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union execs have outsourced their social change mandate to the ALP....

Sixty years on from the Vietnam War marches, Australian union bosses are mostly MIA when it comes to protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Andrew Gardiner reports.

The genocide in Gaza, and moves to muzzle talking about it in universities and schools, have rank-and-file unionists up in arms. But union officials have barely lifted a finger on Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe, or on schemes to stop us talking about it. Instead, we’re seeing a timid, tepid response from union bosses.

Spearheaded by Israel backers Jillian Segal and David Gonski, moves by the Anti-Semitism Education Taskforce threaten to “chill” Middle East debate in our seats of learning and elsewhere. To the dismay of rank-and-file members, many union execs seem ambivalent.

The union bosses appear to be in lockstep with the Albanese Labor Government, which announced last Thursday that the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) would have new powers to compel compliance on a broad swathe of what our PM calls “the evil scourge of anti-Semitism”.

Deference to this new regime is to be gauged via measures like a university “report card” system, put forward by Segal herself and, in NSW, a new code of conduct for school staff. Yet what looks like an assault on our educational sovereignty by a pair of high flyers closely tied to groups with allegiance to Israel, not Australia, has elicited nothing in the way of meaningful resistance from either vice chancellors or union heavyweights.

Antisemitism Task Force

With full backing from Canberra, the coercive power of Segal and Gonski’s new task force is such that journalist and activist Meg Bourne predicts “entire staff-rooms will self-censor in order to avoid reprisals”. Yet officials from the union representing independent school teachers in NSW and Canberra fell right into line, welcoming the changes which, they said, “ensure all schools are free from hate speech”.

Critics of education union bosses’ often-muted response to the Segal-Gonski moves say they’ve abandoned their duty to protect academic freedom and – in one case at least – gaslit rank-and-file members by claiming the moves were “unremarkable” and there was “a need to recognise changes to the law”.

Secondary education union execs came in for particular criticism. The NSW Teachers Federation is accused of sending out Member Alerts that understated the significance of changes to the code of conduct, while the NSW/ACT branch of the Independent Education Union (IEU), representing private and religious school teachers, has been attacked for openly supporting the new code of conduct.

Meanwhile, officials at the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Australian Education Union (Vic.) seem to be dithering amid a slow-walking of moves – approved by rank-and-file members – to divest the superannuation funds of members from companies directly aiding the Gaza genocide.

Where are the unions?

A largely muted, movement-wide response to the genocide in Gaza has many questioning: “Where are the unions”? Their peak body, the ACTU, seems to have gone to ground since May last year, when secretary Sally McManus joined president Michele O’Neil to condemn starvation tactics in Gaza. McManus was spotted at the protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit earlier this month, but has been otherwise quiet in public on Israel and Gaza for the past nine months.

Some unions have bucked the trend, most notably the Australian Services Union (ASU), which succeeded in divesting superannuation funds from companies supporting the Israeli war machine, and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), a vocal participant at rallies. “(Israel is) an oppressive regime responsible for genocide and the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians”, the MUA’s Dave Ball told anti-Herzog protestors in Melbourne.

These honourable exceptions aside, the inaction of union officials stands in stark contrast to the 1970s, when unions halted the mining and export of uranium, and ‘Green Bans’ protected parks, historic buildings and low-income housing. With the Transport Workers Union spurning the chance to “do a Sinatra” on Herzog by refusing to fuel his flight home, perhaps the most effective remaining option for unions is the aforementioned divestment.

Union superfunds silent

Australian Super, whose board includes the ACTU’s O’Neil and the AWU’s Paul Farrow, is heavily invested in at least six such companies: Elbit Systems (drones), ICL Group (white phosphorus), Caterpillar (demolition of Gazan homes and public facilities), Palantir (AI/software for weapons systems) and Lockheed Martin (aerial attacks on Gaza). A successful divestment resolution would, theoretically, hit Israel where it hurts.

