘wildcat’ is used derogatively against the workforce. Yet from the workers view they are not ‘wild-cats’ . They “did not take the decision to stop work lightly” and such a response is proper and legitimate when threatened with being made unemployed by a powerful corporation Qantas. OK, there is disruption to passengers.

I have argued strongly on this blog (see right to strike) that the workers and their union, here the TWU should not be subject to penal powers and fined with Qantas lawyers going to Court…rather the issues in dispute have to be resolved around the negotiating table.

WorkChoices IS NOT REPEALED. The DPM’s FAIR WORK ACT KEEPS THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME TO CRUSH STRIKES!

AND IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU WALK OFF FOR ONE HOUR FOR A PROTEST MEETING YOU ARE DOCKED FOUR HOURS! AND THIS IS KEPT BY THE DPM.

The TWU members concerns are reasonable and cannot be solved by arbitration as the Industrial Commission (unlike earlier years) is compelled to order the stoppage to cease. Arbitration of the issues is severely restricted under the ALP!

The concers are about the outsourcing of Qantas and Jetstar jobs and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

TWU federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks, reported in the Age today.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein said: “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The easy public game for corporations is to say the stoppage is un-lawful and to be penalised. Qantas has already enormous power…yet the ALP ensures that workers rights to protest are not protected!

Wild Cat Strikes Affect Qantas Passengers

31st March 2009

Published by Lis Sowerbutts at 3:43 pm under Australia News Edit This

http://australia.today.com/2009/03/31/wild-cat-strikes-affect-qantas-passengers/

The flying kangaroo as Qantas is sometimes known as, is more than a little embarassed by the chaos in airports around the country yesterday. In Perth passengers were locked out the Qantas terminal for hours after baggage handlers and other ground staff walked off the job with no notice. 

The union seems unclear on what their problem was- in the end its become clear that the issue is that JetStar, Qantas’s low-cost arm, had given their ground-handling contract to another group and thus put the Qantas staff out of a job and the union out of joint.

Already rated as the least reliable airline by Australian travellers you have to say that the union is doing themselves no favours - having just persuaded several thousand more passengers that hell will freeze over before they fly Qantas again. Virgin Blue and other operaters were unaffected.  Although the union may like to say that they are all about safety - the reality is that they appear to be all about protecting their members in the short-term and to hell with the big picture- like does Qantas even have a chance of surviving the current economic crises which has seen travel cut back significantly.

Qantas likes to pitch itself to the business traveller - but those are the ones’ who want a good chance of getting to their destination  on time -regardless of how nice the inflight service is concerned.  They may well be booking with Virgin Blue next time!

Qantas strike causes major delays

Monday 30 March 2009 11:18  
James Thomson

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-travel/20090330-qantas-strike-causes-major-delays.html

An unexpected strike by Qantas baggage handlers has caused major delays to passengers travelling to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.  

Qantas baggage handlers, cleaners and caterers went on strike at 9.20 AESDT, apparently over the company’s plans to outsource jobs to a cheaper company.  

According to reports, up to 300 Qantas workers walked off the job, refusing to unload arriving planes but servicing aircraft due to depart.  

The striking workers said they would continue the protest until 1:00 (AESDT) because Qantas was docking their pay until then. 

Qantas strike slugs airports with delays

BEN SCHNEIDERS

March 31, 2009

WILDCAT strikes have led to extensive delays for passengers at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues.

A Qantas spokesman said most of the airline’s domestic flights were delayed yesterday after the unexpected industrial action at Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane airports.

The spokesman said Melbourne Airport also suffered disruptions — though less serious than elsewhere — because of the unlawful strike.

In one case a Melbourne flight was delayed by 90 minutes, but the more typical delays at Melbourne were less than half an hour.

In other parts of the country, thousands of passengers were affected by the industrial action, for which staff will be docked four hours’ pay.

The snap strike comes amid concerns from the Transport Workers Union about the outsourcing of jobs at Qantas and its subsidiary Jetstar, and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

Union federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein strongly rejected the union’s claims.

“If Mr Sheldon chooses to make that claim, all he is doing is cynically exploiting a tragedy that occurred in the T3 terminal last weekend,” he told reporters.

He defended the docking of pay. “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The union, in a statement yesterday afternoon, said its members “did not take the decision to stop work this morning lightly” and would remain “vigilant” about the safety of employees and passengers.

A Qantas spokesman later also denied union claims that hundreds of jobs were under threat after Jetstar moved to outsource work to a new contractor in Sydney, Hobart and Launceston. That contract begins in the next few months.

Air NZ may sue Qantas over strike

MATT O’SULLIVAN

June 29, 2009

AIR NEW ZEALAND is threatening to sue Qantas to recover millions of dollars of costs incurred last year when the Australian carrier’s engineers went on wild-cat strikes.

The 10-week-long stand-off between Qantas and its licensed aircraft engineers ended last July but its impact was felt for months afterwards because of the backlog of work it created. The industrial dispute was hugely damaging for Qantas’s reputation, causing a many flight cancellations and other scheduling problems over several months.

Air New Zealand, one of Qantas’s biggest customers, had to relocate some of its own engineers to Australia for more than eight months to work on its aircraft because of the dispute. The last remaining engineers returned home only two months ago.

Air New Zealand’s Australian general manager, John Harrison, said the airline would make a final decision on whether to take legal action against Qantas within the next week. “We are considering what to do with Qantas [in the recovery of costs] and that includes the option of legal action.”

Although Air New Zealand was exempt from paying some of the charges under its engineering contract with Qantas, the savings did not cover the total cost of relocating engineers, which included paying allowances and accommodating them here.

Mr Harrison declined to reveal the cost of the dispute but said it was “fairly substantial”. The Herald understands the costs reached into millions of dollars.

Air New Zealand and other airlines also bore the brunt of a wild-cat strike by Qantas baggage handlers at Australian airports in March to protest at the loss of at least 120 jobs through outsourcing. Air New Zealand had to accommodate hundreds of passengers who missed connecting flights and had to deal with mishandled bags.

TWU congratulates Qantas on $117m profit

August 19, 2009

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-business/twu-congratulates-qantas-on-117m-profit-20090819-eq9v.html

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) has congratulated Qantas on posting a $117 million profit, after agreeing to mediation with the airline on legal action over a snap strike in March.

The union praised the Qantas hierarchy and workers for turning a profit in a difficult year, but wants the company to talk to workers about $1.5 billion in proposed cuts.

“While we can take some comfort in Qantas saying they will not make further job cuts across the airline, we are still concerned over the way the company could be looking to save money,” TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said in a statement.

Lower costs “will put further pressure on safety and security, so we will be engaging with Qantas and the workforce over their plans for the future,” he said.

Mr Sheldon praised Qantas chief Alan Joyce, who took over from Geoff Dixon last year.

“Alan Joyce should also be congratulated on his performance,” Mr Sheldon said.

“To his credit he has managed to keep the ship afloat.”

He said the fact Qantas was able to post a profit in a year when the entire airline industry internationally was suffering was a credit to the airline’s staff.

Qantas announced a net profit for 2008/09 of $117 million, down from $969 million the previous year.

The airline and TWU have agreed to mediation after the case was listed for directions in the Federal Court in Sydney on Wednesday.

Qantas is suing the union and some officials over the March 30 strike which caused major delays across Australia and grounded all international flights out of Sydney for up to four hours.

At the time, the TWU accused Qantas of compromising safety and potentially risking a terrorist attack by failing to properly screen contractors before they began work.

Justice Michael Moore noted the Workplace Ombudsman was said to be investigating the case and that other legal proceedings were possibly being contemplated. 
 
 

Welcome to Infoshop News 
Wednesday, September 16 2009 @ 06:04 PM CDT

Australia: Sydney bus drivers defy union and take wildcat action

Sunday, August 30 2009 @ 10:54 PM CDT

Contributed by: WorkerFreedom

Views: 143

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Australia buses strikes Sydney unions wildcat strikes 
 
A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. 
 
Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible. 
 
Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies. 
 
The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area. 
 
Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions. 
 
The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables. 
 
What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”. 
 
In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable. 
 
The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business. 
 
During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions. 
 
The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards. 
 
Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year. 
 
By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy. 
 
Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers said they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks. 
 
One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, said: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship. 
 
“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better. 
 
“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way. 
 
“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.” 
 
The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services. 
 
“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times. 
 
“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.” 
 
Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues. 
 
“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.” 
 
A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 
 
http://libcom.org/news/sydney-bus-dri…n-27082009

Australia: Bus drivers strike in defiance of union

By Mike Head  
26 August 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/wild-a26.shtml

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes.

