Laverton, in Melbourne’s industrial outer west, is an endless sprawl of grey warehouses and industrial plants. Billions of dollars’ worth of products are made or handled in an array of workplaces. Yet occasionally, one (or a few) of these places stop. A strike is on—a reminder that this industrial parkland relies on its workers to run. Lineage, the world’s largest cold storage operator and cold and frozen product supplier for Woolworths, was one of the latest to get the rude awakening. 
A picket line in good spirits, with homemade chop suey, children’s face painting and a small degree of boredom (largely thanks to the success of shutting the place down) made it an easy place to become acquainted with people. The warmth of the picket stood in stark contrast to its corporate, concrete surrounds—and the sub-zero temperatures the workers labour in. While many on the picket line were full-timers (only 20 percent of the team), all were quick to point out that the struggle was also about solidarity with their casual workmates. 
Three of the people responsible for this familial atmosphere are the delegates: Peter “the troublemaker”, Lyndon “the health and safety general” and Bruce “the litigation expert and people person”. Red Flag sat down with them while the strike continued to discuss how they built a union against the world’s largest cold storage operator.
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What are some of the challenges of working here day-to-day? 
Lyndon: There’s a lot. To start off, the place is divided into two main sections: one chilled and one frozen section. The chilled section is between one and three degrees, with the frozen section at negative 23. Working at these temperatures every day can take a real toll on your body. Safety here is a constant problem.
Bruce: The work is physically taxing, many of the boxes you carry can be around 20kg. Add that into the cold temperatures, and it wears you down. 
Peter: We have had ambulances called three times in one week, twice on the same shift. One of the cases looked to be pneumonia. Management said it was just dehydration, but one of the initial signs of pneumonia is severe dehydration. One guy was found literally collapsed over his manual handling equipment in the freezer. 
The high-reach work, which means picking pallets up to ten meters in the air, can be very dangerous. Management makes it so by the constant pressure to speed up, causing corner cutting, and increasing the likelihood of injuries, or even deaths. 
Lyndon: To give you an idea of how the company views safety, the company’s health and safety advisor has said to us on more than one occasion that “the law is not prescriptive, it’s more of a guide”. So in his words, literally, he’s only going to do the bare minimum that is required by law. They more or less refuse to communicate safety issues with us on site. We have had pickers almost killed by falling pallets and not been notified properly.
On another note, this place messes with your life a lot. It is running 24/7, and people need to work a lot. Don’t even worry about having a social life and going out and enjoying yourself, just the basic things of life. A basic work-life balance is out the window. 
Another major issue is favouritism. Management chooses who they pull up for KPIs and other disciplinary issues. People can almost kill others and not be seriously penalised, because management likes them, while people can get targeted and sacked for uttering the word union.
Bruce: Yeah, like we have a guy who has been in this shed over sixteen years, trained many of the managers but never been promoted. What is that? It is simple favouritism. 
Peter: Usually, management is linked via bloodline or chromosomes. Literally, you could nearly put a couple of family names up on this building and that would cover the management team. Management seriously monster people. They target, intimidate and bully people here. 
Bruce: The casuals cop it the worst and that is why so much of our fight is for them. Doing eleven-hour shifts almost every day. I’ve heard of people who work over twenty days straight. They have to accept shifts. You lose future shifts if you call in sick. So heaps of the casuals work sick.
Management does not follow any proper procedures for discipline. They handed a guy a written warning in the middle of his shift, in front of his workmates, accusing him of 50-60 absences. Only seven of those ended up unapproved.
When we pressed them on why it was handled in this way, and why so much of the evidence was illegitimate, they said: “We were gonna give him a warning anyway”. It was deliberate targeting. The warning ended up getting turfed. 
Peter: When Lineage took over in 2020, management went berserk with intimidation and sackings, leading to a serious turnover problem. They went through 1,200 employees in about eighteen months. Often, HR would hire a temp to do the sacking. This place was seriously out of control. 
One of their sadistic discipline strategies is when they start people at seven. It could start with disagreement with a manager, getting sick or carrying an ache or a strain. You ask for less hours, or ask to start at five. They refuse you, so you take it off sick; now you are on a seven. Every morning, they have a toolbox at five o’clock, where everybody greets each other. You are ostracised from your team. 
