Building a union against a warehouse giant

Laverton, in Melbourne’s industrial outer west, is an endless sprawl of grey warehouses and industrial plants. Billions of dollars’ worth of products are made or handled in an array of workplaces. Yet occasionally, one (or a few) of these places stop. A strike is on—a reminder that this industrial parkland relies on its workers to run. Lineage, the world’s largest cold storage operator and cold and frozen product supplier for Woolworths, was one of the latest to get the rude awakening.

A picket line in good spirits, with homemade chop suey, children’s face painting and a small degree of boredom (largely thanks to the success of shutting the place down) made it an easy place to become acquainted with people. The warmth of the picket stood in stark contrast to its corporate, concrete surrounds—and the sub-zero temperatures the workers labour in. While many on the picket line were full-timers (only 20 percent of the team), all were quick to point out that the struggle was also about solidarity with their casual workmates.

Three of the people responsible for this familial atmosphere are the delegates: Peter “the troublemaker”, Lyndon “the health and safety general” and Bruce “the litigation expert and people person”. Red Flag sat down with them while the strike continued to discuss how they built a union against the world’s largest cold storage operator.

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What are some of the challenges of working here day-to-day?

Lyndon: There’s a lot. To start off, the place is divided into two main sections: one chilled and one frozen section. The chilled section is between one and three degrees, with the frozen section at negative 23. Working at these temperatures every day can take a real toll on your body. Safety here is a constant problem.

Bruce: The work is physically taxing, many of the boxes you carry can be around 20kg. Add that into the cold temperatures, and it wears you down.

Peter: We have had ambulances called three times in one week, twice on the same shift. One of the cases looked to be pneumonia. Management said it was just dehydration, but one of the initial signs of pneumonia is severe dehydration. One guy was found literally collapsed over his manual handling equipment in the freezer.

The high-reach work, which means picking pallets up to ten meters in the air, can be very dangerous. Management makes it so by the constant pressure to speed up, causing corner cutting, and increasing the likelihood of injuries, or even deaths.

Lyndon: To give you an idea of how the company views safety, the company’s health and safety advisor has said to us on more than one occasion that “the law is not prescriptive, it’s more of a guide”. So in his words, literally, he’s only going to do the bare minimum that is required by law. They more or less refuse to communicate safety issues with us on site. We have had pickers almost killed by falling pallets and not been notified properly.

On another note, this place messes with your life a lot. It is running 24/7, and people need to work a lot. Don’t even worry about having a social life and going out and enjoying yourself, just the basic things of life. A basic work-life balance is out the window.

Another major issue is favouritism. Management chooses who they pull up for KPIs and other disciplinary issues. People can almost kill others and not be seriously penalised, because management likes them, while people can get targeted and sacked for uttering the word union.

Bruce: Yeah, like we have a guy who has been in this shed over sixteen years, trained many of the managers but never been promoted. What is that? It is simple favouritism.

Peter: Usually, management is linked via bloodline or chromosomes. Literally, you could nearly put a couple of family names up on this building and that would cover the management team. Management seriously monster people. They target, intimidate and bully people here.

Bruce: The casuals cop it the worst and that is why so much of our fight is for them. Doing eleven-hour shifts almost every day. I’ve heard of people who work over twenty days straight. They have to accept shifts. You lose future shifts if you call in sick. So heaps of the casuals work sick.

Management does not follow any proper procedures for discipline. They handed a guy a written warning in the middle of his shift, in front of his workmates, accusing him of 50-60 absences. Only seven of those ended up unapproved.

When we pressed them on why it was handled in this way, and why so much of the evidence was illegitimate, they said: “We were gonna give him a warning anyway”. It was deliberate targeting. The warning ended up getting turfed.

Peter: When Lineage took over in 2020, management went berserk with intimidation and sackings, leading to a serious turnover problem. They went through 1,200 employees in about eighteen months. Often, HR would hire a temp to do the sacking. This place was seriously out of control.

One of their sadistic discipline strategies is when they start people at seven. It could start with disagreement with a manager, getting sick or carrying an ache or a strain. You ask for less hours, or ask to start at five. They refuse you, so you take it off sick; now you are on a seven. Every morning, they have a toolbox at five o’clock, where everybody greets each other. You are ostracised from your team.

