Woolworths workers strike a blow against corporate power

For seventeen days in November and December, striking Woolworths warehouse workers showed the country what it looks like to stand up to corporate power. On one side, we saw the solidarity of workers prepared to sacrifice for each other and for people they will never meet. On the other, we saw the dog-eat-dog of corporate Australia, prepared to drive workers until they break.

Overwhelmingly, people sided with the striking workers. An outpouring of support was evident on social media, talkback radio, the ever-more-empty supermarket and bottle shop aisles, and anywhere else people express opinions. Finally, a group of workers was showing that our side had some power, and was prepared to use it. For that alone, we all owe the Woolworths strikers a huge debt.

So did the workers win?

If the question is, “Did the workers win everything they deserve?”—then the answer is no. If the question is, “Did the workers compel one of the country’s most powerful and ruthless companies to do something it didn’t want to do, and had sworn it would never do?”—then the answer is yes.

By far the most important issue for the strikers was the “Framework”—the brutal performance management system that set workers on a “glidepath” to discipline if they failed to meet 100 percent of an arbitrary, opaque and often impossible productivity target. Prior to the strike, management at Woolworths described the Framework as “a non-negotiable”.

Yet management did negotiate. And eventually they had to give ground. The workers have returned to work with the company committed to a clause in their new enterprise agreements that, for the first time, will put some limits on how far and how fast management can drive the workers.

Corporate power versus workers’ power

Understanding that the battle and its result were fundamentally about corporate power makes it easier to understand. If the Woolworths strike had been just about money, it would have been relatively easy for management to give in.

After all, Woolworths told the stock exchange on 9 December that the strike had cost the company an estimated $140 million in lost sales. Endeavour Drinks, which operates Dan Murphys and BWS bottle shops, estimated the strike has cost them $25 million in lost sales. Both companies acknowledge that losses will rise considerably as they scramble to restock during what should be their most profitable time of year.

If the dispute were just about money, management at Woolworths and Endeavour could have tried to prevent or end the strike by giving $90,000 in cash to each of the 1,800 striking workers. That would have left the companies’ bottom lines in better shape compared to their losses from the strike.

So why didn’t they? Only one thing matters to companies like Woolworths as much as money: power.

This was a strike about management’s power to control and discipline individual workers, and to keep the workforce in each workplace divided from their fellow workers in other workplaces when it comes to bargaining. Central to management’s agenda was a serious attempt to reverse the United Workers Union’s progress in building solidarity through strikes (and the threat of strikes) involving multiple warehouses.

The Framework

I’ve been on plenty of picket lines, but I’ve rarely found such strength of feeling over an issue as was evident in discussions about the Framework over the past few weeks. First and foremost, this dramatic strike was a rebellion against corporations’ unrestricted power to drive workers—under threat of discipline or humiliation—until they break.

One worker mentioned their time working at the Amazon shed in south-east Melbourne. A fellow worker had been so stressed about management’s harassment over pick rates that they didn’t refill their water bottle on a hot day. Maybe they were concerned that drinking enough water would lead to being hassled for “excessive” toilet breaks. The worker passed out on the floor from heat stress and dehydration. They were taken to hospital in an ambulance—and then denied shifts due to “non-attendance”.

The worker related this story and I paused, waiting for the next bit. The bit where there’s some comeback on the company from the union, or from the regulator, or from someone. But there was no more to the story. Amazon is a non-union workplace. There was no comeback for the company. And this is the direction Woolworths has been heading.

“Things were much better than that when I started here”, the worker gestured to the strikebound Woolworths distribution centre behind us. “But now management is getting more and more like Amazon every day.” This is doubtless no coincidence. Woolworths and any other company operating a distribution network can increase their profits if they treat workers like machines and chuck them out if and when they break. For this, management wants unconstrained power in the workplace.

So the main aim of almost every striker I spoke with was to set some limits—in the form of legally enforceable clauses in an enterprise agreement—on management’s power to set and enforce work intensity. This is not easy to do. Not only because the issue goes to the heart of management’s holy of holies, their “right to manage”, but also because it’s hard to design a watertight clause governing work intensity. For instance, not even the construction unions have such clauses in their pattern enterprise agreements.

Before the strike started, management repeatedly described the Framework as “non-negotiable”. For the first week of the strike, the company didn’t seem to shift from that position. Management negotiators were said to be talking about the Framework in negotiations, but only to berate union delegates about it and declare that the company would never budge.

