Our BLT Flyers
BLT circulates flyers every few weeks with short notes about problems construction workers face, wider problems in society and where people overseas are doing it tough.
They are just enough to chew over with a BLT and a coffee in a break.
Contact us to get some up or print the content of the latest one from the download below.
What’s up? Want assistance? Want to let us know what’s happening? Contact BLT. We all need to know how to organise.
BLT stands for Builders Labourers & Tradies. It stands for our fighting history. It chews on things affecting us, our families and communities. We build this city, this country.
Something important to say? Photo to share? BLT belongs to builders labourers and tradies.
Contact: Geoff 0400 899 411 Mick 0409 886 391 or info@blto.org
BLT May 2026
If we don’t have safety
We’ve got nothing
Workers listening at the May Day rally organised by ETU & MUA outside NSW Parliament
We all know safety is worse since administration. Safety is number one. If we don’t have that, we’ve got nothing.
Feel good ads on social media or TV say, “Come home safely because you’re important at home” are bullshit. Safety isn’t just an individual responsibility. Billionaire corporations chase profits above everything. They endanger us. Only our collective strength on the job can ensure that safety.
If we’re going to stand up for one thing, it has to be safety. We need to get organised. We’re not a bunch of individuals. We’re a union. If you have unsafe conditions, and you want help to do something about it, contact BLT. It won’t be easy. They aren’t finished attacking us. Politicians are threatening to deregister the whole union after the next election. We need unity. Forty three people died at work already this year in Australia. Many more had breakdowns or bad injuries. Don’t become a statistic. Let’s organise however we can. Contact BLT privately by our email, QR code, or phone.
“Only our collective strength ensures safety at work”
Mining companies use more diesel than the transport industry. But they pay zero diesel tax. Who is Australia run for?
The three richest Australians, including Meriton’s Triguboff and Twiggy Forrest, make $1.5 million an hour. Most workers get $39.50. Mining boss Gina Rinehart is worth $40 billion, three times more than Trump. She’s Australia’s biggest land-owner. Super cheap Australian resources, plus the labour of mine workers made her rich. Like Tier One construction workers, they earn pretty big money. But it’s away from family, hard, with long hours. Pauline Hanson isn’t a billionaire. People think she supports the poor. It’s easy to find out she always votes for the billionaires against workers, unions and everyday people. That’s why Rinehart supports her, gives millions, pays for a plane. Because instead of blaming billionaires for the shit this country’s in, Hanson blames everyone else. She divides and conquers. Farmers against city folk. “Bad” immigrants against everyone else. Hanson and Rinehart went to Trump’s Mar a Lago, meeting other billionaires. Pauline Hanson supports Trump and every war he starts. She blames the wrong people. She’s just another politician. She divides us. We need to stand together.
US wars? What’s in them for us?
Trump thought Iran would collapse when the US attacked. Instead, it seems the US has lost the war, like in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan. What else? Iran is China’s ally. It’s getting oil through Hormuz, plus smashing the US economically. As Trump backs out, Hormuz is shut to us, cost of living and supply problems explode, especially in construction. And Iran bombed US military bases in neighbouring countries. Allowing US military bases here doesn’t mean the US will help us. They just make Australia a target in future US wars.
Waving flags
The current Australian flag has a foreign flag stuck in its corner alongside the beautiful Southern Cross. It was designed in 1901. It didn’t become our official flag until 1954, nine years after World War Two ended. In both world wars Australians fought under the British flag. If Britain was at war, so was Australia. Since then, our youth have been slaughtered in US wars. Australia needs an independent defence policy!
Big Lies
Hitler created advice about how to lie in politics. He said, make sure the lie is big enough and you repeat it often enough that people will believe it. He called it the Big Lie. He blamed communists and Jews for everything wrong with Germany. There’s a Big Lie here about refugees – that governments give them big money and houses. Because we hear it all the time on social media, on Sky, from our mates, we think it’s true. It’s not. No asylum seekers arriving after 2012 can work or receive Centrelink payments before they receive refugee status. That can take years. They have little power. Yet “migrants who want to harm us” are blamed for all Australia’s problems.
Australian migration has always benefited big business most. Billionaires tell governments what policies they want. We’re never asked.
More Big Lies. Albo’s ‘death tax’? It’s not. Family trusts only exist to reduce tax. Only the richest have them. And, ‘Mum & Dad investors lose most from tax changes.’
Who REALLY benefits most from real estate capital gains? Billionaire Harry Triguboff. We pay income tax on every dollar. Half his capital gains are tax free.
May Day March 2026. Public education workers from teachers to cleaners are getting organised. They work in schools, TAFES & unis, in prisons & adult education.
Lendlease proves
we need to get organised
When Lendlease sacked a long-time delegate, its workers took action with ETU backing. They even broke a concrete pour! It really gave the billionaires a fright.
But their media accidentally let the truth out – our collective militancy and strength were why they attacked the CFMEU. Everything else was an excuse. YES to Lendlease workers! But Lendlease bosses said, ‘Take us to court to prove unfair dismissal.’
Lendlease isn’t stupid. They’d given redundancy to other workers. But strong delegates and organisers are targeted. Legendary BLF leader Norm Gallagher once said, ‘We only win in the industrial courts what we’ve already won on the ground,’ on site. Courts sent him to jail for saying it. It shows industrial laws were created to serve super rich corporations that control Australia.
Unions are tied up in legal regulations. It pretends to be fair. But you get the justice you can afford to pay for. Lendlease was caught evading tax. But it made $225 million last year.
