It’s no secret that unions aren’t in a good place. Strikes are down, wages are down, and union membership is at an all-time low. Unions are getting older, with the membership rate among 20 to 24 year olds at just 7 percent.
The statistics are damning. But if you wandered down to the call centre in Cremorne where I work, you would see something quite different. Most people there are uni students, working to pay the bills. Because the National Union of Workers is good at organising, union density has stayed at a healthy rate for the last few years. For us, being in the union and standing together against oppression and bigotry have become the norm. 
Work gives you a pretty good sense of being at the bottom of the pile and having no control. At my work, management know when you use the bathroom, have a smoke, make a coffee or cough during a call. We make calls, read verbatim from a script, get hung up on and repeat. 
It’s not the greatest. Especially not when our shifts get cut towards the end of the month because the company has already met its monthly targets. It’s as if the better the work we do, the less likely we are to be able to pay rent because it’s not profitable for the boss to keep us on through the whole month.
To be fair, we can read whatever we like between calls. That makes work a bit easier. And management hasn’t been too confident lately about pulling people up when we don’t stick exactly to our designated break times. And we know that if a boss ever tells someone to use their “sexy” or “gay” voice on a call, they will be made to feel so unwelcome that they have to go home. We know that when we see an issue, we speak up. And we know it’s because we’re unionised. 
It hasn’t always been like this. We won the right to read at work after a union meeting voted to demand it. There was a time when the bosses thought it was okay to be openly sexist and homophobic; now they know to keep it to themselves. We used to get just 15 minutes’ break on a whole shift, now we can get away with half an hour. 
Management has stayed the same. The company still get $500 for each survey we complete, making it an average of around $58,000 every hour of every weeknight shift. The laws certainly haven’t changed, but our conditions at work are improving. 
Over the last year or so, a few socialists have ended up at this workplace, and through the union, with our workmates we’ve been fighting: for a better deal at work and against political injustices more generally. We’ve been fighting the divisions the bosses try to stoke and fighting, not just because we’re in our union, but because we’re left wing.
It’s why – after one of the managers said something homophobic to a workmate – we took the first of many workplace photos with the rainbow NUW flag. It’s why – when the Australian government was sending police on Manus Island into the detention centre and beating refugees with metal poles – we stood outside work and took a protest photo. 
And it’s why, when Turnbull and his rich mates kicked off their most recent spate of racist scapegoating about “African gangs”, we already knew what to do, and were outside work taking a photo asserting that solidarity beats fear and that racism will not divide us. 
A lot of us went down to the International Women’s Day rally after it was raised in a union meeting the Friday before, which has meant that now at work people are asking the question: “Why don’t we have free pads and tampons in the women’s bathroom? We should do something about that”. 
A few photos aren’t going to change the world. But people joining their unions, causing a fuss without waiting for the union officials, taking a stand against the divisions fostered by those at the top – whether it’s your supervisor or the prime minister – and being a bit bolshie, definitely will.