Drivers told the WSWS that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit.

Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible.

Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies.

The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area.

Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions.

The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables.

What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”.

In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable.

The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business.

During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions.

The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards.

Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year.

By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy.

Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers told the WSWS they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks.

One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, told the WSWS: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship.

“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better.

“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way.

“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.”

The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services.

“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times.

“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.”

Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues.

“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.”

A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 

Mudgee Guardian – The Weekly

Industry whiplash over jockey strike

BY DON MAHONEY

13/09/2009 9:09:00 PM

Locally based participants in the racing industry sympathise with jockeys’ concerns over the new whip rules, but also feel there could have been a better way of making their point.

Wild cat strike action last Thursday created havoc within the industry and caused the cancellation of many races.

Mudgee’s only locally based jockey Andrew Woods said country based jockeys could be forced out of the industry if strike action extends to country meetings.

“We do not get the big money that jockeys in the major centres get and we need to ride every week just to make ends meet,” Mr Woods said.

“However I totally understand where the jockeys are going on whip use. The padded whips that are now to be used do not damage the horse, they make noise more than anything.

“The new rules mean that jockeys have to change their riding styles when in a tight finish and that was always going to be hard for a jockey who has been riding for more than 20 years. However, we have to change with the times.”

Woods has ridden three winners since the new rules came into play and said he was able to win with just two hits with the whip and hands and heels riding.

On jockeys’  side

Andrew Baddock, thoroughbred manager for prominent owners Gooree Pastoral Company said he agrees that the jockeys have cause to take action.

“They (the jockeys) asked for a compromise and it wasn’t an unreasonable request,” Mr Baddock said.

“My opinion on the whole thing is they say the whips are padded now and don’t hurt the horses so I can’t see why there is any restriction on using the whip anyway because of this. I am totally behind the jockeys, it’s very tough on them.”

Mr Baddock said he felt racing authorities had over-reacted to the cries from the RSPCA.

“Racing has been going for over 100 years quite successfully,” he said.

“I’ve never known any of our horses to be harmed or hurt by whip use. I do think they (Australian Racing Bureau) has rolled over a bit and now I just wonder what will be next.

“Will there be calls to restrict the frequency of breeding mares or will they now try to ban two-year-old racing?

“The thoroughbred industry looks after their animals better than anyone, they are well cared for.

“I can’t see why the jockeys can’t use these padded whips to their discretion.”

New rules are too onerous

Gulgong Turf Club president Percy Thompson, who is also a trainer, said he believes that the new whip rules are too onerous.

“Jockeys only have a split second to make decisions and at the same time have to consider as well as safety concerns,” Mr Thompson said.

“They have a lot on their mind without having to count how many strides and how many times they have hit the horse with the whip.

“However, the jockeys should have set a date in advance of any strike so that owners and trainers weren’t disadvantaged in taking their horses to the track only to have strike action see their horse not start.”

However, Mr Thompson said the jockey’s actions came after the racing authorities refused to budge on a widely called for review of the new whip rules.

Jockeys right, strike wrong

Legendary trainer and horse breaker Max Crockett said he believed the jockeys are right in their call for an early review of the new whip rules.

“However, I was disappointed to see on Thursday that some trainers were abused after the strike was called,” Mr Crockett said.

“The way it was done was wrong and by acting this way they will get the battling jockeys who can’t afford to lose the income off side.

“The rules need change - jockeys should be allowed to use the whip at their discretion over the last 100 metres of a race.

“Some horses don’t need the whip while others think the race is over if the whip isn’t used and I estimate that is the case with 75 per cent of horses. Racing authorities are between a rock and a hard place with the RSPCA who would be better served to look at what happens to horses who aren’t breeding propositions in retirement.

Strike could destroy races

Mudgee Race Club chairman Max Walker said a strike like Thursday’s action at Hawkesbury, Ballarat and Ipswich at Mudgee’s race meeting last Sunday would have done untold damage.

“It would have turned our second best day on record to our worst ever,” Mr Walker said.

“It would have left the many new patrons who were on course that day with a bad taste in their mouth and maybe lose them to racing.

“I believe the issue should be able to be sorted out without taking industrial action.

“The whip dispute has the potential to damage the grass roots of race clubs and bring the whole racing industry down.”

Racing will not go forward

Speaking from Hong Kong, former leading country and now Mudgee trainer Tracey Bartley said he was glad to see jockeys sticking together on the issue of whip use.

“The new rules are ridiculous,” he said.

“I don’t want to see horses hurt, but under these new rules racing won’t go forward.”  
 

May 2007

AIRC orders Fairfax journalists to end wildcat strike

The AIRC has ordered Fairfax journalists and photographers in Sydney to end an unprotected wildcat strike that began yesterday, and return to work at 1pm. If they return, he has ordered the company to meet with union representatives at 4pm this afternoon..  

Fairfax workers to return to work

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,24270806-5005962,00.html

Article from: AAP

By Michelle Draper

August 31, 2008 06:33pm

STRIKING Fairfax Media journalists in Victoria and NSW will return to work tomorrow morning after threats to lock staff out were withdrawn.

Staff at Fairfax mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age walked off the job on Thursday over job cuts and pay negotiations.  
 
The employees met with union representatives today in Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra to discuss changes to pay and conditions offered by Fairfax.  
 
The meetings followed intense negotiations at the weekend between the journalists’ union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) - and Fairfax management.  
 
MEAA spokesman Mike Dobbie said the company had threatened legal action and to lock out employees on Monday morning unless union members agreed to accept the company’s revised enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) offer at today’s meetings.  
 
“They have all resolved, as they did back on Thursday, to return to work tomorrow, commencing at first shift Monday morning,” Mr Dobbie told AAP.  
 
“We await to see the formal offer for an EBA.”  
 
Mr Dobbie said the company withdrew its threats to lock out members and to sue the union and individuals for damages arising from the strike action.  
 
Fairfax Media chief executive David Kirk did not deny the threats had been made.  
 
“It is true to say we reserved all our rights legally and, while no final decisions have been taken, we would clearly have acted in what we thought were in the best interests of the mastheads and of the business as the situation evolved,” he told AAP.  
 
Locking out staff was part of a range of plans the company considered, he said, because the illegal “wildcat” strike placed Fairfax in a difficult position.  
 
Mr Kirk said members at today’s meetings had voted to accept the proposed EBA, which would need to be formalised by a full vote of members during the week, but Mr Dobbie denied any agreement had been reached.  
 
“There were no votes taken for anything because there is no formal offer from the company,” Mr Dobbie said.  
 
“We are awaiting a formal offer from the company in writing that we can put to the members for their consideration.”  
 
He said it was unlawful for the union to put anything to members today.  
 
The three-day strike action followed the announcement last week that Fairfax would slash 550 jobs, in Australia and New Zealand, saving the company $50 million.  
 
The cuts will include 165 editorial jobs across the two countries.  
 
Staff walked off the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald, The Age and Fairfax’s Sunday publications, the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.  
 
The dispute drew the concern today of Federal Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard.  
 
“I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market,” Ms Gillard told Network Ten.  
 
The first high-profile victim of the 550 job cuts came on Wednesday when Age editor Andrew Jaspan was sacked after four years at the paper’s helm.  
 
Fairfax also sacked columnist Mike Carlton from the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, after he refused to cross the picket line to write his weekly column for the Herald’s Saturday edition.  
 
Fairfax, which merged with Rural Press in 2007, recorded a net profit of $386.9 million for 2007-08, up from $263.51 million the previous year.
 

AWU and delegate fined over illegal strike action

http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/blogs/top_stories/archive/2009/03/30/awu-and-delegate-fined-over-illegal-strike-action.aspx 
 
 
Posted
Mar 30 2009, 09:50 PM by Lawyers Weekly

Illegal industrial action at the Lake Cowal gold mine has proven costly for the Australian Workers Union, resulting in fines totalling $55,000.

In a judgement handed down by the Federal Court on Friday 27 March, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was fined $28,000, the AWU New South Wales branch $18,000, and its delegate, Joseph O’Connor, $9000 for two unlawful strikes in October and November 2005.

Holding Redlich partner and workplace relations specialist Charles Power said the decision was a product of its time, and not necessarily relevant to current industry practice.

“This case involved something that took place in NSW about the time the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was established. I think you will find that industry parties in the construction sector have significantly changed their practices since then,” he said.

“Indeed the most recent report of published by the ABCC shows that its compliance activities in NSW have been negligible of late.”

