BY KAMALA EMANUEL
LAUNCESTON — The lockout of members of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU) employed at the Blue Ribbon Meatworks will enter its 21st week on August 18.
It is the longest lockout in Tasmania's history, according to AMIEU branch secretary Grant Courtney. It will be "three times longer than the previously longest lockout", he told Green Left Weekly. "That was at the APPM mill in 1992, and it went for seven weeks."
The workers have been locked out for refusing to sign individual contracts abolishing job security and basic conditions like holiday pay, long-service leave and sick pay.
According to Courtney, when the new owners took over the company after it went into receivership in 2001, they were supposed to employ 300 workers. "They were only employing 95 at the beginning of the dispute. Now there are 23 locked out, 40 have left and another 10 were sacked last week, their jobs outsourced."
Those who have signed the contracts are "doing exactly the same job as they were before", Courtney said, so for the company, "it's about avoiding award provisions".
"Management is on record as saying they 'needed more flexibility than the award'", Courtney explained.
The owners have split the company into two separate entities — Blue Ribbon (which the owners say has nothing to do with the dispute) and a labour-hire company called Newemploy.
The AMIEU is seeking industrial commission orders against both companies, and wants reinstatement and compensation for time lost in the dispute.
In an apparent effort to circumvent a possible reinstatement order, the company has outsourced the jobs of the locked-out workers, who are maintaining a picket line, Monday to Friday, at the corner of Hoblers Bridge Road and Killafady Road, Killafady, near Launceston.
From Green Left Weekly, August 20, 2003.
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