Workers Power

We'll dispossess you back - Revolutionary art with Trent from Last Quokka

15 March 2022

This week we talked to Trent from Last Quokka, an anti-fascist punk band "from the most isolated city on the planet" about their music, their politics, and their (at the time) upcoming tour.

Interview starts at 29:11

Outro song: Colony by Last Quokka

International Working Women's Day - Interview with Decrim QLD

8 March 2022

This week we talked to Decrim QLD about the struggle to decriminalise sex work in Queensland and the problems facing sex workers in the current system.

Interview starts at 38:45

Women fighting back - the history of the PMG telephonist's union

1 March 2022

This week we talk to Jeff Rickertt from the Brisbane Labour History Association. In the leadup to International Working Women's Day we talked about the campaigns of the telephonists' union in the 1970s and 80s. Telephonists were the workers, mostly women, who operated the manual telephone exchanges across Australia for the Postmaster General's Department (PMG), the largest of all Commonwealth departments in its day. In the 1980s the telecommunications division of PMG became Telecom and was then privatised and renamed Telstra.

Until their jobs were destroyed by automation, the telephonists comprised one of the largest groups of women workers in Australia, and in the 1970s and early 1980s they and their union, the Australian Telephone and Phonogram Officers Association, emerged as one of the most militant public service unions in the country. Here in Meanjin they waged some truly amazing battles that really rattled the bosses.

Interview begins at 34:40

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