Unions for Refugees

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) passed an excellent new policy on asylum seekers and refugees at its May National Congress. The ACTU is the peak body of 46 unions representing 1.8 million workers across Australia.

We ask for your support in publicising this policy as widely as possible, and encouraging people to take action on it.

Please:
1. Read the policy, and distribute it any way you can: at work, by email, on facebook.

2. Write to your union's leadership to congratulate them on supporting the policy.

3. Think about ways you can encourage your union to implement the policy. Unions for Refugees is happy to organise refugee speakers for meetings and a stall at union conferences. We can provide leaflets for workplaces and union induction and training courses. 

 

The ACTU's new policy should be read in full, but some of the main points:

- recognise that seeking asylum is a fundamental human right

- calls for onshore processing of applications for asylum, and for the detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island to be closed

- calls upon government to ensure that there is no discrimination in the processing of applications for asylum based on people's mode of arrival

- calls on Australia to increase its intake of refugees to meet the levels received by other industrialised countries

- calls on Australian parliamentarians take leadership and reframe the national debate about refugees and asylum seekers

- calls for Temporary Protection Visas to be abolished

- calls for an end to turn-backs of boats carrying asylum seekers

- condemns the Australian government's Memorandum of Understanding with Cambodia and calls on aid agencies to desist in assisting the re-settlement of asylum seekers in Cambodia

- condemns indefinite detention of asylum seekers and refugees, and says that mandatory detention is not necessary

- calls on the federal government to stop the outsourcing of detention to private, for-profit companies

- calls for the extension of the right to work to asylum seekers

- opposes forcible dep

sent by National RAR