But when the rubber meets the road, this option often goes begging. Aside from the ASU’s success with Vision Super and a member-driven partial divestment by HESTA, union officials have ignored, slow-walked or outright

blocked efforts to stop funding the suppliers of Israel’s war machine.

Farrow might sit on the Australian Super board, but his union appears to be one of the least inclined to help the Palestinian cause, as is the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), whose assistant secretary is on the board of Rest Super.

“We’ve seen the most willingness to act (on divestment) from ordinary members. Union leadership says they’re eager to do the right thing, but we’ll have to wait and see”, Molly Coburn, campaigns lead at the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, told MWM.

The biggest divestment debacle belongs to the NTEU, whose National Council of members passed a “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” resolution in 2024, only to see union execs not prevail on their fund, UniSuper, to act. The gap – in deed if not word – between rank-and-file members and head office is beginning to look like a chasm.

Social change outsourced to ALP?

Why are today’s unions so timid when compared to their 1970s forebears? A part of it is their co-dependency with the ALP, in which union bosses (not ordinary members) can aspire to pre-selection for Parliament and other assorted perks in exchange for “throwing money (and said members) into getting Labor elected”.

“The union bureaucrats have placed an ever-greater emphasis on getting Labor elected over mobilising workers’ power,” activist Ian Rintoul explained. In other words,

union execs have outsourced their social change mandate to the ALP,

a party of neoliberal acolytes whose commitment to the people of Gaza amounts to little more than “whispering, mumbling clichés and banalities”.

It gets worse. Not content with tossing sumptuous junkets at politicians and reporters, the Tel Aviv lobby offers the same and more to union officials through its Australia-Israel Labour Dialogue, a group laser-focused on stopping, you got it, divestments.

Following one such junket as a young activist, former ACTU president and PM Bob Hawke was so smitten with Israel that he lauded the country as “a working class building its own nation through its own physical and intellectual labor”.

These trips, and the other activities, “have only one objective and that’s to see that no matter what Israel does, it will never be criticised by Canberra”, former Foreign Minister Bob Carr said.

But perhaps the biggest reason lies, again, in the divergent priorities of rank-and-file members and union executives. Not only do the latter seem indifferent to causes like Gaza, but in some cases, they’ve worked against unaffiliated rank-and-file groups who are the heartbeat of activism, like Unionists for Palestine (U4P).

For four straight days in early 2024, U4P pulled off a successful, 1000-strong “community picket” of Israeli-owned ZIM Ganges, suspected by activists of being a conduit for arms shipments to Israel. Members allege that within weeks of the Port Melbourne picket, efforts were underway to undermine and divide the group by infiltrating meetings and using assorted nefarious tactics.

“Is there a group of Trade Unions for Sudan (or) Trade Unions for Afghanistan? As I understand it, 750,000 people have been killed in Sudan”, said Health Services Union president Gerard Hayes, clearly unimpressed with all this grassroots activism.

“U4P came under attack from ALP-aligned union members and officials, including the Victorian Trades Hall, because we were seen as a threat to union structures and to the ALP”, the group’s Monica Campo told MWM. The attraction among some of these officials to “power for its own sake” leaves a growing number of rank-and-file activists wondering if there’s a better way.

https://michaelwest.com.au/from-vietnam-war-to-gaza-genocide-where-have-all-the-unions-gone/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

difficult...

Greens leader Larissa Waters has responded to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese labelling former Australian of the Year Grace Tame “difficult”.

Albanese is under fire after he took a swipe at Tame during the Herald Sun’s Future Victoria Summit yesterday, where during a word association game he called the activist and child abuse survivor “difficult”.