NUW delegate

Building a union culture at work 

Last year’s strike at the Polar Fresh distribution centre in Melbourne’s west continues to pay dividends ­– for the workers involved, and for those in other warehouses.
Polar Fresh is a third-party contractor that manages the chilled warehouses for Coles along the eastern seaboard. Almost all of the refrigerated products (fresh produce, dairy, meats, etc.) that end up on Victorian and Tasmanian Coles supermarket shelves come through this warehouse.
The three-day strike in late July last year, involving more than 600 members of the National Union of Workers, inflicted serious damage on Coles and its contractor.
In the lead-up to the expiry of their previous enterprise agreement, the mood among workers in the shed had been steadily building towards action. The pace of work is gruelling, the pay is lower than in many other sheds, and many workers were employed insecurely through labour hire companies.
Workers mobilised behind two key demands: a wage of $30 per hour (up from around $27) and increased job security. When it became clear that the company would not concede either, they hit the picket line. For three days, they shut down the warehouse. When the company tried to get product to stores through a network of scab warehouses across Melbourne, the workers shut those down too.
Coles and Polar Fresh prepared for this strike for months, but the first cold storage warehouse strike in living memory hit them hard. Within just a few hours, supermarket shelves across the state emptied as the threads of Coles’ logistics empire approached breaking point. Within 24 hours, the company came back to the table to negotiate, and within three days Polar Fresh workers had a brand new agreement that included one of the highest pay rises in the industry, 50 new full time jobs and guaranteed conversion of agency workers to direct employment.
A year on, the pool of workers in the Polar Fresh shed employed by labour hire companies has shrunk from 170 to about 30 and continues to fall. More than half of the workers now have full time jobs, and most of the rest are either part time or directly employed casuals.
The strike was clearly a significant victory for the workers involved, but its ramifications are also being felt across the industry. Coles is now terminating its contract with Polar Fresh and instead will be directly running its warehouses in QLD, NSW and Victoria.
Soon to be departed Victorian Polar Fresh managers have admitted in meetings with workers that Coles management no longer trust Polar Fresh to manage a consistent supply of fresh produce – its most profitable section – during bargaining periods. For now at least, the collapse of Polar Fresh looks very much like the defeat of Coles’ strategy of undercutting wages and conditions by outsourcing its chilled warehouse operations to a cut price third party labour provider.
In addition, the new Coles (formerly Polar Fresh) warehouse in Queensland is close to finalising a new enterprise agreement. The new agreement will likely include many improvements similar to those won by the Victorian strikers, including a 4 percent pay rise each year and concrete job security guarantees. Connections between workers in the Victorian and Queensland sheds were developed after last year’s strike, and the Queensland workers were clearly emboldened by the action in Victoria. Not willing to risk another blow to their supply network, Coles management made it clear during bargaining that they would countenance significant improvements to wages and conditions in order to avoid industrial action.
How did the workers at Polar Fresh achieve this? They were determined not only to keep all of their conditions, but also to demand new, audacious improvements. They were willing to strike, and willing to do what it took to win, including driving to the other side of the city to shut down scab warehouses.
This orientation stands out in the current picture of industrial struggle in Australia. When union campaigns do break out, they are often defensive, with demands that rarely go beyond maintaining conditions already won. Of course it’s crucial that we hold on to what we’ve won in the past. But if we’re going to break out of the passivity that seems to pervade our movement, we cannot limit our demands within limits acceptable to the bosses. We need to find the issues that are important for workers and be prepared to fight for them.

Coles still rattled by Polar Fresh strike one year on

Workers at the Big W distribution centre in Warwick, Queensland, have taken industrial action for the first time since the warehouse opened nearly 20 years ago.
Their stoppage, for one hour, may seem small in an industry in which the National Union of Workers dominates many other distribution centres. But for these workers – who have been treated like the backward cousins of the Woolworths “family” for too long – this is an important step in the right direction. Further action will be taken if necessary.
For years, the Warwick Big W DC operated 24 hours a day, five days a week. It serviced more than 90 stores throughout Queensland and New South Wales. In 2012, a new facility was opened in western Sydney and took over distribution to half that number.
Workers at Warwick felt the impact immediately. The afternoon and “graveyard” shifts were abolished, and everyone was placed on a limited morning shift. At the time, union membership was low and the “union” on site was the conservative SDA. For the best part of 18 years it did nothing, while Big W enjoyed enormous growth.
The situation began to change around a year ago, when the Warwick Big W workers had a visit from the NUW. Despite a hostile environment created by the company and the SDA, a union organiser and a team of delegates have worked hard to get close to half of the shed into the NUW.
These workers are now bargaining for a new enterprise agreement. This time they have a strong voice and are determined not to back down. The company has offered a 6.9 percent wage rise over three years. Members of the NUW want a two-year deal and a 3 percent increase each year, along with 20 weeks’ redundancy pay for those with 10 years’ service, a labour hire clause, casual loading at 22 percent and the right to take disputes to arbitration at the Fair Work Commission.
Workers at Warwick are multi-skilled, and most hold a Certificate 3 in Transport and Logistics. They are paid $24.55 an hour for same work that others in the Woolworths distribution chain get paid more than $30 for. They’re not demanding parity at this point, just to close the gap on their counterparts.
Woolworths’ profit has been flat this financial year at a tick over $2 billion for the whole group and a shade over $100 million for Big W. Why should workers bear the brunt of management’s bad decisions? They do their job the same whether profits are up or down.
Woolworths seems to be on the attack at the moment. It has recently announced the closure of the Hume distribution centre in Victoria (the highest paid and strongest NUW site in its network), and workers at the Melbourne liquor DC were forced to strike over the company’s push for more labour hire workers.
Right now, Woolworths workers in Brisbane and Barnawartha are also bargaining for their agreements. This time, with a much more militant union on site and a determined group of delegates countering the company stooges, you can be assured that the Warwick Big W DC workers are no longer the backward cousins.

Building a union culture at work

Coles still rattled by Polar Fresh strike one year on

First strike for Queensland Big W workers

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