The Rudd government and the labour aristocracies unions big test: The indentured labour disguised slavery 457-visa system.

The Rudd government and the labour aristocracies unions big test: The indentured labour disguised slavery 457-visa system.
A two-class worker system was created under the last government. Part 1
The Australian labour aristocracy and imported indentured labour workers not having the ordinary rights of Australian workers. Tens of thousands of these indentured workers now work in Australia.
The numbers of these imported workers is expected to expand greatly in the future.
Will the Rudd labour government now expand those two-class worker 457 systems with the help of labour unions?

These unions now only officially represent a minority of the Australian working people. Particularly in that comparatively privileged sector concentrated in the state and federal governments employ.

As the Australian 'working class' has in the main now become an unexploded labour aristocracy petty bourgeois class, much of this class now themselves prefer individual AWA contracts that reflect the new relations of production and to capital in services based economy.

  Cooperative Union /government actions in supporting the management of the 457 visa system are anti-worker from top to bottom and are based on the outlook that workers are not human beings and that it is not human    beings together with Mother Nature that create the wealth. Instead, the workers are said to be a "cost of production" and some unions are now planning to assist the government   monopolies in bringing down this "cost" as much as possible. So as to keep capitalism more profitable so it can afford to keep the bribes and privileges going to the Australian labour aristocracy .The 'official" Australian workers.

            As part of capitalisms anti-social offensive, those in power including their union   helpmates are dragging Australia backwards by assisting the monopolies to create and expand a   caste of indentured workers through temporary foreign worker   programs.

All of these measures have been taken simply by enacting new regulations without changing the legal face of the immigration law. In this way a "guest worker" program is more and more replacing immigration. .  They at the behest of the multinational companies that dominate our economy are dragging
            Society back with the large-scale introduction of a system in which
            Workers could live here in Australia for many years and have no rights   As citizens, no rights to permanent residency even.

 They are forced to live a totally uncertain and very vulnerable existence without normal workers rights.
Any complaints and they can be shipped out at the will of the employer of the government.  Haneef the doctor framed on terrorism charges was on one this type of Visa and was shown to have no rights at all.

This also means
            Introducing a system where the route to residence and citizenship
            For these workers is through the employer, which means a system
            Where the monopolies decide whether a worker should be sponsored or
            Not.

               These workers cannot move from one employer to another,
            Have no rights as permanent residents or citizens, and are often at
            The mercy of modern-day slave traders or "brokers," threatened with
            Deportation if they protest their wages and working conditions.

A real working class union system   would respond on the basis that "Our
            Security Lies in Our Fight in Defence of the Rights of All."

Instead, many Unions are now offering to cooperate to manage this system Under the pretext that government union cooperation can make it work for Aussie 'workers" and ensure their jobs as a more openly bribed labour aristocracy caste, while claiming they can 'assure" the 'rights of the new imported underclass worker caste.

They even hope to get the labour government to make these workers to sign up as 'Australian" union members, as if they were being treated the same in their contracts as all other Australian workers. If this occurs this will be a great boost to the union coffers for workers that can receive very little 'service' from these unions in practice. Sure the might have the little victory here protecting this or that group of imported workers as horrific cases of abuse comes to light but the indentured labour contracts system are designed to stop that.

In so far as they do support this system these unions abandon their working class origins and their original working class nature. The real task facing workers unions would be to abolish this whole system of indentured labour not indulge the pretence that they can help manage it fairly.

 In fact this will be   the management of disguised slavery of these poor workers.
A Support for the pretence that the indentured labour contracts was freely entered into. All those who have come to Australia

            As temporary foreign workers should be provided with landed
            Immigrant status upon arrival in Australia. No workers should be tied
            to one employer, and this practice must be ended at once.
"Illegal" but normal everyday practices, activities such as those practised by the labour brokers to whom many   temporary foreign workers have become indebted for tens of thousands of dollars through kickbacks for jobs and hidden continuing payments during the life of the contract, must be ended and   violators punished.

Profiting from providing substandard and overcrowded housing at inflated prices in Australia and deducting charges from the workers' pay check for airfare, housing etc. must be made illegal if this system is allowed to continue.

Not all of these 457 visas are for poor workers many are issued to the floating labour aristocracy and managers of imperialism many of whom are granted, like the capital they serve free international mobility. (Individual contractors are often called Expatriates)

Governments and international mining companies find these 457 visa workers particularly suited to 'sensitive' industries like Uranium mining. Language problems can be very helpful in fending of environmentalists trying to work out what these and other  mining or manufacturing companies are doing ,the processes they are using ,environmental safety issues and so on.

Australian workers on AWA contracts in the mining industry often receive a high "wages" form of income. And the "left" pretends that the profits of the resources industry are all derived from cruelly 'exploiting" these highly paid Australian
Workers.

This 'Marxist' sounding tale disguises the fact, that the high profits won are actually monopoly prices derived from demanding a cut from the profits created from the labour of the "cheap" labour workers in China, who turn these natural resources into commodities that are then sold at a profit.

As now the dominant player internationally in the purchase of iron and coal the Chinese demand is the dominant factor in setting the international prices that the other steel producing nations and companies must compete with.

