Labor has the space to do what it wants – and what it wants, apparently, is to be the Liberal Party of the 1990s.

US offers to get Australians out of camps if they are issued with travel documents, but Labor has said ‘this is not something the government is considering’ * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Australian children held in increasingly “militarised” displacement camps in north-east Syria have been told they will be shot if they try to breach the fence line, as Australia refuses to issue its citizens with passports so they can be repatriated. The US has offered to bring the Australians out of the camps on the proviso they have been issued with travel documents or passports, a condition to which Australia has not agreed. Continue reading...

This post is intended more as an open question, rather than a solution. It follows this recent thread on Mastodon: https://gts.sadauskas.id.au/@aj/statuses/01KBP9Y461FYMP7BWPB5MZHVGM In recent times, there's been a lot of discussion about income inequality. The world's richest people are going from being billionaires to trillionaires. Meanwhile, wages and conditions for the rest of us, adjusted for inflation, are stagnant or declining. There's been many solutions proposed, from wealth taxes to universal basic incomes. And there's certainly a lot of merit to these proposals. But the issue is that many of these solutions require a sympathetic government in power to enact. I'm wondering if part of the solution lies in stronger white-collar unions? At least in Australia, the trade union movement has tended to be strongest in blue-collar industries, particularly around skilled trades. Where professional workers have been organised, it has tended to be in the public sector. Fields like health, education, and government clerical work, which are dominated by the public sector, have tended to be the most organised white-collar professions. But union density in other professional workplaces has tended to be lower. This has increasingly been an issue as professional work and services have made up a growing proportion of our economy. Many workers in these fields are members of professional associations that provide a range of valuable services to members. Think training, certification, industry events, industry publications, and the like. But industrial relations often isn't a focus. Should there be a new class of white-collar unions that focus on collective bargaining, but also provide these services to members? And could a higher level of unionisation in professional workplaces be an effective pathway for closing the income gap between the mega-wealthy and the rest of us? In particular, most of the new generation of mega-wealthy trillionaires appear to be concentrated in the tech sector. Tech workers, if they organised, could potentially have massive leverage. Imagine, for a moment, a strike where something like AWS, Google, YouTube, or Facebook went offline! Imagine a world where employees at those firms use their leverage to negotiate a share of their firms profits? Or an end to the most exploitative gig economy practices? Or guaranteed seats on the company board elected by staff? Or even things like six weeks of paid annual leave each year, plus one paid rostered day off each month? Or perhaps companies investing in things like staff-owned housing co-ops, so employees have access to affordable rent? All of this leads to a question: Do you agree that higher levels of professional unionisation could help address issues like income inequality? If so, what could or should we be doing to encourage more white-collar workers to join unions? If you're a white-collar worker, and you're not in a union, should you be? And what could the unions that represent professional workers do to make membership more appealing? #unions #business #workers #capitalism #economy #economics #auspol #askfedi