melbourne indymedia

The Howard government's Workplace Relations laws will have a profound effect on female employees, because it is specifically directed at casual, part-time, non unionised workers. It is no accident that Spotlight has been able to offer its new staff 2 cents an hour to 'compensate' them for the loss of overtime and leave loading payments. The meat workers at Cowra were able to fight off the company's attempts to do the same to them because they were able to mobilise public opinion through their unions. [Full Story]

Frankston Activist Group for Workers Rights is holding a vigil outside Frankston Spotlight on 17 June.

Eight Simple Rules for Employing My Teenage Daughter
Spotlight in IR spotlight | IR Policy & IR Reform

from the newswire
Two of the most rotten things about capitalism are the way it forces us to do things we wouldn't want to do unless we needed the money and the way everything is turned into a commodity. Moralism and puritanism are politically useless when discussing the question of prostitution because they are ultimately disempowering to sex workers.

Organisations like The Scarlet Alliance are tremendously important and there's nowhere near enough of this kind of organising. These groups work at the coal face of the sex industry to improve the conditions sex workers and give them a sense of their own worth and strength. In many ways these groups are like the trade unions you would find in conventional industries. In other ways, they go beyond what normal unions do because of the nature of the sex industry. [Full Story]

Sheila Jeffreys, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, argues that The Legalisation of Prostitution is A failed social experiment. Read the discussion about Queer theory and violence against women.

[Scarlet Alliance | International Union of Sex Workers |
Historical essay: Emma Goldman on The Traffic in Women]

Around Melbourne this week women are celebrating International Women's Day in rallies, a fair at Ceres Environmental Farm, breakfasts, and other events. March 8 was first celebrated as International Women's Day in 1911, and in Australia in 1928, and associated with a general strike in 1909 for 13 weeks by the women Garment Workers Union in New York. On Saturday March 6 a rally and march was held in Melbourne, although numbers attending were disappointing, and the rally reflected only a small proportion of the diversity of feminist and women's organisations in Melbourne. (Photos).

Issues addressed by speakers at the Saturday rally included the Stolen Wages Campaign, the sexual abuse of women by footballers, the Women for Peace vigil against war outside the US Consulate, and women in unions.

In Brisbane several hundred women rallied in the city Square and held a march.

[Discuss | Women's stories - women's actions | A History of International Women's Day in Australia]

from the newswire
The Miss World competition was established in 1951 by Eric Morely with the purpose of discovering the most ‘beautiful’ woman in the world. The competition was held in a Bingo Hall, to encourage people to visit the Festival of Britain; in 1951 Miss World was crowned in a bikini. During the 1980s the competition was revamped, and claimed to pay more attention to the personalities of women, in 2003 competition publicists claim that the Miss World contest embodies ‘beauty with a purpose.’ In the 21st Century the competition is televised worldwide and is the third most watched show in the world, with approximately 2.5 billion viewers.

Controversy has surrounded the competition, at times with right-wing fundamentalists and feminists protesting against the contest’s representations of womanhood, as illustrated in Nigeria earlier this year. In the Australian context it is claimed that the competition’s purpose is to ‘capture the modern Australian woman,’ who is ‘a much broader person’ than simply a professional beauty. Is the Miss World competition ‘congruent with what really is going on for a young woman,’ a celebration of beauty, intelligence and womanhood, or simply an affirmation of stifling gender norms, nationalism and sadistic beauty myths? [...More]

| Feminista |