This is how management bleeds you out. You are starting when everyone else is on their first break. So they miss out on both of those interactions. Finally, they might get sent home at eleven o’clock when everybody else is going to break at twelve. So they’re completely segregated from the rest of the community here. Management says that they don’t know what’s going on. That is a lie. It is deliberate.
Peter mentioned that the union dropped to about 40 or so members when Lineage took over. You now report close to 300 only a few years later. How did you get into the union side of things here, and what were the initial challenges you faced trying to establish it?
Peter: Our strength was really low at the start. At our lowest, coverage dropped to below 20 percent. The workplace ballooned in size from 80 something to over 420 people, and a number of the delegates got promoted and other people left. It was impossible to get a union organiser on the site. 
So it was a slog. For the first nine months, I would stay here for extra hours, doing ten hours a day, six days a week. I would use the shift changeover to interact with all the different shifts. In the first nine months, we moved to about 70-80 members. 
Management were like hawks when it came to discussing the union on the floor. If casuals mentioned union during their first weeks, they would get blacklisted. One manager recently said to me, “I don’t know why you go around and sign up casuals when we can just get rid of them whenever we want” and smiled at me with this massive grin on his face, like he was the Joker or something. This is the mentality management has. So I just had to persist. 
Along the way, I had been promising all these people that when they sign up we’d be getting mass meetings soon. After eleven months, we still did not have mass meetings, and I was getting pressured by the members. I ran a petition to get the mass meeting. I came in early to get the guys on their changeovers. I would just say, “Support your fellow workers, sign the petition”, we union bashed the whole shed and got like 270 signatures. Then we pushed to have our non-paid mass meeting. This was all over two years back.
It ran across the three shifts. We introduced another eight union delegates on the site and with our membership numbers pushing closer to 150, management began to accommodate. In our clause, it states that all employees can be invited to mass meetings, so that was our window to just invite everyone, and we shut down the whole shed. Virtually anyone that wasn’t a manager or an admin was invited—we now try to include the admin staff in the union. The message was “everyone please come learn about union”. It was a huge success.
So after the union was allowed to come down for the mass meetings, organisers were granted right-of-entry more frequently, which helped us build. Then it became my mission to find a strong delegate team. 
Being more established, management would still target delegates. Our leading arvo shift delegate was stood down in the lead-up to the strike. They targeted him because he is one of the most present and vocal on the afternoon shift. Being a delegate, you get the target on you—you certainly make sacrifices here to make this place better.
Lyndon: The reason why we have all these people out here strong and together is entirely down to Peter and the work he’s put in ... it is just phenomenal. He’s been escorted out of toolbox meetings because management don’t want him to talk and he has been told he can’t come into things, but he keeps going back. He has inspired me to go and become a delegate and do the same things he does because he can’t fight it alone—he is exhausting himself. So the rest of us are following his footsteps to continue the fight. [Lyndon was not the first delegate to recount that Peter had been decisive in them becoming a delegate or had trained them to be a strong one—ML.]
Peter: In terms of sacrifices, management took away my overtime in July this year to deter me from union bashing the place. I said, “I don’t care if I lose overtime, I’m still going to show up and do the hours”. Matter of fact, my wife didn’t even know that I was not getting paid OT until I got on the picket because I didn’t tell her. So my sacrifice is everyone else’s reward.
Reflecting on all the work and building you have done, what do you think were some of the factors that helped?
Bruce: Our delegate team. Our strength is we all add something into the mix. For example, Lyndon is the General of Health and Safety and Peter is the “problem child” to management. I love litigation, I love making sure things are fair, and the rest of our team adds something too. It makes us a strong, united force.
Lyndon: I think the main thing that helped us build the union was management’s behaviour. It made it easy to say to people, “This is why we need to stand together”, when they are treating everyone so unfairly. 
The conversations were really important too. You see how big the warehouse is, so there are lots of people. Peter is always walking back and forth, during breaks going around talking to different groups in the different lunch rooms in different areas of the warehouse.
Bruce: When we win a case, word spreads. We’ve got a few people who can’t really understand English properly but then we get a win, word spreads and suddenly we have them joining the union. I know for me I had to win at least two to three cases for people to believe in me to represent them. Now every time there is anything to do with litigation, they say, “Go see Bruce”. Every time we go to the office there’s that fear right away in management. They often say, “Oh Bruce, what are you doing here?”
