The return of Haiti’s former dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, has raised questions about continued US interference in the disaster-ravaged country.

On Tuesday May 19, 30,000 Queensland teachers held a 24-hour strike over the measly 12.5 per cent pay rise over three years offered by the Queensland Government. The Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) convened 49 meetings across the state, the largest in Brisbane with over 4000 workers.

Every week brings news of thousands of jobs lost as the Australian economy falters.
Revised growth projections from the IMF have underlined the depth of the decline facing the world economy.

Kevin Rudd was expected to announce an increase in Australia’s troop commitment to Afghanistan, following his first meeting with President Obama in Washington.

Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), the government’s key mechanism for addressing climate change, is under fire on all sides. It’s not hard to see why.

NSW unions are again locked in battle with the state Labor government over privatisation. With the government accelerating its planned sell-off of prisons, members of the Public Service Association (PSA) were set to strike and rally outside NSW Parliament on Tuesday April 2 as Solidarity went to press.

Labor won the Queensland election, but beyond Anna Bligh becoming Australia’s first elected woman premier, there was nothing to celebrate.

Despite its promise to create jobs in the economic downturn, the Rudd government is imposing job cuts on the federal public service.

Following his apology to the Stolen Generation, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised to deliver an annual “report card” on the government’s progress in addressing Indigenous disadvantage. This report card was to be delivered on the opening day of Parliament each year, to mark the 2008 apology.

During his “report card” speech Kevin Rudd claimed his government had “driven reforms through employment programs to give more Indigenous peoples the skills they need to get and keep a job.”
Yet they have moved towards virtual abolition of Community Development Employment Projects (CDEPs), which employed tens of thousands of Aboriginal workers.

In a shock move in October 2008 the former Northern Territory Minister for Education Marion Scrymgour declared that the first four hours of teaching in all Northern Territory schools would be in English.

We face two global crises, climate change and economic collapse. The answer to both is climate jobs, or what some have been calling a “green new deal”.

Mass demonstrations in Pakistan have forced President Asif Ali Zardari to back down and fulfil an election promise to reinstate judges sacked by the government of Pervez Musharraf.

The second general strike in two months brought France to a standstill on March 19. Millions demonstrated in 200 cities and towns around the country.

Anger at the Irish government’s response to the recession has exploded into angry and growing protests. Over 120,000 joined a protest in Dublin in late February, and unionists are campaigning for a public sector-wide strike.

On January 22 US president Obama signed his first Executive Order (EO). The order banned torture, directed the CIA to “shut what remains of its network of secret prisons” and ordered “the closing of the Guantanamo detention camp within a year.”

Solidarity spoke to two leading climate activists, John Hepburn from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Damien Lawson from the Victorian Climate Action Centre, about the campaign against Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme

Demanding the government “buy Australian” or impose tariffs has failed to save jobs in the past, and paints “foreign workers” as the enemy, writes Phil Griffiths

In response to the economic crisis, the federal government has moved to reduce Australia’s skilled migration intake.
Some unions not only welcomed this, but called for cuts to the 457 temporary visas scheme and even for migrant workers already working in Australia on 457 visas to be sacked first before “local workers”.

NINETY YEARS ago Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, was assassinated. This came in the midst of the mass revolt by the German working class that brought World War One to an end. Her murder was ordered, not by a military dictatorship, but by the party of which she had been a leading member for much of her life—Germany’s Labor party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Review: The Reader
Directed by Stephen Daldry, In cinemas now

Review: Quarterly Essay “Quarry Vision: coal, climate change and the end of the resource boom”
By Guy Pearse, Black Inc, $16.95

WORKERS AT Brisbane’s Treasury Casino are getting restless. The casino EBA expired on December 31, 2008. Since negotiations started in November 2008, Tabcorp, the Casino owners, have made just one paltry offer of a 3.5 per cent wage rise.

MINOR CHANGS saw Rudd pass his “WorkChoices-lite” package through the Senate in late March.

Profitable companies are using the economic crisis as an excuse to sack workers and slash wages.
Despite a 9 per cent rise in profit to $713 million dollars last financial year, Fosters has outsourced the jobs of over 100 maintenance workers at its Abbotsford plant in Melbourne through a labour hire company.

Bosses at Drivetrain Systems have used “divide and conquer” tactics to stop workers resisting mass sackings at an Albury-Wodonga gearbox factory.

On February 25 meetings of approximately 200 members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at the University of Sydney voted to seek a ballot authorising industrial action in our enterprise bargaining campaign. The ballot opens on March 27.

Julia Gillard recently announced the introduction of “demand driven” places at universities. Paddy Gibson spoke to Elly Howse, co-education officer of the Sydney University Student Representative Council on what the changes will mean for the quality of education and access at universities.

The recent Israeli assault on Gaza sparked global outcry. In the US and UK, it has also produced a new wave of student militancy in opposition to imperialism in the Middle East.

Workers across the country were outraged with the announcement in February that Pacific Brands plans to sack 1850 workers. Many joined the factory workers’ rallies in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to demand the company reverse the sackings.