Update : “People Power Union” today established a YouTube channel with four videos of several Baiada employees who express opposition to the strike and the NUW.
If Tory PR flack Jason Aldworth says it’s OK, and if a Coles company hack says he’s comfortable with it, who am I to argue?
More meat, less fat, Baiada Poultry, well you can’t beat that!
Beginning at 5pm tomorrow (Sunday, November 20) there will be another BBQ at the Baiada picket (17-19 Pipe Road, Laverton North (Melways map ref. 40, D10)), followed by a rock and/or roll concert featuring Legends of Motorsport / The Sweet Teens / Red Rockets of Borneo / Rei Mond and Jess Curruthers and moar. As an added BONUS!, always-outrageous comedy duo Fear of a Brown PlanetAS SEEN ON TV! will be running a face-painting tent for The Kids–so bring The Family.
In other news, Andrew Crook has exposed two of the Tories responsible for attempting to mount a counter-propaganda campaign (on behalf of the “People Power Group”) in response to the picket: Jason Aldworth and Hamish Jones (Liberals exposed as kingmakers in bitter chicken spat, Crikey, November 17, 2011).
Aldworth was the bRanes behind the “Alliance of Australian Retailers”, a tobacco industry-funded front formed just prior to the 2010 Federal election to campaign against the plain-packaging of tobacco products, while Jones apparently *s in the 2003 doco State of the Union re the downfall of the Melbourne University Student Union, got a bit of stick for publishing some unkind words on his blog in 2007, but has since graduated to become a Whirling Dervish in the world of social media (with just occasional forays into Politics).
Baiada has been kicking union ass in the courts, with Fair Work Australia ordering first union officials then union members to leave the picket–or else. Nonetheless, while industrial wreckers of one sort or another remain on-site chickens are becoming scarcer (see : Strike threatens chicken supply, Ben Schneiders, The Age, November 17, 2011). Meanwhile:
…the issue in dispute at Baiada, which centres on attempts to restrict the use of contractors, will be challenged in the Federal Court. The Australian Industry Group will ask for a judicial review of a Fair Work decision involving electrical contractors. That decision approved a workplace agreement in Victoria that ensured that temporary workers would be paid the same as in-house workers.
Multi-billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has authorised the NYPD to evictOccupy Wall Street.
“Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
By my calculations, this means that Mayor Bloomberg is 8 times more democratic than failed Tory politician Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle.
Note that Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square is owned by TNC Brookfield Office Properties, the Australian subsidiary of which owns 8 million square feet in 18 office properties in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
Make $2 million more over 5 years for every 1000 new members
Every 1000 new members you sign up can make you an extra $2 million over 5 years, after the costs of recruitment.
That’s a lot of extra money available for campaigns, to provide services for your members and to build the strength of your union.
To strengthen your union’s financial base call Stuart McGill now on 0412 141 753.
Earlier this year I received an email from an ex-WorkPartners employee describing their experiences in 2008 working for the company, which specialises in recruiting workers to trade unions.
Or did.
Stumbling around the NUW site recently, I came across a media release [DOC] noting that regarding WorkPartners it “will be pursuing all avenues to secure workers’ entitlements, and where possible pursue further employment options. Workers with WorkPartners across several states were stood down. The company has now been put into liquidation.”
I didn’t notice it at the time, but WorkPartners apparently went bankrupt late last month:
A PRIVATE company paid by unions to recruit members has been placed in liquidation owing up to $4 million, including at least $750,000 to 700 current and former employees.
Unions National Pty Ltd, trading as Work Partners, was wound up on Tuesday night after acknowledging it was “or may be” insolvent and could not pay its debts when they fell due…
A firm designed to recruit members for unions has been placed in liquidation with more than $4 million in debt, the second collapse of its kind within just one week, suggesting some sectors of the recruitment market are struggling to keep up.
The liquidation of Unions National, which traded as Work Partners, comes after family-owned business Extrastaff Recruitment was placed into administration last week…
In any case, given the collapse, I thought now would be a good time to publish the story I was sent earlier in the year, along with a little more infos I gathered at the time regarding the company.