Acting ABCC Commissioner Ross Dalgleish said the penalties reflected the seriousness of the unlawful industrial action that had occurred.

Justice Jagot found that industrial action in October and November 2005 contravened s.38 of the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (BCII Act), s.170MN of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WR Act) and the relevant Certified Agreement.   

- Laura MacIntyre

wilcat strike activity in australia - various medias

The problem of the mortgage

Although the Rioght to Strike is a human right that Australian govenrment agreed to years ago, the  liberal democractic institution of the UN and the volunteerism that underpins it, means there are little consequences when Workchoices and Fair Work effectively outlaw the right to strike.

Wild cat strikes should not be unlawful

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2009/03/wild-cat-strikes-should-not-be-unlawful/

In today’s press are reports of a so-called ‘wild-cat strike’ at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues. The term ‘wildcat’ is used derogatively against the workforce. Yet from the workers view they are not ‘wild-cats’ . They “did not take the decision to stop work lightly” and such a response is proper and legitimate when threatened with being made unemployed by a powerful corporation Qantas. OK, there is disruption to passengers.

I have argued strongly on this blog (see right to strike) that the workers and their union, here the TWU should not be subject to penal powers and fined with Qantas lawyers going to Court…rather the issues in dispute have to be resolved around the negotiating table.

WorkChoices IS NOT REPEALED. The DPM’s FAIR WORK ACT KEEPS THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME TO CRUSH STRIKES!

AND IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU WALK OFF FOR ONE HOUR FOR A PROTEST MEETING YOU ARE DOCKED FOUR HOURS! AND THIS IS KEPT BY THE DPM.

The TWU members concerns are reasonable and cannot be solved by arbitration as the Industrial Commission (unlike earlier years) is compelled to order the stoppage to cease. Arbitration of the issues is severely restricted under the ALP!

The concers are about the outsourcing of Qantas and Jetstar jobs and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

TWU federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks, reported in the Age today.

“Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred,” Mr Sheldon said.

“If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed.”

Qantas spokesman David Epstein said: “The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours.”

The easy public game for corporations is to say the stoppage is un-lawful and to be penalised. Qantas has already enormous power…yet the ALP ensures that workers rights to protest are not protected!

Wild Cat Strikes Affect Qantas Passengers

31st March 2009

Published by Lis Sowerbutts at 3:43 pm under Australia News Edit This

http://australia.today.com/2009/03/31/wild-cat-strikes-affect-qantas-passengers/

The flying kangaroo as Qantas is sometimes known as, is more than a little embarassed by the chaos in airports around the country yesterday. In Perth passengers were locked out the Qantas terminal for hours after baggage handlers and other ground staff walked off the job with no notice. 

The union seems unclear on what their problem was- in the end its become clear that the issue is that JetStar, Qantas’s low-cost arm, had given their ground-handling contract to another group and thus put the Qantas staff out of a job and the union out of joint.

Already rated as the least reliable airline by Australian travellers you have to say that the union is doing themselves no favours - having just persuaded several thousand more passengers that hell will freeze over before they fly Qantas again. Virgin Blue and other operaters were unaffected.  Although the union may like to say that they are all about safety - the reality is that they appear to be all about protecting their members in the short-term and to hell with the big picture- like does Qantas even have a chance of surviving the current economic crises which has seen travel cut back significantly.

Qantas likes to pitch itself to the business traveller - but those are the ones’ who want a good chance of getting to their destination  on time -regardless of how nice the inflight service is concerned.  They may well be booking with Virgin Blue next time!

Qantas strike causes major delays

Monday 30 March 2009 11:18  
James Thomson

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-travel/20090330-qantas-strike-causes-major-delays.html

An unexpected strike by Qantas baggage handlers has caused major delays to passengers travelling to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.  

Qantas baggage handlers, cleaners and caterers went on strike at 9.20 AESDT, apparently over the company’s plans to outsource jobs to a cheaper company.  

According to reports, up to 300 Qantas workers walked off the job, refusing to unload arriving planes but servicing aircraft due to depart.  

The striking workers said they would continue the protest until 1:00 (AESDT) because Qantas was docking their pay until then. 

Qantas strike slugs airports with delays

BEN SCHNEIDERS

March 31, 2009

WILDCAT strikes have led to extensive delays for passengers at Australian airports after hundreds of baggage handlers and other staff walked off the job yesterday morning in response to concerns about outsourcing and security issues.

A Qantas spokesman said most of the airline’s domestic flights were delayed yesterday after the unexpected industrial action at Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane airports.

The spokesman said Melbourne Airport also suffered disruptions — though less serious than elsewhere — because of the unlawful strike.

In one case a Melbourne flight was delayed by 90 minutes, but the more typical delays at Melbourne were less than half an hour.

In other parts of the country, thousands of passengers were affected by the industrial action, for which staff will be docked four hours’ pay.

The snap strike comes amid concerns from the Transport Workers Union about the outsourcing of jobs at Qantas and its subsidiary Jetstar, and about the airline’s security practices after the recent bikie brawl at Sydney airport.

Union federal secretary Tony Sheldon said up to 25 per cent of private contract employees were not undergoing proper security checks.

"Quite clearly, if a plane is at 20,000 feet in the air and it blows up, it will be Qantas’ fault that that’s occurred," Mr Sheldon said.

"If it is an explosion, or a device that explodes at one of our airports, it will be Qantas that the finger will be clearly pointed at — but unfortunately it will be the workforce and innocent bystanders that will be killed."

Qantas spokesman David Epstein strongly rejected the union’s claims.

"If Mr Sheldon chooses to make that claim, all he is doing is cynically exploiting a tragedy that occurred in the T3 terminal last weekend," he told reporters.

He defended the docking of pay. "The law is quite simple: if people walk off in unauthorised industrial action, they don’t get paid for four hours."

The union, in a statement yesterday afternoon, said its members "did not take the decision to stop work this morning lightly" and would remain "vigilant" about the safety of employees and passengers.

A Qantas spokesman later also denied union claims that hundreds of jobs were under threat after Jetstar moved to outsource work to a new contractor in Sydney, Hobart and Launceston. That contract begins in the next few months.

Air NZ may sue Qantas over strike

MATT O’SULLIVAN

June 29, 2009

AIR NEW ZEALAND is threatening to sue Qantas to recover millions of dollars of costs incurred last year when the Australian carrier’s engineers went on wild-cat strikes.

The 10-week-long stand-off between Qantas and its licensed aircraft engineers ended last July but its impact was felt for months afterwards because of the backlog of work it created. The industrial dispute was hugely damaging for Qantas’s reputation, causing a many flight cancellations and other scheduling problems over several months.

Air New Zealand, one of Qantas’s biggest customers, had to relocate some of its own engineers to Australia for more than eight months to work on its aircraft because of the dispute. The last remaining engineers returned home only two months ago.

Air New Zealand’s Australian general manager, John Harrison, said the airline would make a final decision on whether to take legal action against Qantas within the next week. "We are considering what to do with Qantas [in the recovery of costs] and that includes the option of legal action."

Although Air New Zealand was exempt from paying some of the charges under its engineering contract with Qantas, the savings did not cover the total cost of relocating engineers, which included paying allowances and accommodating them here.

Mr Harrison declined to reveal the cost of the dispute but said it was "fairly substantial". The Herald understands the costs reached into millions of dollars.

Air New Zealand and other airlines also bore the brunt of a wild-cat strike by Qantas baggage handlers at Australian airports in March to protest at the loss of at least 120 jobs through outsourcing. Air New Zealand had to accommodate hundreds of passengers who missed connecting flights and had to deal with mishandled bags.

TWU congratulates Qantas on $117m profit

August 19, 2009

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-business/twu-congratulates-qantas-on-117m-profit-20090819-eq9v.html

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) has congratulated Qantas on posting a $117 million profit, after agreeing to mediation with the airline on legal action over a snap strike in March.

The union praised the Qantas hierarchy and workers for turning a profit in a difficult year, but wants the company to talk to workers about $1.5 billion in proposed cuts.

"While we can take some comfort in Qantas saying they will not make further job cuts across the airline, we are still concerned over the way the company could be looking to save money," TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said in a statement.

Lower costs "will put further pressure on safety and security, so we will be engaging with Qantas and the workforce over their plans for the future," he said.

Mr Sheldon praised Qantas chief Alan Joyce, who took over from Geoff Dixon last year.

"Alan Joyce should also be congratulated on his performance," Mr Sheldon said.

"To his credit he has managed to keep the ship afloat."

He said the fact Qantas was able to post a profit in a year when the entire airline industry internationally was suffering was a credit to the airline’s staff.

