Shifty deal to avoid paying sacked Wangaratta workers
Serial corporate welfare bludger Philip Bart is at it again. Nearly 60 workers from the Wangaratta mill of his textiles company (Bruck Textile Technologies) have been sacked, while Bart and his associates refuse to pay the $3.8 million these workers are owed in redundancy pay, annual and long service leave.
Instead they’ve handballed the responsibility to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee (FEG) scheme. The FEG is a corporate welfare fund which pays workers’ employment entitlements from public funds so that bosses don’t have to when their ventures sink.
Bart, who hails from the mansion-studded Sydney harbourside suburb of Point Piper, was also the principal shareholder in National Textiles when it collapsed in 2000. Stan Howard, brother of then Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, was its chairman. That company refused to pay all $11 million in entitlements its 340 workers had accrued. The federal government stepped in to provide $4.2 million to cover the shortfall.
This time, Bart and his fellow directors have pulled off a particularly shady piece of corporate gymnastics to get out of paying the entitlements altogether.
On 10 July, Bart and other directors sold Bruck Textile to a new company that they had created a month previously – Australian Textile Mills (ATM). The price? One dollar. For that, ATM – also owned by Bart – took 130 of Bruck Textile’s workers (leaving about 60 with the shell company) as well as most of Bruck’s assets and liabilities.
Bruck’s directors liquidated the company the next day, leaving 60 workers without jobs, and the company, stripped of all assets, with no obligation to pay the millions in entitlements it owes.
According to a Bruck spokesman, however, the company still owes Bart $8 million. The largest debt listed in the liquidator’s report is an $8 million liability to Sisely Properties. Sisely Properties owns the mill compound out of which Bruck Textiles operated.
Known as Bruck Properties until just months before Bruck Textiles went into liquidation, Sisely Properties shares the same board as Bruck, including principal shareholder Bart. Despite the connection, Sisely Properties will not be liquidated. Instead it retains a claim on the debt owed to it.
It appears that the land will not be sold either. Bruck representatives have signalled that after liquidation they intend to proceed with a residential redevelopment of the mill compound.
All these manoeuvres are part of an attempt to mask the fact that the people who worked for decades to produce the profits for Bart and Co. are being done over by their bosses. They are forced to rely on the FEG for their entitlements while the bosses who should be paying those entitlements use that money and more to line their own pockets.
Shop steward Dianne Baker, sacked after working at the mill for 25 years, says the workers are angry at the job losses and so is the entire town, in Victoria’s northeast. “We’ve just been tossed and they’re carrying on as if everything is fine”, Dianne told Red Flag.
Among those sacked are five of the mill’s six union shop stewards. “They’re culling off the ones who would fight them the most”, as well as union members or workers who have spoken out in the past, says Reg, another of the mill’s shop stewards to get the sack. He says the move is an attack on the unions, designed to weaken them for the next round of attacks.
Responding to questions in 2000 about whether he’d considered selling his million dollar yacht to pay some of the company’s debts to National Textile workers instead of using government money, Bart blustered: “Not really. At the end of the day, I don’t apologise for working hard.”
Reg told Red Flag he thinks it should be Bart who pays, not the government. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I’m getting my money, but he’s the one who’s done this. He’s the one who should foot the bill”.
