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Animal rights activists have released secretly-recorded footage of disturbing cruelty to chickens at a Bridgewater Poultry farm. This is no fly-by-night operation. This is a farm owned by pillars of the farming industry: “Bridgewater Poultry is owned by a consortium of farmers, including Victorian Farmers Federation Egg Group president Tony Nesci, who had seen the footage. Mr Nesci said he was not responsible for the workers’ treatment of the animals because they were contractors. … Stop trying to put the blame on us, they were responsible in their actions.” So in this case he wants the responsibility pushed down to the bottom rung — but when the RSPCA contacted farmers to raise concerns, Nesci wanted them to deal with the national body instead. This is the main benefit of outsourcing arrangements: everybody can deny responsibility for systemic problems by pointing their finger at someone else. And Nesci trots out the other standard excuse: “We in the egg industry are at the mercy of only a handful for people who are prepared to do this job. We were fortunate to find somebody who would do the job.” What this always — always — means is they are not prepared to offer pay and working conditions to make the job attractive.

(Update — Nesci stood down as NFF Egg Group President.)

Godfrey Moase has reflected on the recent federal election result, and has drawn some lessons for social movements that seem broadly right to me — they could be distilled down to something like ‘significant social change can only be achieved through a bold vision supported by an organised community’. Electoral politics is just one piece of the puzzle, and far from the most important one: “There is no shortcut past building a strong, effective and activated social base if we want to win lasting change and a safe climate.” Moase concludes with a rallying call: “The next three years should not be written off as lost to the wilderness. Deep social change, of the kind and scale required to build a new economy that is just, sustainable and democratic, is not incubated in the parliamentary sphere. Rather, the deep and transformational change required to properly deal with the climate emergency emerges in our communities and is later ratified by parliaments.” I look forward to his promised Part Two, which will address what needs to be done for the next three years.

Peter Whitehead: “The subtext of ‘millennials spend whatever amount on small pleasures’ is implicitly to argue that this is an extravagance, that if only they’d spend it on something better, they wouldn’t be so sad. It is the product of an ideology that cannot conceive of a common good beyond the market… The fact that we can no longer conceive of a future wherein people might be able — even entitled — to an existence that does not merely consist of subsistence but rather is actively pleasurable is depressing beyond belief, and marks one of the crueller turns in capitalist ideology post-crash. … Every time we see things like ‘the minimum wage is liveable if you just cut out luxuries’ we need to read the subtext: ‘I don’t think happiness is something the poor should be allowed to have.’ We need to reclaim the old slogan ‘Bread and Roses’, but this time with an emphasis on the roses.” In the Australian context, perhaps we need to demand ‘Smashed Avocado and Roses’…

“British Conservatism has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped ‘conserving’; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology. Today, that relationship has been reversed: a party in thrall to ideology is reduced to boardroom banalities and half-remembered hymns to a Thatcherite past.” It strikes me that Robert Saunders’ New Statesman argument about the closing of the conservative mind maps fairly closely onto the Australian Liberal-National Coalition. Just look at the Morrison government, with no real ideas — just ideological slogans about cutting corporate taxes, punishing refugees, bashing unions, and fetishising coal.

The Centre for Future Work’s Dr Jim Stanford has published a new research report, Union Organising and Changing the Rules: Two Sides of the Same Coin. It notes Australia ranks poorly on the World Economic Forum’s index of labour rights, and there is a strong link between union membership density and labour rights. Stanford warns the union movement not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in reviewing the ‘Change the Rules’ campaign: “While there are a few countries with strong labour rights but relatively small unions, there are no exceptions in the other direction: that is, there are no countries where labour rights are weak, but unions are strong anyway. [I]t is apparent that there are no countries in the OECD which have attained union density equal to 20% of the workforce or higher, without demonstrating a WEF workers’ rights score of 80 or higher. The significance of this finding for Australia (with a workers’ rights score below that threshold) seems clear: in order to successfully rebuild union density, and obtain the resulting benefits for workers, Australian labour advocates must also win significant improvements in labour laws and basic union freedoms.”

(This follows Stanford’s colleague Alison Pennington’s call for a bigger vision — in my view the technical changes Stanford wants must be linked to that vision if there is any hope of winning public support for them.)

