Workers at a Metcash warehouse and distribution centre in Adelaide’s inner west are fed up with being the lowest paid Metcash employees in the country. Metcash, a wholesale grocery distribution business and ASX top 100 company, employs more than 6,000 people across 80 sites. Its website boasts about the company’s “commitment to its employees at every level”. The workers at its Kidman Park warehouse would beg to differ.

Speaking to Red Flag about enterprise agreement negotiations, union delegate Bart Potter said: “We’ve been told that any wage increase over 2 percent has to be ‘self-funded’”. Options put to the workers for “self-funding” their pay rise include giving up every second rostered day off, cutting Saturday penalty rates or shortening breaks. The company has also suggested that workers accept a wage rise for only some workers or that new employees be denied existing entitlements.

Workers are not happy with the suggestions says Bart. “It’s not fair, we don’t want to give up the conditions we’ve fought for in the past. We feel we work just as hard as any other Metcash site in Australia and now want that to show by having equal pay.” 

Metcash’s 350 Kidman Park employees supply groceries to IGA supermarkets in Adelaide. The company directly employs 200 of these workers, 130 of whom are members of the National Union of Workers. Another 150 are employed through a labour-hire agency. Though not covered by the site agreement, their conditions are loosely pegged to those of the directly employed staff. 

According to Bart Potter, wage rates at Kidman Park are more than 5 percent below those of the next lowest paid workers in the Metcash network. “They don’t want to give us more”, he says.

“They are trying to divide us by introducing options that will benefit some but take money from others. Collectively the workers have decided it’s time we stop accepting low increases and that we will not trade-off conditions to get bigger increases.”

“Now, all we want is to come up to next lowest state which would mean a 5.5 percent increase, and then for the company to maintain our wages to theirs”, Bart explains. “We also want an increase of pay grade for dispatch staff, who we feel have been underpaid for the duties they have to perform.”

The current enterprise agreement comes to an end in February, so there are no legal protections for industrial action until then. Bart says union members are concentrating on building their strength in the meantime. “Since negotiations started, 30 workers have joined the union, and more will soon – they can see we are organising.”

Confidence is growing, he says. “It’s time we stood up for ourselves.”

NUW members will be collecting signatures of support out the front of IGA/Foodland shops across Adelaide in the coming weeks.