Corporate welfare should come with strings
Businesses receiving government corporate welfare should be required to follow industrial relations and OHS laws, and should put caps on executive and board payouts. There is a clear national interest....
View ArticleOnline social activism and Twitter
A large part of my job is online communications: blogs, social networking, and new fads like Twitter. A big challenge is how to use these tools in a meaningful way to support the campaigning and...
View ArticleLabourStart Photo Competition
For all you inspired unionists out there, I strongly encourage you to enter the LabourStart Photo Competition. It’s a great initiative, and there are already some really good photos that have been...
View ArticleOpposition IR Shadow Minister cut from Reith cloth
Workforce Daily has a few interesting takes on Eric Abetz’s elevation to the IR portfolio as part of the new Opposition Shadow Ministry. (No link unfortunately, as it’s an email newsletter). Abbott:...
View ArticleDelegates key to union power
Back in 2003-04, David Peetz and Barbara Pocock (from Griffith University and the University of Adelaide) conducted a survey of 2500 union delegates to examine the power of workers in their workplace....
View ArticleThis year was great
The ITUC has launched a new online campaign highlighting the exploitation of workers and children in the third world. The campaign’s website – Change the World – is very professional, although it is...
View ArticleTouch screens, HTC and union busting
I have recently ordered a HTC Desire (the latest touch screen Android smart phone), so was disappointed to learn that HTC is one of a number of companies engaged in anti-union behaviour. Via...
View ArticleSignificant IR changes possible through regulations, other Acts
Tony Abbott said that he won’t change the Workplace Relations Act in his first term of government, and Eric Abetz says the only “tweaks” will be to regulations. Significant changes to the industrial...
View ArticleBad decision in equal pay for women Budget backdown
The Federal Government has announced that it will no longer support the Australian Services Union’s test case to get equal pay for women. The excuse for this backdown is that funding the decision would...
View ArticleWorker Representation on Company Boards
I was reading an interesting ebook about the future of UK Labour (pdf) and came across an interesting policy of having worker representation on boards: So policies like a cap on interest rates, worker...
View ArticleSupporting Wisconsin union members, one pizza slice at a time
The battle to preserve collective bargaining in America is taking place in Wisconsin, after a Tea Party backed Governor announced budget cuts – not only to pensions and pay – but also to basic human...
View ArticlePerformance pay for teachers is a terrible idea and here’s why
On 7 February 2007, the then-Federal Education, Science and Training Minister, Julie Bishop, announced that ‘like other professions, teachers should be recognised and rewarded on merit.’ This policy...
View ArticleThe Qantas lockout and social media #fail
I was asked over the weekend to comment on the use of social media by Qantas, who on Saturday announced that they would lock out their workforce and ground their entire fleet. It is now clear that this...
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Retaining members in public sector unions
University of Warrick academic Jeremy Waddington and UNISON national officer Allan Kerr authored a fascinating article for the Industrial Relations Journal, Membership retention in the public sector....
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Who are the real competition for unions?
Conservative crank Gerard Henderson wrote last year that unions “have nothing to fear from external competition”. Apart from demonstrating that he knows relatively little about the new Fair Work Act,...
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Campaigning and Bargaining for Climate Action
At the end of November, I spoke at a climate conference at the University of Toronto, about a union climate campaign I organised from 2008 to 2011. The presentation was a case study on the NTEU...
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Global labour’s challenge to climate change
I originally published this on The Guardian and am republishing it here. At the end November 2013, Philip Jennings, the general secretary for the global union federation UNI Global Union spoke at a...
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