Hello friends and comrades,
This week’s episode of the Radio Reversal podcast features an interview with Dr Jeff Rickertt, renowned People’s Historian, for Labour Day 2025. Han speaks with Jeff about histories of labour organising (particularly here in so-called queensland), the early formation of unions, and the tensions and contradictions these movements expressed and revealed regarding race, gender, and colonialism. They spoke also about the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organising, particularly Aboriginal labour strikes as a strategy in anti-colonial struggle, often outside of the systems of mainstream/whitestream organised labour. They explored labour organising as a site of solidarity and transformative politics, discussing some of the recent examples of labour organising against the genocide in Gaza, and how workers have attempted to leverage their collective power to refuse complicity in this genocide.
This is part of our ongoing series on Disasters, Crisis & Collective Futures. The polycrisis shapes and reconfigures the nature of work and working conditions; the possibilities of labour organising to contest the crisis conditions of colonial racial capitalism warrant exploration and action. But organised labour movements can also be sites of liberal reform, sites where (some) workers are strategically drawn back into complicity and cooperation with capital in order to ‘stabilise’ the crisis without addressing the conditions of exploitation and injustice that (re)produce it.
As we face down emboldened fascist movements, growing political repression and overt genocidal violence in Palestine and beyond, we’re looking back to think about the long history of workers organising on this continent, its tensions and contradictions, and what we ought to be doing collectively as workers in this moment.
A reminder! On Sunday May 18th, 1pm in King George Square, people are gathering in rememberance of the 77th anniversary of the Nakba and to protest the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. Bring your pots, pans, and wooden spoons to protest the deliberate starvation of Gaza by Israel. Make noise, stand together.
We’ll see you out there.
In solidarity,
Radio Reversal Collective
Share this post