Watch SEP meeting video: “The Coles Smeaton Grange struggle: The next stage for the working class”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/cole-m16.html




Our reporter
13 hours ago







Last Sunday, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held a public meeting reviewing the political lessons of the more than three-month lockout of Coles workers at the company’s Smeaton Grange warehouse in southwestern Sydney.

The event was attended by almost 90 people, including postal and warehousing workers, as well as teachers and students in Australia, along with participants from New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

Late last month, the Smeaton Grange workers were starved into accepting a sellout agreement by the United Workers Union (UWU), which isolated their locked out members, refusing to provide strike pay or organise any support for industrial action by other Coles workers.

The return-to-work agreement, which had been consistently rejected by workers during the lockout, ratified the closure of the warehouse and the axing of all its jobs in exchange for a paltry wage and redundancy deal demanded by the multi-billion dollar supermarket corporation.

The determined struggle of the Smeaton Grange workers bluntly exposed the unions as an industrial police force, highlighting the urgent need for a new strategy and organisations of working class struggle.

Sunday’s meeting, which can be watched below was, and remains, the only public event examining the longest industrial dispute in Australia’s largest city in decades.