Workers at Oxford Cold Storage, who have suffered from some of the worst pay and conditions in Victorian warehousing, have won an important victory.  

The massive complex in Melbourne’s west is the largest cold storage warehouse in Australia, and one of the largest in the southern hemisphere. The company mainly handles pharmaceutical and food products for companies such as McCain, Murray Goulburn, Fonterra and Peters Ice Cream.

Management has spent recent years “restructuring” and cracking down on union activity to tighten the screws on the workforce and increase productivity. What was once a well unionised shop became a bosses’ paradise, with stagnant wages, poor conditions and widespread bullying and intimidation. 

Claire Lewis is an organiser for the National Union of Workers at Oxford. She told Red Flag: “The company started casualising and outsourcing its workforce over 12 years ago.  It got so bad that there were at least five different enterprise agreements in operation at the site. Workers’ wages were frozen for two years as a result”.

Oxford employs around 400 workers, but until recently only 20 were directly employed by the company. The rest were employed by as many as a dozen shell labour hire companies, many of which were owned or controlled by Oxford.

When the enterprise agreement for workers employed by one agency expired, that agency was shuttered and the workers rolled over to a newly created agency that already had an agreement signed by one or two workers, often team leaders. 

In this way, the company has continuously shuffled workers around to avoid collective bargaining and strikes by workers. Luis Fleiszig, a director at Oxford, was upfront about this strategy when he spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017: “Our bargaining position is better if they are [employed by] separate entities”.

The union tried to organise Oxford workers for years, but they struggled to crack the company’s well-established system of divide and rule. 

A breakthrough came in 2017 when the union surprised even itself by winning a Federal Court injunction against one such roll over. 

The injunction temporarily halted the company’s ability to shuffle workers between agencies, forcing them to deal with the union and its members.

This meant that union members were able to negotiate a new agreement, which was voted up in December last year. This agreement is a major victory for the workers. It includes significant wage increases and improvements in conditions, including a new paid rest break for overtime shifts and eliminating junior pay rates.

Importantly, management was forced to create more than 70 direct permanent jobs, provide for labour hire casuals to convert to permanent direct employment, and extend union rights to all direct and labour hire workers on site.

These wins will help combat Oxford’s divide and rule strategy. The win will also help raise the floor for conditions in the industry more broadly.

“Already, over 60 workers have converted to direct employment with Oxford and there are more to come”, Lewis said. “It’s a large employer so we will be able to use this to argue for similar conditions with other companies in the industry.”