Casual labour
I was employed as a casual loss prevention officer (LPO) for over three years. Through working very steady hours the first two years, I developed the expectation that, as I was fulfilling an apparent need, my hours should continue. Among the reasons for perceiving this need, there is risk involved in dealing with shoplifters. It is a safety requirement that at least two LPO's work together to provide backup and protect each other. I was fulfilling this need, among others.
When I started out, I was working 24 hours a week, filling in around my uni schedule. On holidays I was encouraged to take as much extra work as I could; during Christmas I worked up to six days a week.
About two years into my tenure, my employer instituted some new policies/structural business changes. I was cut from 21 to around 12 hours a week. On weekends, I often worked alone, without backup. Extra holiday work was out of the question, except at Christmas.
I immediately asked for an explanation. "Those are the needs of the business", I was told. "We don't have money for casual hours."
Now, you might say "fair enough", and I can see that view. Casual labour is uncertain labour, and that's why you get casual rates not permanent part-time rates (though the difference isn't that much, and consider the benefits you don't get). But, after fulfilling a need for two years with regular hours, you view that as your regular income. When you receive a regular income, in any mode of labour, you come to reasonably expect it to continue, barring critical mistakes, and base your life and financial commitments around this.
There were no such mistakes; just someone's new strategy to make more profit by reducing salary or "hours".
With the new industrial relations system, my reality is the reality for all modes of labour. I've struggled financially because of these events, but I still couldn't imagine what it would be like were I, for example, an abattoir worker in rural NSW getting fired after 20 years because someone made a decision based on a business need they perceived.
In Australia we have such a pacified population, politically. Most people you talk to say things like "Yeah, that's terrible, but what can you do?" In contrast, look at the French. I wish we had that kind of political consciousness and savvy. I'll be rallying on June 28.
Tim Niven
via email)
[Abridged]
Latin America coverage
Good show! Keep the news from the Latin Americas coming. We, here in the northern part, are able to learn
little or nothing about events down there, unless we search the web, and/or learn the Spanish language.
Keith Leal
Alberta, Canada
Work Choices
Where is the official union movement now that they are needed? The Howard government's Work Choices seminars are being held in all major cities, yet as the first three in Newcastle, the Newcastle Trades Hall Council, Unions NSW and the ACTU were conspicuous by their absence.
I attended the first one, and after an hour I said this felt like Orwell's 1984, because Work Choices mean no choice. I called on all present — including the government staff running the seminar — to join me in walking out as a protest.
At the next two seminars I handed out a leaflet, which used GLW's headline "France shows the way", updated to "& now also the Solomons!". The leaflet begins with words from the Anarchist Age Weekly Review: "Lessons of history: The difference between French & Australian workers is that Australian workers, seduced by the idea that you can achieve justice by working up the right channels — e.g., the Boeing workers union? — now find themselves in the ignominious position of being 21st century corporate slaves. French workers, students & the unemployed have not forgotten the lessons of history." It ends with words from Alison Dellit's GLW review of V for Vendetta: "(We need) active resistance... in defiance of those (like our union leaders?) who argue that we must be restrained and reasonable in the face of evil governments."
Why not book in with some friends to a seminar near you, get in early and do a noisy sit-in — force them to have you removed. When injustice becomes law, resistance — and thought-crime — becomes duty.
Peter McGregor
Newscastle, NSW
Little Britain
What I don't think has been emphasised enough is that Little Britain is essentially queer humour with universal appeal, in the same sense that Monty Python was Oxbridge humour with universal appeal.
Ben Courtice et. al. (Write On, GLW #665) write that "we don't see why men in bad drag giggling 'Ooooh, I'm a lady' is funny..." In at least some male queer circles, this has become a piss-take of a certain type of gay man who is being a bit pretentious and precious.
The "bad drag" is deliberate. The character is a tragic-comic figure, desiring to be gorgeous, but with obviously the "wrong" gender, "wrong" age and "wrong" fashion sense. The empowering sense of the humour comes from the fact that "we" understand this humour: we get the joke. Those in other social circles may just not get it — in much the same way that an older generation just didn't get Monty Python.
Dale Mills
Chippendale, NSW
Asylum seekers
The "Pacific solution" was no solution for asylum seekers before. It is not a humane or morally justifiable solution now. Australia should protect Papuan refugees, assess their cases fairly, and offer them a secure and permanent future here if necessary. At the same time, Australia should encourage Indonesia to respect human rights, and not persecute its Papuan citizens. Of course, people who experience and fear violence at home will run for protection. The Papuans have every right to ask Australia for safety and we are morally obliged to give it. There is no "third country" that will take them. They are our neighbours. It is up to us.
Elaine Smith
West Haven, NSW
From Green Left Weekly, May 3, 2006.
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