Waters posted on X and suggested the PM instead try the words “unbreakable”, “warrior” or “fierce” to describe Tame.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-news-live-trade-minister-says-government-will-fight-trump-tariffs-families-of-australian-diplomats-directed-to-leave-israel-and-lebanon-amid-heightening-tensions-20260226-p5o5k1.html

 

HAVING KNOWN ALBO'S WAYS, GUS CAN SAY WITH CONFIDENCE THAT HIS BRAIN IS STARTING TO GET FILLED UP WITH BULLSHIT FROM "HIS ADVISORS", "SENIOR PS CHIEFOS" AND MOSSAD'S VERNACULAR VIA THE SPHINCTER OF ASIO... ALBO IS IN NEED OF A REALITY SCRUB UP...

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

berlinade....

 

Lettre ouverte à la Berlinale — 17 février 2026

 

We write as film professionals, all past or present participants in the Berlinale, who expect institutions in our sector to refuse any complicity in the horrific violence that continues to be perpetrated against Palestinians. We are appalled by the Berlinale’s participation in the censorship of artists who oppose the genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and the key role played by the German state in this situation. As the Palestine Film Institute has stated, the festival “monitors filmmakers while continuing to cooperate with the federal police in their investigations.”

Last year, filmmakers who spoke out in favor of Palestinian life and freedom from the Berlinale stage reported being severely reprimanded by the festival’s senior programmers. A filmmaker was reportedly the subject of a police investigation, and the Berlinale management falsely suggested that his moving speech, grounded in international law and solidarity, was “discriminatory.” As another filmmaker told Film Workers for Palestine about last year’s festival, “There was a feeling of paranoia in the air, of not being protected and being persecuted, that I had never experienced before at a film festival.” We join our colleagues in rejecting this institutional repression and anti-Palestinian racism.

We completely disagree with the statement by Berlinale 2026 jury president Wim Wenders that cinema is “the opposite of politics.” The two cannot be separated. We are deeply concerned that the Berlinale, funded by the German state, is helping to put into practice what UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression and opinion Irene Khan recently condemned as Germany’s misuse of draconian legislation “to restrict the defense of Palestinian rights, chill public participation and reduce discourse in academic and artistic circles.” This is also what Ai Weiwei recently described as “Germany doing what it did in the 1930s” (nodding in agreement with his interlocutor who suggested that “it’s the same fascist impulse, but with a different target”). All this at a time when we are learning horrific new details about the 2,842 Palestinians “evaporated” by Israeli forces using US-made, internationally banned thermal and thermobaric weapons. Despite overwhelming evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, its systematic atrocities, and its ethnic cleansing, Germany continues to supply Israel with weapons used to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza.

The tide is turning in the international film world. Numerous international festivals have endorsed the cultural boycott of Israeli apartheid, including the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the world’s largest, as well as the BlackStar Film Festival in the United States and Film Fest Gent, the largest in Belgium. More than 5,000 film professionals, including leading Hollywood and international figures, have also announced their refusal to work with complicit Israeli film companies and institutions.

Yet, the Berlinale has so far not even responded to the demands of its community, which called for it to issue a statement affirming the Palestinians' right to life, dignity, and liberty, condemning the genocide of Palestinians perpetrated by Israel, and committing to defending the right of artists to express themselves freely in support of Palestinian human rights. This is the very least it can—and should—do.

As the Palestine Film Institute stated, “We are appalled by the Berlinale’s institutional silence on the genocide of Palestinians and by its refusal to defend the freedom of expression of filmmakers.” Just as the festival has already taken a clear stance in the past against the atrocities committed against populations in Iran and Ukraine, we call on the Berlinale to fulfill its moral duty and clearly state its opposition to the genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians, and to completely cease shielding Israel from criticism and calls for accountability.

