BY SUE BOLTON & SAM WAINWRIGHT
On July 24, the day after the Australian Industrial Relations Commission rejected the Australian Council of Trade Unions' petition to compensate workers for excessive overtime, Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union construction division national secretary John Sutton announced that the finishing touches had been put on the division's claims a new round of "pattern bargaining" (negotiating simultaneous enterprise agreements with many employers in the same industry).
Around 4500 construction enterprise agreements are due to expire between September 30 and December 30.
"Overtime is endemic in our industry and we will be coordinating action around the nation to allow our members to reclaim their lives", Sutton said.
An important aim of the bargaining round will be to extend the 36-hour working week to building workers in all states.
During their pattern bargaining campaign in 2000, Victorian building workers won the agreement of employers to implement a 36-hour week in stages.
In an interview with 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, Victorian president of the CFMEU construction division John Cummins described that campaign as "a bit of civilising of the industry".
"Industry-wide, there was no ceiling on overtime previously. Job sites were working seven days a week, all hours of the day. What we brought in is a ceiling, a maximum, a cap. If people don't want to work it they don't work it", explained Cummins.
"We don't have the 'not enough hours in the day' approach that really characterised the industry before we got into the last campaign", he added.
When the Victorian building unions launched the 36-hour-week campaign, they faced entrenched opposition from the Master Builders Association.
The employers retaliated against building workers' selective bans and locked out a few thousand building workers for three weeks in March 2000.
However, a group of companies broke away and negotiated an enterprise bargaining agreement which included the phasing in a 36-hour week over three years. Once the first group of employers crumbled, the rest followed suit.
"We were able to mobilise the membership so as to get the outcome we wanted", said Cummins.
The final stage of the 36-hour week will be implemented in 2003 when the number of rostered days off (RDOs) which building workers get each year will increase from 22 to 26.
Victorian building workers still work a lot of overtime. But for the first time there is a cap on the number of hours which workers can work in any given week or day. Victorian building workers can work a maximum of 56 hours a week with Monday to Thursday work capped at 10 hours and Friday and Saturday work capped at eight hours.
"If employers had their way they would try to force workers to work on their RDOs", said Cummins. "We really have industry 'no-work' days [in Victoria]. We don't offer an across-the-board flexibility on industry RDOs... Everybody can then plan their leisure time around that. In NSW they have had flexible RDOs and there haven't been any industry 'no-work' days... The NSW branch now tells us that they want to address this."
The Victorian branch also won seven "no-work" weekends, attached to RDOs, a year.
Although the union has not discussed further reductions to working hours, Cummins said that the union is "more than happy to support" democratically made individual site decisions to do so. Because of the unstable nature of the industry, many workers want to work as much as possible when they have a job.
A more important focus for the Victorian unionists, said Cummins, "is to extend shorter hours beyond Victoria. So if we can help the other branches to deliver the shorter hours for their members there, then that's what we see as our main priority."
Cummins explained that if "one of the other state branches is having problems with a national builder who is refusing to entertain their claim, we'd think there was something wrong with us if we didn't give them a [hand]".
This commitment is important because, according to Cummins, some branches will find it harder than others to win. He pointed to the small building industries in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, where "you could probably count on one hand the number of cranes that are up in the air at any one time".
Cummins said: "If the two biggest branches [Victoria and NSW] of the union start delivering better conditions for better than half of the national organisation, then it will be a lot easier to flow on to other branches."
NSW state secretary of the CFMEU's construction division, Andrew Ferguson, told GLW that most Sydney agreements expire on October 1. "We anticipate that in the first week of October there will be 50,000 construction workers in Sydney taking different forms of strike action around this campaign. We think that over the next two months we will conclude a lot of agreements making provision for the introduction of a 36-hour week."
Ferguson said the branch discussed closing sites, with full pay, on the six Saturdays adjacent to long weekends during the year.
"Workers would have a long weekend and no cut in pay as opposed to having a ban on work on Saturday, and having a $200 wage cut."
Although Ferguson confirmed that the NSW branch would now be campaigning for 13 extra paid leisure days (RDOs) in the coming enterprise bargaining campaign, the NSW branch is taking a different approach to that taken in Victoria.
Ferguson said "We've been debating it, but increasingly we've been coming around to a position of allowing the workers to have no work on the Saturday but having six RDOs on those Saturdays at [weekday] rates of pay. So they'd have a wage cut but they'd still be getting some money and they'd have seven additional RDOs during the working year."
All of the evidence from Victoria, is that the increased leisure time from the extra RDOs, the no-work weekends, and the cap on overtime is immensely popular among the members. Cummins summed up the sentiment around the shorter working week as "working to live, not living to work".
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 31, 2002.
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