Striking Wedderburn workers win
Service Technicians at the scale-making company Wedderburn have won their first enterprise agreement after 11 days on the grass. The agreement secures a wage rise, improved on-call and overtime allowances and long service and redundancy entitlements. The rank and file union organising that got the workers to this point has been a new experience for most involved.
Until January, Wedderburn’s Thomastown site was almost entirely non-union. “In 119 years of Wedderburn history, there has never been a need for a union”, explained shop steward Humphrey Caspersz. “There has been a good relationship with the employer, but in the last three years we’ve noticed a change”, he told Red Flag.
The company started to restrict conditions that had long been enjoyed. Some people were denied overtime payments, and there was general concern that their on-call allowance hadn’t been increased in eight years.
Simmering unhappiness led to a core group of workers calling a meeting off site. An organiser from the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union was invited to attend. All 13 attendees walked out of that meeting as union members. Within a month, everyone else was on board too.
United, the workers were convinced of the need to win an enterprise agreement to protect their conditions from the company’s whims. But management didn’t make it easy, first ignoring their claims and then hiring industrial relations lawyers to deal with the dispute. The lawyers gave no impression of being interested in a resolution.
“There were delays with emails, and they bogged things down with paperwork and red tape”, Humphrey said. Other workers on the picket line expressed similar frustrations. A negotiator would fly down from Sydney for a meeting. On hearing the workers’ claims, the negotiator would feign offence at their temerity, break off negotiations, fly home and not make themselves available again for weeks.
The breaking point came when the company added an extra claim in the middle of negotiations, demanding the introduction of GPS tracking equipment in all the technicians’ vehicles. That’s when the workers decided they’d had enough.
Humphrey recalls the look on the face of the company’s regional manager as the results of their strike action ballot were read out at the Fair Work Commission. “You could see the blood drain from his face as he saw each way people voted”, he said. The vote in favour of an unlimited number of work stoppages of indefinite duration was carried 16 to one.
One of the most staunch on the picket line was Ian Millar, a Wedderburn employee of 11 years and one of the first union stewards. Ian’s career finished up shortly before the dispute started but he came back to help with the picket and “see things through”, as he put it.
The Wedderburn workers’ hard fought for enterprise agreement is now in the final drafting process. They hope to have it signed off at the commission before Christmas.
