Thread by @gemoase

At the #climatestrike. Here’s a 🧵 on how climate strikes could go into the workplace even within Australia’s restrictive IR system.

The starting point is to organise based on how workers concretely experience climate breakdown at work - extreme heat, storms, fire, floods and all the threat to safety and disruption to livelihoods that flows from these events.

Climate breakdown is experienced both as a threat to a safe workplace and a threat to wages and conditions. The latter is important but the former provides a basis to organise outside of the restrictions of the Fair Work Act.

Climate disasters and climate-fuelled extreme weather is an OHS threat to workers that each employer has a duty to mitigate even though they don’t directly control it (much like COVID).

This duty to provide a safe workplace is an obligation that employers owe to all workers - employees (permanent or casual), labour hire workers and contractors.

Moreover, the employer has a duty to consult with workers about how they are providing a healthy and safe workplace and resolving or mitigating any threats to worker health and safety.

TLDR each employer owes a duty to every worker to provide a safe workplace and to consult about how this is happening.

As a reflection of this duty, each worker has the right to cease doing a duty or task or even work all together to deal with an immediate and serious threat to their health and safety. If your workplace is on fire your boss can’t order you to stay at your desk.

This safety stoppage can be done immediately and in response to the threat.

Workers as a whole also have the right to elect their own health and safety representatives (HSRs) and the right to organise autonomously about how the election proceeds. An employer can’t control this process unless workers consent.

Oncce elected HSRs have additional protections from employer retaliation (not perfect but real), and they have key shared rights around the country.

HSRs have the right to access paid training on OHS rights and responsibilities as well as how to deal with safety issues.

HSRs have the right to choose where they get this training from (in every jurisdiction there’s always a union or labour council training).

HSRs have the right to invite whomsoever they need onto the workplace to help them investigate and problem solve OHS issues. This can include union officials or specialists on a subject matter.

HSRs have the right to use paid time to consult with the workers they are representing.

HSRs have the right to issue improvement notices to their employer that the employer has to address or appeal to the state regulator if they disagree with the notice.

HSRs have the right to issue a cease work order for immediate and serious threats to worker health and safety (this in addition to the right every worker has to take action against any immediate and serious threat).

Workers generally retain the right to recall or elect new HSRs if they don’t think they are adequately represented.

So what does this mean? It means if you’re into climate action and you’re in work get into OHS at work.

Find out if you’ve got an HSR at work. Get worker support to become a rep. Get trained. Join your union whether there is an EBA or not.

You can build structures across a geographic region or across an occupational group or industry.

You can do all this as a concrete response to a climate disaster at work, or better yet you can do this to better collectively protect your co-workers from the next inevitable climate disaster.

You are also making real the costs that workers are already paying for climate breakdown and forcing capital to respond to the situation rather than letting capital cost-shift onto workers and their communities.

TLDR #climatestrikes in the workplace are possible. We don’t have to let our view of what is possible be limited by the Fair Work Act.