Peter: The wins are so important. Safety is often the issue we fight around. The issues could be really small, but winning was what helped. Nearly one-third of the delegates are HSRs as well, so we can push back through the safety angle and that really gets them on the back foot. 
Sticking at it is important. They try to scare me, but I do not care. I’ve been in this game too long. I just keep pushing on. My persistence will beat them because I show up every day. 
Building a union team was crucial though. I could not do this alone. I would continue to go around every day to the morning toolboxes and spread union. I was always talking union with as many people as possible, always planting the seed. Amidst that, I was also keeping an eye out for potential delegates. I eventually got Lyndon to come on board. Lyndon would toolbox on his toolbox, Bruce would toolbox on his toolbox—and then I would be toolboxing as well. The three of us work different days, so we have coverage seven days a week. I started taking the afternoon shift delegates with me on tour to toolbox the teams. 
We would use these toolboxes to announce mass meetings, too. So whenever management made an offer during the past couple of months of bargaining, I would announce a mass meeting to discuss it in the toolbox. Meanwhile, I am showing the newer delegates, do not be shy, be brave, be bold and stand up there. At first, they were like, “Can I even make an announcement?” and I told them, “Don’t ask them, tell them. Tell them you’re there today to make an announcement”. 
The three of you have done something that cuts against the grain of the modern union movement, which is to rebuild its strength. It took a lot of time, work and bravery. What have been some of the highlights and lowlights of your times organising the union here?
Lyndon: The toughest part is just the managers either ignoring you or doing nothing at all. The highlight for me is when they call you into the office and tell you to stop doing what you’re doing because you are scaring them. 
Bruce: We now have all these union ambassadors out there, guys who aren’t delegates but who are spreading union around the place too. I hear them talking to people, trying to convince people to join the union or take a stand. My highlight definitely, though, is one of the guys in the freezer who has become a real leader. When he first started here, he always kept to himself, kept his head down. But now he’s totally different. I’ve seen him arguing with management when they’re trying to get out of the gate. I see him in the freezer aisles telling people to join the union. I love seeing how he has transformed. What changed for him was seeing how management actually behaved—how they treated him, his friends and his workmates. Now, people look up to that guy, see him as a leader. 
Peter: For me, it has been a little bit of a different journey. At times, I was very isolated. One of my delegates openly said he did not want to challenge management because he hoped to get promoted. At one point, I was the only delegate on the day shift. I just kept pushing, and my nickname here is “the troublemaker”.
Lyndon: I have actually heard management call him that. If he is coming to a toolbox, as he walks in management will say, “Here comes the troublemaker”. Literally.
Peter: I walk into the office and they say, “Oh, the troublemaker is here”, “Oh, the troublemaker, what do you want?” My reputation surpasses me. They have tried to pull me into meetings with managers on my own—but after ten years in the saddle, I am prepared for that shit. I always have a wingman. I simply cannot afford to drop my guard because I’ve got too many members that rely on me. 
A highlight for me was getting permission from the then-operations manager to have our fortnightly meetings. They’ve been happening for three years now, and helped build the union. 
Do you have anything else to add about what you are doing here on strike? 
Lyndon: The picket is an amazing experience—just seeing people coming together to fight for a common cause and all the bonding. We are doing more than just saying no to Lineage; we are building our community, too. My hope, which I keep trying to remind people, is we need to keep the attitude and whatever we’ve got built out here when we go back. That’s how we make things better.
Bruce: This strike must be hurting them. On the picket line, we find it very funny that management now comes up to us, offers us water, asks how our day is. We never get that inside. It’s always bossing us around, KPIs and discipline. Suddenly, they have a heart. 
Management did not see this strike coming. And then, when they realised it was, they just went, “Oh no, they’re gonna break”. Are we breaking? No we are not—we’re having parties out here. Someone brought a PlayStation. People have been bringing their kids. I’m laughing because we have such a great culture here. It’s so positive. We’re one big family. 
We never knew we were going to be out here. But us coming together now kind of really strengthened our team. I love this team, they become your second family basically. We can create that if we work as a team. We stick up for each other. That’s what it’s all about. Make the stand. Have your voice heard.
