Australia: BHP iron ore strike in Pilbara—first in decades
Reports of exactly how many workers walked off the job range from almost 200 to just 63, with the company anxious to downplay the industrial action as an ineffectual fiasco.
Alabama miners are determined to fight, but the UMWA is isolating the strike and working to defeat it.
That's why we're building independent rank-and-file committees of miners, linked with committees of autoworkers, educators, and Amazon workers, which will break the isolation imposed by the corporate-controlled unions and unite the working class.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) now includes committees of rank-and-file autoworkers, educators, Amazon workers, postal workers, and bus drivers.
If you are a rank-and-file mine worker, fill out this form now to contact us and start building a committee.
You can also text us at 205-614-9370
“The aim of this global initiative is to develop a genuine broad-based movement of the international working class, and to encourage workers in all countries to break out of the prison-like shackles in which they are confined by the existing state-controlled and antidemocratic unions, staffed by right-wing pro-capitalist executives.” – DAVID NORTH
Reports of exactly how many workers walked off the job range from almost 200 to just 63, with the company anxious to downplay the industrial action as an ineffectual fiasco.
The existing accounts of the lockout all put the defeat down to the miners themselves—courageous, but worn down after 16 months of struggle. This article examines the critical role of the Labor Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party in isolating the locked-out miners and finally forcing them back to work on the terms of the coal barons.
Christopher Harder, a former criminal lawyer, has called for police to investigate the unlawful deal to drop charges against the company’s chief executive Peter Whittall.
The unions responded to BHP’s scab labour initiative by pleading for more backroom talks.
The continued attempts by the AEU bureaucracy to force through a sellout, and the mass opposition of educators, underscores the crucial importance of the new rank-and-file committee aimed at organising teachers and staff independently.
The resolution passed at yesterday’s lunchtime meeting was part of the campaign for a No Vote by all WSU staff members on the regressive enterprise agreements that management and the two campus trade unions are trying to rush through.
The Committee for Public Education, a rank-and-file educators’ network, calls on teachers and educators to repudiate the government-AEU conspiracy against their rights, including by voting “no” in the union’s rushed ballot.
The WSU management is trying to push through new 2026–30 enterprise agreements that will facilitate more job destruction, further real pay cuts and increased workloads.