WorkPartners is/was the brainchild of Stuart McGill (a former staffer for Senator Doug Cameron). In an online presentation, McGill presents a convincing case for adopting a rational, which is to say business-oriented approach to selling a product–union membership–to a market–industrial workers. McGill argues that the key to increasing consumption (and hence income) is informing the consumer of the wide range of financial benefits available to union members. He further notes that:
Interestingly when I talk to people who are twenty-something, a lot of them have never heard, really, seriously, never heard of unions, let alone have any sense of what they do… then among some of my progressive and Left friends, particularly some of my Green friends, they say it’s a has-been story thank you very much, what can they do for me? In fact, some of the things that I would like to see in the world–they say to me–unions oppose. This is why I think unions are still critically important: pay, protection and influence. They are the best way to get each of those…
On December 13, 2009, McGill joined Brian Henderson, the Secretary of the Victorian Australian Education Union (AEU), in a forum to discuss Union Recruitment or ‘The trials and tribulations of growing union membership in the 21st Century’:
In the last two years, the Australian Education Union in Victoria, as well [as] other unions in several states, have used a new methodology pioneered by Dr [?] Stuart McGill. It has seen a dramatic growth in membership.
The Secretary of the AEU, together with Stuart McGill, will discuss the new approach and its successes, as well as the controversies that surround it.
Can this new method play a major part in making unions even larger social movements than in recent years? What works for 20 somethings? What happens to unions when the baby boom retires? Can workplaces get greener via workplace bargaining? How do we build productivity, make work more interesting, and get better paid?
These and more issues and questions will be discussed. Come and hear the burning debates in modern unionism.
McGill also features in a Sydney Morning Herald article regarding allegations of branch-stacking in Labor branches in the Blue Mountains: Mountain blue over branch stacking, Lisa Carty, March 2, 2008.
While WorkPartners is probably most widely known for its work on behalf of unions, its recruitment model was spawned in relation to fund-raising for business charities, where it was known as ‘Good Cause’, with clients including the NSW Cancer Council, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Save the Children (Look who’s taking a huge slice of your charity, Michael Pelly, The Sydney Morning Herald, December 23, 2004). The article notes that “The not-for-profit sector is huge. The Fundraising Institute of Australia said it was worth between $3 billion and $5 billion each year, comprised 4.7 per cent of GDP and employed 6.8 per cent of all workers”. See also : Fundraisers flood city – Spruikers paid to solicit for charities, Mandi Zonneveldt, Pathways Australia, April 2004.
Update : Join a mass community action in solidarity with striking Baiada poultry workers. Meet at 9.30am at 17 Pipe Rd, Laverton for 9.45 departure to protest site. Stop Baiada shifting production to other sites! Demand that Baiada listen to workers and agree to a fair EBA! No more cash in hand for $10 an hour! No more bullying! No more deaths at work! See also : Australia: Striking process workers resist police attacks, wsws.org | Poultry workers strike for decent pay and conditions (Socialist Party), November 15, 2011.
The strike at the Baiada chicken factory in Laverton, which began on Wednesday November 9, is now almost six days old. On Sunday, a meeting between NUW officials and Baiada management failed to achieve a resolution to the dispute, and so a union and community picket at the factory at 17–19 Pipe Road continues.
While Right-thinking North Shore gels remain appalled by the evil games of unionists, in reality the strike was triggered by Baiada’s insistence that it continue to pay contractors, cash-in-hand and labour hire workers lower wages than permanent workers (who labour in even worse conditions than does the permanent workforce). The company also demanded the right to sack workers if, after being given just 48 hours notice, they were unable to work assigned hours, to force workers to work Saturdays on normal rates, and to pay workers injured on site just 80% of their weekly wage. The working conditions at Baiada are further discussed in Paltry sums for poultry workers (Goya Dmytryshchak, Brimbank Weekly, November 8, 2011).
