BY GRAHAM MATTHEWS
MELBOURNE — In a "private settlement", three Victorian unions have agreed to pay $300,000 in fines to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for violating the secondary boycott provisions of the Trade Practices Act.
The settlement, which also includes an agreement by the unions not to use picket lines in the Orbost area of East Gippsland for five years, will finalise a long-running battle surrounding a union blockade on premises owned by Bass Strait gas fields operator OMV.
The picket line was set up in October last year when unions involved in building OMV's Orbost natural gas plant — the Australian Workers Union, the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) — discovered that the eventual plant operator, Upstream Petroleum, planned to employ staff on contracts.
"The company was trying to establish [individual contracts] to undermine a collective agreement with the unions", AMWU Victorian assistant secretary Steve Dargavel told Green Left Weekly. "The unions succeeded in establishing a collective agreement with the company. After the dispute was resolved, the ACCC launched an investigation."
The ACCC has the power to subpoena large amounts of information. It can also compel witnesses to give evidence without the right to refuse to attend proceedings, or to refuse to give information. "The ACCC alleged that the unions were engaged in a secondary boycott by preventing one union from trading with another", Dargavel said.
The broad powers of the ACCC have been used against unions in the past, Dargavel explained, notably in the lock-out of maritime union members by Patrick in 1998. "We have to assume that the ACCC will be used increasingly as a battering ram by the Coalition government against organised labour. And this is a taste of the future."
This attack on the unions will not go unopposed, Dargavel indicated. "Unions are talking about this matter and about an effective response that defends the right to strike and the right to organise — both of which are obsessing the current federal government."
From Green Left Weekly, May 21, 2003.
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