Peter: Persistence, persistence, persistence makes you win. I have had, at times, five managers trying to bully me out of attending a toolbox. But I just push through. You can just never give up.
Being a delegate is challenging. You have to tell people that you can make this place better—and make them believe it. You start with some small wins and people start believing. Eventually you can demand change, and that’s what we’re out here doing now: demanding change.

Matt Laidlaw

Building a union against a warehouse giant

Jerome Small

Woolworths workers strike a blow against corporate power

It’s a sight for sore eyes. 
For the past two weeks, a news cycle usually dominated by trivia, tragedy and paid talking heads has featured an unusual sight: striking workers. The people whose labour makes society function, who are most of the time ignored and invisible, are walking out of their workplaces, into the streets and onto the nightly news. 
There have been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-27/thousands-rally-queensland-against-qld-governmnet-suspend-bpic/104652842">construction workers</a> in Brisbane and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nurses-took-to-the-streets-after-insulting-pay-offer-next-stop-court-20241113-p5kq80.html">nurses</a> in New South Wales taking action. But, more than anyone else, it’s the 1,800 warehouse workers striking in Victoria and NSW who have pushed working conditions, corporate greed—and, crucially, workers’ power—onto the political agenda. Organised by the United Workers Union, these workers have seriously disrupted the super-profitable “business as usual” of Woolworths supermarkets—one of the biggest, most ruthless, and fiercely <a href="https://thenightly.com.au/business/coles-woolworths-continues-fall-from-grace-to-now-be-among-nations-top-three-distrusted-brands-c-16973063">hated</a> companies in the country. 
Two weeks into the strike, the outcome still hangs in the balance. But win lose or draw, the warehouse workers’ strike is likely to be the most significant industrial dispute in Australia this year. As Red Flag has <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/woolies-distribution-workers-strike-for-everyone">argued</a>, every worker in the country has a stake in its outcome. 
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the strike so far came on Monday 2 December. Up until that point, management’s policy seemed to be one of sucking the energy and momentum out of the dispute. Management locked the gates of the strikebound facilities on day one, ramped up alternative supply chains, harassed workers by phone and text, and waited for demoralisation to set in. But faced with significant and growing gaps in supermarkets, and gaping holes in the stock at Dan Murphys, management decided to take a chance. 
On Sunday 1 December, Woolworths CEO Amanda Bardwell put out a statement claiming that only a minority of workers at the giant Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre in Dandenong South were union members; that the vast majority of workers were keen to scab on the strike; that management had reached a deal with the Shop Distributive and Allied union (which is notorious for undercutting other unions, and even <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5320">legal minimums</a>, in their enterprise agreements); and that as a result, full production would resume at South Dandenong from 6am Monday morning. 
Anyone aware of Woolworths management’s commercial practices, such as allegedly <a href="https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-woolworths-and-coles-to-court-over-alleged-misleading-prices-dropped-and-down-down-claims">lying about their own prices</a>, will not be surprised to learn that this statement was, to put it mildly, a little shy of the truth. Out of slightly more than 300 workers at the Dandenong centre, the UWU have a membership of more than 240 (and growing). The SDA, by contrast, have seven members at the facility. Unsurprisingly, Bardwell’s statement neglected to mention this relevant fact.
Perhaps Bardwell and team believed their own bullshit. Perhaps they thought that one day of transparent PR spin would be enough to demoralise the workers and their supporters. If so, management were in for a shock. By 5am on Monday, a crowd of around 100 workers and more than 200 community supporters—a large number of them mobilised by Victorian Socialists—were assembled, ready to turn back any scabs. 
An hour passed. Then another. And then another. 
Spirits were high on the picket as workers, students and well-wishers chatted, chanted, and practiced our picket drills. Rumour was that the would-be strike breakers had been put on a bus, then taken off, then put back on, then taken off. 
It wasn’t until 12 hours after management’s supposed start time that a tiny crew of would-be scabs turned up, only to be turned away from the facility with no great drama. Management’s grand reopening turned out to be just another Woolworths fake news story. 
As word of the victory spread, workers on other pickets celebrated. Rhys, a worker at the Erskine Park distribution centre in Sydney, told Red Flag, “Hearing about this big Melbourne story on Monday. They [management] failed, you know, this morning they failed. And today they’re trying to get an injunction through Fair Work to open that site. And it just makes you laugh. You know, it’s not scary. It’s just funny.”