Qantas announced a net profit for 2008/09 of $117 million, down from $969 million the previous year.

The airline and TWU have agreed to mediation after the case was listed for directions in the Federal Court in Sydney on Wednesday.

Qantas is suing the union and some officials over the March 30 strike which caused major delays across Australia and grounded all international flights out of Sydney for up to four hours.

At the time, the TWU accused Qantas of compromising safety and potentially risking a terrorist attack by failing to properly screen contractors before they began work.

Justice Michael Moore noted the Workplace Ombudsman was said to be investigating the case and that other legal proceedings were possibly being contemplated. 
 
 

Welcome to Infoshop News 
Wednesday, September 16 2009 @ 06:04 PM CDT

Australia: Sydney bus drivers defy union and take wildcat action

Sunday, August 30 2009 @ 10:54 PM CDT

Contributed by: WorkerFreedom

Views: 143

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Australia buses strikes Sydney unions wildcat strikes 
 
A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes. 
 
Drivers said that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit. 
 
Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible. 
 
Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies. 
 
The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area. 
 
Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions. 
 
The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables. 
 
What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”. 
 
In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable. 
 
The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business. 
 
During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions. 
 
The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards. 
 
Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year. 
 
By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy. 
 
Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers said they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks. 
 
One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, said: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship. 
 
“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better. 
 
“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way. 
 
“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.” 
 
The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services. 
 
“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times. 
 
“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.” 
 
Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues. 
 
“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.” 
 
A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 
 
http://libcom.org/news/sydney-bus-dri…n-27082009

Australia: Bus drivers strike in defiance of union

By Mike Head  
26 August 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/wild-a26.shtml

A six-hour strike by 130 bus drivers in western Sydney on Monday morning, carried out in defiance of their union, has produced furious denunciations in the media and from an industrial court judge. The drivers walked out at the Busways Blacktown depot at 3.30 a.m. against the imposition of new timetables that would impose shorter times for routes.

Drivers told the WSWS that the timetables, due to commence in October, would be impossible to meet, forcing them to run late, which would not only inconvenience and anger passengers but cut short the drivers’ break periods. The workers said they would be under enormous pressure to drive over the speed limit.

Months of trade union talks with the company have failed to halt the onerous new conditions. Angered by the lack of support from the Transport Workers Union (TWU), the drivers conducted their own stoppage, giving no warning to the union or management. The TWU opposed the strike and intervened to end it as quickly as possible.

Drivers said the timetables would add to Sydney’s public transport shambles, which has seen the state Labor government in New South Wales cut the frequency of rail services and scrap plans to extend the rail network to new outlying suburbs. In many outer western and southern suburbs, the so-called public transport system depends almost entirely on heavily government-subsidised private bus companies.

The Busways Group is a large private operator, holding lucrative state government contracts to run more than 600 buses, and employ more than 700 drivers, on approximately 100 routes in the Sydney and New South Wales Central Coast regions, and around 30 more in the state’s mid-North Coast area.

Like employers across the board, Busways is utilising the economic crisis, with the backing of the state government, to demand a productivity speed-up. With unemployment continuing to rise throughout Sydney’s western, working class suburbs, the company is actively recruiting drivers willing to accept the new conditions.

The mass media launched a scathing attack on the drivers for halting services from the depot during the morning peak period, claiming that their actions had seriously disrupted and traumatised commuters, as well as school children and parents. As drivers pointed out, this was sheer hypocrisy as passengers were frequently left stranded by delays caused by the existing, already over-stretched timetables.

What really provoked the media’s wrath was that the drivers had defied the TWU and taken matters into their own hands. The tabloid Daily Telegraph labeled them “rogue drivers” who had acted “without consulting any official of the Transport Workers Union”. An editorial declared that a “bolshie minority” had staged a “wildcat strike” because their “tempers led them to ignore even the instructions from their own union”.

In the state Industrial Relations Commission, Justice Frank Marks accused the drivers of “industrial thuggery of the worst kind … in the face of opposition from their elected delegate and without consulting any paid TWU official”. The judge ordered the TWU and its members not to take any further industrial action over the timetable.

The response betrays considerable nervousness on the part of the official establishment that the drivers could set an example that would encourage other sections of workers to defy the trade unions and take independent action to defend their jobs and conditions. Over the past three decades, the unions have been the essential instrument in sabotaging any resistance by the working class to the pro-market agenda imposed by successive Coalition and Labor governments on behalf of big business.

During the past year, as the global recession has deepened, the TWU and its counterparts throughout the union movement have worked hand in hand with the Rudd Labor government to help companies large and small impose far-reaching cuts to jobs, working hours and conditions.

The reaction to a relatively small wildcat strike by Busways drivers reveals just how reliant governments and big business are on the unions. The reference to “bolshie” workers—that is, drawing a parallel between the Busways drivers and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917—reveals the growing concerns within ruling circles over the consequences of sharpening social tensions produced by worsening unemployment and deteriorating living standards.

Like other sections of the working class, private bus drivers have been forced to sacrifice pay and conditions. After years of TWU complicity in the introduction of “flexible” conditions, drivers now receive virtually no penalty rates, regardless of how early, late or broken their shifts. Despite the intense pressure of constantly driving in heavy traffic, and being responsible for the safety of thousands of passengers daily, they are paid base rates of just $50,000 or so a year.

By contrast, the Rowe family, which owns the Busways Group, is thought to be one of the wealthiest in Australia. The extent of its profits, and the government subsidies it receives, is shrouded in secrecy.

Although the Busways management has now agreed to further talks on the proposed timetables, and despite judge Marks’s no-strike order, drivers told the WSWS they would strike again unless the company dropped its demands. The TWU, on the other hand, has worked to isolate the Blacktown depot drivers, even from the workers at the company’s 15 other depots, let alone other bus drivers and transport workers, all of whom face similar attacks.

One driver, who has worked for Busways for 10 years, told the WSWS: “We acted out of frustration after 10 years of fighting oppressive and deficient timetables. The new timetables will be a nightmare. The TWU did not condone the strike, and said we could be fined $50,000. It’s like a dictatorship.

“The union is useless, and there’s nowhere for drivers to go. The government pays the private bus companies by contracts and it wants us to be slaves—it doesn’t want us to be paid better.

“I am very dubious toward the union and I am disillusioned by all governments—like most people. Every time, we vote governments out, rather than vote anyone in. The Liberals screw us one way, and Labor does it another way.

“There are drivers who have been here for 20 years and it’s the same problem. The company gives us routes that take 40 minutes, and allows us only 35 minutes. I have one long run now from Blacktown to Riverstone where I am often 20 minutes late. The best I have ever done is 10 minutes late.”

The driver condemned the remarks of Judge Marks, calling them “biased and fascist”. He also answered the judge’s claim that the new timetables were required to match planned reduced train services.

“We are trying to do something about it—to stop the public transport chaos. The new timetables have nothing to do with the new train timetables; the government is also introducing new bus routes. The length of time we are given to drive the routes is not related to the train times.

“We are fed up. We have been through the system to try to get changes and nothing ever happens. We can’t get the union to do anything about anything. The purpose of unions was supposed to be to increase conditions, not decrease them.”

Another driver, who has worked for the company for five years, was bitter about the TWU’s role. “The union blamed the workers for going on strike. We decided that we couldn’t wait for the union. The union is only worried about the $60 a month we pay in dues.

“The new timetable means less time to complete our routes. We will run late and be blamed by the public. Because we’ll run late, there’ll also be less break time.”

A Busways mechanic voiced support for the drivers’ action. “Everyone has the right to express their grievances, or it’s not a free country. When I get called out for bus repairs, I see the pressure the drivers are under. It’s bad enough to be under pressure from the public, without being under pressure from the company as well.” 

Mudgee Guardian – The Weekly

Industry whiplash over jockey strike

BY DON MAHONEY

13/09/2009 9:09:00 PM

Locally based participants in the racing industry sympathise with jockeys’ concerns over the new whip rules, but also feel there could have been a better way of making their point.

Wild cat strike action last Thursday created havoc within the industry and caused the cancellation of many races.

Mudgee’s only locally based jockey Andrew Woods said country based jockeys could be forced out of the industry if strike action extends to country meetings.

“We do not get the big money that jockeys in the major centres get and we need to ride every week just to make ends meet,” Mr Woods said.

“However I totally understand where the jockeys are going on whip use. The padded whips that are now to be used do not damage the horse, they make noise more than anything.

“The new rules mean that jockeys have to change their riding styles when in a tight finish and that was always going to be hard for a jockey who has been riding for more than 20 years. However, we have to change with the times.”