Landlords are, as a rule, awful — and it seems the government landlords who control vulnerable people’s access to social housing are no exception. A new report analysed court and tribunal decisions and found that tenants are frequently evicted because of circumstances beyond their control, including victims of domestic violence evicted because of the behaviour of their abusers. For example: “In a 2017 case, Victoria’s public housing authority evicted a woman with an acquired brain injury and a cognitive disorder from her home of nine years. The woman appealed, telling a tribunal much of the ‘evidence presented related to her partner … over whom she had no control’. She told the tribunal he had hit her ‘two weeks’ before the hearing. But the department successfully argued the ‘yelling, screaming, making loud noises, fighting and using threatening and abusive language’ represented a ‘nuisance’ breach.” This “nuisance” included threats of violence by the woman’s partner. The tribunal (presumably VCAT) upheld her eviction. The report was produced by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, and it notes that the threat of eviction is not only unjust in these circumstances, but that it can actively discourage vulnerable tenants from seeking assistance to address their problems.

Just days after promising a tough new approach, the Fair Work Ombudsman capitulated to Uber, allowing the tech giant to continue undercutting minimum wages and working conditions. Hiding behind a sparse media release, the FWO [$] “declined requests to reveal more detail behind the Ombudsman’s reasoning”, which does not suggest confidence it has reached the right conclusion. Workplace law experts are concerned about the secrecy of the process, with Professor Andrew Stewart calling it “very disappointing, given the significant uncertainty that exists over the legality of Uber’s arrangements. The central issue … could and arguably should have been tested in court, not behind closed doors.” It may be the case that the existing laws do not adequately protect Uber drivers, but regulators should be transparent about decisions that affect the rights of thousands of workers. Of course, this is the Uber model: “Uber always depended on pursuing artificial market power and destroying any constraints on the exercise of that power. It was always explicitly transferring wealth from labor to capital, and from democratically accountable public control to totally unaccountable private control.”

I don’t often agree with The Australian’s Legal Affairs editor, Chris Merritt, but he is spot on in his column today: “It might sound counterintuitive, but when parliament considers its response to police raids against the media, greater protection for journalists does not need to be the main game. … After the events of last week, there is little doubt that this system is covering up matters that, while embarrassing, could have been made public without harming the nation’s security. … The real harm from excessive secrecy has nothing to do with the media. It can deprive the community of information about government conduct that is necessary for the proper functioning of democracy. Once officials classify material as secret, its unauthorised disclosure is a criminal offence, regardless of whether it should never have been secret in the first place.” Merritt calls for stricter classification guidelines, increased resourcing of the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and more scrutiny by independent officers and judges at all stages of the process — but he’s right that a review of what is kept secret and why is the most important issue.

Some good news: “Since the privatisation of Victoria’s coal-fired power stations in the 1990s, the Latrobe Valley has been known for high unemployment. But now one group of workers has taken the task of creating new jobs into their own hands. … [S]ince the closure of the Hazelwood power station in 2016 the group has taken steps to realise its dream of a worker-owned factory in the industrial town of Morwell.” When a local manufacturer shut down, the Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Cooperative stepped in and purchased their plant, equipment and intellectual property, and has now begun producing solar powered hot water systems. The group says: “At Earthworker Energy, the workers are the owners. Each member has equal voting rights and decisions are made democratically. We have no boss or external shareholders. This means we ensure our workplace is safe, we are invested in the quality of the goods we produce, we make decisions in the interest of our local community and profits are shared equally and locally. … We believe that if we are to properly care for our environment, our communities and those of future generations, then we need a proper say in the economy. Bringing democracy into the workplace is a good place to start.”

The Centre for Future Work’s Alison Pennington: “A labor movement that primarily fights over distribution is in a weak position to assert a dignified collective control over its broader destiny. … Today the proliferation of low-margin, low productivity firms — in part due to the rise of new business models that slice up the supply chain and obfuscate who is in charge of employing workers — makes the organizing challenge even harder. It’s unclear from where or whom workers can win their cut of the profit. … The task of Australian socialists should be to arm the workers’ movement with the ideas and politics that can increase our control over all aspects of our lives.” What struck me about Pennington’s piece is how many of her concrete proposals were part of the union movement’s (failed) campaign — bargaining beyond the enterprise level, allowing more issues to be covered by collective agreements, revitalising education and training. But the ‘Change the Rules’ slogan made these technical issues the goal, rather than presenting a vision of what the new rules could achieve for people. It was a campaign that would persuade union bureaucrats, but nobody else.