An estimated 1000 people – and a very large pair of makeshift undies – hit the streets of Wollongong on Saturday as part of an ongoing fight for workers’ rights.
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The 2017 May Day march, dubbed the biggest in about a decade, saw union groups – representing nurses and midwives to miners and public servants – make their voices heard.
Worker exploitation, cuts to penalty rates and looming hospital privatisations were among the concerns raised during the public campaign.
Another issue – displayed using a large pair of calico underwear featuring the words “Shame on you, S32” – was the recent sacking of Appin miner Dave McLachlan.
Mr McLachlan, the CFMEU’s Appin Colliery lodge president, had his employment terminated by South32 on April 19, six weeks after he led an undies protest.
Miners at Appin wore their underwear for 10 minutes on March 7, to highlight issues with South32’s supply of work clothes and a delay of more than a year in providing a promised laundry service.
South32 said the protest was “unprotected industrial action” and “involved people presenting for work inappropriately dressed”.
Mr McLachlan briefly addressed Saturday’s May Day crowd, which gathered in the Crown Street Mall, and used the opportunity to thank the community for its support.
“The support is going to be needed [on an] ongoing [basis], it’s going to be a long, stretched-out process,” he said.
“If they can do it to me at a coal mine, they can do it to anybody.”
Later, the crowd repeatedly chanted “Save Dave” – the slogan at the centre of a recently-launched national CFMEU campaign to have Mr McLachlan reinstated.
South Coast Labour Council secretary Arthur Rorris told the Mercury the miner’s sacking served as “a reminder and as a wake-up call for everybody”.
“The purpose of May Day is to tell people like Dave, and the millions of workers around Australia, that when they struggle for these things, they don’t struggle alone,” Mr Rorris said.
“They don’t walk alone. We’ll be walking with them.”
Mr Rorris said Saturday’s march was the biggest since WorkChoices, law changes made by the Howard government in 2005, and numbers had been bolstered by “a series of attacks” on workers.
“Let’s be honest and call it what it is, it is a war on workers,” he said.
“If we’re going to have a war, we’ll fight it and we will win.”