Woods has ridden three winners since the new rules came into play and said he was able to win with just two hits with the whip and hands and heels riding.

On jockeys’  side

Andrew Baddock, thoroughbred manager for prominent owners Gooree Pastoral Company said he agrees that the jockeys have cause to take action.

“They (the jockeys) asked for a compromise and it wasn’t an unreasonable request,” Mr Baddock said.

“My opinion on the whole thing is they say the whips are padded now and don’t hurt the horses so I can’t see why there is any restriction on using the whip anyway because of this. I am totally behind the jockeys, it’s very tough on them.”

Mr Baddock said he felt racing authorities had over-reacted to the cries from the RSPCA.

“Racing has been going for over 100 years quite successfully,” he said.

“I’ve never known any of our horses to be harmed or hurt by whip use. I do think they (Australian Racing Bureau) has rolled over a bit and now I just wonder what will be next.

“Will there be calls to restrict the frequency of breeding mares or will they now try to ban two-year-old racing?

“The thoroughbred industry looks after their animals better than anyone, they are well cared for.

“I can’t see why the jockeys can’t use these padded whips to their discretion.”

New rules are too onerous

Gulgong Turf Club president Percy Thompson, who is also a trainer, said he believes that the new whip rules are too onerous.

“Jockeys only have a split second to make decisions and at the same time have to consider as well as safety concerns,” Mr Thompson said.

“They have a lot on their mind without having to count how many strides and how many times they have hit the horse with the whip.

“However, the jockeys should have set a date in advance of any strike so that owners and trainers weren’t disadvantaged in taking their horses to the track only to have strike action see their horse not start.”

However, Mr Thompson said the jockey’s actions came after the racing authorities refused to budge on a widely called for review of the new whip rules.

Jockeys right, strike wrong

Legendary trainer and horse breaker Max Crockett said he believed the jockeys are right in their call for an early review of the new whip rules.

“However, I was disappointed to see on Thursday that some trainers were abused after the strike was called,” Mr Crockett said.

“The way it was done was wrong and by acting this way they will get the battling jockeys who can’t afford to lose the income off side.

“The rules need change - jockeys should be allowed to use the whip at their discretion over the last 100 metres of a race.

“Some horses don’t need the whip while others think the race is over if the whip isn’t used and I estimate that is the case with 75 per cent of horses. Racing authorities are between a rock and a hard place with the RSPCA who would be better served to look at what happens to horses who aren’t breeding propositions in retirement.

Strike could destroy races

Mudgee Race Club chairman Max Walker said a strike like Thursday’s action at Hawkesbury, Ballarat and Ipswich at Mudgee’s race meeting last Sunday would have done untold damage.

“It would have turned our second best day on record to our worst ever,” Mr Walker said.

“It would have left the many new patrons who were on course that day with a bad taste in their mouth and maybe lose them to racing.

“I believe the issue should be able to be sorted out without taking industrial action.

“The whip dispute has the potential to damage the grass roots of race clubs and bring the whole racing industry down.”

Racing will not go forward

Speaking from Hong Kong, former leading country and now Mudgee trainer Tracey Bartley said he was glad to see jockeys sticking together on the issue of whip use.

“The new rules are ridiculous,” he said.

“I don’t want to see horses hurt, but under these new rules racing won’t go forward.”  
 

May 2007

AIRC orders Fairfax journalists to end wildcat strike

The AIRC has ordered Fairfax journalists and photographers in Sydney to end an unprotected wildcat strike that began yesterday, and return to work at 1pm. If they return, he has ordered the company to meet with union representatives at 4pm this afternoon..  

Fairfax workers to return to work

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,24270806-5005962,00.html

Article from: AAP

By Michelle Draper

August 31, 2008 06:33pm

STRIKING Fairfax Media journalists in Victoria and NSW will return to work tomorrow morning after threats to lock staff out were withdrawn.

Staff at Fairfax mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age walked off the job on Thursday over job cuts and pay negotiations.  
 
The employees met with union representatives today in Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra to discuss changes to pay and conditions offered by Fairfax.  
 
The meetings followed intense negotiations at the weekend between the journalists’ union - the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) - and Fairfax management.  
 
MEAA spokesman Mike Dobbie said the company had threatened legal action and to lock out employees on Monday morning unless union members agreed to accept the company’s revised enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) offer at today’s meetings.  
 
"They have all resolved, as they did back on Thursday, to return to work tomorrow, commencing at first shift Monday morning," Mr Dobbie told AAP.  
 
"We await to see the formal offer for an EBA."  
 
Mr Dobbie said the company withdrew its threats to lock out members and to sue the union and individuals for damages arising from the strike action.  
 
Fairfax Media chief executive David Kirk did not deny the threats had been made.  
 
"It is true to say we reserved all our rights legally and, while no final decisions have been taken, we would clearly have acted in what we thought were in the best interests of the mastheads and of the business as the situation evolved," he told AAP.  
 
Locking out staff was part of a range of plans the company considered, he said, because the illegal "wildcat" strike placed Fairfax in a difficult position.  
 
Mr Kirk said members at today’s meetings had voted to accept the proposed EBA, which would need to be formalised by a full vote of members during the week, but Mr Dobbie denied any agreement had been reached.  
 
"There were no votes taken for anything because there is no formal offer from the company," Mr Dobbie said.  
 
"We are awaiting a formal offer from the company in writing that we can put to the members for their consideration."  
 
He said it was unlawful for the union to put anything to members today.  
 
The three-day strike action followed the announcement last week that Fairfax would slash 550 jobs, in Australia and New Zealand, saving the company $50 million.  
 
The cuts will include 165 editorial jobs across the two countries.  
 
Staff walked off the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, the Illawarra Mercury, the Newcastle Herald, The Age and Fairfax’s Sunday publications, the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.  
 
The dispute drew the concern today of Federal Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard.  
 
"I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market," Ms Gillard told Network Ten.  
 
The first high-profile victim of the 550 job cuts came on Wednesday when Age editor Andrew Jaspan was sacked after four years at the paper’s helm.  
 
Fairfax also sacked columnist Mike Carlton from the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, after he refused to cross the picket line to write his weekly column for the Herald’s Saturday edition.  
 
Fairfax, which merged with Rural Press in 2007, recorded a net profit of $386.9 million for 2007-08, up from $263.51 million the previous year.
 

AWU and delegate fined over illegal strike action

http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/blogs/top_stories/archive/2009/03/30/awu-and-delegate-fined-over-illegal-strike-action.aspx 
 
 
Posted
Mar 30 2009, 09:50 PM by Lawyers Weekly

Illegal industrial action at the Lake Cowal gold mine has proven costly for the Australian Workers Union, resulting in fines totalling $55,000.

In a judgement handed down by the Federal Court on Friday 27 March, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was fined $28,000, the AWU New South Wales branch $18,000, and its delegate, Joseph O’Connor, $9000 for two unlawful strikes in October and November 2005.

Holding Redlich partner and workplace relations specialist Charles Power said the decision was a product of its time, and not necessarily relevant to current industry practice.

"This case involved something that took place in NSW about the time the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) was established. I think you will find that industry parties in the construction sector have significantly changed their practices since then," he said.

"Indeed the most recent report of published by the ABCC shows that its compliance activities in NSW have been negligible of late."

Acting ABCC Commissioner Ross Dalgleish said the penalties reflected the seriousness of the unlawful industrial action that had occurred.

Justice Jagot found that industrial action in October and November 2005 contravened s.38 of the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (BCII Act), s.170MN of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WR Act) and the relevant Certified Agreement.   

- Laura MacIntyre

ANTI-MALTHUSIANISMs… contd

Up Lift <suspiciousasians@yahoo.co.uk> 
to climate09-int
show details
 7:13 am (54 minutes ago) 
lorna,

re: below - exactly what type of "intelligent policies" are we talking about, implemented by who, and at whom should they be directed?

"A reasonable objective is the reduction to population levels as they were before the widespread use of fossil fuels; that is, to one billion or less . This will be accomplished either by intelligent policies or inevitably by plague, famine, and warfare."

I could go into my concerns about overpopulation discourses - and how this is exactly why the climate justice action network is opening up discourses to be clear that many issues are interrelated and have the same source - but i will let leslie marmon silko do the talking from her book "the almanac of the dead"

"Clinton did not trust the so-called “defenders of Planet Earth.” Something about their choice of words made Clinton uneasy. Clinton was suspicious whenever he heard the word pollution. Human beings had been exterminated strictly for “health” purposes by Europeans too often. Lately Clinton had seen ads purchased by so-called “deep ecologists.” The ads blamed earth’s pollution not on industrial wastes – hydrocarbons and radiation – but on overpopulation. It was no coincidence the Green Party originated in Germany. “Too many people” meant “too many brown-skinned people.” Clinton could read between the lines. “Deep ecologists” invariably ended their magazine ads with “Stop immigration!” and “Close the borders!” Clinton had to chuckle. The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone."

