Yearly Archives: 2016

The first week of July in Australia is National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance week (NAIDOC). Its origins stem from the 1920′s when Aboriginal groups started to campaign to increase awareness in the wider community of the status and treatment of Indigenous Australians. NAIDOC week is an opportunity to continue […]

Workers all around the world organise to increase their wages, fight for secure employment contracts, and achieve safe and healthy workplaces. They are opposed by companies who want workers to work harder, for longer, and for less so profits can be higher. Governments help companies by passing laws that criminalise […]

Earlier in June, Japanese union members held a demonstration outside the Central Minimum Wage Council to demand a substantial minimum wage rise. Workers are demanding that the minimum wage be increased by at least 25%. In an unrelated dispute, Filipino workers at a Toshiba plant in Tokyo’s Fuchu City who […]

Last week, a huge explosion rocked the western suburbs of Tehran, the capital city of Iran, when underground subway workers hit a gas pipeline. The explosion left a crater up to 50 metres deep. Two workers died as a result, but had the explosion occurred in a more populated area, there […]

Friday 24 June 2016 marked 100 days since 41-year-old Han Kwang-ho, committed suicide. Han was a union organiser at YooSung Entreprise, a Hyundai auto part supplier in South Korea. Han had endured five years of intimidation, repression and attacks by the company in retaliation for his trade union activities. On Friday, labour activists commemorated […]

In mid-June, 50 workers employed by Carlton United Brewery, part of the SABMiller group, the second largest brewer in the world, were fired. They were then told that they could reapply for their jobs with another company that would then sub-contract to CUB. Their new positions would be on individual […]

The Australian labour movement lost another stalwart feminist unionist this month, with the passing of comrade Lynn Beaton.  Lynn is best known to her political activists in Melbourne Australia, and is fondly remembered as a political activist, author, community academic and trade union warrior.  Vale Lynn Beaton.

Earlier this month, the arrest and detention of Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, highlighted the continuing level of repression that exists in the country. Since the government moved against the popular uprising in early 2011, working class people and organisations have borne the brunt of […]

Last week, another massive demonstration was held in the southern Japanese island of Okinawa against the presence of USA military bases. While the catalyst for this latest protest was the rape and killing of a local woman by a US servicemen, there are deeper issues. Many Okinawans feel that the […]

Earlier this month, the Turkish police detained Arzu Cerkezoglu, general secretary of the national trade union centre DISK, on charges of 'insulting the President’. This law of ‘insult’ was only introduced in 2014, but already around 1,850 people have been charged under this Act. It carries a jail term of […]