Otis workers win
An eight week lockout ended on 17 December with Victorian Otis workers winning a new enterprise agreement. Members of the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union – who build and service lifts and escalators (including on construction sites) – had been locked out since 21 October.
Their new agreement retains most of the conditions that the company had been trying to strip away and includes a 14 percent wage rise over the life of the three and a half year agreement, income protection and increases to daily fares and travel allowances.
After beginning negotiations with the company in April the workers initiated protected industrial action from the end of September, imposing overtime bans and stoppages. Management responded by closing the gate to its Victorian workforce and trying to replace the highly skilled technicians with scab labour, including some who were flown in from interstate. Around 170 units ordinarily serviced by the locked out workers were soon out of operation.
The company didn’t buckle quickly though, instead putting a dodgy agreement to the vote on 27 November. After it was rejected by 90 percent, management invited the workers back. They refused the offer and instead voted to stay out until the company bettered its deal.
The Victorian Otis workers received widespread international support during their dispute. The company is the largest manufacturer of lifts and elevators in the world, with 200,000 employees globally. The union representing Irish Otis workers, the Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union, responded first with its Dublin members voting for strike action in solidarity. Similarly, Otis workers in New Zealand, Canada and Denmark held stop work meetings to hear about the Victorian dispute, send messages of support and collect for the strike fund. The ETU says that these actions strengthened the workers’ resolve.
“The company is trying to use the Abbott government’s building code to rip out conditions that have been in place for years”, ETU organiser Howard Worthing told Red Flag. “The strike wasn't about money but maintaining hard won conditions.”
The win is an important signal that unions can fight to retain conditions even where they may run foul of the anti-worker building codes favoured by successive governments. The codes, which exist federally and in some states, preclude companies with non-code-compliant enterprise agreements from tendering for government contracts. They will be tested this year. Several industry-wide agreements are due for negotiation and could erupt into major confrontations over conditions if governments and employers don’t back down.