Yaz

Basta de gritar contra al viento - toda palabra es ruido si no está acompañada de acción
Enough of shouting against the wind - all words are noise if not accompanied with action
                                         - Gloria Anzaldúa -

— On Thu, 1/10/09, Lorna Salzman <lsalzman1@verizon.net> wrote:

From: Lorna Salzman <lsalzman1@verizon.net>
Subject: [climate09-int] Climate Justice movement should incorporate this
To: lsalzman1@verizon.net
Date: Thursday, 1 October, 2009, 7:51 PM

Those organizing the protest at Copenhagen on global warming should use this manifesto as the foundation of their principles and statements.

LS

A Manifesto for Earth

             By                 
 
      Ted Mosquin, P.O. Box 279,
Lanark, Ontario K0G 1K0 Canada
Email:
mosquin@xplornet.com      and      J. Stan Rowe
(June 11, 1918 to April 6, 2004)

     
————————————————————————

This Manifesto has been published in the quarterly journal: ‘Biodiversity’ Volume 5, No. 1, pages 3 to 9, January/March 2004. The journal is owned by The Tropical Conservancy, a charitable organization whose address is 94 Four Seasons Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K2E 7S1. Subscriptions rates and back issues at URL: <www.tc-biodiversity.org> where an electronic version of the Manifesto will be available in the near future. A pdf file of the Manifesto (with graphics) can be downloaded at www.ecospherics.net/pages/EarthManifesto.pdf

Julie Graham — A Postcapitalist Politics

Saturday Night — 10.03.09 —  Julie Graham — A Postcapitalist Politics
for Difficult Times

1. About this Saturday
2. About Julie Graham
3. Community Economies Collective - Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures
4. Link to Gibson-Graham’s papers, books and projects

___________________________________________________
1. About this Saturday

What: Talk / Discussion with Julie Graham
When: Saturday 10.03.09 @ 7:00 pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
Who: Free and open to all

Julie Graham’s talk is both directly and indirectly related to two
previous events at 16Beaver: World Capitalist Crash Course with Loren
Goldner & Howie Seligman and Connective Mutations with Franco Berardi.
J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work offers an alternative, differentiated vision of
economy incorporating a rich plethora of non-capitalist economic
activities, and a political imaginary that envisions economic
transformation through place-based actions and the transformation of
subjects. Through collaborative action research with communities in the
US, Australia and Asia, J.K. Gibson-Graham demonstrate that it is possible
for individual and collective subjects to create innovative, participatory
economic institutions and practices. In chapter 6 of their most recent
book, A Postcapitalist Politics, “Cultivating Subjects for a Community
Economy,” they say, “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and
the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a
distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing,
thinking, feeling and moving bodies.”

Julie and Kath’s work presents a unique combination of grass roots
political activism and an intense theoretical engagement with a number of
traditions: political economy, feminist, queer and psychoanalytic theory,
cultural geography, and, most recently, Eastern teachings. Rather than
just talking about economies, their work engages the subjects of
economies, including ourselves.

We are sending this email out early with the hopes that you may be able to
read it for a more lively discussion.

___________________________________________________
2. About Julie Graham

Julie Graham is a scholar activist who teaches rethinking economy and
economic alternatives at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Under
the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham, she co-authored with Katherine Gibson The
End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy /(2nd edition, Minnesota, 2006), which challenges the usual vision
of capitalism as the dominant or only viable form of economy, and A
Postcapitalist Politics (Minnesota, 2006), which focuses on building
community economies in the face of globalization. Over the past 20 years
she has been engaged in research, activism and teaching related to diverse
development pathways and community economies, including the economy of
generosity that is fueled by gifts of labor, goods and money; the
non-capitalist market economy made up of worker collectives and
self-employed individuals; and the social economy comprised of non-profits
and alternative capitalist businesses. She is a founding member of the
Community Economies Collective, a university-based group involved in
building community economies in Australia, the US, and the Asia Pacific
region.

___________________________________________________
3. Community Economies Collective, "Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures,"

IMAGINING AND ENACTING NONCAPITALIST FUTURES

The Community Economies Collective

Feminists…want to leave their husbands, abandon their children, become
lesbians, practice witchcraft, and overthrow capitalism. (Pat Buchanan)

Inspiring, isn’t it? Imagine if rather than having to "overthrow"
capitalism (now a virtually unimaginable project) leftists could pursue
the other revolutionary options available to Buchanan’s feminists— what if
we could leave capitalism, abandon capitalism, become socialists, practice
socialism? What follows is the unfinished story of such an imagining. It’s
the story of a search—for a new way of thinking socialism and a new way of
performing it. It’s also the story of a group of people who began a
research project together and became a desiring collectivity.  We started
out, embarrassingly, with no real desire for “socialism.” Yet maybe that’s
not so surprising. Over the last hundred years, the word has been drained
of utopian content and no longer serves, as it once did, to convene and
catalyze the left. This makes it difficult even to speak of “the left” or
to use the pronoun “we” with any confidence or commitment. As
self-identified leftists at the end of the 20th century, we found
ourselves tongue-tied, not knowing who or what we might speak for. But
what if the current dispersed and disidentified state of the left could be
seen as an opportune reversal, and the absence of a mobilizing vision
could be read as a new kind of presence? If formerly there was certainty
(if not unanimity) among leftists about the lineaments of a desirable
society, now there is silence, tentativeness, and openness to possibility.
The project of creating alternatives has become a voyage to unknown
destinations, accompanied by unfamiliar or unexpected companions.   In
this vacant/pregnant environment our group came to life in 1997—a
collection of students, postdocs and faculty members, loosely knit across
continents, who hoped to become desiring economic subjects of a
“socialist” sort (even if that initially meant little to us). Without a
destination we set forth, tired of waiting for a revolution we didn’t want
and tired of waiting generally. From the perspective of a more literate
moment (after many courses and reading groups), it seems clear to us now
that we were embarking on what William Connolly has called a “politics of
becoming”3—a process through which we would not only begin to envision
other worlds, but also cultivate ourselves and others as possible
inhabitants.

Legacy

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing
deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late
capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.4
Seeking a politics of desire and invention, we found the prevailing (left)
economic imagination to be a colonized territory, offering us very little
in the way of models or alternatives. Think about “socialism,” for
example, which bears the unbearable burden of providing a complete and
total alternative to capitalism, itself envisioned as total and complete.
If capitalism is characterized by private ownership and market relations,
socialism must entail state ownership and non-market allocation. Yet
socialism cannot simply present itself as capitalism’s opposite. It must
also be its equivalent—expansive yet sustainable, efficient but not
exploitative, it must have capitalism’s strengths without its weaknesses.
To its great disadvantage, socialism has been largely defined by
capitalism, as its opposing counterpart and suitable replacement. And the
project of building socialism has been similarly constrained. To the
extent that capitalism is understood as a systemic form of economy, the
enactment of socialism is a task of systemic transformation. Before
socialism can be constructed, a capitalist totality must "break down" or
be "overthrown." We wanted to step outside the confines of economic
monism, where capitalism is everywhere and its opposite (a now discredited
socialism) is the only alternative. This would require reading the
economic landscape through a lens of difference rather than sameness,
enabling ourselves to see capitalist and noncapitalist (even socialist)
activities coexisting there. If we could locate noncapitalist activities
here and now, if we could see them as prevalent and sustaining, perhaps we
could find more possibilities of participating in their creation. Perhaps
too the imagined scale and temporality of socialist politics could undergo
a shift, becoming more partial and proximate.

