Workers are revolting despite restrictions on strike action

Written by: Ned K. on 24 September 2025

Reports in mainstream news bulletins and social media show that workers across a wide range of industries are taking matters into their own hands through industrial action. 

Currently industrial action in the form of bans and/or strike action is taking place at Fonterra (makers of Bega cheese), public service workers in NSW and SA, nurses and support services workers in public hospitals in SA, security guards in Victoria and teacher support staff in Queensland, Ikea distribution center workers, to name a few. To top it off, the ABC and social media reported that the workers employed by animal care "not for profit" RSPCA went on strike in Lonsdale in Adelaide for the first time. A spokesperson for the workers on ABC said that the RSPCA showed more respect for its budget surplus than the workers who care for the animals.

A common theme of the industrial action is demands for higher wages and safe staffing levels and safe workloads. These two aspects of workers' demands are a reaction to the large corporations and their subservient governments' relentless drive to extract more surplus value from workers by reducing the real value of wages and "increasing productivity" (unsafe workload and lower staffing levels).

In some struggles, workers have conducted long campaigns to reverse privatization of services and have successfully won direct employment by governments after years of governments handing over the running of public services such as hospitals to private foreign owned multinationals like Downer Group and Danish owned ISS.

These collective actions are the tip of the iceberg of the feeling of millions of workers across Australia. The ruling class relies on its governments to contain struggle and isolate workers through repressive industrial laws which only allow "protected industrial action" during an enterprise bargaining period. 

Despite these restrictions, more and more workers are taking action. They learn more through taking collective action for a few hours or a day than they learn in all the drawn-out negotiations with employers and tri-partite "productivity" talk fests of governments, big business and the ACTU leaders.

From their struggles, workers' leaders emerge and workers in workplaces not taking action observe and learn what is possible,

DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN!

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