True Australian heroes

Read David Peetz's excellent Brave New Workplace on individual contracts and the government's war on collective bargaining. Peetz starts by describing how union activists at one Queensland mine were taken off duties and assigned to pull out weeds in the hot Queensland sun with a hand-held hoe rather than the skilled jobs they used to do. If we are looking for heroes in Australia we should start here with workers sticking by their mates. For more info see here. Striking that the nineteenth century thinker who is mentioned in a 2006 book on industrial relations is not Marx but Peter Kropotkin, a sign of the times.