Solidarity

Here’s what John Howard really thinks about the workers at Tristar:

… Mr Howard refused to meet a delegation of the company’s workers who travelled to Canberra in November last year to appeal for his help.

The company’s workers, who were visited by Mr Hockey yesterday, accused the Government of only taking notice of theirs and Mr Beaven’s plight after it was raised on air by the broadcaster Alan Jones.

Mr Beaven’s family welcomed the breakthrough as they maintained their vigil at his bedside in Sydney. “He’ll probably be dead by the morning,” his brother-in-law John Pert told ABC Radio. “We got the cheque to him and he said, ‘Thank you’.

“Those are probably his last words actually.”

The report notes that “[i]f Mr Beaven had been granted a forced redundancy, he would have been entitled to more than $100,000.” It also points out that the company is still refusing to make other employees redundant, despite a lack of work, because it does not want to pay their full redundancy entitlements. Those workers “were not convinced Mr Hockey would help them in the way he helped Mr Beaven.”

It seems the only way a worker can get support from the Howard Government is to contract cancer and call talkback radio.

Update: Another decent article, which notes that Beaven’s full entitlements were over $150 000 and also briefly discusses how the company is trying to avoid its obligations.