Warehouse workers gear up for a fight

Marcus Harrington, NUW delegate, Woolworths Hume Distribution Centre

Fourteen years of struggle have earned workers at the Woolworths Hume Distribution Centre in the northern Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows some of the best wages and conditions in the logistics industry. With the current enterprise agreement set to expire on 1 September, this year presents these workers, members of the National Union of Workers, with an opportunity to make further improvements.

Woolworths has launched aggressive campaigns against penalty rates at the Brisbane Liquor and Wodonga Regional Distribution centres. Workers in Melbourne are set to protect current standards and make advances. These workers are practised in the fight.

The Hume Distribution Centre emerged from a greenfields (new) site in 2003. A major gain from the first agreement was a clause providing part time workers with the right to greater access to weekly hours, allowing transition into full-time employment and placing a restraint on casualisation. First won at Hume, this condition has since flowed through to the entire Woolworths supply and retail chain.

The site’s first strike in 2005 went for two days before the company backed down on its plan to remove directly employed casuals and transfer their employment to a third party provider. Permanent workers stood in solidarity, protected their casual comrades and won close to 100 permanent jobs through the life of that agreement.

In 2008, workers at the site successfully fought off Woolworths’ attempt to do away with the enterprise agreement and managed to protect all conditions for a further two years.

With the ink barely dry on its 2010 balance sheet, showing a record $2 billion profit and a 14th consecutive year of record surpluses, Woolworths announced another vicious attack. It planned to wash away hard-fought conditions and ignore the workers’ request for a decent wage increase and job security.

A bitter round of negotiations unfolded, with the company unwilling to negotiate on workers’ priorities. The 600-strong workforce again embarked on industrial action, withdrawing their labour for one week. The action included successful protests at the Broadmeadows site, Woolworths’ stores and Corrigan’s Qube warehouse, where a scab workforce was operating. They also managed to completely close the Woolworths Liquor Laverton shed for a day.

Returning to work victorious, the NUW members had won, among numerous items, protections around roster changes and the right to a redundancy package upon the site’s closure. A 3.4 percent wage increase for each year of the agreement was also guaranteed following the company’s threat that no wage rise would be granted.

Gearing for another tough battle through the 2013 campaign, delegates recently won an additional 40 permanent jobs for casual workers, going some small way to reversing the casualisation trend in Australia

Workers at the Broadmeadows warehouse are currently in a pitched battle with management in a struggle to have the company recognise agency casual workers as members of the union, their right to representation and the full rights of the elected agency casual delegate.

Permanent workers have again stood up for their casual comrades, demanding everyone be treated on the same basis.

The NUW has been prominent in recent times, through successful industrial campaigns at the Baiada chicken processing plant and Coles and Toll Logistics. The Hume Distribution Centre workers can add to that history through a united struggle against one of the nation’s largest and most profitable corporations.

 

Locked-out power workers dig in

Jerome Small

“It’s gotta be all in or nothing … it was a unanimous vote to not go back cap in hand.”

I’m talking with John, one of the workers who keep Yallourn running. The giant power station in the Latrobe Valley supplies 22 percent of Victoria’s electricity. And for over a decade, it has been at the forefront of management attacks on the Latrobe Valley’s workers.

Since 21 June, Yallourn management has imposed an indefinite lockout on 75 power station operators. They are being punished for pushing for clauses on secure employment, consultation and staffing levels in a new enterprise agreement.

For generations, Victoria’s electricity industry was built up and run by workers employed by the State Electricity Commission, the SEC. Workers enjoyed secure employment and good conditions, maintained by a degree of industrial power that governments had good reason to fear.

The industry was sold off by the conservative Kennett government in the 1990s. The working class communities of the Latrobe Valley were gutted.

In 2000-01 a bruising industrial battle included a seven-week lockout of Yallourn workers, a spontaneous walkout at three Latrobe Valley power stations, a community campaign in support of the workers and losses to the company of more than $100 million. Ultimately, an arbitrated settlement stripped key conditions from the Yallourn workers. Minimum staffing levels, compulsory redundancy and contracting out were key areas where the workers lost out.

John spoke to Red Flag about the decision to take the company on, despite facing an indefinite lockout.

 “When we had our mass meeting … the union blokes were very firm on it; they said first of all, if we’re 50-50 on it, it’s not worth proceeding with. It’s gotta be all in or nothing. The other thing they said is, ‘Don’t be kidding yourself thinking that this is going to be for a week or two – this could be for up to two or three months.’ And it was a unanimous vote to not go back cap in hand.”

