The release of our audited accounts and operating report for the previous financial year shows the overarching and significant factor in our work this financial year has been the pandemic. The various industrial and health and safety issues that arose for hotel quarantine staff, contact tracers, prison officers, occupational health and safety inspectors, health workers and child protection workers to name but a few, have been our main focus.
As the world prepares to meet at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, activists from the union movement around Australia will join together to hear from workers, climate change experts and movement leaders about the next steps in our campaign.
The union movement will be uniting behind workers and individual unions pursuing job security claims as the ACTU declared unions will be “turning up the heat” on employers as the economy emerges from the pandemic, flagging more action, picket lines, and product boycotts, to pressure companies to offer more secure employment conditions to workers.
The Federal Government succeeded in passing their Respect@Work Bill which legislates for about five and a half of the 55 recommendations in the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s landmark inquiry into sexual harassment at work. The ACTU pressed for amendments to the Bill for the full implementation of the Respect at Work report.
Australian workers used to have secure jobs with secure pay but the Federal Government keeps putting big business ahead of workers. Let's do something, before it's too late - if we don't act now, reliable work will be gone for good.
Join us and together we can restore job stability for all.
Casual Work
Unions and business are committed to working cooperatively with governments to keep workplaces safe and to achieve the highest possible rates of vaccination though building confidence in the vaccination program and supporting workers to get vaccinated. The ACTU and the BCA acknowledge that the Federal Government’s COVID-19 vaccination policy is that it should be free and voluntary. We believe that for the overwhelming majority of Australians your work or workplace should not fundamentally alter the voluntary nature of vaccination.
The ACTU has called on the Morrison Government not to ratify the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, which includes Myanmar’s military junta, at the JSCOT inquiry. RCEP has been negotiated behind closed doors between Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Despite its size, there is no evidence that the RCEP agreement will benefit Australian workers.
The ACTU argues that ratifying RCEP will:
Reactive economic policy is no safeguard in a public health crisis. From yawning gaps in the vaccination rollout to reactively cobbling together a below-poverty-line disaster payment during Victoria’s lockdown, the brunt of the Federal Government’s refusal to actively plan for public health during a pandemic has consistently fallen on those already hardest hit. As case numbers rise in New South Wales and other states remain on the alert, the Federal Government shows little attempt to meaningfully break this cycle.
The passage of the Your Future, Your Super Bill last month is another attack on working people and their retirement savings. The legislation schackles workers to their current funds and new workers to their first fund, introduce performance benchmarks for super funds, and impose onerous regulations on industry super funds which for-profit funds will be functionally exempt from. The measure to schackle workers to their current fund, or first fund, upends industrial default selection.
Mark Perica (CPSU Federal Office Senior Legal Officer) is again representing Australian workers at the ILO. His blog continues. CAS Journal : midnight, Friday 11 June 2021 Tonight, I had my intervention on Cambodia which is a case involving serious contraventions of the freedom of association convention C87. A couple of days ago, we had our co-ordination meeting of the workers group on Cambodia which ,of course, included the delegation of Cambodian workers. We are making the case for them. We have to be careful not to say anything that causes someon