Rereading the economy

In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) J.K. Gibson-Graham argues that
representations of capitalism constrain our political imaginations and
economic possibilities. If we understand capitalism as necessarily
expansive and naturally dominant, we eliminate the imaginative space for
alternatives and the rationale for their enactment. It seems that we need
to conceptualize the economy differently in order to enact a different
economy. More specifically, we need to de-naturalize capitalist dominance
and to represent noncapitalist forms of economy (including ones we might
value and desire) as existing and emerging, and as possible to create.
Rereading the economy does not mean simply investigating the interstices
and bringing minority practices to light; it involves opening up the
entire economic space to resignification. Fortunately there are many
others to guide us in such a radical undertaking. Most recently, feminist
theorists have produced a powerful critique of conventional economic
representation and an accompanying re-visioning of “the economy.” On the
basis of accountings of unpaid labor performed in households and
neighborhoods (including childcare and housework), feminists argue that as
much as 50 percent of all economic activity in both rich and poor
countries is excluded from labor force statistics and national income and
product accounts. Calling upon a time-honored definition of economic
activity, their intervention helps us to see the discursivity and
contingency (not to mention interestedness) of concepts of economy. It
reminds us that to call a society or economy "capitalist" is an act of
categorical violence, one that obliterates from view the economic activity
that engages more people for more hours of the day over more years of
their lives than any other.

A diagram from a popular radical economics textbook conveys the point
visually:    (see PDF)

To the extent that we think of capitalism as coextensive with commodity
production, capitalism occupies no more than half the economic space. But,
as Bowles and Edwards point out, not all commodity production can be
considered capitalist (that is, if we understand capitalism as involving
commodity production by free wage labor under exploitative conditions in
which the surplus is appropriated by nonproducers). Commodities are just
goods and services produced for a market—they can be produced under a
variety of different production relations. Slaves (unfree and unpaid)
produced cotton for a market in the antebellum US south. Worker
collectives (who appropriate their own surplus), self-employed people
(also self-appropriating and thus not exploited), and slaves (without
freedom of contract) in the prison industry today produce goods and
services for a market, but not under capitalist relations of production.
In this reading, perhaps 40 percent of the total product of the US economy
is produced under capitalism. That allows a lot of room for other kinds of
things in the social space of economy. The project of rereading the
economy depends on the familiar (to Marxists at least) proposition that
knowledge is neither neutral nor singular; instead multiple, politically
inflected knowledges coexist in unstable relations of dominance and
subordination. Rereading the economy entails excavating subjugated
knowledges, both academic and popular, and drawing upon them as
resources—to bring what is unsayable into language and what is hidden into
visibility.  Rereading is necessary to empower novel social and political
possibilities but it will never be sufficient, as those who are impatient
with language activism frequently remind us. Moreover, it exposes us to
the dangers of intellectual arrogance and social isolation. Nevertheless
we pursue it because we feel deeply that representation is powerful and
that visibility as a project has transformative force (this is something
the queer contingent in our group will not allow us to forget or
underestimate). Part of fostering a different economy involves cultivating
a language of economic difference, within which alternative economic
projects can be conceived, and through which alternative economic subjects
can be validated and come to self-recognition.

To continue reading please download …

Community Economies Collective, "Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures," Socialist Review, Vol. 28, no. 3+4 (2001).

http://www.sduk.us/beaver/community_economies_collective.pdf

___________________________________________________
4. Link to Gibson-Graham’s papers, books and projects

www.communityeconomies.org

__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
New York, NY 10004

for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org

TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry

my rant against acf’s malthusianism

quick response. re: ACF’s Malthusianism view

re: a more radical refute would be better.

some points on ACF
- not only racist but also a very classist and anti-woman stance. Most
of the people displaced are poor women, often peasantry or indigenous
peoples and if not also workers or excluded from the global economy in
some way. The arguement of the ‘autonomy of migration perspective’
within the no-border movement argues that movement against borders in
the non-activist world sense is actually an attack on the
rule/governance of state and capital. Therefore, at its extreme, the
history of migrants, ‘worker’ or otherwise has always been one of the
biggest threats to capital and still is. Migrants are not someone who
in an opposing climate justice perspective are cast as victims,
climate refugees but should be seen as part of the same struggle. We
did alot of work to break down the rhetoric of victims by articulating
and supporting the militant attacks from inside woomera etc.

Further on the autonomy of migration or ‘exodus’ from the rule of
capital today in aus, see the indigenous walk-off campaigns old and
new… maybe worth linking …

- population questions are in the national frame, the environment or
the territory of struggle are global.

 - no real critique of over-consumptionism can really be made without
a good critique of capitalism, or else it falls back to national or
individual guilt too easily…

resources

re: women, anti-malthusian and ecological questions see the accompany
essay in ‘ how deep is deep ecology’ by david watson. once available
at barricade in melbourne and maybe via @nnares mailorder or ak press
etc.

- if you have some friends who had a noborder/anti-state/anti-nation
position, brushing up on the anti-population work done in that
movement might be a good move.

- to be able to stay or to move autonomously…

because in nature no body is illegal
http://delicious.com/dr.woooo/what-to-do-re%3A-climate-chaos+noborder

Peru, after the conflict , companies are refused when approaching with a diplomatic handshake

e Hunt Oil company -due to the constant conflicts and international pressure- made a meeting with the Communal Reserve at the Amazon Rainforest where they want to do their exploration activities… http://multimedia.larepublica.pe/main.php?g2_itemId=14430 (spanish) All the leaders of the Communal Reserve fully reject the operations of Hunt Oil company in this area. More info on Hunt Oil: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hunt_Oil_Company http://www.huntoil.com/ DISSEMINATE AND SUPPORT THE INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE! "Hunt Oil Company y la Repsol Exploración Perú son cotitulares del lote 76 otorgado por el Estado en 2006 para realizar los trabajos de exploración y explotación de petróleo en esta parte de la región de Madre de Dios. Este lote se superpone casi en su totalidad sobre la Reserva Comunal Amarakaeri, un territorio ancestral de los pueblos Harakmbut, Yine y Machiguenga y cuyo reconocimiento oficial se logró después de más de diez años de lucha indígena" http://www.larepublica.pe/regionales/17/09/2009/comunidades-nativas-rechazan-exploracion-petrolera-en-reserva-comunal-amarakae

sydney crisis conf prelim documentation

sydney crisis conf prelim documentation
http://archive.blogsome.com/2009/08/14/gfc-workshop/

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: there’s going to be a review of the conference in the next issue of mutiny. (cut)…
 
Also, maybe not quite what you were looking for, but there were a couple of audio recordings done at the conference (though only on the Sunday of it unfortunately). they’re gradually going online here: http://crisisconference2009.wordpress.com/discussions-and-workshops/
 
This one is from the ‘Economies of Race, Queer Households and the Crisis’ workshop. http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/766685/CrisisConference.mp3

There are also these two, though at the moment they really need to be edited, especially for volume. I can send them on again when they’re properly ready.
 
Scarlet Alliance workshop http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2074984/MIsh%20Scarlet%20Alliance.MP3

Unemployed worker’s struggles http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2074984/Drew%20Cottle.MP3
 
Hope that helps,
 
(cut)

hIT THE production of climate cha

Hit the Production of Climate Chaos – get involved

The climate catastrophe has not happened by random chance and the melting glacier is not its place. Our economic system, the way it produces goods, and the way they are transported and finally consumed is the root of climate change.

We do not believe that this COP will solve the climate crisis. The delegates, NGOs and company representatives are stuck in an ideology of never ending economic growth and universal market solutions to all human-made problems, such as ecological destruction. Social justice issues are consequently ignored.

On December 13th we call for action on this economic system. We encourage affinity groups to take action on targets in Copenhagen, and abroad. In the Morning of December 13th we will also shut down the harbour of Copenhagen through a mass action blockade. The harbour is a key symbol of the global free-market economy. Here becomes visible what is usually hidden: ecological deterioration, economic and social exploitation, and utter injustice.

Since the dawn of colonialism the global shipping industry has been characterized by violence. What was once gold pillaged from the Incas is these days profit based on cheap resources and cheap labour – usually transported by ships. Today, container shipping is one of the foundations of capitalism. There are hardly any regulations: fuel is not taxed, emissions are not subject to control and borders are seemingly non-existent for container ships. At the same time, the never ending need for more cheap goods is almost limitless. The “free” global flow of goods continues to grow – with benefits for only the few.

But whereas these flows of goods can enter the EU/ rich world freely, humans cannot. As soon as people do not have the right passport or enough money when entering rich countries, they are put in prisons, deported and deprived of the most basic human rights. And the militarisation of the seas is not just happening around the EU borders. It is also used to protect international shipping, like in Somalia where international fishing fleets have robbed Somali fishermen of the fundamental elements of their existence.

Finally, international shipping is more than just a method of transport for the global economy. It is in itself a primary cause of climate change. Approximately 5% of Global Greenhouse Emissions are produced by the shipping industry. Container ship fuel is basically toxic waste left over from petrol production, containing high amounts of sulphur and mercury. And like international flights, nobody is responsible for shipping industry emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Climate justice and real social change will not come from above. Effective change has to come from everyone – affected, responsible, and observer. True change has to be organized and realized by people all over the world – all people on the streets and in the fields. We say no to the power of governments, companies and so-called non-government organisations which are only interested in maintaining their power, influence and flows of capital.

