Thought I’d give a little rundown for international comrades about the industrial action currently happening on the Sydney train network between railway workers and the state government of NSW, because it’s really starting to pop off.

A bit of background, under Australia’s reformist arbitration system of workplace relations, a lot of workplaces have something called an enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) that is negotiated every 3 years between management and the workforce (with the union generally doing the negotiating). Workers can generally only take industrial action or strike during or in the lead up to the negotiation period - so once an EBA is locked in, workers in that workplace/company won’t be able to take action for about two years.

All these mechanisms were brought in during the early 20th century as a form of corporatism between bosses, the government, and increasingly as time has gone on the degraded union movement (with some unions being much more anti-worker than others, look up the SDA for an interesting side note on how bad some Australian unions can be). Australian industrial relations law and the various bodies that arbitrate between workers and employers basically exist as a release valve that shaves off the sharp edges of the class struggle, of course usually with a preference towards the bosses over the workers. Over the years the system has become more or less pro-business depending on which capitalist party is dominant in the capitalist two-party system (they can do things like stack arbitration courts with people who suit their agenda, or straight up chance the laws).

Alright, so in Sydney the employer of the local railway workers is the state government of NSW, currently run by the extremely pro-capitalist Labor Party. They’ve been going back and forth negotiating an EBA with the RTBU, the union that represents the rail workers, for a while now. The battle lines are currently drawn at the government’s offer of a 15% pay rise over 4 years (barely above inflation), and the worker’s demand of 32% over 4 years. There’s also a lot of other clauses about benefits and stuff that are included in the EBA and they’re arguing about some safety related stuff.

There’s been on and off little industrial actions over the course of the negotiations (at one point the workers opened up the gates at the stations and let everyone ride for free, but that’s been ruled illegal now). The union flirted with the idea of striking over New Year’s (an insanely busy night for the network with Sydney’s famous fireworks) but ended up backing down.

However starting yesterday (Wednesday) they’re doing 3 days of action which is basically bricking the entire network. For example they’re only driving 30km/h in 80km/h zones. The ETU (electricians union) has vastly exacerbated matters by putting a ban on a lot of maintenance work on the network (based). The Sydney rail network is barely functional at the best of times (heavy rain will cause huge delays a lot of the time) and this action fucked shit up big time. Yesterday the trains were running 45, 90, 120, 200 minutes late on some lines, according to the news over 1,000 services were totally cancelled. People were saying their 45-60 minute commute took 4 hours. A lot of office workers just didn’t go in. One of the worst affected lines goes to the airport, fuck knows how many people missed their flights yesterday.

Sydney is an incredibly commuter-heavy city. If you work anywhere close to the heart of the city driving is a huge inconvenience. Our traffic is fucked (terrible urban planning and a huge body of water in the middle of the city). So this is basically the biggest news in town for the next few days.

The local shitrag newspapers (all various levels of pro-capitalist going on a spectrum from snooty upper-middle class to bloodthirsty racism depending on whether or not Rupert Murdoch owns them) have been doing as much as they can to smear the unions, but a lot of people online don’t seem to be buying it. I’m sure there’s a silent majority of right wing idiots that eat that slop up (Sydney/NSW and Australia on the whole is full of CHUD pain pigs who love capitalism and racism despite being actively harmed by both) but online I’m seeing maybe a 70/30 split of people saying “no it’s actually the governments fault, their offer is shit”. I haven’t had the displeasure of seeing what Sky News Australia have had to say, but I’m sure it’s “union ebil”. I saw the papers are spreading a narrative that some train drivers make $200k a year already which is just laughable.

The state government is in 100% attack mode, smearing the union for not taking their crappy offer, saying they will explore “legal avenues” to stop the action.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. It seems like public opinion isn’t as anti-union as I would have expected, but Sydney commuter treatlers will run out of patience with their trains being delayed extremely quickly. Obviously the union won’t get the 32%, that’s just a bargaining position.

Nice to see an Australian union (plus the ETU who have been very based in the last 12 months) finally exercising their considerable power. I wish I was repped by a union with half as much cojones. Here’s hoping they win. And if you’re based in Australia and see people shittalking the union or the workers online, defend them! Let people know the NSW government could end this right now if they wanted and encourage worker solidarity.