Signed by:

Abbas Fahdel
Adam McKay
Adèle Haenel
Alan O’Gorman
Alexandra Juhasz
Alexandre Koberidze
Alia Shawkat
Alison Oliver
Alkis Papastathopoulos
Amjad Abu Alala
Ana Naomi de Sousa
Angeliki Papoulia
Angelo Madsen
Antigoni Rota
Ariane Labed
Artemis Anastasiadou
Ashley McKenzie
Atsushi Funahashi
Avi Mograbi
Bahija Essoussi
Ben Russell
Bingham Bryant
Blake Williams
Blanche Gardin
Brett Story
Brian Cox
Camilo Restrepo
Carice Van Houten
Charlie Shackleton
Cherien Dabis
Christopher Young
Dali Benssalah
David Osit
Deragh Campbell
Dustin Defa
Eduardo Teddy Williams
Eleni Alexandrakis
Elhum Shakerifar
Emilie Deleuze
Emmanuel Gras
Eyal Sivan
Fernando Meirelles
Fil Ieropoulos
Gabriella Gerolemou
Geoff Arbourne
Hany Abu Assad
Hind Meddeb
James Benning
James Wilson
Javier Bardem
John Greyson
Jon Jost
Joshua Oppenheimer
Ken Loach
Khalid Abdalla
Laurent Van Lancker
Leah Borromeo
Line Langebek
Lukas Dhont
Mahdi Fleifel
Mai Masri
Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Manuel Cuenca
Manuel Embalse
Marcelo Martinessi
Marina Gioti
Marion Schmidt
Mark Ruffalo
Merawi Gerima
Miguel Gomes
Mike Leigh
Miranda Pennell
Mohanad Yaqubi
Nadia El Fani
Nahuel Perez Biscayart
Namir Abdel Messeeh
Nan Goldin
Narimane Mari
Nina Menkes
Pascale Ramonda
Patricia Mazuy
Paul Laverty
Paul Lee
Pedro Pimenta
Peter Mullan
Phaedra Vokali
Robert Greene
Robin Campillo
Saeed Taji Farouky
Saleh Bakri
Samaher Alqadi
Sarah Friedland
Sebastián Escobar Peña
Sepideh Farsi
Shirin Neshat
Simone Bitton
Smaro Papaevangelou
Sofia Georgovassili
Sylvain George
Tatiana Maslany
Thodoris Dimitropoulos
Tilda Swinton
Tobias Menzies
Tyler Taormina
Zawe Ashton

https://www.legrandsoir.info/lettre-ouverte-a-la-berlinale-17-fevrier-2026.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.dw.com/en/berlinale-director-could-be-dismissed-amid-polarized-gaza-debate-reports/a-76091332

UNAC/UHCP...

 

Union bureaucracy sabotages the Kaiser Permanente strike

BY Tom Hall

 

On Monday afternoon, the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals abruptly shut down the month-long strike by 31,000 healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii. There was no semblance of democratic discussion, no new contract and not even a tentative agreement. The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy simply cited unexplained “significant movement at the bargaining table” and ordered workers back to work.

Once again a critical struggle of the working class has been sold out by the trade union bureaucracy.

Kaiser nurses and other healthcare workers were fighting against stagnant wages, chronically understaffed facilities and staffing ratios too low to provide adequate patient care. Kaiser Permanente, though formally designated a non-profit, is a healthcare giant that epitomizes the private, profit-driven character of American medicine. The corporation reported $9.3 billion in net income, while CEO Greg Adams received $13 million in compensation. Kaiser has recently settled with the Department of Justice for $556 million for Medicare fraud.

Kaiser also maintains extensive investments in contractors that profit from ICE detention. It recently entered into an agreement with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to train military doctors in preparation for mass-casualty scenarios in future wars.

The shutdown of the strike was a deliberate act of sabotage, not only against Kaiser healthcare workers but against the broader movement emerging in the country. The strike was shut down the same day that 500 Kaiser operating engineers were to have joined the strike.

UNAC/UHCP ended the strike right when it was on the verge of gaining over 100,000 reinforcements from workers across California. Sixty-five thousand teachers and classified staff in the Los Angeles Unified School District have authorized strikes in the face of sweeping budget cuts. Forty thousand graduate and academic workers in the University of California system, members of the United Auto Workers, have voted to strike. A unified movement would have laid the basis for a powerful strike wave across the West Coast, encouraging similar action throughout the country.