Yallourn already has the lowest number of operators per unit in the Latrobe Valley. Complex machinery pulverises the coal and moves it on conveyor belts up to the furnace. Because only two workers per shift are employed to sort out any problems with a blockage in this equipment, control room operators are sometimes required to race out to deal with a problem in the conveyor system. Without stronger protections in the enterprise agreement, the workers worry that this short staffing will get worse.

Already, the workers have been vilified in the press, with allegations of a “suspicious fire” as the lockout began. In fact, as John explains, it was an electrical fault. This is not uncommon in an ageing, privatised plant, where maintenance is cut to the bone.

 “[It was] one of the big [6,000 volt] circuit breakers … a big switch about the size of a large refrigerator. Just as the power station management were handing out lockout notices to all the guys on the day shift, one of them actually exploded … and there was a small fire that started as a result of it.

 “If anything, it points the finger at the lack of maintenance. Those of us that are from the old SEC days know … things that used to be routinely maintained are no longer routinely maintained, and companies just run the risk of breakdowns and failures. For instance, that room where that circuit breaker failed, those rooms used to be vacuumed once a week by cleaners and trades assistants. Now they’re never vacuumed.”

This is a serious issue because of the coal dust: “There’s lots of coal dust around because we pulverise the coal to burn to generate electricity … We get the CFA and our own firies responding all the time, to small what we call PF or pulverised fuel or dust fires all around the place. In the old days we used to keep that sort of dust and electrical set-ups well separated, because you’ve got a pretty good ignition source!

 “That’s one thing I see with the privatisation is just the lack of maintenance. And that goes right through to the distribution network. You can talk about bushfires starting from SP Ausnet’s distribution network, substations, they were all maintained on strict routines years ago. Companies just push their routines out now to see how far they can go, which basically means they can cut jobs.”

The locked-out Yallourn workers are members of the Mining and Energy Division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. While management scabs are keeping the power station running, the workers’ protest camp can be found on Eastern Road, Yallourn, 24 hours a day.

 

Napthine ‘allowing Victoria to burn’

Steph Price

For the second time in a year, Victorian firefighters have marched on state parliament to protest funding arrangements for the Melbourne Fire Brigade and Country Fire Authority. More than a thousand firefighters and their supporters rallied on 1 July against the introduction of the fire services levy.

The firefighters union (UFU) warned that the new levy – to be collected from all Victorian property owners – will give rise to a massive windfall for a government that has slashed funding for fire protection in recent years. 

“We’re here to make sure that the money is spent on the fire services and not just going into the government’s general pool of money”, said Anthony from the Moonee Ponds Fire Station. In the last financial year, the UFU calculates that the state government has pocketed $157 million that was collected to fund Victoria’s two fire services.

Addressing the rally, UFU secretary Peter Marshall talked about the frontline impact of an underfunded service: “Hoppers Crossing needs a new radio network, Eltham needs radios, Ballarat needs a new fire station … Napthine is allowing Victoria to burn.”

The rally also heard about the drawn-out battle for a new enterprise agreement for MFB corporate and technical staff. These workers, including administrative staff and mechanics, haven’t had a wage rise since 2009. Belinda, who works at the MFB Eastern Hill complex, told Red Flag that, despite this, she’s most concerned about job security.

With the threat of deeper public sector cuts in the air, the union is promising not to compromise on the inclusion of clauses protecting permanency for the technical staff. Ultimately, if they don’t win job security, she says, “The fire brigade will cut services or expect firefighters to take up the administrative jobs.”

Firefighters, unlike the premier, put their bodies on the line every day of the week. The least they deserve is to be properly funded and equipped to do their job.

 

Big attacks on WA public service

Luke Messina, delegate in the WA public sector union (CPSU/CSA)

The recently re-elected West Australian Liberal government of Colin Barnett is attacking the public service with a vigour not seen in years. Intent on pushing through a number of attacks at once, he plans privatisation, scrapping of permanency, redundancies, holding down wages and the abolition of meaningful union right of entry.

Until now WA has been the only state where those in permanent public sector positions cannot forcibly be made redundant. That is, permanent staff are actually permanent. The government is legislating to change this and is softening up the public with rhetoric about “contemporary management practice” and do-nothing public servants with “lifelong tenure”.

Once the government secures the ability to carry out forced redundancies, the sky is the limit for the number of people who could lose their jobs. Right now, the government is talking about the loss of 1,200 positions, with those remaining taking on the extra workload.

The government is planning to privatise all motor vehicle licensing. It is currently conducting an outsourcing “trial” in Bunbury for heavy vehicle licensing. Transport minister Troy Buswell has said that motorcycle licences are next.