Real Marxists say that exploited workers in the production process create profits and the price mechanism is used by capitalism to distribute a share of the profits to the capitalist class as a whole, including the share paid to the raw material suppliers.  These profits won in the production process are realised at the final sale of the commodities in the distribution process.

For an example of how this 457 visa system works in practice on the job in this industry, see the report at yet another 'left" nationalist website that promotes the 'Marxist' idea that the huge profits in this industry are created from the Australian 'workers" who should of course demand a bigger 'share' of the capitalist profits.

Some unions are doing the best they can for these imported workers but as on the whole the union movement only now serves the labour aristocracy, the official workers, there is no longer any possibility that the whole union movement will take a working class internationalist stand.

http://mike-servethepeople.blogspot.com/
 "Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) official Joe McDonald has demanded immediate access to an iron mine in Western Australia's Pilbara region following the death of a worker at the site on Friday January 11, 2008.

Workers at the mine are employed on unAustralian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) which deny the union the right to enter the mine. In the absence of trained union health and safety reps, safety issues are dealt with by management alone.

Workers at the site raised 82 separate safety issues about two months ago, but according to McDonald "We couldn't get near the place" because of AWA conditions.

The dead man was employed at the Cloud Break Mine, located near Newman, about 1200kms from Perth.

The mine is owned by Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Metals Group (FMG). Forrest briefly eclipsed Jamie Packer as Australia's wealthiest man at the end of December, when the value of his one billion shares in FMG rose 8.1% (or by an extra $544 million) to $7.26bn. However, falls in share prices on Wall Street during January have since seen him drop back behind Packer.

The dead man was a young worker in his 20s who had been married only a week prior to the accident which claimed his life. It was only his second day on the job.

He was in a boom lift, or cherry picker, with another worker and was working the controls to get close to a building under construction.

They were about 40 metres off the ground when his head became wedged between the building and the controls on the cherry picker.

This meant that the other worker could not access the controls to lower the boom and free him.

According to Kevin Reynolds, WA secretary of the CFMEU, there was a manual override switch on the ground. There were three workers near the switch, but all were Section 475 visa workers recruited from Thailand who could not speak English and could not work out how to use the override switch.

It took over half an hour for the worker to be freed from the cherry picker, by which time he had died."

Its 2008 and despite the mobilisation of workers "your rights at work " etc to get rid of Howard government .But already we can begin to see how the patriotic road will pan out in  the role a lot of the unions will now take under the Rudd government 

http://www.lhmu.org.au/default.asp
Cheap guest workers won't fix Tasmania's tourism problems

Tasmanian Tourism Council Chief Simon Currant's call to import Asian workers will not solve the complex problems of Tasmania's hospitality industry says the LHMU, the hospitality Union.

"We believe importing unskilled guest workers is a short-term fix aimed at covering up years of poverty wages and industry inaction by getting somebody else to fix the problem," says David O'Byrne, LHMU Tasmanian Branch Secretary.

"To say people don't want to work in hospitality because Australians like their weekends is offensive. People don't want to work in the hospitality industry because it is low paid and it is dangerous. It's worth noting the mining industry seems to have no problems getting people to work on weekends.

"The labour and skills shortage in hospitality is the direct result of the industry's failure to invest in their people.

"The hospitality Industry has the highest proportion of low wage workers and it has the second highest injury rate of all industries, second only to construction.

"The sector is plagued by Australia's highest labour turnover figures, chronic labour market shortages and a crippling deficit in skills and experience."

The solution  for the LHMU?

Same as Howard, Costelo"s and Vanstones.look after the capitalist's profits.

 So, now the union agrees and will "consult " to assist only in the 'short and medium term" of course!

"The LHMU acknowledges there is a skill shortage and will, in consultation with industry, look at options for skilled migration as a short-term solution when the industry itself begins to address its fundamental problems in the medium to long term."

No doubt they will insist on the 457 systems better policing so that it is all 'fairly
 run in defence of the interests of the privileged Australian workers.

Any real union workers movement interested in the rights of ALL workers would insist in the abolition of the whole indentured labour system nationally.

Full stop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
In Marxist theory, those workers (proletarians) in developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of underdeveloped countries form an "aristocracy of labor." The phrase was popularised by Karl Kautsky in 1901 and theorised by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's theory contends that companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world (where wages are much lower), resulting in increased profits. Because of these increased profits, the companies are able to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. Lenin thus contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world, and argued that a workers' revolution could only begin in one of the underdeveloped or semideveloped countries, such as Russia."

Wikipedia claims that . 'This theory of the labour aristocracy is controversial in the Marxist movement."

Meaning of course that the revisionists and Trotskyists 'left" have abandoned that  marxist theory and pretend that it is only about a handfull of very highly paid workers and 'sellout "union officials.

Anarchists.
The term was originally coined by The Anarchist  Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 as a criticism of the notion that organised workers are the most radical. Bakunin wrote: "To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers."
This found exspession in the Anarcho syndicalist idea of building one union The IWW. As way of building unity and overcoming craft unionist  and national and class divisions.To sign up the immigrant workers the labourers and the tradesmen in one union.

In more recent years this anarchistic view  influenced  the work by Sakai on american labour,  settlerism, race  and nation.

J. Sakai's Settlers: 'The Mythology of the White Proletariat (OCR)"

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/10/28/17790131.php