Lendlease plays by different rules in different conditions. When it was making super-profits from our labour, it wanted us at work so profits rolled in. They wanted industrial peace. The Construction Commission banned the Eureka flag from sites, and Lendlease took it to court because the ban interfered with its massive profits when we stopped work. Now we’re much weaker they attack us.
Step by step, we have to rebuild our own independent ability to fight back on site. We can’t all shut sites down, but if we can spend time talking with our workmates, building trust, we can push back together where the boss is weak and we’re united.
Our time will come.
What’s up? Want assistance? Want to let us know what’s happening? Contact BLT. We all need to know how to organise.
Something important to say? Photo to share? BLT belongs to builders labourers and tradies.
Contact: Geoff 0400 899 411 Mick 0409 886 391 or info@blto.org
Too hot to handle. Too wet to work.
Workers tell BLT they’re working in 40 degree heat. Heat waves are hotter and more frequent. Extreme heat already kills over half a million people worldwide each year. In 2024, heat killed a QLD CFMEU worker. 20 were hospitalised.
If your core temperature goes over 40 degrees you risk heat stroke. Your body creates sweat to cool you as it evaporates from your skin. But that dehydrates you. Add high humidity (water vapour in the air) and evaporation stops. The body pumps more and more blood to your skin to try and cool you. It doesn’t work. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure goes down. You lose concentration. You become confused.
It’s already deadly but you’re doing hard high risk work. What a mix!
‘Rain drops. We stop.’ That was the old saying. Not anymore. A crane driver for a third tier hire company told BLT he arrived at a job in pissing down rain. He was pressured to work. He couldn’t see the load coming down. At another site he was told to set up on a dangerously steep slope. He refused and quit.
Our health and safety are the bottom line. We’ve already had two men die from a wet weather crane collapse on a Meriton site. It doesn’t matter how much you earn if you die or your health is destroyed. Construction bosses signed EBAs that say we stop work when it hits 35 degrees.
Lets’ enforce it.
After Bondi, some questions
People need answers after the horrific attack at Bondi. If antisemitism was rising, why weren’t people protected at such a well-publicised Jewish event?
A secret ASIO operative warned ASIO that both Bondi terrorists, father and son, were involved in the terrorist Islamic State. Why did ASIO ignore it? Some say it couldn’t afford to act. Bullshit! $600 million a year not enough?
Police were asked for protection at Bondi. They refused. They said, “too difficult, too expensive”. So how could they afford 55 cops, with six on horses at a tiny Aboriginal protest on 1 November?
Why did governments invite a war criminal filmed signing bombs to drop on Palestine, with over 600 slaughtered since the “ceasefire”? Is it OK to commit mass murder and starve people? Why talk of outlawing words, when Israel is openly destroying Palestine from the river to the sea?
Why blame demonstrators for Bondi? In two and a half years there was not one violent incident at a protest. Jewish groups, Holocaust survivors and their families attended every Palestine rally.
Who failed to stop a terror attack and hid their failure by sending hyped up riot police in black to attack protesters? 3000 cops! How much did that cost? Why weren’t they at Bondi?
Ordinary police in blue were so angry they told off riot squad cops for smashing defenceless people.
Mr Minns, are police more important than nurses?
Last year Minns gave police a 40 percent pay increase with zero industrial action.
He said NSW urgently needed more cops. He only offered nurses 10.5 percent, both over three years.
Governments paid developers billions to build hospitals. But they won’t pay the nurses enough to run them. They won’t cut brutal nursing workloads. NSW Police have often attacked workers defending their rights in the past. Maybe Minns and Co are expecting more of that as times get tougher.
Don’t bring it here
Opponents of Israeli genocide are accused of “bringing terror here”. But all federal governments allowed the US Pine Gap war base in Alice Springs to guide missiles and killer drones in the Middle East. We’re taking terror overseas!!!
Australia sent our precious young people to suffer and to die in every US war, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and secretly to Africa. Today the Australian navy patrols wherever the US asks.
Are we a US puppet state, or what?
Rewarding John Holland for harming us
If you found out something you were doing might kill people, you’d stop doing it, right? Or expect to go to jail. Not if you were John Holland’s bosses.
Exposing workers to deadly silica dust, they created a “Future Plan” because immediate action would “cost too much.” Governments agreed. Tunnelling through Sydney sandstone exposed thousands of workers. And Holland obstructed testing.
Now, when some of their young construction workers are already sick, John Holland’s been rewarded with a multi-billion-dollar tunnelling contract. They’re not the only ones. Developers and builders didn’t ban engineered stone. Neither did courts. Construction unions did, by going on strike, by refusing to work with it. We got it banned.
Corporations here knew since the 1920s asbestos was deadly. Gina Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, made his and her millions mining asbestos in Wittenoom in WA. Two thousand workers and residents there were killed by asbestos. Hancock was never charged. The Builders Labourers Federation was instrumental in banning asbestos. But it’s back on building sites. At the Deadly Dust strike and march in April 2023, a long-time concreter told us, “I don’t go to the doctor. I don’t want to know the answer.” If you’ve been exposed to any deadly dust, see your doctor. Treatment slows the illness. Contact : https://asbestosdiseases.org.au / or 08 9344 4077
Minns and Coalition team up to smash compo
BLT said not to trust the Coalition, or Unions NSW which refused CFMEU and Teachers Union offers to bring thousands out against cuts to compo, especially for mental illness. The day after the new NSW Coalition leader started, she supported Minn’s bill. Unions NSW did nothing. Insurance companies are the big winners. They all attack the most vulnerable.
We’ll remember!
BLT Feb 2026
