MUA members speak out against the Patrick deal
Each week 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly sponsors the Friday breakfast show on community radio 3CR in Melbourne. The June 26 show covered the MUA-Patrick settlement, which was adopted against some opposition at MUA meetings in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane last week.
JORGE JORQUERA interviewed three MUA members with strong concerns about the deal: wharfie GRAHAM BELL (P & O Ports, Brisbane), wharfie TREVOR WHITLING, (Strang Stevedoring, Melbourne) and seafarer CHRIS CAIN (MUA convenor for Mermaid Sound). Following are edited highlights of those interviews.
Graham Bell
The biggest issue with the agreement has to be the sheer volume of the job losses, about half the work force. And I hear Corrigan's looking at more.
Does this mean that the situation's going to be worse for the supplementaries too?
What's new is the flexibility in the starting of the shifts. That's particularly hard on supplementary employees, or those involved in irregular shiftwork. Not only will they do a midnight, afternoon and day shift all in the one week, they'll face a multitude of different starting times.
Where the work force is almost halved with no immediate change in actual workload, are major speed-ups inevitable?
Regardless of the rhetoric that's coming from these free marketeers, workers can work only so fast. Take Peter Reith's whinge about how long it takes a bloke to get from the smoko room up to the crane. It takes as long as it takes, doesn't it? Management is going to have to come to terms with that.
Isn't there going to be a big flow-on in the industry from this deal?
We're very worried about this. Our organiser has a feeling P&O will be a lot more brutal than Patrick. The worrying thing for supplementaries (and now for permanents too) is that Patrick says that now they have an excess of jobs. But what's to say they wont need more workers in two months? Then they'll flood the wharves with a lot more supplementary labour. This would cut our take-home pay because there'll be less work to be shared around.
What about the MUA dropping its legal case?
That sticks in the throat of most people who felt very personally affected by the rhetoric coming out of Reith, Howard, Corrigan and McGauchie. We catch them with their finger in the cookie jar and they get away scot free! But with Alan Fels able to hit the MUA with multi-million dollar fines, maybe dropping the conspiracy charges is a price we have to pay.
Trevor Whitling
In today's Australian, Corrigan claims a huge victory, saying that when people start to read the fine print they'll realise just how big it is.
I believe that. It was reflected in the Melbourne vote, which was approximately 60-65% for and the remainder against. Of the 65% that were for it, I think the majority were made up of the fellas who were thinking they were going to get the redundancy package, particularly those in line for the contracted-out positions. The workers who will still be at the coalface voted against it, and rightly so.
The meeting took nearly six hours so it must have been ...
Yeah, heated! However, they were virtually told to vote for it. None of the workers had a prior involvement in the agreement and had not seen it before the meeting. The leaders virtually said, "Here's a copy of the agreement, but as you read it, just vote yes anyway".
Last week a foreman at Patrick died in an accident. Aren't the speed-ups going to have a lot of occupational health and safety repercussions?
I believe they will be able to extend your shift by four hours with virtually one minute's notice towards the end of the shift, whereas now they must ask you before the last smoko break — sort of a health and safety factor. No matter how good a worker you are, you won't be as efficient in hours 10 to 12 as in hours one to five, especially since they've raised the benchmark to 25 container moves an hour. I believe were dealing with an attempt to bring in 12-hour shifts by stealth.
Graham Bell said it's likely that, within a few months, the 687 workers left will not be enough. It's almost as if Corrigan is ... paving the way for more casuals.
Yes. People will now get brought in for two hours work at very short notice. A lot of existing supplementaries will drop off the books and as each one goes there'll be a new applicant. You then run the chance of getting scabs like bloody ex-P&C Stevedores. Yet more stealth. Australia wake up!
One of the things that was starting to wake up Australia was the MUAs legal suit. What do you think of it being dropped?
The average person just cannot believe that we've given away a powerful case when we were fighting the good fight. To have that taken away from us and cop a massively reduced agreement — it's just ludicrous.
Chris Cain
One of the things I'd like to say before I comment is that Im not here to split the union, even though there may be some comment later on that people like myself — or any other critical member — are trying to do that.
What Im trying to achieve is to draw the union back to the membership, to further enhance it for when its going to come into a very, very difficult position down the track.
I feel disappointed with what's happened. It was the trade union movement as a whole which held this strike together — building workers, construction workers, metal workers, members of the community, even old age pensioners. And if all these people responded to one thing, it was our moral high ground, the feeling that "there's 1400 jobs there" that we fought for and saved.
There's still 1400 jobs there, but what this deal accepts is casualisation, something that was fought against for years by waterfront workers and seafarers, because it's plain that with casualisation comes the demise of the trade union movement.
We're heading back to a bull system, where management can pick and choose. That's happening at sea, too. After July 1 we'll lose our roster system, retreating to where management can pick. If you don't like it or try, as a delegate, to better conditions on the job, you'll be gone, because there'll be nothing behind you.
Also, everyone on the waterfront I speak to really can't understand why we've dropped off the conspiracy charges: what were we actually doing down on the picket line for five or six weeks?
What we achieved on that line was to draw the trade union movement back together. At the end of the blue, when the 1400 men got back in the gate, I spoke to an old wharfie who'd been down on the line every day. He was there with his mother and he came running up and said: "Chris, can you get me on camera?" — as a memento. He said: "I want to thank Reith, Howard and Corrigan and all the rest of them multinationals for bringing the trade union movement back together and sticking as one to get them workers back through the gate."
I thought that was the highlight. I thought we were going to move forward, go for a bit of strength, since we had national and international support.
From a rank-and-file point of view [the solidarity from other workers] was tremendous. I was one of the people in WA that went around building sites and to see them lose three days pay, down tools and walk off the job at the risk of losing their own jobs — that was tremendous. They need to be congratulated.
Was there an alternative to the sort of arrangement that's being put to workers at the moment?
When the blue started and MUA members were dragged off the job by goons in balaclavas it was an issue for the whole of working Australia to look at publicly and come out in support of the waterside workers. Why, people are now saying, did we roll over so easily to let Howard, Reith and Sharp off the hook? Compare this to the treatment of those of us who were on the picket line. If a copper had battered me over the head and put me in jail, they wouldn't have dropped off me! I would've been charged and sent to jail. These questions are not really being addressed at the moment.