Not much has been said in the American press–I’m shocked–about what’s happening on the labor front in Australia so I thought it would be worth a quick little update.

Fresh from re-election as the Aussie Prime Minister eight months ago, conservative John Howard, is trying to make the country into one of the most deregulated workplaces in the world. He wants to exempt employers with less than 100 workers from unfair dismissal laws and undermine the entire collective bargaining system by passing laws that would favor individual (!!!) contracts over collective union-negotiated contracts. Egads!

And he’s trying to nationalize labor laws, as a way of shredding the state laws that are often overseen or pushed by more friendly Labor-run state governments.

This crap came up before but was defeated each time it came to parliament. Problem is Howard now has the votes in the Australian parliament because his center-right coalition took control of the Aussie Senate in the past election. Drats.

But, here’s the good news. The labor movement has been out in the streets, drawing 200,000
workers and miners into the streets–which is pretty damn big relative
to the propulation of the country. And labor is spending about $6 million for a national advertising blitz.

As a result, support for Howard’s Liberal-National coalition has fallen to the same level as the Labor party at 50 percent. Though he did win re-election (partly because the Labor Party has fallen on hard times), 60 percent of the people oppose his changes and his approval ratings are in a free-fall, dropping seven points in just two weeks to 47 percent, according to a July 6th article in the Financial Times. That means that the labor movement’s position has been embraced by a much broader audience beyond union members.

The importance of connecting to the concerns of a broad audience made me think of a letter a labor friend of mine just sent to the Democratic leadership. Here’s an excerpt from the letter from Roger Tauss, international vice-president of the Transport Workers Union:

“Blue collar workers, unhappy with the Administration of George W. Bush waited in vain during the last election for some sign that Democrats understood their concerns and wanted to help. Yet, while talking freely about foreign policy and social issues, the party relegated job and living standard issues to an afterthought. Imagine. Three Presidential debates and not even one mention of the Bush Administration’s elimination of overtime pay for millions of Americans! Outsourcing, the threat that sends chills down the spine of almost every worker, was reduced to a couple of lines of obscure tax policy!

Nor, apparently, has the Democratic Party learned from its mistakes. Large numbers of Democrats in both the House and Senate continue to vote for legislation that beggers working Americans while further enriching top corporate executives:

• A bankruptcy bill that makes people forced into debt by serious illness or unemployment continue to pay off their debt for years while creating new loopholes for wealthy Americans to escape the same fate.

• Various measures to protect the dishonest accounting of corrupt corporate CEO’s while prohibiting ordinary investor’s from getting a fair shake.
• A so-called tort “reform” bill that restricts lawsuits against corporations that put profits ahead of health and safety – lawsuits that are the private sector way of enforcing the law and the only way left after the Bush Administration has put regulators into bed with the regulated.

No wonder it is so difficult to find anyone who thinks they know what the Democrats stand for when a significant part of the Democratic caucuses support these measures….”