The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) said 300,000 joined rallies and marches nationwide that day. Police put the numbers at 150,000. The largest rally—in Melbourne—drew 150,000 according to ACTU and 80,000 according to the cops.

In the lead-up to the protests, Australia Post, the post office, threatened to take action against any employee who stopped work to take part. Despite the threat, “hundred and hundreds” of Australia Post employees went to the protest in Melbourne alone, Len Cooper, the Communication, Electrical and Plumbing Union’s Victorian branch secretary, told the Melbourne Age. “It’s the biggest turnout yet.”

The large actions came as bosses are beginning to use the new laws—dubbed “Workchoices” by the federal government, headed by Prime Minister John Howard—to attack wages and job conditions previously protected by federal law.

Spotlight, for example, a chain of 100 fabric and homeware stores employing about 6,000 people nationally, is axing benefits such as premium pay for overtime and weekend work for new fulltime employees worth up to $90 a week, in exchange for a two-cent-an-hour pay hike.

In a widely publicized case in April, soon after the laws took effect, bosses at the Cowra Abattoir in western New South Wales moved to sack 29 meat workers and rehire 20 with slashed wages. While Howard and Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews pressured the company to back off, the Office of Workplace Services later found that the company action was lawful because the bosses made the wage cuts for “operational reasons.”  
 
 
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