Warehouse workers to fight Woolworths closure
Warehouse workers have vowed to fight, following an announcement that retail giant Woolworths plans to vacate its Broadmeadows facility by 2018.
The workers, members of the National Union of Workers, supply more than 200 supermarkets across suburban Melbourne and regional Victoria.
Through relentless struggle, the Hume Distribution Centre workers have become the highest paid store people across Woolworth’s national distribution network of 20 facilities. They have won some of the best conditions in the logistics industry.
The workers at the Hume DC, located in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, were summoned by management to a meeting on 9 June, where the announcement was made. They were told that Woolworths would shift its major Victorian distribution centre to Melbourne’s south-east and that the new warehouse would be automated, leaving 700 people out of employment. The exact location of the new distribution centre has not been revealed.
The workers are preparing to wage a campaign to save their jobs and prevent the Broadmeadows shed from closing. Many have been employed at the centre since it opened in 1999.
Woolworths announced a record profit of $2.45 billion in 2014, up from $2.3 billion in 2013. Given the volume that is distributed out of the Hume DC, the Broadmeadows workers have played a crucial role in producing the company’s profits.
The announcement of the planned closure means Woolworths turning its back on the northern suburbs of Melbourne, from where it has operated warehouses for 50 years. The state member of parliament for Broadmeadows, Frank McGuire, has been contacted, but has not yet responded.
News of Woolworths’ relocation plan is the latest devastating blow to the Broadmeadows community, decimated by factory closures and job losses over the last five years. The Ford Motor Company will close the doors on its Broadmeadows production line by the end of 2016, bringing to an end 57 years of skilled and secure employment and leaving a further 600 people in the area out of work.
In the same week as the Woolworths announcement, management of Austube Mills, in the neighbouring suburb of Somerton, announced that 86 steel manufacturing workers would be retrenched by the end of August, with the company leaving Victoria in November.
With job losses in the region stacking up and a casualisation crisis gripping the country, workers understand the importance of the fight to save the Hume Distribution Centre.
