BY GRAHAM WILLIAMS
GEELONG — Production workers at the Godfrey Hirst carpet factory here have voted to accept a company offer of a 5% pay rise over 11 months, after a successful industrial campaign involving work bans, 24- and 48-hour strikes and limiting shifts from eight hours to only six hours.
The deal, accepted by a mass meeting of Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia members on September 19, also specifies that workers will no longer be employed on fixed-term contracts. Instead, they will be employed as either permanents or casuals; casuals employed for longer than eight weeks will have to be put on as permanents.
The company has also agreed that workers made redundant will receive three weeks' pay for every year of service and a full payout of all sick leave accrued.
The workers see the improved redundancy package as an important victory, because the company plans to move its warehouse section from Geelong to its Laverton plant in western Melbourne. While the workers in the warehouse have been offered alternative positions in the factory's mill, some won't be able to transfer.
The deal also specifies an expiry date of August 31, the date the TCFUA is seeking for all its agreements so as to allow legal industry-wide action. The federal government is determined to prevent this kind of "pattern bargaining", threatening unions and individual organisers with heavy fines, but has so far failed.
The TCFUA's industry-wide plan parallels the "Campaign 2000" plan being fought for by manufacturing unions, which will allow a collective campaign for better pay and conditions across Victoria's manufacturing industry.
While TCFUA members have won their demands from Godfrey Hirst, members of the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union are still in dispute with the company.
Unionists from the ETU and AMWU have now held a 24-hour "protest line" outside the plant for six weeks. They are demanding similar pay and conditions improvements to those achieved by the TCFUA and an expiry date identical to those on other AMWU and ETU agreements.