The unfairness of Work Choices is well known. Along with taking away many workers’ rights, Howard has also unfairly removed our limited legal right to strike. Howard’s spin ‘We won’t remove the right to strike’ tries to hide the repressive changes. Work Choices makes legitimate union industrial action ‘unlawful’. Striking workers protesting for their legitimate workplace and economic interests risk new penal powers. The strategy to legally suppress strikes is back. It is first used against building and construction workers.

These 9 further limits on the right to strike are not warranted and most unfair. Below is brief discription.

1. Minister Andrews has unprecedented power to intervene to halt any strike.
   
   
2. Compulsory, complex, secret ballots have now to be conducted before taking lawful protected action.
   
   
3. New provisions outlaw basic union rights for industrial action for industry or pattern bargaining.
   
   
4. One amendment, with wide ramifications, allows third persons affected directly or indirectly by industrial action (other than the employer and union in dispute) to halt protected legal strikes.
   
   
5. Unions pursue claims to encourage unionism and many employers agree. Unbelievably in a system based on ‘voluntary agreement’, employers and workers are now banned from reaching agreement on such claims, called ‘prohibitive content’.
   
6. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission, has more powers to halt industrial action ‘not protected’. The AIRC ‘must’ stop strikes. Employers can easily get their law firms to apply to the AIRC for orders and courts for labour injunctions to halt a strike.
   
   
7. The formerly limited right to protected action for enterprise bargaining is narrowed. Many exceptions are listed. Any other industrial action that is not protected will be penalisable.
   
   
8. Work Choices repeals the section for the AIRC to settle a dispute before employers can take common law action for damages.
   
   
9. Legitimate political protests and environmental actions such as green bans are at risk. OHS action is legally more complex. A strike is not lawful if (inadvertently) a non-unionist is involved.

More detail: Chris White Howard removes the right to strike 2 page pdf document

Chris White is researching labour law whitecd@velocitynet.com.au
References www.jape.org | Evatt Foundation http://evatt.org.au/news/336.html