The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.29           August 10, 1998 
 
 
Australian Dockers Debate Settlement  

BY LINDA HARRIS
SYDNEY, Australia - Dock workers employed by Patrick Stevedores here voted on June 24, after a five-hour meeting, to accept an agreement that includes massive job losses and significant changes to working conditions. The previous day wharfies in Melbourne accepted the deal following a five- hour heated debate, with some 30 percent voting against it. These two meetings constituted the majority of Patrick workers around Australia.

The settlement was negotiated between officials of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), and Patrick. It came after the victory won by the union on the picket lines after Patrick had sacked its entire workforce on April 7 and replaced them with scab labor. The month-long battle, which won broad support from workers and others, forced the company and the government to back down from their union-busting course. Patrick workers marched back through the gates on May 7.

Terms of settlement
Under the new agreement, 626 of 1,315 permanent jobs will be lost through voluntary redundancies. Of these, 160 MUA maintenance workers will be taken back as contract workers on a three-year contract and 40 security, cleaning, and linemarking jobs will be contracted out. Gang sizes have been reduced from 10 to 6 and the company will now control rosters and job allocations. Overtime will be cut, while "incentive bonus payments" will be made for increased crane lift rates.

All 25 wharfies who had been blacklisted at the return to work have now won their jobs back. And as part of the deal Patrick was forced to resume operations in all ports, including those such as Newcastle, which it had threatened to abandon.

"A lot of people don't like it," Peter Francis, a member of the MUA site committee at Port Botany, said in an interview with the Militant, "but at the end of the day everyone realized that there was no choice in the matter and they voted for it." He said that there won't be a problem filling the redundancies. "There are a lot of older blokes at Port Botany who are happy to go." He said many of them couldn't keep up with the increased pace and wouldn't want to work under the new conditions.

Dimitris Arvantis, a maintenance worker for 14 years at Patrick's Port Botany terminal, told the Militant, "This agreement will turn the terminals into a death trap with the cuts in gangs." He said that it was not good for the young workers or the future generation. "Everyone is crook [sick] about it, because we had so big a fight." Arvantis didn't vote at the meeting; he said they were told they faced the threat of being outside the gate for the next 14 months if they voted the agreement down.

One of the results of the agreement is to increase the weight of casualization on the waterfront. Beside the outsourcing of work to contractors, lashing of vessels will now be done by casual workers and they will now be offered work before overtime is offered to permanent workers. There are currently 600 casual MUA members employed by Patrick. During the fight on the picket lines workers expressed expectations of winning more permanent jobs.

It is unclear what will happen to injured workers under the new agreement. In the past, they were rehabilitated on light duties, for example, cleaning. Now cleaning jobs will be contracted out. MUA members who are cleaners will be offered interviews with the contractor, but many of them have some form of injury and the company will not have to hire them.

`I don't see how it can be safe'
Joe Serena, a straddle carrier driver at Patrick's East Swanson Dock, was among a third of the workers in Melbourne who voted against the deal. "Personally, I wasn't happy with it, but you have to go with the times," he said. With staffing levels cut, he thinks that the productivity targets are barely possible. "I just don't see how it can be safe," he said. Serena used to drive in two stints - three hours and two-and-a-half hours - and also work lashing containers on the ships. Now he will drive for seven hours with only a 45-minute break. "Four o'clock in the morning, that's when you hit a brick wall," he said. "This extra time in the straddle will make it tougher."

The company can now demand that they work four hours overtime after the normal eight-hour shift. "Especially after the midnight shift you don't want to work another four hours. This is an occupational health and safety issue," Francis commented.

Both Patrick chairman Christopher Corrigan and Minister for Workplace Relations Peter Reith have claimed the settlement is a victory for "waterfront reform." However, reflecting the view of a layer of big business, the Melbourne daily the Age editorialized, "The government and its ally, Patrick, have failed to achieve their fundamental goal, the inauguration of a new era on the waterfront through the destruction of the union's monopoly."

An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald, while claiming that the outcome vindicated both Patrick and the government for taking on the MUA, warned "there is a danger that the union will fight to claw back some of the ground it has given [as they did in] the early 1990s."

Greg Combet, ACTU assistant secretary, said that the redundancies were not as significant as those in the 1990s and could have been agreed without the events of the past months if the company had been prepared to negotiate. In 1992 the union negotiated government-funded redundancies with the then-Labor government that cut the workforce on the waterfront by more than half.

As part of the new deal, Patrick has agreed to pay the MUA's legal bills and the MUA said it would drop its conspiracy case against Corrigan and Reith. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), however, has refused to drop legal action it has taken against the MUA over secondary boycotts during the dispute. MUA national secretary John Coombs said that dropping the ACCC case was a condition of the agreement.

On June 16 Producer & Consumer Stevedores (PCS), the scab labor outfit set up by the National Farmers Federation, was forced to sack most of its 353 employees, who had worked during the MUA lockout. PCS admitted it had been squeezed out of stevedoring by the settlement between the MUA and Patrick.

P&O, the other main stevedoring company, is looking to cut up to 550 jobs from their workforce of 1,200.

Linda Harris is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union.

 
 
 
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