BY ALEX BAINBRIDGE
HOBART — "Workers had a gun at their head." This was how Australian Manufacturing Workers Union organiser Greg Cooper described the circumstances surrounding the vote workers employed by the Incat boat-building company on May 11 to accept a four-day week instead of 200 redundancies threatened by the Incat management.
"Our union does not support a reduction in working hours, pay or conditions", Cooper told the Mercury. "We are bargaining with this company for a pay rise and they are saying take a pay cut or lose your job."
Cooper also said that it would be illegal for the company to reduce employees' hours without the signature of the unions. He said this would not be forthcoming until the financial position of the company had been independently determined and a redundancy package was in place, the Mercury reported.
Even after the May 11 vote, Incat managing director Craig Clifford was still threatening redundancies "if the situation doesn't improve". Management has been making much of the fact that the company has four unsold boats including one that had been decommissioned on May 11 after having been leased to the Australian military as a troop transport to East Timor.
Thus Incat workers have been labouring under the cloud of threatened redundancies even before the May 10 public reporting of this latest management ultimatum. A minority of Incat workers participated in the first strike in the company's history in early April in support of the unions' demands for a 15% pay rise over three years and a shorter working week.
The AMWU estimates that the cost of the pay rise and shorter working week combined would be around $2 million — a fraction of the most recently released annual profits of the company.