AB Oxford Cold Storage is a monster of a place. Located in the heart of Melbourne’s industrial west, it’s the biggest cold storage warehouse in Australia and ranks among the largest in the southern hemisphere. It employs 21 people.

To run the warehouse properly, in fact to run it at all, the family that owns the business needs more people than that, hundreds more.

This is a warehouse operating with 185,000 pallets, at a crunch point in a supply chain that spans from rural farms to metropolitan supermarkets. More than 400 people spend hours and years of their lives making AB Oxford run. The trick is that these hundreds are hidden behind smoke and mirrors.

The company staffs the warehouse through a seemingly impenetrable mess of contracting arrangements and labour hire agreements. It is a deliberate design, intended to isolate workers and prevent them from fighting together for better wages and conditions.

“What’s happening at Oxford Cold Storage is a lot like the situation at Carlton United Brewing Company, but on a much larger scale”, NUW site organiser Claire Lewis explained to Red Flag. “Oxford has taken the labour hire model to the extreme. There are nine distinct employing entities on the site.”

Three of these entities are shell companies. They have no head offices or contracts with other firms and are part-owned by the same three people, who play the role of either director or manager in one or other of the companies. These entities, in reality, are nothing more than paperwork.

All up, a little more than 200 workers are employed by these three fictional agencies, and many of them have worked at the site for more than a decade. Every few years they are told that the agency they work for is “wrapping up” and that their employment will be switched to a new company. They are forced to sign another contract, now employed by yet another fanciful agency, with exactly the same director as before.

Fighting for better wages or working conditions under any of the agencies, real or fictional, is hard. Claire Lewis explains: “The only time workers can take protected industrial action is during periods of enterprise agreement negotiation. By hiring their workers through labour hire companies and forcing them to transfer their employment to newer agencies before the expiry of their agreement, Oxford prevents the workers from ever having an opportunity to negotiate collectively. This has been going on at the site for over 10 years.”

Triangular employment relationships aren’t the only weapon in AB Oxford’s arsenal. The company also favours old-fashioned intimidation. Workers have been threatened with the sack if they refuse to sign the new “agreements” drafted solely by management. There are reports that some workers have been forced to sign resignation letters which are kept on file for any instances of “misbehaviour”.

AB Oxford is not alone in its use of contracting arrangements to hold back workers’ ability to bargain. The practice is rife in the logistics and warehousing industry, where even minor stoppages by workers can quickly unwind important supply chains. Bosses have settled on labour hire as a prime method of dividing workers to make it harder for them to strike. “When companies started using agencies, the unions weren’t ready for it; it’s all to undermine collective bargaining”, said Lewis. AB Oxford, more than anything, is a case for why agency hire must be fought.

In an important development, there are signs that things might be shifting at Oxford Cold Storage. In early January, amidst an air of excitement, a petition was circulated amongst the workers of one of AB Oxford’s agencies. The petition called on the agency to recognise the right of workers to organise, and to bargain together under the union’s banner. A majority signed the petition.

However, in an act of defiance that might have been met with a stiff financial penalty had it been by a union, the company’s agency repeatedly refused to comply with a Fair Work Commission order to facilitate an independent ballot of workers. The point of the vote is to establish, once and for all, that workers want to bargain collectively.

In a scathing decision published on 9 January, commissioner Roe said: “In the current circumstances I am satisfied that the actions of the company in publishing a partisan notice effectively discouraging employees from voting ‘yes’ in the ballot … has resulted in a situation where I now doubt that the ballot will be an appropriate and effective method for determining the question”.

Despite the company’s best stand-over tactics, a ballot held on 13 January confirmed that an overwhelming majority want to fight together for a better deal.

This is only the beginning of what will be a drawn-out process of untangling the existing agreements – there are huge challenges ahead – but the actions of one group of AB Oxford workers is a decisive step forward. They have withstood the fear that comes with defying your boss in an atomised workforce.

“People had believed there was nothing they could do, but now they’re starting to gain confidence in their workmates and in themselves”, said Lewis. Other groups of workers, employed by different agencies, are talking about their own petitions.

The reality is they work together every day, at the same site, under the same conditions. They have the same enemy and, if they can find a way to unite, they can finally turn the tables on a company that has had everything its own way for far too long.