The bureaucracy could not allow this because it would threaten their financial and social interests. Other similar betrayals have taken place over the last several days. Over the weekend, union officials in New York City shut down the final holdouts of a six-week strike by nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian, where nurses rejected an earlier deal the union put to a vote in violation of its own bylaws.

In California, union officials ended a four-day strike by 6,000 San Francisco teachers earlier this month. The city, awash in cash from the artificial intelligence boom, is pleading poverty for public schools. Layoffs were announced almost immediately after the strike ended, with the district citing declining enrollment.

These betrayals have been accompanied by the open intervention of Democratic Party politicians. In San Francisco, multi-millionaire Mayor Daniel Lurie and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who amassed immense wealth during her decades in Washington, played central roles in brokering the teachers’ deal. In New York City, “democratic socialist” Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Julie Su, former US labor secretary and now deputy mayor for economic justice, worked behind the scenes to work out a settlement, as police arrested protesting nurses.

Similar patterns are evident elsewhere. The United Steelworkers pushed through a sellout agreement covering 30,000 refinery workers, setting the stage for an isolated strike at BP Whiting in Indiana, where management is demanding deeper concessions. As with the previous contract reached at the start of the Ukraine war, this is a war contract. Its purpose is to keep fuel flowing as the US military wages war against Iran.

Union officials in Minneapolis and across the country have directly opposed strike action against ICE raids. Teachers unions have instructed members not to encourage or participate in student walkouts protesting deportations. The UAW warns that the right to strike is at risk under the Trump administration, yet has proposed no action to defend it.

This conduct flows from the fundamental social and economic interests of the bureaucracy, not merely from a conservative outlook. Over the past four decades, even as strike activity was driven to historic lows, spending on union officials expanded dramatically. US unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from workers’ dues and invested in the stock market, on six-figure salaries, luxury travel and a host of other privileges.

Their hostility to the working class is bound up with entrenched anticommunism, nationalism and deep connections to corporate politicians. Historically, the Democratic Party has been their principal vehicle. Increasingly, however, sections of the bureaucracy have aligned themselves with Trump, drawn by their support for “America First” policies and economic nationalism.

At Kaiser, UNAC/UHCP participates in the Labor-Management Partnership, funded by management with millions of dollars annually. The partnership was explicitly established in 1997 to prevent strikes and foster a “culture of collaboration,” according to the agreement’s own language. During the recent strike, Kaiser implicitly threatened this framework in a lawsuit, effectively threatening the union bureaucrats with a cutoff of funding if they failed to end the strike.

A clear rule has emerged: the more powerful the objective position of workers and the more a broader movement begins to develop, the more openly the union bureaucracy intervenes to sabotage it. No amount of “pressure” can alter the social interests of this layer any more than pressure can induce corporate management to abandon the capitalist profit motive.

Workers therefore must organize themselves to confront and override this sabotage. The task is not the reform of the apparatus but its removal from control over the struggle and the restoration of power to the shop floor. This is a necessary step toward establishing the political independence and freedom of initiative of the working class, linking immediate contract struggles with the fight against fascism, war and social inequality.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on workers to form rank-and-file committees, connected across workplaces and industries, to discuss strategy and prepare collective action regardless of the permission of union officials. Such organizations must be completely independent of corporate politics, including the Democratic Party, whose leaders fear an independent movement of the working class more than they oppose Trump.

A network of rank-and-file committees is indispensable to the preparation of a general strike, which emerges as the logical and necessary outcome of the developing opposition.

The IWA-RFC fights to build new forms of struggle corresponding to the conditions of the class struggle in the twenty-first century. Workers who agree with this perspective and wish to take up this fight should make contact and begin the process of organizing rank-and-file committees today.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/25/iiwx-f25.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.