It’s hot, there are flies, and we’re all sick of sausages – but morale amongst the coalminers here at Tahmoor is higher than ever.
Workers at Xstrata coal mine in New South Wales, Australia have been locked out in a bitter dispute over sackings but they are determined to keep fighting until Xstrata managers sit down with unions and negotiate a fair agreement.
It’s hot, there are flies, and we’re all sick of sausages – but morale amongst the coalminers here at Tahmoor is higher than ever.
Workers at Xstrata coal mine in New South Wales, Australia have been locked out in a bitter dispute over sackings but they are determined to keep fighting until Xstrata managers sit down with unions and negotiate a fair agreement.
The case is a key test in Australia regarding a company shifting the burden of the recent economic collapse onto workers. The CFMEU is not alone in fiercely resisting job cuts because of a failed neo-liberal economic agenda. From Russia to Chile, at Europe’s largest zinc deposits in Ireland’s County Meath, where 670 were retrenched by Tara Mines, to the hundreds of thousands of migrant miners across the world who are out of work with no place to go, it is workers who are paying the unjust price of capital’s failure.
The CFMEU fightback is just one example of the necessary, the pivotally necessary response that is needed to re-shape a social agenda.
