Miners from the Hunter No. 1 colliery in the Hunter Valley have been on strike since June 10, when they began "protected" industrial action, allowed during an enterprise bargaining period. The 400 miners have since voted to remain on strike, following the refusal by the company, Coal and Allied — a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, formerly CRA/RTZ — to withdraw offers for workers to leave their union and accept individual contracts. JENNIFER THOMPSON spoke to TONY MAHER, vice president of the Mining and Energy Division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, about what is at stake in the dispute.
Hunter Valley No. 1 mine is the only operation in the NSW open cut coal industry without an enterprise agreement. According to Maher, most mines in NSW are on their second or third generation enterprise bargains. Wages at Hunter No. 1 have fallen about $6 per hour behind the others.
The dispute began as a classic struggle about an enterprise agreement, according to Maher. The workers were frustrated by two years of "getting nowhere". For example, the company wouldn't devote enough meeting time to develop an agreement.
To pressure the company, there were a few 24- and 48-hour stoppages, and bans, but it still resisted serious discussions, said Maher, while wanting to continue implementing changes.
The union attempted to negotiate a truce — "We wouldn't take industrial action for a month or two and they wouldn't do anything provocative".
That failed, Maher said, "because their idea of a truce was us not taking industrial action and them being free to offer individual contracts. We decided to go on strike."
Now, says Maher, the issues are no longer just wages and conditions. The union has 90-95% of the coal industry under enterprise agreements, most achieved without industrial action. "The issue now is the company's attempt to break the strike."
All the company's actions are directed towards that, Maher said, "and they have been spectacularly unsuccessful thus far". Rio Tinto has sought and been denied Industrial Relations Commission orders in February to ban future "probable" industrial action and, after the strike began in June to terminate the "protected" bargaining period.
On June 25 the IRC urged the company to withdraw the individual contracts for 30 days to allow collective bargaining to proceed, in return for workers ending their strike. The mine manager rejected the proposal.
On July 7 Prime Minister John Howard intervened, backing the company's attempts to replace collective bargaining with individual contracts.
Asked whether the company aimed to repeat the Weipa experience of refusing a collective agreement and then offering individual contracts, Maher said that Rio Tinto's hallmark approach has been upset by the union's industrial action. Classically, he said, the approach is to "prevent any result coming out of collective arrangements and offer the dollars you would normally put into the collective agreement on an individual basis".
Union officials involved in Bell Bay and Weipa and Hamersley, he said, "are going to go to their graves wondering what would have happened if they'd organised a campaign of industrial action in support of the collective claims early on, before they lost support".
It will be a long struggle, said Maher, unless there is some sort of breakthrough by the company in terms of forcing a team of scabs in or intervention by the government or the commission.
"The commission so far has said that the laws of the land are that you're on your own. The government has done a lot of cheering from the sideline, but if that's all they do, the only impact will be strengthening the resolve of our members because they hate those second-rate politicians with some passion. The more they intervene in the dispute, the more determined the members get."
The current dispute involves 400 members and costs a lot more to maintain than the nearly year-long Vickery mine strike involving 30 miners, said Maher, but a strike fund levy has been voted by a national plebiscite.
The CFMEU decided not to attend the July 8 IRC hearing at which the state government-owned FreightCorp tried to force its drivers, members of the Public Transport Union, to cross the picket line.
"Individual drivers have taken the decision on principle, and we're confident that they will continue to do so. The orders sought by Freightcorp are a disgraceful kowtowing to Rio Tinto."
FreightCorp's action, which continues in court this week, is the result of Rio Tinto standing over people, said Maher.
"At the picket line on July 4, Coal and Allied were getting FreightCorp supervisors to carry messages to the drivers threatening them with fines and damages and everything else, and the supervisors locked the crew into the back of the engine so they couldn't talk to us and continued that intimidation for the full shift."
The action had probably been orchestrated by Coalition industrial relations minister Peter Reith, he added. "The government wants to play a role in major disputes; they don't play an independent role, they come in clearly on one side.
"They're no more than the political department of Rio Tinto."
Maher said the union didn't have a view about possible solidarity action by Maritime Union members at the port in Newcastle, should coal get that far. "If it were to get to that, they would have to break the picket line, and there would probably be an escalation of the dispute before it got anywhere near Newcastle."
The company wanted the dispute broadened to other operations, he said. On July 9, the Port Waratah Coal Services management announced that workers refusing to load Hunter Valley coal on to a waiting ship would be sacked, in an apparent attempt to threaten escalation of the dispute to a national port strike.
Such an escalation would allow the government and mining company to test the Coalition's new Workplace Relations Act, passed last year with Democrat backing, which prohibits "secondary boycott" solidarity actions.
"They want us back at work with our tail between the legs, with fines and damages hanging over our heads and a broken and disorganised rabble", said Maher.
In another attempt to get at the union, on July 8 industry minister Warwick Parer announced an Industry Commission inquiry into the black coal industry. The investigation will examine cost factors "from pit to port", work practices and whether safety practices are proscriptive compared to overseas mines and metal mining, as Rio Tinto has claimed.
On the same day, Howard expanded his list of things to blame for continuing high unemployment to include restrictive work practices and union involvement in industrial operations.
Maher said the new inquiry underscored the solid relationship between Rio Tinto and the government. "They click their fingers and they get an inquiry just days after their own academics-for-hire report from the National Institute for Labour Studies came out, critical of coal miners for being overpaid and under-worked."
Australian coal mines still kill a dozen workers every year, Maher said. "In a work force of only 20,000, that is too high, and you have Rio Tinto wanting to deregulate safety arrangements. They should be condemned in the strongest terms for that. We know what deregulation and self-regulation in the mining industry does."
A NSW government-commissioned report released earlier this year found that a reduction in lost time from injuries was window dressing rather than a real improvement in safety.
Employees were being encouraged to attend work with minor injuries — "a phenomenon we call the walking wounded" — through monetary incentives, and exhortations to make the mine look good, said Maher, showing what happens without regulation.
"The government has had before it since it took office a very important new International Labour Organisation convention on safety and health in mines. An essential part of it is a recommendation to extend the safety regulations across all sectors of mining.
"It also recommends that workers in all mining sectors have the right to refuse to work in what they consider to be unsafe conditions. We have that right in coal mining; we don't have that right across all mining in Australia."
Under that ILO convention, Maher said, federal and state governments would be required to improve and extend safety regulation. "Rio Tinto wants to go the other way. The government's dithering on the ILO convention is quite clearly at the instruction of Rio Tinto.
"Being able to refuse to work is crucial. That tragic Moura disaster where 11 workers were killed: the inquiry into that found that management took the view that it was the workers' responsibility to either go down or not go down. If that's the case, then workers need the right to refuse very clearly.
"Rio Tinto says that there are too many provisions, it's too restrictive; they want to run things."
In regard to work practices, Maher says that they "are the subject of virtually every enterprise agreement. We have enterprise agreements with 90-95% of the industry, the highest rate of enterprise agreements in any industry in Australia. All of the issues that might be raised — recruitment practices, retrenchment practices, seniority, overtime, any of those things — are addressed one way or another in most of those agreements.
"Most of the things that Rio Tinto are complaining about in the media just aren't economic issues, and a number of Rio Tinto companies have already reached agreement on those issues. It's an attempt to mask the real agenda of the company."