Baiada Poultry is a private company owned by the Baiada family, and is ranked among the largest private companies in Australia. The Baiada family’s wealth was estimated at $495 million by Business Review Weekly in June 2011, and the company had revenue in 2009-2010 totalling $1,195 million. (Its chief customer is Coles, whose CEO, Ian McLeod, pocketed a $15.6 million pay cheque for 2010-11.) The company is managed by a board of directors: its Managing Director, John Camilleri, is founder Charles Baiada’s grandson. Camilleri is also on the board of the Australian Turf Club, and uses some of the money he gains from chickens to invest in horses. One of his horses, Macedonian, has thus far won $414,276 in prize money–which is $314,276 more than WorkCover fined Baiada after it was “convicted and fined for safety failings which led to the death of Saint Albans man, Mario Azzopardi around 3.15am on 5 December 2005”.
The industrial action at the Laverton factory is beginning to have effects upon the supply of chickens to Baiada’s customers. As a result, the company has been insisting that workers at its Adelaide factory perform overtime, which they have refused. Consequently, a large number of these workers are reported to have been sacked. Participants in Occupy Sydney have supported the striking Baiada poultry workers by briefly occupying a Coles supermarket in Sydney’s CBD, while Occupy Melbourne supporters are taking part in an action later today in Melbourne’s CBD.
Every year, hundreds of millions of chickens are slaughtered for their meat in Australia, and the conditions in which they are bred has created a niche market for those concerned for their welfare. In 2002, Baiada launched a new range of chicken branded ‘Lilydale Select Free Range Chicken’. Notwithstanding its propaganda regarding the many freedoms its Lilydale chickens enjoy, the company is one of a number of chicken producers currently being sued by the ACCC, which alleges “misleading or deceptive conduct in relation to the promotion and supply of chicken products”. In June 2010, the company sued Patty Mark and Animal Liberation Victoria for trespass/damages/exemplary damages/costs in relation to trespass on their broiler chicken factory near Werribee; actions which helped to expose the conditions under which chickens at the company’s Pankhurst Farms are bred. ALV has also been active in rescuing stranded birds from the factory in Laverton.
Occupy Melbourne and the OM Union Working Group has organised a very special action in support of striking Baiada workers. Participants will be travelling to Trades Hall after the action and then out to the picket line in Laverton.
When : 5.30pm, Tuesday, November 15 Where : City Square
Five men from Kroměříž have been charged with promoting Nazism on the Facebook social networking site. The men used their profiles to publish video footage of Nazi symbols and music videos with neo-Nazi themes. The lyrics to the music featured a racist subtext inciting hatred against people not of the “Aryan” race, Kroměříž District State Prosecutor Pavel Pukovec told the Czech Press Agency last week. If found guilty, the men face between three and 10 years in prison.
Ouch.
England
‘Hope Not Hate’ has profiled the fascist groupuscule New Right. In Australia, the New Right banner was briefly raised–along with “national anarchism”–by the Sydney-based, German neo-Nazi, Welf Herfurth. He subsequently appears to have mostly abandoned his efforts to instead promote the work of the openly neo-Nazi groupuscule Volksfront Australia. In June, Herfurth’s San Franciscan-based acolyte “Andrew Yeoman” (Andrew White) closed shop on his BANANA sect, while Herfurth’s Melbourne follower Scott Harrison has declared himself a Reverend in a tinpot White supremacist kvlt known as Creativity.
Germany
LEAD: German prosecutors: Neo-Nazis suspected in Turkish murders
DPA
Nov 11, 2011
Berlin – Three apparent neo-Nazis who spent 13 years on the run are the main suspects in the murders of nine shopkeepers of Turkish and Greek origin in Germany, prosecutors said Friday.
‘There is sufficient evidence that the murders may have been the work of a far-right group,’ prosecutors said in Karlsruhe.
A woman is in custody and is likely to be charge with murder.
The two men, who are also suspected of robbing a bank, were found dead in a burnt-out camper van this week. They are believed to have shot themselves.
The point-blank shootings of shopkeepers from 2000-06 had puzzled German police for years and spread fear among minorities.
The victims were shot in the head by attackers who walked into their shops, then walked away. The only common factor was that the victims were males of Turkish appearance.
The three suspects vanished in 1998 just as police were to arrest them for planting two bombs, neither of which exploded, with neo-Nazi motives.
They had since been moving around Germany, living under false names, police said earlier this week.
Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said the pistol used to kill the shopkeepers was found in the men’s flat in the city of Zwickau, eastern Germany.
Police searching the camper van containing the bodies of the men, aged 34 and 38, also found two pistols stolen in a 2007 attack on police in the city of Heilbronn. A 24-year-old policewoman was killed and a policeman critically wounded in the attack.
Federal prosecutors said the woman was suspected of membership in a terrorist group, murder, attempted murder and arson, adding that other neo-Nazis may have had connections with the trio.
BACKGROUND: Serial killing of migrants in Germany started in 2000
DPA
Nov 11, 2011
Hamburg – A series of killings of immigrant businessmen in Germany began in 2000, and police now suspect all were the work of a neo-Nazi group.
Eight of the victims – who all ran small businesses – were Turkish-born, and one was of Greek origin. All nine were shot dead at close range with the same gun, a Czech-made Ceska 7.65-millimetre pistol, police ballistics experts said.
Two victims operated doner kebab food stands, leading media to term the attacks the ‘doner murders.’ Others ran newspaper stands and other small businesses of the type operated by people with little capital but willing to work long hours.
The victims were shot in broad daylight by an assailant who calmly walked away afterwards and was not recognized by witnesses.
Police, who led a national inquiry, said three killings took place in Nuremberg, two in Munich and one each in the cities of Kassel, Hamburg, Rostock and Dortmund.
The series began with the killing of a florist in September 2000 and lasted until April 2006.
It was not immediately clear Friday if a similar killing last week of a 41-year-old doner kebab seller in the eastern German city of Chemnitz was also carried out by the same group.
There has been some speculation that–gasp!–authorities in the state of Thuringia–specifically those belonging to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution–assisted the suspects avoid arrest. Julia Jüttner, Birger Menke and Christian Teevs (‘The Bomb-Makers of Jena’: Suspects in Bizarre Case Identified as Neo-Nazis, Der Spiegel, November 10, 2011) ask:
How can three people under the observation of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency just disappear — and commit crimes — for such a long period? Especially given that domestic intelligence has no small number of informants in the far-right scene?
Take, for example, Timo Brandt, the leading figure in “Heimatschutz Thuringia” as well as its forerunner group, the “Anti-Antifa Ostthüringen.” It was revealed in 2001 that Brandt had been an informant for Thuringia’s state Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Under the codename “Otto,” he worked as an informant for several years and earned a handsome 200,000 deutsche marks (about $100,000 at the time) for his services. He would later claim that he re-invested the money into political activities and propaganda.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe is a new e-book edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze; in it “a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it”.
Poland
On November 11 (Independence Day) in Warsaw several thousand far-right nationalists and football hooligans held a march through the centre of town. An account of the small riot and a smaller, anti-fascist counter-demonstration/’blockade’ which accompanied the march is provided by blogger ‘Radically Real’:Independence Day in Warsaw, November 12, 2011. See also : Antifa blockade Warsaw : November 11, 2010, November 7, 2010.
On November 4, Russian ultra-nationalist tendencies held a so-called Russian March on the outskirts of Moscow to mark the country’s Day of National Unity. The event, organized by several far-right and neo-Nazi groups, attracted several thousand participants according to various estimates. Some coverage reported that the protesters were mainly youth, wearing masks and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans such as, “Russia for Russians” and “We will build a white paradise! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
Spain
November 11 was the four-year anniversary of the murder of 16-year-old Spanish skinhead Carlos Javier Palomino by the neo-Nazi Spanish soldier Josué Estébanez. In October 2009, Estébanez was sentenced to 26 years jail for the crime.
WHEN : 7pm, Sunday, November 13 WHERE : 17–19 Pipe Road, Laverton North (Melways map 40, D10)
Striking workers at Baiada Poultry factory have been standing strong in the face of a brutal police assault on their peaceful picket line on Friday night that saw one worker hospitalised. Now they need your support.
The Supreme Court has banned officials from the NUW, the workers’ union, from supporting or organising a picket so union members and supporters have stepped in to organise a community picket.
