The real story
Anybody present at the wharfies picket in Sydney is impressed by the amazingly powerful feeling of the place and the lack of colourful background in media reports — the grand old Sydney rock walls, the banners, the family meals and the tent city at each gate, the roars of delight when buses of workers arrive to help.
I was saddened by the picketers' fear of being shown as violent by the media — a fear that drives them to shoo cameras away because a scene might be deemed too horribly violent by the news-consuming public.
Such a decision meant that nobody got to see how three men's hands were deliberately burnt by a scab worker wielding an oxy torch attempting to illegally break open a locked gate on Friday near Darling Harbour. When police sorted out the very dangerous situation, it was clear who was being violent and breaking the law. At the time all we could do was pour milk for cups of tea and water from plastic drinking bottles over the burning hands.
There is nothing like a strike to sort out the heroes, and you won't know anything about it by watching TV. Another thing I learned by spending a couple of hours in Sydney was that the wharfies have signed enterprise agreements that include the "12-hour captive clause". They have to be at work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, four weeks out of five. No matter how well they are trained, they aren't operating the cranes all day. Clearly safety and accident prevention must be factored in to productivity counts, unless we want to descend into Dickensian conditions on the waterfront. Stevedoring costs are minuscule when you consider the workers' lives and the profits in every container. Let's hear the real story.
Queanbeyan NSW
Suffer the little children
I suppose it didn't occur to Messrs Reith, Corrigan and Howard, now so sanctimoniously bleating about children appearing at the waterfront disturbances, that possibly the stevedores had nowhere else to take them.
If both parents are working, they can probably afford a childcare centre or kindergarten; but if father is suddenly deprived of his job, mother must hang on to hers like grim death (and poverty is a sort of death); she certainly can't ask her employer to let her take the kids to her workplace.
And with only one salary coming in the couple certainly can't afford child-care of any sort — the Kennett government has seen to it that fees are exorbitant. On Kennett's head be it.
Father must support his colleagues in the fight to get back his job. Where are the kids to go? Grandparents are not always available.
Crocodile tears for the poor kids are sheer hypocrisy. If fathers are to remain unemployed and unpaid for a long time, it is the kids who will suffer, as Messrs Reith, Corrigan and Howard well knew when they sacked 1500 men.
Malvern, Vic
Overpaid bludgers
The crisis on the wharves can't be because the wharfies are being paid too much, despite what Peter Reith alleges. At $700,000 to raise a child today, the average worker needs to earn at least $100,000 a year to be as well off as their grandparents.
By those standards, wharfies are underpaid and the rest of the Australian wage earners are simply being totally exploited.
Australians must remember, our politicians get paid more than wharfies and there hasn't been one in the last fifty years worth feeding, let alone paying. So, if wharfies are being locked out because they're seen as overpaid bludgers by politicians, then it's simply a case of the pot calling the kettle black! Best solution is lock our politicians out of Parliament houses!
Canungra Qld
High stakes
I agree with Sue Boland that the stakes are high for all workers in wharf dispute (GLW, April 22), and I also agree with Bob Mills "Limits of wharf benchmarks" (Australian Financial Review, April 20) that achieving reliability and efficiency on the wharves is a complex matter which is unlikely to be solved by the current dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia employees.
I am disturbed by the fact that the MUA employees of Patrick Stevedores were sacked as Justice North has argued because of their union membership including those who were involved in most efficient operations at Townsville, Burnie and Perth.
In other words, Patrick Stevedores' action was not simply an act of frustration directed at relatively inefficient employees in Sydney and Melbourne. It was an act designed to replace union employees with non-union labour and was intended to discriminate against workers who belonged to a union. I find this to be contrary to Australian traditions of fair-mindedness and fair play and, if successful, to constitute a potential threat to the income levels and working conditions of many employees.
In other words, if you don't like the lower remuneration and reduced conditions a large employer demands, he or she will find a way to get rid of you, even to the extent of restructuring his or her business so that he or she is not obliged to pay your redundancy, long service leave entitlements etc.
Furthermore, it has plunged Australian ports into what seems to be likely to become a prolonged industrial dispute which will harm many of the businesses depending on the free flow of imports and exports.
I hope the major parties involved can engage in serious negotiations as soon as possible which will, hopefully, bring an end to the current dispute and start the process of achieving greater reliability and efficiency on the wharves.
Farrer ACT
Contempt of court
I understand that the thousands of protesters, journalists etc. at the Community Assembly at Webb Dock in Melbourne are now in contempt of court — utter contempt!
Traralgon Vic
Science and spiritualism
Ron Guignard and Camille NicFhionghuin-Gee (Write on, GLW #314) rather miss the point in their attempts to defend Tarot cards/astrology/the I Ching.
Of course believers in spiritualism can hold progressive political views, just as materialists can be villains. The question, however, is whether such beliefs aid those who hold them to attain their goals (progressive or otherwise) by informing them of real cause and effect relationships.
"A computer is appropriate technology for some circumstances; the I Ching for others", writes Guignard. Really? In what fields has I Ching "technology" proved its efficacy?
Science is a method of investigating reality, of trying to learn cause and effect relations. Investigators sometimes make mistakes, and some of them are frauds or crooks. This does not invalidate science; indeed, it is just because science is an investigation of reality that mistakes or frauds can be uncovered.
By contrast, spiritualism does not seek to discover cause and effect relations, but presumes that these are already known. A Tarot card reader, for example, will "research" what his/her "technology" says the future holds for you, but does not investigate what it is that supposedly connects the cards to your future.
Hence if another reader — or an astrologer — forecasts a quite different future, there is no accepted spiritualist method for settling the disagreement. If you want to know whether your life next December will be "governed" by Mars or Venus, you'll have to wait and see. But if two scientists differ as to whether there will be a solar eclipse in that month, astronomy knows how to discover which of them is right before the event.
Finally, I am surprised that NicFhionghuin-Gee berates me for "spirituality-bashing" in Green Left Weekly. As a believer in astrology, surely she knows that the stars make me do it.
Sydney