Workers mercilessly mocking their management as the company flail around looking for a way to neutralise worker power and worker solidarity, is an unparalleled, and much too rare, joy. 
Of course, the future is unwritten and so far, though the company has moved on some issues, the strikers are yet to fully win their main demands. It’s encouraging though that some heavy artillery of the union movement is taking an interest, with the Victorian Building Industry Group of unions <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Do4MDWWWU/">declaring</a> that they will support the striking warehouse workers “industrially, politically, and financially until these workers win this dispute”. But with pressure increasing on all sides, it’s impossible to tell how the dispute will resolve. 
Even at this stage though, the strike—as with any serious dispute—has shone a revealing light on politics and society. 
Predictably, the Liberals, though willing to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-to-supermarkets-rein-in-prices-or-we-ll-force-you-to-sell-off-stores-20240702-p5jqh1.html">mouth off</a> once in a while about a “big stick” approach to taking on the big supermarket companies, have not uttered a single word to support the people actually taking on these same companies—the striking workers. 
Labor politicians have barely been more visible, with Cabinet ministers’ <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-04/woolworths-union-dispute-government-uwu-woolies-shelf-dan-murphy/104682096">reported comments</a> falling well short of any actual support for the workers’ demands. The Victorian Greens have finally crept out of witness protection on the issue, posting two Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/victoriangreens/">reels</a> in support of the strike in the past day or so. 
By far the most prominent political party supporting the strike has been Victorian Socialists. The party’s support extends not just to social media <a href="https://www.instagram.com/vic_socialists/?hl=en">posts</a>, but to party members and supporters doing one of the most important things in politics: turning up. The Melbourne Age (in a rare <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20241202092230/https:/www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/protesters-block-entry-to-woolworths-warehouse-as-grocery-shortages-continue-20241202-p5kv0m.html">sympathetic report</a>) noted the presence of many VS supporters at Monday’s early morning picket: 
“Activist and Victorian Socialists federal Senate candidate <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20241202092230mp_/https:/www.theage.com.au/link/follow-20170101-p5k5fq">Jordan van den Lamb</a>—known as purplepingers online—issued a call-out to followers on social media on Sunday, urging them to attend Monday’s action in Dandenong South. Party member Ryan Stanton said activists, students and trade union members were among those who turned out with the party to support Monday’s protest. ‘Woolworths is one of the main drivers behind the cost-of-living crisis,’ Stanton said. ‘They’ve been price gouging...but what a lot of people don’t know is that they’re also doing their best to make working lives harder for the workers who actually pick the stock that goes to the stores.’”
It’s no surprise that socialists, for whom workers’ struggles are at the centre of social change and the vision of a new world, are also some of the most active supporters of those struggles when they erupt. 
But the strike reveals much more than the real values of political parties. Like any major dispute, the strike makes it obvious who does all the goddam work around here—and who doesn’t. Without workers’ labour, it turns out, none of us have toilet paper, pasta, frozen goods, chilled goods, beer—or anything else. Anyone who doubts this can wander through one of hundreds of Woolworths supermarkets or liquor stores in Australia’s most populous states. The strike shows anyone who cares to look that even in this automated age, workers and our labour underpin everything. 
What a contrast to Woolworths management. 
Throughout the strike, Bardwell and her extensive team of executives, HR goons, lawyers and spin doctors are no doubt working as hard as they ever do. The stream of dishonest press releases, legal threats and fake-welfare harassing phone calls to striking workers is testament to that. But nothing at all of any value to human beings results. The billable hours rack up, but not one extra roll of toilet paper gets to the stores.
To put it plainly: this layer of CEOs and executives and their well-paid flunkies is parasitical. They contribute nothing of value to society, but feed off the rest of us. In even simpler terms: they need us, but we don’t need them. 
The Brad Banduccis, the Amanda Bardwells and their bought-and-sold servants in politics and the media can wander around as if they’re the most important people on the planet. A major strike, however, makes it abundantly clear whose labour really matters—and who would have nothing without it. 
The essential nature of the work millions of workers do every day, to society and to the capitalists’ profit-based “business as usual” set-up, gives workers enormous power. But it’s obvious that this power can only be exercised collectively. 
