The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year.
I got an email from my union last week informing me that we’d just had a “union win”. I’m a casual worker at a university, and my union previously negotiated an enterprise agreement locking in pay rises that won’t make up for the last few years’ inflation.
On 22 February, more than 200 social and community service workers in Melbourne stopped work to protest in solidarity with the Palestinians. Demanding community sector organisations make a statement against the genocide in Gaza, the workers marched from the Victorian Council of Social Services to the offices of the Federation of Community Legal Centres.
Hundreds of police swarmed around the Webb Dock container terminal in Port Melbourne on the afternoon of Monday 22 January—using horses, capsicum spray, assaults, and arrests to break up a peaceful protest that had held up the docking of an Israeli-owned ship, the ZIM Ganges, for four days.
In a darkened cinema in Buenos Aires, a film about the 2001 economic crisis and the romantic importance of tango music is about to begin. But first comes an advertisement for the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Art, which runs the state-owned cinema. The crowd cheers: they reject its impending privatisation.
In an old, rundown theatre in Córdoba, Argentina, a mass assembly of cultural sector workers and students met on the night of 3 January. Almost every seat inside was taken; many stood, packed next to the cinema screen and flooding the aisles. A stream of people ran to the front to get on the speaking list.