Barnett has also in effect said that he will not negotiate for the next public service-wide agreement. Bargaining is due to start next month, but the premier has already said that any wage offer will be limited to the CPI, currently 2.4 percent. This is a slap in the face, and not just because WA is a boom state. The premier has just granted his own staff, an inner circle of media and political advisers, increases in the region of 54 percent.

Undermining union right of entry to workplaces will hamper the fight against these attacks. Union organisers will no longer be able to conduct “walk-throughs”; rather they will have to sit quietly in a nominated room and hope that members and potential members seek them out.

Unfortunately, the union’s response has been flat-footed. It wasn’t until two weeks after forced redundancies were announced that union members received an email about a lunchtime rally to be held on 6 August.

However, 34 vehicle assessors, first on the privatisation chopping block, took strike action on 27 June, walking off the job for the third time. Much more of this sort of fighting attitude will be needed to stand up to these attacks. What we need from the union is a serious industrial strategy; otherwise the Liberals will walk all over us.

 

Community workers to walk off the job

Adam Bottomley, ASU delegate at Mind Australia

Community mental health workers at Mind Australia are escalating our industrial action with a state-wide 24-hour strike on 10 July. Mind’s executive management are still seeking to take away RDOs (rostered days off) and extend the span of “regular hours” which would cut penalty rates from late shift workers.

Mind workers report that management’s behaviour in the negotiations has included intimidation, lies and threats to stand down workers without pay for taking Fair Work Commission-approved protected industrial action. Most workers have not been intimidated by the actions of management, and new layers of workers have joined the union after losing faith that the company can be trusted not to slash conditions and mistreat workers.

The strike and accompanying protest at Mind’s Victorian head office is likely to be one of the biggest acts of industrial action by workers in the Social and Community Services sector in over a decade. As one union member at Mind recently stated, “We are committed to those we work with, we give more than required! Remember the nurses’ disputes of the ‘80s. They held their line, we need to do the same.”

 

‘Spill and fill’ job purge at Curtin Uni

Diane Fieldes

Academics in a number of schools at Curtin University will be required to reapply for their jobs as part of what the bosses are calling workforce “reshaping”. According to the WA secretary of the NTEU, Gabe Gooding, some staff have been told not to bother reapplying. The union estimates 45 workers will lose their jobs in the process.

This “spill and fill” jobs purge is associated with the introduction of teaching-focused positions in the recent enterprise agreement struck by the NTEU and the university. A new position, the “scholarly teaching fellow”, is meant to be for new employees drawn from the ranks of the long-term casuals who currently do around half of all university teaching. Management, of course, are using the new positions not to reduce the appalling level of casualisation, but to boot out existing more senior (and therefore more highly paid) staff, or to punish “research inactive” academics.

In late 2012 Curtin was the first branch of the NTEU to sign off on a new enterprise agreement. The Curtin agreement introduced additional categories of teaching-focused classifications for existing academics, with the option of forcing people into those roles. Up to a fifth of academics will have these teaching roles. The agreement also lifts restrictions on how many weeks a year staff can teach. And it could require as much as 23 hours of face-to-face teaching a week. This is a major ramping-up of workloads – at a time when every academic knows the worst aspect of the job is the ever increasing workload.

At the recent national council, the general secretary, Graham McCulloch, counterposed what he characterised as the drawn-out campaign of strike action at Sydney University to the quick and easy negotiating process at Curtin, Edith Cowan and Central Queensland universities, where agreements were signed without any industrial action at all. Signing in haste can mean regretting at leisure. Within a week of national council, the union was in dispute with the university over its radical plans.

The Curtin agreement has now become a test case for the sector – for our side and for the bosses.

 

Building workers back community picket in Tecoma

Steph Price

Residents of Tecoma in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges have been fighting since 2011 to prevent the construction of a McDonalds in their suburb.

Recently their campaign got the backing of building workers who downed tools and stopped work at the site of the proposed restaurant. The following statement was released by construction unions the next day:

“Building unions support right of Tecoma community to oppose development. The Building Industry Group meeting today convened by the Victorian Trades Hall Council resolved to support the rights of the Tecoma community to protest against inappropriate development.

“Building workers in Victoria have a proud tradition of protecting those things that make this state great. All Victorians are able to enjoy the City Baths, the Melbourne Market and the magnificent Regent Theatre because building workers refused to demolish these treasures.

“In Tecoma, passionate local protesters are committed to preventing what they see as inappropriate development. In those circumstances it is not safe to put building workers in the middle.”