Petition for the rights we need to win

Please email us your support for this petition, with the details of your union affiliation, and download the petition (as pdf) and circulate it in your union or workplace.

PETITION FOR THE RIGHTS WE NEED TO WIN

WE THE UNDERSIGNED call on all the leaders, organisations, and activists in the labour movement to join us in a campaign for the essential workers' rights denied or left without mention in current ALP policy.

We will campaign especially for the following planks of the policy adopted by the ACTU congress of October 2006:

* A legal right to strike, and repeal of sections 45D and E (from 1977) of the Trade Practices Act, which ban “secondary” or solidarity action.
* Pattern bargaining (or multi-employer collective bargaining) should be legal for all industries. Strike action in pursuit of pattern or industry-wide bargaining must therefore also be legal.
* Union representation in bargaining as a right for every individual worker, regardless of whether his or her fellow-workers are too scared to claim that right.
* Legal rights of access to workplaces, to workers, and to documents for union * Employers should be legally obliged to take part in collective bargaining, and can escape collective bargaining only when the union can find no index – no petition, no mass meeting, nothing – that the majority of workers want collective bargaining.
* Unfair dismissal laws that apply to all workers equally.

We will also campaign for the full and rapid implementation by an ALP government of planks included in the policy of the April 2007 conference such as the abolition of AWAs and of the ABCC.