It’s three o’clock on a stinking hot Queensland afternoon, and I’m standing at a picket line outside the Dulux paint factory on Brisbane’s south side.

The combined expertise of the hundred or so workers here produces a whopping 1.6 million litres of paint a week, making it the biggest producer in the country.

Nearly the whole site is striking over proposed redundancies, save for a handful of casuals and office staff who have chosen short term gain over sticking with their comrades.

There’s not a lot of respect for them on the picket line at all, says one of the workers. “These casuals used to be on 10 or 15 dollars an hour. But about five years ago, all of us permanents in the union fought for them to be on the same wage as us. And now they’re scabbing on us.”

That’s not all. The job requires caution, hard work and skill (most have worked here for 15 to 20 odd years), which is why many are concerned about the safety implications of allowing several inexperienced casuals and pen pushers to run the factory themselves.

“There’s 12 instances of safety breaches that we’ve seen just from standing outside the gates”, I’m told.

Suddenly, number 13 unfolds in front of us. One of the scabs, driving a truck of flammable resin through the gate, is in such a hurry to break the picket line he forgot to fold down a guard rail on top of his vehicle, which is now stretching out a power line overhead. He’s ignoring the desperate pleas of workers to stop. The cable snaps and whips back towards us, almost striking dozens of people.

According to Energex workers later on the scene, there was a good chance the line, which turns out to have been a cable TV wire, could have been live.

Ironically, since the strike began a week ago, the company’s security guards and the police have justified breaking the picket to allow trucks (and thus, profits) through the gate as exercises in “health and safety”.

To the shaken crowd of unionists before me, the fallacy of that assertion could not be clearer. The reality is that Dulux’s determination to maintain profitability during the strike has led to a carelessness that could have resulted in disaster.

Yet the only person in any trouble is a picketer who has been charged for obstructing a truck.