However, management faced multi-million-dollar losses each day. The company’s already rock-bottom reputation, not irrelevant to a supermarket, was taking a further pounding from the public reaction to revelations about the punitive Framework. And maybe management got a shock of their own from the sight of hundreds of workers and community supporters at the picket at the Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre at 5am on Monday 2 December, in response to the company’s arrogant announcement the previous day that it would be business as usual at the shed from 6am Monday.

Whatever the reason, management started moving a little. UWU National Secretary Tim Kennedy noted a “positive development” on ABC radio that afternoon: Woolworths was “starting to take these issues quite seriously”. But in the days that followed the company stalled, applying for a bargaining order from Fair Work Commission Deputy President Gerard Boyce.

We should note in passing that, before this dispute, Boyce’s main claim to fame was for displaying a life-sized cardboard cutout of veteran union-buster Donald Trump in his Fair Work Commission office, as well as a range of figurines conforming to sexist stereotypes.

This paragon of impartiality did what the bosses’ court usually does, ruling in favour of the company and finding that the picket violated the “good faith bargaining” provisions of the Fair Work Act. In the real world, the picket had no impact on whether bargaining occurred—but this didn’t matter in the topsy-turvy legal world of the “Fair” Work Commission.

So while the strike was piling pressure on the company, there was pressure on the union as well. A finding that the bargaining order had been breached would have opened a path to Fair Work declaring the UWU’s industrial action legally “unprotected”. This, in turn, would have allowed anyone losing money from the strike to seek damages from the union.

Not only that. The company’s intransigence showed that it was prepared to wear significant economic losses to preserve its managerial power. A sweeping win for the workers would require an escalation in picketing from the union side, a longer strike, or both.

In all likelihood, this would have required defying the draconian, anti-democratic laws restricting the right to strike and picket in Australia—some the most restrictive anti-strike laws in the developed world. A bruising battle not just with Woolworths but with corporate Australia in general would have been on the cards, along with a potential confrontation with a federal Labor government, which notably declined to endorse any of the workers’ demands.

Instead of taking this course towards escalation, the union decided to take the offer on the table and recommended a return to work.

The result doesn’t leave the workers empty-handed on their most important issue. Though the final wording isn’t publicly available, the proposed clause relating to performance standards breaks the Framework’s most disgraceful and punitive aspect—that a failure to pick at 100 percent of the arbitrary rate decreed by management sets the worker on an automatic path to discipline. There’s some nerdy detail here for those wanting to wade through the legal weeds.

The clause will need dedicated work from capable and zealous union delegates and health and safety reps, backed by union members and the union office, if it’s to make a meaningful impact on management’s practices. But this battle will now occur with the whole country knowing what the Framework is and despising Woolworths for it, and with workers having spent two weeks on strike resisting it—and forging bonds of solidarity with each other.

No battle over something so important to management will be a walk in the park. But the strike has given workers some extra tools to resist Woolworths’ punitive speedups and has reshaped the terrain on which the battle will continue.

Woolworths’ war on solidarity

If Woolworths viewed the demand for limits on management power over the pace of work as a major threat, the union’s claim for a national agreement covering all distribution centres in the company’s supply chain no doubt got every red light flashing at corporate HQ.

The whole point of the enterprise bargaining system, introduced by the Hawke/Keating Labor government in the early 1990s, is to fragment workers’ industrial power. Woolworths and similar companies can set up a series of shelf companies to run their various distribution centres, all with separate enterprise agreements governing wages and conditions and, crucially, each with different expiry dates. Because legally protected industrial action can be taken only after an agreement is past its expiry date, there are severe limits on workers’ ability to strike together to magnify their industrial impact.

The construction unions have resisted this trend by keeping a common expiry date for all enterprise agreements in each state so that workers across the industry can bargain together. It’s to the UWU’s credit that they’ve taken steps in this direction in recent years, fighting to align the expiry dates of different agreements to enable several workforces to take legally protected industrial action.

The UWU’s demand this time around was for a common three-year expiry date for the striking Woolworths sheds, so they could negotiate and potentially strike at the same time again in the next bargaining round. The union also wanted a national agreement covering not just present but future work, or at least a series of minimum conditions. The UWU’s success in winning a claim along these lines at major third-party logistics operator Toll in 2021 shows that this was not just some idle talking point.

Though conceding this demand wouldn’t have cost Woolworths a cent, management viewed it as a threat to their ongoing power to divide and conquer the workforce in future bargaining rounds. Management resisted as though their lives depended on it—and they were successful. It seems there will be no national minimums at Woolworths of the sort won at Toll a few years ago. And though MLDC, Dandenong South and Erskine Park got three-year deals, Barnawartha emerged with a two-year deal. The Lineage cold storage shed in Melbourne, an important addition to the strike though not a Woolworths shed, will have a four-year deal.