We will try to stop this madness for a day. Fighting for climate justice means changing our economic system and this needs to happen here in the rich global north, which reaps the most benefits from the disaster. For the free flow of people and ideas, instead of flows of goods to benefit the few.

Contact htp@riseup.net to get involved with planning the action, or come to one of our next meetings: Berlin October 3-4 & Copenhagen October 18.

Indigenous self-determination gathering 09 - alice springs


Our Land Our Culture Our Sovereignty


Indigenous Self-Determination Gathering

 

We are requesting donations for the following event:

From the 27th-29th November an International Indigenous Self-Determination Gathering is being held near Alice Springs.

The gathering will be a chance for Indigenous and non-indigenous people from Australia, Aetorea (New Zealand), Papua, South America and other countries to have the opportunity to talk about Indigenous Self-Determination.

The Gathering aims to build bridges connecting our struggles, and strengthen

solidarity, friendship and collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous

grassroots organisations throughout various regions of the world, especially where multinational corporations and military interventions severely impact on indigenous lands and poor and excluded people and communities.

The gathering will bring together Indigenous and Non-Indigenous communities to share experiences of resistance and struggle and to develop a common vision for social change and justice.

 

Last year, at the Solidarity Gathering in Melbourne, there were workshops on the impact of mining on Indigenous communities, self-determination and sovereignty, water rights, indigenous education and indigenous rights. These stories from South America to the Northern Territory, Aeotorea to Papua highlighted the similarities of struggles that Indigenous Peoples have with colonising forces. Hearing the commonalities and the work being done to promote and protect indigenous rights was empowering for those who attended the Gathering last year.

It was decided that this year’s gathering would be held in Central Australia in response to the many attacks on the rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Northern Territory. From the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), to the defunding of homelands; from threats to bi-lingual education to the Federal Government’ compulsory acquistion of Alice Springs town camps. The Northern Territory bears the brunt of the Government’s latest attacks on Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia.

This year Australia endorsed the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, however the visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples has stated that the Northern Territory Emergency Response (Intervention) is racist and violates the UN Conventions that the Australian Government has signed. This gathering will be a chance for individuals and organisations to begin asserting their rights as the first peoples of this world.

Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Individuals and Organisations from Australia and around the world are invited to attend and showcase the work that they are doing to promote Indigenous Self-determination, advocate for Human Rights and the empowerment of communities, and struggle for the protection of country and traditional culture.

Alongside the more political workshops and information sessions there will also be spaces in which to learn language, Indigenous symbols, traditional medicines, bush tucker, local history and more.

Evening activities will include Indigenous film screenings and hopefully some local music and local dancers.

Camping location and food will be provided at minimal cost to non – Indigenous participants and free for indigenous.

The conference is organised by the Latin American Solidarity Network (LASNET) and Rollback the Intervention.

For more information please contact:

Barbara Shaw, from Mount Nancy Town Camp Mparntwe-Alice Springs 0401 291 166

Marisol Salinas, Mapuche indigenous from Chile 0413 597 315

We are requesting donations from your organisation to fund as many Indigenous as possible to attend this conference. We need money for travel, food and accommodation for international and Australian Indigenous participants.

Please send donations to:

Money Order made out to LASNET at

P.O.BOX 813, North Melbourne, Vic. 3051
Or direct deposit to our Bendigo Bank account 633-000-1331-47793 made out to LASNET

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: anna mcildowie <anamac84@hotmail.com>
Date: Sep 22, 2009 1:26 PM
Subject: [aisd_melb] Indigenous Self Determination Gathering 09 [1 Attachment]
To:

 

 
[Attachment(s) from anna mcildowie included below]

Dear Friends,

We thought you might be interested in donating to the 2009 ‘International Indigenous Self-Determination Gathering’ being held near

Mparntwe-Alice Springs in November. You may have attended or heard about last years gathering held on Wurundjeri country at CERES in the Kulin Nation. This year’s event hopes to build on it’s success. Attached is a call out letter from the organisers. We are passing it on from them. If you know of any other individuals or organisations that would be interested in donating, endorsing or attending the event please pass this email on to them too.


Best Wishes,

Anna McIdowie

The Alliance for Indigenous Self Determination, Melbourne

Stop the Violence Against Oil War Refugees in Denmark! towards COP15

Stop the Violence Against Oil War Refugees in Denmark!

We denounce the violence in Denmark against refugees from the oil war in
Iraq. The violent police action to deport asylum seekers in the Brorson
church in Nörrebro in the Danish capital Copenhagen where riot gear was used
inside the church as well as the use of massive force on the street outside
the church against supporters of the refugees is not humane.

This violence is inherent in the present fossil fuel based development
model. This development model is the basis for unsustainable production and
consumption in privileged countries like Denmark. At the same time the
majority of the population in the world live in places that gets
impoverished. Here the natural resources are exploited benefiting the
privileged rich social classes living elsewhere by the use of aggressive
economic or military means. The result is growing social inequalities and a
global ecological crisis including global warming.

We support the massive Danish civil disobedience against the violence used
against the Iraqi refugees. Hiding asylum seekers in Denmark is a crime. It
has especially severe consequences for priests in the Danish state church as
they are employed by the Danish state. The priest that allowed the refugees
to use the Brorson church as an asylum is now faced with charges from his
employers which may end by the loss of his job. He is supported by
proximately half of the priests in the Danish church and one fourth of the
Danish priests claim that they are willing to hide refugees as an act of
civil disobedience. The violent eviction of the refugees from the church
also caused wide spread protests among the rest of the population. Some
hours afterwards 20 000 people gathered in a demonstration  to denounce the
police action and deportation. Thousands of Danes from all strands of
society now claim that they are willing to use civil disobedience to hide
refugees and a lot of actions takes place to mobilise against the inhumane
acts against refugees in Denmark.

We environmental, peasant, pacifist, indigenous, religious and other
movements in different parts of the world call for solidarity with the
Danish civil disobedience movement to protect refugees and demand a humane
asylum policy and practice. We see the respect of the age old right of
church asylum as important for a society that want to call itself humane and
democratic.

We are also worried about the way the Danish state acts in a time when the
causes behind growing number of refugees are going to be discussed a the UN
Climate summit in Copenhagen 7-18 of December. More and more refugees comes
from regions were war and occupation is carried out to enforce the
exploitation of fossil fuels in the interest of rich and privileged
countries or from regions with victims of global warming.  Denmark is in
many cases in the forefront of repression and criminalisation of popular
movements. In Denmark contrary to a neighbouring country like Sweden hiding
asylum seekers is a crime and thus a movement which in Sweden includes tens
of thousands of people is criminalised in Denmark. The first organisation to
be sentenced as a terrorist organisation in Denmark according to new laws is
Greenpeace who entered the office of a corporation in Copenhagen and made a
banner drop protesting against GMOs.

The Climate Summit is a historic opportunity to strengthen a global climate
justice alliance among all movements and those governments willing to
acknowledge global and social justice as the basis for solving the climate
crisis. It is of importance for the whole humanity that this voice can be
raised. The massive use of force against those inside and outside of the
Brorson church to enforce the deportation of the refugees puts in question
the willingness of the Danish state to provide the possibility of a
democratic participation in the climate negotiations including movements
from the South. The Danish People&sup1;s Party which has pushed the Danish
government towards more and more restrictive policies towards refugees is
now also calling for a closure of the borders for demonstrators during the
Climate Summit.

We call upon solidarity among all movements supporting climate justice
against repression and escalation of violent police actions against refugees
and movements in Denmark and during the Climate Summit.

Friends of the Earth Sweden

Other undersigned…..

The deportation has been criticised as the Danish state entered the church
and after a while put their riot gear on. This has been claimed by others to
be a lie. But in the end it became clear that although the police did not
enter the building in riot gear they put them on after a while. The police
action outside the church to fulfil the deportation was violent according to
all sources.

The first video showing how the police action and the response developed can
be seen at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HG1t-pead8

The police video from the action was published later. In the video it
becomes clear that the police had the riot gear on after a while and that
the Iraqi refugees were shocked , some raised chairs over their hads but did
not hit any policemen whith other tried to commit suicide with glass and
jumping from high up. It is claimed but not shown on the video that the riot
gear was used after that some glass was thrown at the police. When the news
was presented it became clear that the violence used by the police outside
the church is accepted as truth both by those criticising the deportation
and those defending the police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNzGLAB-Sqw