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It's called pyramid contracting http://labor.net.au/news/1113193724_8739.html. What happens quite simply is company A puts in the lowest bid knowing full well they will never pay out one cent in liabilities, they do this by subcontracting to company B. Company B then arranges all the labour contracts through subsidiary company C. Company C now contracts out upon an individual basis to each and every company that represents each individual employee who must take full liability for all the actions of the individual employees company.

So no training trigger happy thugs are given free licence to go 'individually' bankrupt without affecting the profit of the head company in the slightest.

Now that can even be further manipulated into the corporations advantage. The worst, the most egregious and violent individuals will be reserved for revenge attacks upon the enemies of the corporation (whether direct or temporarily paid to be), they will be let loose upon those enemies to kill, main and brutalise. For which they will be convicted but there are plenty more where they came from and it won't cost the corporation one cent.

Guess who ends up paying, c'mon guess who foots the bill when those individual labour companies go bankrupt on the very first civil suit, your guessed it, the people who let the contracts. Privatisation of profits equals socialisation of losses.

We're not highly unionised, no. I know of 1 particular workplace that IS highly unionised, but they'd be the odd ones out.

IT workers certainly aren't conscious of being a part of the working class. They make the common mistake of considering themselves to be somehow above the working class, probably due to their income. My income, for example, is quite good. My working conditions are even better - I have a very supportive employer, and upper management even look kindly upon my activism, for example in the antiwar movement. In my current position, therefore, I don't see how a union would directly benefit me. HOWEVER, I realise that I may not be in my current position forever. I may not even be in the IT industry. My relationship to the union and other IT workers, and all workers in general, is one of solidarity. I stand alongside them in their struggles for better conditions, and in particular in defense of the new IR laws which come into effect in July.

This stance - of solidarity instead of just self-interest - is the stance that IT workers haven't yet taken on, hence the terribly poor union membership. Of course, there are other reasons why people have abandoned the unions or not turned to unions in the 1st place. I certainly have no illusions about them being a particularly progressive force. Their support of the Australian Labor party despite decades of 'economic rationalism' under Hawke & Keating is enough to send people away in droves ...

The last comment is about you 'never been approached to join' a union. In places like IT call centres, I can imagine a union representative turning up and making a sales pitch. In other areas - for example in our company where there are only 2 IT workers - it simply is not feasible for union reps to tour every single company looking for members. The IR laws also further hinder union access to workplaces, making the likihood of you being approached even less. This doesn't, however, preclude you from approaching them . As the Howard government and successive Labor governments increase the attacks on our 'way of life', I expect more people will be forced to take a more militant stance and actively seek out their union in seach of a method of defense.

ABC TV has...managed to survive with its current affairs programs intact, loathed by Labor and Coalition alike, as it should be. And as it should be, it still strives to put forward an alternative view. So that when the commercial media is dictated to by myopic intrusive ownership and ill-informed populism, is forced through thoughtless need to make irresponsible programs that lack both style and substance, caresses inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks to marginalize the already marginalized, that describes the world in simple terms, provides simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal outcomes, then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and it's precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter"

And the head of the ABC agreed with him! Said that the ABC's job was to cause discomfort to the comfortable, or some such seditious nonsense. There's already

> A one week cruise ... represent an acceptable risk for career astronauts.
> Builders .....would probably like to see the tools and procedures proven where
> there is at least some hope of recovery to Earth

Builders on Earth are bad enough at taking basic precautions such as sun blocking cream or wearing a the right sort of shirt - what makes you think they'll go to the effort on another planet?

The original submission is wrong. It's not the opposition party that's searching for his email address (duh, they work in the same building for *#(%'s sake!), it's the Labor Council of NSW, that represents unions in Australia - that is searching for his email address. The page offering the reward of AU$100 worth of Linux merchandise and a case of Coke (to geeks nonetheless!) says it all.

The original submission is wrong. It's not the opposition party that's searching for his email address (duh, they work in the same building for *#(%'s sake!), it's the Labor Council of NSW, that represents unions in Australia - that is searching for his email address. The page offering the reward of AU$100 worth of Linux merchandise and a case of Coke (to geeks nonetheless!) says it all.

Bah! Only worth doing for the case of Coke and AUD$100 of linux merchandise. Like they will listen. Info can be found on the challenges official web site Where's John?

In Australia, the Australian Services Union provides some basic union services to IT workers, however, as the name suggests, they cater more for call center personnel and office equipment repairers, and I don't believe they have representatives in any programming shops. The New South Wales government recently established the IT Workers' Alliance, which should better cover programmers and engineers.

Those with a university degree could also ask APESMA for legal advice or employment updates.

Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so I've got a little safe distance from many of these US issues (for now: Australia looks set to become a suburb of the US any day now...).

Anyway, I think the issue with FBI surveillance is not so much that we're concerned about Them spying on Us, and finding out all of Our secrets: after all, if that were the only problem, then some of you would be quite right, and we needn't worry if we're not doing anything wrong.

No, the worry is more about who's monitoring and what they're doing with it. Can the watchers, given this degree of access to our private communications, *really* be trusted to be as dispassionate and unbiased as we hope?

The problem with *any* abrogation of authority, surveillance, administrative or enforcement powers is that they then have the ability to use if for their purposes. Okay, rooting out terrorists is a worthy aim, but can we trust that they'll stick to that? Do we know that *Their* definition of "terrorist" matches *Ours*?

My definition of terrorist includes stuff like "blowing up as many people as possible". How do I know that theirs *doesn't* include stuff like "belongs to a subversive organisation like Amnesty International"?

Check this article on the work of the NSA during the cold war. I'm tempted to buy the book, depressing as it may be, but I'm not sure how much of it hasn't already been covered in the selection of Chomsky books on my shelves. The NSA *may* have been protecting what they thought of as American freedoms, but if those schemes were enacted, how many Americans (and others) would have suffered? Is *that* justifiable?

And as for the "who's a terrorist" question, well, how about the Reclaim the Streets crowd? How about Women in Black, recent nominees for a Nobel Peace Prize? When the definition of "terrorist" stretches that far, how many of us are innocent?

Given that there are at least 2 countries right now who are using the "War on Terrorism" excuse to launch a greater offensive against their enemies, I'm not overly confident that this surveillance would be used *solely* to find and bring to justice those guilty of the Spetember 11th bombing. Anyone criticising current US government policy could be considered a suspected terrorist. Anyone protesting the indefinite detention of material witnesses could be considered a terrorist. What then? Who's made any safer by this, and who suffers?