Boring intellectuals may recite their inane “ideas make reality” mantra until they are blue in the face. For a while it may – indeed probably will – fool some, but it won’t change much in the long run. It’s reality that drives action, which leads in turn to ideas.
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And so, while a few Aussie hens are still fooled into making common cause with the foxes, workers are re-learning the painful lessons their elders knew well: there is no way around, they need to act. So organise yourselves, and, as the chant says, stand up and fight back.
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After two years of their bosses calling them essential workers and politicians waxing lyrical about their heroism, in NSW train and bus workers (see photo opening) and teachers are forced to go on strike today. The reward they were offered was privatisation, wage freezes/unequal pay, increased workload. Weren’t we supposed to be all in this together?
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet will now learn there is much more than PR and cheap flattery in the “essential worker” label: this absurdly sprawled town cannot run without those workers. Show them your might, guys and gals. Hit them hard, where it hurts, Rail, Tram and Bus Workers NSW Branch.
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The NSW teachers are striking against mutually reinforcing huge workloads and poor pay. Resignations and labour shortages are the consequence, increasing workload in turn.
But the teachers make me proud for an additional reason. The not particularly gung-ho NSW Teachers’ Federation is striking – for the first time in a decade! – against an order from the Industrial Relations Commission.
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Then Sarah Mitchell appears before ABC reporters. In an spectacular display of self-contradiction and hypocrisy, the deplorable NSW Minister for Education first attempts to paint a business as usual picture:
“It's really fantastic to be here at a great local public school in Western Sydney, seeing the amazing teaching and learning taking place in our younger students in the classroom, a real privilege. Can I thank the thousands of teachers who work so hard each and every day to support our students, but particularly today?”
Yes, you can thank them with words, but a more concrete form of gratitude is much better: give those teachers stability, remove the excess workload, spend money on the schools, pay them well.
Instead, after thanking them, Mitchell accuses the NSWTF of “pitting teachers, families, and students against each other”. Let’s get things straight. The strike is against you, Mitchell, not against families and students. It’s a last resort measure against your intransigence.
By representing yourself as spokeswoman of parents and students (“I am disappointed and I am frustrated on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of parents”) it’s you who you are attempting to pit community and teachers and unions against each other. You speak on behalf of the Perrottet regime, Mitchell, not of the community. Literally minutes earlier everything was going fine, it was business as usual. How come now there are hundreds of thousands of people affected?
Incidentally, if one believes the pretty ABC reporter, the community seem fairly supportive of the far more disruptive train and buses strike.
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Mitchell may be right on something though. That seems to be an illegal strike. Industrial relations laws in Oz consecrate much anti-worker injustice. You see, in this pseudo liberal democratic country workers have no right to strike. What they – or rather their unions – have is “protected industrial action”, which the IRC can stop arbitrarily. This has got to change, whether Peter Hartcher and those on whose behalf he writes like it or not.
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And the thing is, workers are doing that at the same time, spontaneously, not only in Oz, but in Europe (the photo above is from Cádiz, Spain metalworkers) and the US. Bill Clinton’s crude “it’s the economy, stupid!” may have been a gross simplification of a materialist view, but it’s way closer to truth than the slogans as pretentious as they are vapid “cultural change!”, “free marketplace of ideas!”, “ideology!”.
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Join your union. There is strength in union.
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| “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” [A] |
Image Credits:
[A] Karl Marx tombstone at Highgate cemetery. Author: Lars Larsen. Source: WikiMedia. File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Although I love Larsen’s excellent photo, my use of it must not be taken to suggest he endorses me or said use of the photo.
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