The lack of a common expiry date at the Woolworths sheds is a setback for the UWU’s project of amassing ever-larger numbers of workers in bargaining simultaneously, capable of unleashing ever-increasing industrial firepower to win ambitious, life-transforming demands. But it’s not necessarily a fatal blow to the strategy. For instance, a three-year expiry date would mean the agreements at MLDC, Erskine Park and Dandenong South will expire at the end of 2027. This is potentially within striking distance (so to speak) of the late April 2028 expiry date of the Melbourne Fresh Distribution Centre agreement. It’s a setback for the union, but not a knockout blow.

Money

Pretty much every worker I spoke to stressed that the strike was not about money. But when workers’ living standards are getting smashed by a historic cost-of-living crisis, money is also an impossible topic to avoid. Dave, a UWU delegate who was part of the recent strike, pointed out in a speech to Melbourne’s weekly Palestine rally on 8 December:

“The bosses complain that the workers want more money. And what is wrong with that? What do they think we do with the money? Workers are not buying the complicity of politicians. Workers are not paying fancy lawyers to suppress workers’ rights. Workers are paying overpriced rent. Workers are paying overpriced utilities. Workers are giving the money back to Woolworths for overpriced groceries.”

Before the recent dispute, entry-level wages at the Melbourne South Distribution Centre were $33.43 per hour. Without shift loadings or overtime, this would be a weekly income of $1,270, or around $66,000 per year—well below the average full-time “ordinary hours” wage of around $100,000 per year.

If achieved, a wage increase significantly above inflation won by a high-profile strike would have been a massive gift to the entire working class—in the same way that the headline 28 percent over four years achieved by Victorian nurses has become a benchmark that public sector workers everywhere feel they can and should be pushing and striking for.

By the looks of it, Woolworths was determined to keep the headline pay rates low to deter future efforts to align workplace bargaining periods. The flip side was its preparedness to throw money at some workers to keep them out of the strike, and to offer more to some workers via local agreements.

Management put enormous effort into keeping the Melbourne Fresh Distribution Centre out of the dispute. In October, the company offered a 14 percent up-front pay rise to most of the workers, finally getting a deal approved (after two failed attempts) by a margin of only ten votes.

The final settlement across the striking sheds was 4-4.7 percent in the first year, followed by 3-4 percent increases in following years. This is in line with inflation forecasts and average EA outcomes at the moment, though not enough to make up the ground lost by many workers in the inflationary surge of 2022-23.

Given Woolworths’ strategy of trying to wind back the clock on multi-site collective bargaining, it’s no surprise that many of the gains that will make the biggest difference to workers’ lives are somewhat hidden due to being site-specific.

At Lineage, for instance, though the headline pay increase is 4.7 percent in the first year, a site rates clause for casuals will result in well over half the workforce getting several more dollars per hour. A “market rate” allowance of $2 per hour, which was previously totally at the discretion of management and paid to many existing staff but not to all new starts, will now be written into the EA for everyone. And there will be 50 conversions from casual to permanent.

At MLDC, management has agreed to an ex gratia payment of up to $26,000 upon site closure, on top of the existing redundancy payment, which is capped at 82 weeks’ pay. For the first time, there will be an enforceable ratio of permanent workers to casuals, starting at 60 percent permanent in 2025 and increasing to 65 percent permanent in 2026.

The fine detail of the new proposed EAs are not publicly available, making it difficult to assess site-specific results like this in detail.

What would it have taken to secure a more sweeping win?

Is there a scenario in which the strike won the strongest possible clause against the Framework, a precedent-setting national agreement with a minimum pay rate of $38 per hour, a substantial pay rise ahead of inflation and the raft of improvements to local conditions that were part of the log of claims at each shed?

Over the past decade or so, the UWU, along with other unions, has demonstrated that it’s possible to defy the law and/or dance around it. In 2012, Toll won an injunction to limit picketing at its Coles supermarket warehouse in Somerton in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. The picketing continued regardless, with the construction unions, the nurses’ union, the firefighters’ union and many others all taking turns on the picket line. Also in 2012, there was a spectacular two-week mass picket on a major construction site in central Melbourne. Despite a finding that the picket was illegal and substantial fines against the CFMEU, this dispute was a turning point in stopping the spread of major non-union companies in the commercial construction industry in Victoria.