Join the rally to stand up for decent wages, decent working conditions, and the right to peaceful protest…
Meanwhile in Sydney, Occupy Sydney briefly occupied a Coles supermarket in solidarity with striking workers. (Baiada supplies chickens to Aldi, Coles, KFC, Nando’s, Red Rooster and Woolworths.) On the other hand, from her vantage point on Sydney’s desperately impoverished North Shore, trollumnist Miranda Devine has written in The Daily Telegraph some blah blah blah on the subject of the EVIL! UGLY! union thugs of the NUW.
An interesting text. The sentence in bold needs correction but… and the statement possibly requires something about the right to a tent arf arf.
In others news, Jon Faine expresses pain @ Lord Mayor Robert “Magnets How Do They Work?” Doyle in an interview on 774. Doyle and the Melbourne City Council will next week quash a motion by Greens councillor Cathy Oke for an independent inquiry into WTF happened when police violently evicted Occupy Melbourne from City Square on Friday, October 20.
Interestingly, Doyle makes two main claims in support of his decision to authorise police to evict the occupiers:
1) occupiers had earlier promised him to leave upon being ordered to by police (I still can’t find much infos inre this alleged promise) and;
2) he was provided with police intelligence to the effect that “…a number of the people who were instigators in the resistance to leaving the Square were well-known to the police. A number of them were looking for trouble. A number of them simply wanted to fight police…”
Doyle sensibly fails to provide any further details regarding his claims. He makes similarly unsupported claims regarding issues of “public safety, public welfare and public health” as providing grounds to justify his decision, laments the involvement of violent “professional protesters”/droogs in OM and yadda yadda yadda.
Pretty standard ideological fare from a professional Tory.
Note that, in an interview with Neil Mitchell on 3AW on October 24, Acting Police Commissioner Ken Lay blamed the “anti-Jewish” BDS group and the Socialist Alliance for the police violence.
Draft declaration for Occupy Melbourne
The following declaration prepared by the “Declaration Working Group” will be presented to the Occupy Melbourne General Assembly on Saturday 12th [November] in the Treasury Gardens.
We stand in solidarity with the people in the Occupy movement in Australia and across the globe. In the name of freedom and democracy, we stand resolutely in opposition to unjust, unrepresentative, and unsustainable systems and practices world-wide.
Our Vision
We recognise that we occupy already occupied land and that Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded. Acknowledging the ongoing impacts of colonisation must be the basis of our solidarity with Indigenous peoples.
We seek to create a just and equitable society in which political and economic power is not concentrated in the hands of a small minority.
We seek broad social change and aspire to end all forms of exploitation, oppression and marginalisation.
We envision an economic and financial system that is sustainable, democratic and just. We believe this requires fundamental changes to the current system and to structures of state and corporate power.
We believe that there is nothing more powerful than an engaged people inspired by the vision of a better future. Out vision is of a world in which all human beings have the opportunity to flourish peacefully within the ecological limits of our planet.
To realise this vision, we occupy Melbourne and through this Declaration, invite people to join us.
Our Group
We are an open and evolving grassroots people’s movement. We welcome, support, and are comprised of all ethnicities, cultures, abilities, genders, ages, sexualities, and faiths. We embrace our differences and choose not to be affiliated with any political party or organisation.
Our Process
We seek to understand and learn from one another and to open up spaces for discussion and dialogue. Our movement is leaderless and non-hierarchical.
We make decisions through an inclusive, participatory, and direct democratic process. We aspire to consensus-based decision-making in which all voices are heard and taken into account.
We do not believe it is enough to demand change from the top down not wait for change to arrive. We strive to live our values to the best of our ability, by reflecting our commitments to inclusive democracy, justice, community and sustainability in all our actions and pursuits.
We proceed with unshakable conviction: humbly, passionately, and in the spirit of celebration.
One picketer was taken to hospital by ambulance with suspected spinal injuries following the police assault on Friday evening. Despite intimidation by police and private security, a community picket continues throughout the weekend at the Baiada factory, 17–19 Pipe Road, Laverton North. Please call the Workers Solidarity Network mobile on 0431 445 978 for further infos. To donate to the strike fund: Carboni Social Club, BSB 803226, Account no: 10077.
“What’s disgusting? Union busting! What’s outrageous? Poultry wages!”
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
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