This is how management bleeds you out. You are starting when everyone else is on their first break. So they miss out on both of those interactions. Finally, they might get sent home at eleven o’clock when everybody else is going to break at twelve. So they’re completely segregated from the rest of the community here. Management says that they don’t know what’s going on. That is a lie. It is deliberate.

Peter mentioned that the union dropped to about 40 or so members when Lineage took over. You now report close to 300 only a few years later. How did you get into the union side of things here, and what were the initial challenges you faced trying to establish it?

Peter: Our strength was really low at the start. At our lowest, coverage dropped to below 20 percent. The workplace ballooned in size from 80 something to over 420 people, and a number of the delegates got promoted and other people left. It was impossible to get a union organiser on the site.

So it was a slog. For the first nine months, I would stay here for extra hours, doing ten hours a day, six days a week. I would use the shift changeover to interact with all the different shifts. In the first nine months, we moved to about 70-80 members.

Management were like hawks when it came to discussing the union on the floor. If casuals mentioned union during their first weeks, they would get blacklisted. One manager recently said to me, “I don’t know why you go around and sign up casuals when we can just get rid of them whenever we want” and smiled at me with this massive grin on his face, like he was the Joker or something. This is the mentality management has. So I just had to persist.

Along the way, I had been promising all these people that when they sign up we’d be getting mass meetings soon. After eleven months, we still did not have mass meetings, and I was getting pressured by the members. I ran a petition to get the mass meeting. I came in early to get the guys on their changeovers. I would just say, “Support your fellow workers, sign the petition”, we union bashed the whole shed and got like 270 signatures. Then we pushed to have our non-paid mass meeting. This was all over two years back.

It ran across the three shifts. We introduced another eight union delegates on the site and with our membership numbers pushing closer to 150, management began to accommodate. In our clause, it states that all employees can be invited to mass meetings, so that was our window to just invite everyone, and we shut down the whole shed. Virtually anyone that wasn’t a manager or an admin was invited—we now try to include the admin staff in the union. The message was “everyone please come learn about union”. It was a huge success.

So after the union was allowed to come down for the mass meetings, organisers were granted right-of-entry more frequently, which helped us build. Then it became my mission to find a strong delegate team.

Being more established, management would still target delegates. Our leading arvo shift delegate was stood down in the lead-up to the strike. They targeted him because he is one of the most present and vocal on the afternoon shift. Being a delegate, you get the target on you—you certainly make sacrifices here to make this place better.

Lyndon: The reason why we have all these people out here strong and together is entirely down to Peter and the work he’s put in ... it is just phenomenal. He’s been escorted out of toolbox meetings because management don’t want him to talk and he has been told he can’t come into things, but he keeps going back. He has inspired me to go and become a delegate and do the same things he does because he can’t fight it alone—he is exhausting himself. So the rest of us are following his footsteps to continue the fight. [Lyndon was not the first delegate to recount that Peter had been decisive in them becoming a delegate or had trained them to be a strong one—ML.]

Peter: In terms of sacrifices, management took away my overtime in July this year to deter me from union bashing the place. I said, “I don’t care if I lose overtime, I’m still going to show up and do the hours”. Matter of fact, my wife didn’t even know that I was not getting paid OT until I got on the picket because I didn’t tell her. So my sacrifice is everyone else’s reward.

Reflecting on all the work and building you have done, what do you think were some of the factors that helped?

Bruce: Our delegate team. Our strength is we all add something into the mix. For example, Lyndon is the General of Health and Safety and Peter is the “problem child” to management. I love litigation, I love making sure things are fair, and the rest of our team adds something too. It makes us a strong, united force.

Lyndon: I think the main thing that helped us build the union was management’s behaviour. It made it easy to say to people, “This is why we need to stand together”, when they are treating everyone so unfairly.

The conversations were really important too. You see how big the warehouse is, so there are lots of people. Peter is always walking back and forth, during breaks going around talking to different groups in the different lunch rooms in different areas of the warehouse.

Bruce: When we win a case, word spreads. We’ve got a few people who can’t really understand English properly but then we get a win, word spreads and suddenly we have them joining the union. I know for me I had to win at least two to three cases for people to believe in me to represent them. Now every time there is anything to do with litigation, they say, “Go see Bruce”. Every time we go to the office there’s that fear right away in management. They often say, “Oh Bruce, what are you doing here?”

