Tag: wage theft

Construction workers at a union rally — the CFMEU has faced decades of political and media campaigns despite winning better wages and safety conditions for Australian builders.

The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

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For thirty years, Australia’s most powerful construction union has served as a moral punching bag for the nation’s political and media establishment. Every few years another “reckoning” arrives: a Royal Commission, a regulator’s dawn raid, a media exposé discovering organised crime in high-vis. Each time, … Continue reading The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power

CAUGHT IN THE CRUNCH: The Surveillance State Comes to Your Local Supermarket

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Walk into any Coles outlet today and you’re not just buying milk. You’re feeding a surveillance machine processing 10 billion rows of data through Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. In early 2024, Coles signed a deal to deploy Palantir’s “Foundry” platform across more than 840 stores, analysing every transaction, every worker’s movement, every shift allocation. Workers across Victoria are monitored, with one shelf-stacker in Ballarat saying: “The computer knows where I am before my manager does.”