Workers at Downer Group’s Pakenham East Rail Depot and Stabling Yard, who have been on strike for secure jobs, are yet to settle a new enterprise agreement. Sue Bolton reports.
Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
14 May 2021
India: Striking health workers in Punjab sacked
Around 1,400 striking National Health Mission (NHM) workers, including staff nurses, medical officers, homeopathy Ayurveda doctors and ministerial staff, were sacked by the Punjab government on May 10 for refusing to end their week-long strike.
About 3,000 NHM workers walked out on strike to demand higher wages and permanent jobs. The sacked workers, who were fired through the draconian Disaster Management Act, were from seven districts in Punjab.
Last September over 30,000 NHM contract workers held a national stoppage over the same demands. Although many have had ten years’ service, they are paid meagre salaries and are denied entitlements available to regular government employees.
Molycop threatens steel jobs in Australia as it demands increased tariffs
Inside a SAG milling factory (Molycop.com)
The threat was issued last month by Molycop’s Australasia president Michael Parker. The existing tariffs on imported steel products, due to expire in September, range from 11.7 percent to 57 percent.
Parkers’s statement is bound up with preparations launched last December by Molycop’s owner, the US-based private equity firm American Industrial Partners (AIP), to sell the enterprise which is valued at around $2 billion.
Locking in favourable tariffs will be important to AIP’s bid to attract potential investors.
Interested parties so far include multi-billion-dollar investment firms such as Blackstone and Brookfield, as well as other global companies in the mining industry. Predatory private equity giants are short-term investors that ruthlessly restructure companies, ripping up jobs and conditions, to cut costs then resell at a profit.