Weipa workers: fighting CRA union busting
By Jennifer Thompson Unionists at CRA-owned Comalco's bauxite mine and kaolin plant at Weipa are fighting for the right to wage rises won through collective bargaining. The dispute is a result of Comalco's refusal to negotiate a wage rise for unionised with workers since 1991. Comalco is using the federal Labor government's 1993 industrial relations legislation to de-unionise the work force. Fellow workers who have signed individual non-union contracts have received wage rises of up to $20,000. The promise of a big pay rise has tempted many of the Weipa workers, denied a pay rise any other way, to sign individual contracts. In Weipa, of the 700 previously unionised workers, only 71 are still represented by their union. Comalco sees the money it is shelling out to buy workers from their unions as an investment for the future. The probable location of a new aluminium smelter at Weipa has added to Comalco's drive to eliminate union protection for workers. Comalco's strategy at Weipa is a repeat of its attempts to introduce non-union individual agreements at its Bell Bay and Boyne Island smelters, and at parent company CRA's Hammersley Iron mine in the Pilbara. Already many CRA workplaces have become largely de-unionised through the use of non-union enterprise agreements or individual contracts. According to the Financial Review, 11,000 of CRA's 16,000 workers have shifted to individual contracts over the last three years. While CRA is only one of a few big mining industry companies pursuing a head-on confrontation to drive unions out of its workplaces, others will be looking on with interest. The Financial Review's Ian Howarth notes that BHP and the other major mining companies are signing two to three-year enterprise deals with unions, leaving plenty of time to measure the results of CRA's push for staff contracts. The ACTU has backed the workers by organising walkouts at other unionised CRA workplaces, particularly coal mines in NSW and Queensland. CRA's coal mining operations are the next likely places for its union-busting campaign. Unions also plan to stop ore and other products being freighted by rail and sea. ACTU-convened union meetings on November 20 will plan further action against CRA. The ACTU, however, has started this industrial campaign after the horse has bolted. CRA has managed to force a majority of its workers and workplaces onto contracts, leaving a small number of unionists to oppose arrangements which will leave workers at the mercy of the company — especially if unionism is broken altogether. The option of fighting the attacks from outside by transport unions using secondary boycotts is also under attack from the same Labor legislation that brought in non-union agreements. Bosses in the shipping and stevedoring industries immediately went to the Industrial Relations Commission for a ruling against the waterfront strike.
Accord
The ACTU and the union movement, however, got bogged in this mess a long time ago, when they signed the Accord with the Labor Party. The "cooperation" agreed between Labor and the union movement turned into cooperation to deliver "responsible" wage outcomes — wage restraint — to maintain Labor's standing with big business. The cost to workers' interests through eight versions of the Accord was the 17% to 30% decline in real wages and the $40 billion average annual shift from wages to profits. The ACTU's wages strategy has been to trade-off productivity gains — working conditions — for relatively paltry wage rises inferior to cost-of-living increases. The increased earnings to business as a result have allowed them to amass the booty to capitalise on workers' disillusionment with the union bureaucracy and buy out unionism. The most recent twist in the ACTU's dance with the government was the introduction of enterprise bargaining in Accord VII. Employers then set about dividing workers to break down conditions and wages. When the implementation of enterprise bargaining wasn't going far enough, fast enough, the Labor Party introduced non-union Enterprise Flexibility Agreements (EFA) in the 1993 Industrial Relations Reform Act. An EFA was the mechanism for the introduction of a performance-based individual contract system at Woodside Petroleum's North-West Shelf project last year. Iain Ross, deputy AIRC commissioner, is said to have helped to draft the EFA legislation when he was assistant secretary of the ACTU. He was involved, in his new IRC position, in the rulings on an EFA for the Sydney Asahi metal factory which found that the union could be excluded from negotiations for an agreement. The ACTU's strategy of taking employers to court along with its attempts to get more pro-union commissioners into the federal Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) has been a sad failure. CRA successfully appealed the December IRC decision to grant a paid-rates award, equivalent to the salaries of contract workers at CRA's Bell Bay smelter. The IRC rejected an application to flow-on the Weipa individual contracts salary rates to a paid-rates award on November 15. Within the union movement, there has been strong criticism of the Australian Workers Union — dubbed Australia's Worst Union — with good reason. In Weipa, Comalco has refused to recognise any union representation other than the AWU, but the problem is bigger than a right-wing do-nothing union. Since the 1989 pilots's dispute no union has been prepared to run a wages campaign to claw back the wealth drained from wages to profits during the '80s. Sue Bull, Democrat Socialist spokesperson on industrial relations said, "The ACTU, after presiding over 12 years of give-backs, is scared of the total erosion of unionism and admitting that this fight is a do-or-die for unions and workers' ability to act collectively. "While the motives of the union bureaucracy might be self interest", she said, "a future without unions will leave workers open to the worst rampages of employers. "For that reason we should provide all the support we can to the striking CRA workers, with donations, motions of support in our unions, pressure on the Labour Councils to campaign with street demonstrations, and support committees in all workplaces."