Locked out meatworkers say: NO INDIVIDUAL CONTRACTS The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, October 6th, 1999. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. Email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~cpa Subscription rates on request. ****************************** By Rohan Gowland At G&K O'Connor meatworks, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Pakenham, a key struggle against individual contracts is taking place. The company has locked out its 380 workers since March this year. It has now been given the green light by the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) to offer Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) - individual contracts - to selected workers. by Rohan Gowland The ruling of the full bench of the IRC says that the current enterprise agreement had not been properly certified and therefore the company could ignore it. The ruling allows O'Connor to opt out of negotiating a new enterprise agreement with the union and employ hand-picked workers on individual contracts. Australasian Meat Industry Employees' Union Victorian Secretary, Graham Bird, told The Guardian that since the IRC ruling, O'Connor has told the workers if they don't sign an AWA they'll never work there again. Mr Bird said the union believes that Richard Hamberger, the Federal Employment Advocate, whose role it is to oversee the introduction of AWAs, has some questions to answer in relation to the AWAs being offered by O'Connor. "Our belief would be that the agreement doesn't fulfill the no- disadvantage test and that people had been coerced into signing them." O'Connor has claimed that up to 20 AWAs have been registered, but Mr Bird said that to his knowledge there may only be one or two workers who have signed while the "vast majority are holding firm, refusing to sign the AWA and maintaining their position that they are prepared to work under decent wages and conditions, the same as other people in Victoria". Casual ``on call'' What O'Connor wants to impose on its workforce is the system operating in the US where, instead of a weekly wage, workers are paid by the hour. They would be permanent casuals and be expected to work at any time "on call", with no guarantee of any work at all. O'Connor has targeted the guaranteed minimum weekly payment that workers currently receive. Even under this present system, the guaranteed minimum was only four days minimum pay per week. Mr Bird said that under the proposed system, "apart from dropping the wages by about 25 per cent, he [O'Connor] also brings in a system where they only get paid if there is work. "They simply get told, `well, there's no work tomorrow, so you don't get paid tomorrow'. And if there's no work for three days of the week, you don't get paid for three days of the week. "Basically, it's formalised casual work", he said. The union is pursuing various applications in the Federal Court and the IRC. O'Connor has made full use of Reith's industrial legislation which allows employers to lock out workers once the company has made a show of attempting to negotiate. This legislation has enabled O'Connor to make outrageous demands for a 17.5 per cent wages cut, which it knew the union would reject, and then claim it had attempted to negotiate, and so was now free to lock out workers, its intention from the very beginning. The owner O'Connor himself has given plenty of evidence, through statements he has made to the union, that he is getting support from Reith to follow the example of the waterfront dispute. Throughout this dispute, O'Connor has used the same legal firm that was used by Reith during the waterfront dispute, Dunhill Madden Butler, despite promising the union that it would not use this firm. O'Connor has been the "Chris Corrigan" of the meat industry, one of the four industries that Reith announced would be targeted by his government - along with mining, the waterfront and construction. -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
LL:ART: Meatworkers say: NO INDIVIDUAL CONTRACTS
Communist Party of Australia Tue, 05 Oct 1999 21:08:17 +1000
