Fat profits for meat industry bosses
Workers at the Teys Australia abattoir in Beenleigh, Queensland, remain in limbo as the company drags out legal proceedings about their enterprise agreement. Since September 2013, Teys workers have been paid under a sham agreement the meat workers’ union says wasn’t approved by a majority of workers.
According to the Queensland branch of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, management arranged for supervisors and other staff not covered by the agreement to vote in an approval ballot. As early as March 2014, the full bench of the Fair Work Commission ruled that the agreement was not valid because the vote wasn’t fair.
But Teys has refused to back down and offer terms a majority will agree to, instead fighting multiple court cases to win the right to impose its terms, which include faster production and less pay. It has continued to enforce the terms of the dodgy agreement despite a number of courts finding that it is not a legal enterprise agreement.
Teys Australia is one of Australia’s largest meat processors. It is the product of a merger between Teys Brothers and Cargill, a monster agribusiness corporation – the largest privately owned company in the US. Cargill is a renowned corporate villain, which was once labelled as having the worst environmental record in the agribusiness industry by the Council on Economic Priorities, a US public interest research group. It has been cited numerous times for serious and persistent safety violations in its food factories, which largely employ desperate migrant workers.
In Australia, the union says the company’s strategy is obvious. The meat industry has a high turnover rate, and Teys is hoping that dragging out its legal cases will cause many of the unionists opposed to its “reform” agenda to move on before it ever has to renegotiate. But the company isn’t beyond making direct threats either, telling the Australian Financial Review after a court ruled against it in February that it would consider closing the Beenleigh plant if it didn’t get its way. Teys is also campaigning for the federal government to do more to change the industrial relations landscape before the 2016 federal election.
Meanwhile, nearly 800 meat workers haven’t had a pay rise since 2011 and are still working under an agreement which numerous layers of the judiciary have ruled to be non-compliant with the bosses’ own laws. While the media scream about union thugs and workers are fined thousands for striking, a major corporation like Teys flouts the law with impunity. Its offices won’t be raided by police, and its directors will never face cross-examination at a royal commission. It’s a double standards that reveals the class nature of society. Winning in court is never enough for the working class. We need a strong and militant labour movement that can force the bosses to concede.