This and similar traumatising experiences for the capitalist class and their legal flunkies prompted Victoria’s Supreme Court to issue more and more sweeping injunctions against picketing in recent years. However, the Maritime Union of Australia proved in its epic 2017 Webb Dock dispute that it’s possible to defy such injunctions and get a result. The MUA was subjected to years of legal action and still has the threat of substantial fines hanging over its head if it takes unprotected industrial action at Webb Dock. Nevertheless, the 2017 dispute was important for the union getting a toehold in the facility, which is now fully unionised.

In the recent Woolworths strike, the company took the unusual step of proceeding against the picket not through the Supreme Court but through the Fair Work Commission. The result was a bargaining order: a ruling that the picket breached the “good faith bargaining” requirements of the Fair Work Act. This order only applied to the bargaining agent – ie the United Workers Union and “its employees, its officers, servants or agents”—not to other unions or to community members who aren’t “officers servants or agents” of the union.

A callout on the evening of the last Friday of the strike brought well over 100 community picketers to Dandenong South. If unions had duplicated this on a larger scale in the following days, management probably would have had to spend a few days launching new legal action in the Supreme Court, to win a different injunction. Woolworths’ losses would have continued to mount. And even beyond this, the dispute could have dragged on.

This would have been a bold move. But as Sally McManus once said (in pretty much the only fighting words she’s spoken as ACTU secretary): bad laws are meant to be broken. The history of our movement proves this—from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the big battles of the 1890s to Clarrie O’Shea, the Victorian nurses in 1986, all the way to Webb Dock. Sometimes, these are smashing wins that transform the industrial landscape. Sometimes, the result is a bruising draw, or even a hard-fought defeat. Win, lose or draw, large numbers of workers testing our powers in battle has very often laid the basis for future gains.

Arguably, the Woolworths dispute was a brilliant opportunity to break through Australia’s restrictive industrial laws. It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of workers than the heroes who stood on the picket lines for seventeen days. Or a more sympathetic issue than opposition to corporate power in the form of some faceless robot driving workers past the point where their bodies break. And Woolworths is deservedly one of the most hated companies in the country.

There was a lot at stake for corporate Australia. Australia’s capitalists and their political servants—both Liberal and Labor—have spent decades shaping the legal and industrial framework precisely to avoid large-scale, popular and effective strikes.

So Woolworths was playing a role as the front line of the capitalist class and was determined to block any further union advances. To make the most of the potential from our side, we would have needed a campaign prepared to take on the whole of capitalist Australia—and potentially the Labor federal government.

Defiance of unjust laws is part of the big picture of what would have been needed to turn this strike into the smashing win that the workers deserved, and which the rest of us would have benefitted from. At the micro, practical end of the scale is something equally important: the need for an active strike.

Whatever the issue, whatever the size of workforce, whatever the strike’s duration, workers will come through it in better shape, and often with a better result, the more active and engaged everyone is. Many past strikes organised by the National Union of Workers (now merged into UWU) had some element of this sort of outreach—including Baiada in 2011, Toll in 2012, Super A-Mart in 2014 and Polar Fresh in 2016.

Part of management’s strategy in this strike was to suck the energy out of the dispute by closing the warehouses. From day one, an active program of skilling up every striker to put their case in front of other workers could have helped to counter this.

Pretty much anyone on any picket line would have a friend, family member or former workmate who works in a similar facility in the next suburb, or just next door. Or a very different workplace, perhaps. Getting leaflets promoting the strike, the picket and the hardship fund into these workplaces, and into the hands of working-class people at markets and shopping malls and anywhere else people gather, helps to increase strikers’ resolve and sense of purpose. Along with the concrete solidarity manifested in picket line attendance and financial support, this activity increases the morale of the strikers, boosting the odds of lasting one day longer than management.

Perhaps more than any other recent dispute, the Woolworths strikers helped popularise our side’s most powerful weapon—the strike. They demonstrated in practice that working-class people can force giant corporations to do something they swore they’d never do.

Some of the most important results of a strike can be the hardest to quantify, especially for those of us outside the workforce. Activists who have come forward. Delegates and HSRs who have found a renewed strength and purpose. Previously disengaged workers who ended up jumping the right way. Consolidating and building on these steps—especially when under pressure from management back on the job—will be crucial to whatever comes next.

The strikers and their many supporters will undoubtedly continue to debate the strike’s lessons and prepare for the next round—both in the daily struggles in the warehouses and in the bargaining rounds to come. As that discussion continues, we all owe these heroes our thanks and our ongoing solidarity.