Workers' power

Workers are more productive than ever, so why are we often working harder, for longer, in less secure jobs? The retirement age keeps being pushed higher but hundreds of thousands of people in work can’t get enough hours. We need to stop deregulation and casualisation, and instead use every means to improve wages and conditions for workers. Even more important, workers need to act collectively to organise and strike against exploitation and injustice in the workplace.

What we think

1. All economic value, and therefore all business profit, is produced through the exploitation of human labour and the natural world.
2. When workers do not collectively own and manage their own place of work, the interests of workers and employers are counterposed. There is always a battle over the share of value produced in the economy going to bosses’ profits versus the share going to workers’ wages.
3. Work should be socially useful, personally rewarding, safe, secure and well paid.
4. There must be equal pay for work of equal value; workplaces and industrial laws must be free from discrimination.
5. Workers should collectively own and democratically control their workplaces, including the right to elect and fire management.
6. Workers have the right to be a member of a trade union that is free from government or corporate interference, and the right to organise, to strike and to collectively bargain.

We’ll fight to

Rights and collective action

1. Remove all restrictions on workers’ right to strike and protect Victorian workers from persecution under Australia’s anti-union and anti-strike industrial laws including providing for the political and legal defence of any worker or union being pursued legally for taking industrial action, and banning prosecutions of striking workers by state sector employers.
2. Cap the pay of executives in the public service, government agencies, universities and state-owned corporations at no more than five times Victoria’s median full-time wage.
3. Reverse outsourcing, privatisation, the use of labour hire and the contracting out of ongoing services, policy work and other core functions of government.

Wages and conditions

1. Ensure there is a current, union negotiated enterprise agreement in place wherever the government provides or funds a service. This includes the entire state public sector, state funded social services and state construction infrastructure. The government should mandate minimum conditions for workers in these sectors, including a $35-an-hour minimum wage and full penalty rates.
2. Create jobs with necessary training for all who want them, expanding public housing, renewable public energy supply, public health, public education, public farms, public transport and other public services and infrastructure.
3. Address chronic wage theft by expanding and publicising Wage Inspectorate Victoria. Allow the inspectorate, unions and workers to prosecute major cases of wage theft.
4. Increase funding for Victoria Legal Aid to assist migrant workers get full residence and workplace rights.
5. Increase rights and protections of casual and gig economy workers, including reintroducing the state-funded Victorian Sick Pay Guarantee, and implementing a system to ensure leave and other entitlements follow workers whenever they move to a new role.

Organising and industrial rights

1. Mandate annual elections for health and safety reps in every workplace; where a union has a member or members on site, it must run the election.
2. Legislate to allow workers to picket their work during an industrial dispute.
3. Fully decriminalise sex work, and recognise sex workers’ right to organise collectively for their pay and conditions.
4. Make May Day a public holiday.
5. Bring WorkCover workplace accident insurance and compensation fully into public ownership and fund peer and/or specialist support and advocacy services for injured workers, to ensure they receive their full entitlements.

Public sector

1. Review and cut all state government contracts with the big four consulting and accounting firms (PwC, KPMG, EY, Deloitte), following the PwC tax leak and KPMG scandals at the federal level, and bring the policy, advisory and IT work currently contracted to them back in-house to a properly staffed and resourced Victorian public service.
2. Scrap the below-inflation public sector wage cap and expand agency operating budgets to guarantee real wage increases for all public sector workers.
3. Reverse all public sector job cuts made under the ‘Silver Review’ (formally the Independent Review of the Victorian Public Service, led by Helen Silver).
4. Require all public sector vacancies to be advertised within two weeks of becoming vacant.
5. Amend the Victorian Public Service Code of Conduct to protect public servants’ rights to political speech and free expression outside of work.