Peter: The wins are so important. Safety is often the issue we fight around. The issues could be really small, but winning was what helped. Nearly one-third of the delegates are HSRs as well, so we can push back through the safety angle and that really gets them on the back foot.

Sticking at it is important. They try to scare me, but I do not care. I’ve been in this game too long. I just keep pushing on. My persistence will beat them because I show up every day.

Building a union team was crucial though. I could not do this alone. I would continue to go around every day to the morning toolboxes and spread union. I was always talking union with as many people as possible, always planting the seed. Amidst that, I was also keeping an eye out for potential delegates. I eventually got Lyndon to come on board. Lyndon would toolbox on his toolbox, Bruce would toolbox on his toolbox—and then I would be toolboxing as well. The three of us work different days, so we have coverage seven days a week. I started taking the afternoon shift delegates with me on tour to toolbox the teams.

We would use these toolboxes to announce mass meetings, too. So whenever management made an offer during the past couple of months of bargaining, I would announce a mass meeting to discuss it in the toolbox. Meanwhile, I am showing the newer delegates, do not be shy, be brave, be bold and stand up there. At first, they were like, “Can I even make an announcement?” and I told them, “Don’t ask them, tell them. Tell them you’re there today to make an announcement”.

The three of you have done something that cuts against the grain of the modern union movement, which is to rebuild its strength. It took a lot of time, work and bravery. What have been some of the highlights and lowlights of your times organising the union here?

Lyndon: The toughest part is just the managers either ignoring you or doing nothing at all. The highlight for me is when they call you into the office and tell you to stop doing what you’re doing because you are scaring them.

Bruce: We now have all these union ambassadors out there, guys who aren’t delegates but who are spreading union around the place too. I hear them talking to people, trying to convince people to join the union or take a stand. My highlight definitely, though, is one of the guys in the freezer who has become a real leader. When he first started here, he always kept to himself, kept his head down. But now he’s totally different. I’ve seen him arguing with management when they’re trying to get out of the gate. I see him in the freezer aisles telling people to join the union. I love seeing how he has transformed. What changed for him was seeing how management actually behaved—how they treated him, his friends and his workmates. Now, people look up to that guy, see him as a leader.

Peter: For me, it has been a little bit of a different journey. At times, I was very isolated. One of my delegates openly said he did not want to challenge management because he hoped to get promoted. At one point, I was the only delegate on the day shift. I just kept pushing, and my nickname here is “the troublemaker”.

Lyndon: I have actually heard management call him that. If he is coming to a toolbox, as he walks in management will say, “Here comes the troublemaker”. Literally.

Peter: I walk into the office and they say, “Oh, the troublemaker is here”, “Oh, the troublemaker, what do you want?” My reputation surpasses me. They have tried to pull me into meetings with managers on my own—but after ten years in the saddle, I am prepared for that shit. I always have a wingman. I simply cannot afford to drop my guard because I’ve got too many members that rely on me.

A highlight for me was getting permission from the then-operations manager to have our fortnightly meetings. They’ve been happening for three years now, and helped build the union.

Do you have anything else to add about what you are doing here on strike?

Lyndon: The picket is an amazing experience—just seeing people coming together to fight for a common cause and all the bonding. We are doing more than just saying no to Lineage; we are building our community, too. My hope, which I keep trying to remind people, is we need to keep the attitude and whatever we’ve got built out here when we go back. That’s how we make things better.

Bruce: This strike must be hurting them. On the picket line, we find it very funny that management now comes up to us, offers us water, asks how our day is. We never get that inside. It’s always bossing us around, KPIs and discipline. Suddenly, they have a heart.

Management did not see this strike coming. And then, when they realised it was, they just went, “Oh no, they’re gonna break”. Are we breaking? No we are not—we’re having parties out here. Someone brought a PlayStation. People have been bringing their kids. I’m laughing because we have such a great culture here. It’s so positive. We’re one big family.

We never knew we were going to be out here. But us coming together now kind of really strengthened our team. I love this team, they become your second family basically. We can create that if we work as a team. We stick up for each other. That’s what it’s all about. Make the stand. Have your voice heard.

Peter: Persistence, persistence, persistence makes you win. I have had, at times, five managers trying to bully me out of attending a toolbox. But I just push through. You can just never give up.

Being a delegate is challenging. You have to tell people that you can make this place better—and make them believe it. You start with some small wins and people start believing. Eventually you can demand change, and that’s what we’re out here doing now: demanding change.