Meatworkers have lost a drawn-out battle to retain existing wages and conditions under a new agreement with supermarket giant Coles. Making up a fraction of Coles’ workforce, meatworkers and their union, the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU), couldn’t get the numbers to unpick a dirty deal between the company and the SDA, which will gut standards in Coles meat rooms.

A single national agreement covering all Coles workers was approved by an electronic ballot that ended on 5 May. It will replace all existing agreements, including those that specifically set the pay and conditions of meatworkers, a traditionally militant pocket of Coles’ workforce. 

While a minority of the 77,000 workers eligible to vote on the agreement actually participated in the ballot, the meatworkers’ union says this won’t trouble the company. “They’ll still be rolling around in cake and champagne at Coles offices”, said the Victorian state secretary of the AMIEU, Paul Conway, who spoke to Red Flag about the outcome.

Despite a determined “vote no” campaign from the meatworkers – at its strongest in Victoria and Tasmania, where workers took strike action –  just 8 percent voted against the new deal. “To be perfectly honest, we would have hoped to get more of a no vote”, he said. 

Everything was stacked against the meatworkers. The ballot was conducted by CorpVote Pty Ltd, a so-called independent voting services company, which allowed workers to view only material prepared by the company. Photos of in-store voting stations show computer screens frilled with dozens of Coles cards telling workers to vote yes, “So we can grow together”.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, a leaked email revealed that the company had directed store managers to “check your notice boards from time to time and remove anything from the Meat Union”. The email counterposed company policy toward the meatworkers with its approach to the SDA, the union that covers most Coles workers, because the SDA’s “notices are not against Coles or the agreement”.

Conway said the union was “absolutely disappointed” with the voting set-up. “This was open to exploitation. You’ve got to think about the membership of the SDA; it’s a lot of young people. I’m sure a lot of them would have been tapped on the shoulder and told ‘You want a wage increase, don’t you?’

“They march them down to the office to vote. How do you even scrutinise that?”

For meatworkers, the national agreement negotiated between the SDA and Coles eliminates some penalty rates and reduces others, introduces mandatory weekend work, cuts paid rostered days off and abolishes adult wages for young meatpackers and cabinet attendants. Grandfather clauses mean that many of the changes will affect only new hires, introducing a two-tiered wage structure into supermarket meat rooms.

  Conway says the company’s role in cutting wages is expected. “It’s what they are, they’re a business.” But of the union which handed meatworkers’ wages and conditions to Coles, Conway is less circumspect. “I absolutely hate the SDA”, he said. “None of this could have transpired if not for the SDA.”

Despite the scale of the defeat, the meatworkers aren’t giving in. “I certainly don’t think we throw our hands in the air and say RIP meatworkers or the workers’ union”, Conway said. “The way I view it is now is, because it’s a one store agreement, potentially anyone who walks into a meat room can be a member of ours.”