This mundane fact has important consequences. Any strike points in the direction of solidarity and collective action, and an ethos directly at odds with the dog-eat-dog individualism fostered by the system. Even a quick look at the scope of the warehouse strike, and its demands, shows this. 
Everyone on strike knows that warehouses commonly shut after 20 years, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each time this happens, Australia’s current system of enterprise-by-enterprise bargaining (introduced by Labor in the early 1990s) allows a company like Woolworths to set up a new shelf company, and dictate a new enterprise agreement on favourable terms. The gains won by previous rounds of struggle are largely wiped out, and workers in the new facility (many of whom have come from an older facility) have to start on lower pay. 
This is why one of the strike’s main demands is for a national agreement or at least for a series of nationally applied minimums, which Woolworths has to meet for existing and new sections of its supply chain. A minimum pay rate of $38 per hour is one key part of this. 
In other words, each of the Woolworths strikers knows that the only way to secure their own long-term interests in having decent wages, is by fighting for many thousands of workers they have never met to get a minimum pay rate of $38 an hour. A secure victory for one, it turns out, can only be achieved by a victory for all.
Not just the demands of the strike, but also its scope, show the same dynamic of expanding solidarity. If one warehouse goes on strike, it’s a major hassle for Woolworths management. But this impact is multiplied, and multiplied again, with each warehouse that joins in the action. 
This is why the elected officials, organisers, delegates and members of the UWU have put years of effort into lining up the expiry dates of the enterprise agreements covering the distribution networks of the major supermarkets. “United we stand, divided we fall” is not just a pleasant-sounding slogan. It reflects a class logic: the logic of working-class people in struggle for their own interests is to fight in ever-widening circles of solidarity. 
And this logic intensifies once the actual strike starts. Ask a striking worker about their experience of the strike. You’ll get an answer about how great it is to see and feel their own power in the flow-on effects from their strike. You’ll get an answer about the joy of forming a bond with people who share the same workplace and the same task but who have never had a chance to meet and talk, let alone establish a connection in common struggle. 
And you’ll get an answer about overcoming the sort of “divide and conquer” between shifts and job roles that management thrives on and promotes. Rhys, one of the strikers at Sydney’s Erskine Park distribution centre, explained to Red Flag how significant it is to see one of the main divisions in the shed—between day shift and afternoon—simply dissolve during the strike. “To see how together we are, it’s like it’s not two shifts, there’s just one shift” he said, “There’s just one way out—and it’s great to see that it’s everyone supporting everyone”.
This logic of working-class struggle, the logic of “everyone supporting everyone”, can extend beyond shifts, and beyond sheds. Far beyond, in fact.
One of the most generous and moving acts of solidarity with the warehouse strikers comes from refugees, a group of people who have been vilified and demonised in Australia for decades. A large group of refugees recently held an epic 100-day protest camp outside the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne’s Docklands area, demanding the dignity and security that Labor promised them ahead of the 2022 election. 
This extraordinary protest received invaluable support from the UWU, whose Victorian office is located nearby. Many of the refugees involved are now returning that solidarity in the most practical way imaginable: by assisting the strike kitchen. As the refugees explain on their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RefugeeWAVE">Facebook page</a>:
“Striking workers are heroes. They challenge the divisions created by bosses and prove that unity can overcome the barriers keeping us apart. Their struggle inspires us all to fight for a more equal and just society. In solidarity with these workers, Rathy and Maki have decided to start a Strike Kitchen called Meals for Equality. Starting Monday, they will prepare meals for the striking workers, showing that refugees and migrants stand united with the workers. When politicians like Dutton and Albo blame refugees and migrants for problems they created, we must counter this divisive narrative.” 
This is not just a gift to the striking workers. It’s a concrete example of solidarity that in months and years to come we can throw back in the face of anyone who buys into the lie that migrants and refugees are a threat to workers in this country. This example proves the exact opposite: while one of the biggest companies in the country was trying to starve and bully striking workers back to work, refugees were on the pickets, helping to keep the strikers fed. 
This sort of industrial action, and the solidarity it inspires, is far too rare in Australia today. In the 1970s, Australian workers had one of the highest strike rates in the world. Millions of workers struck to win decent wages and conditions, and an important minority of militant, political unionists led industrial campaigns to support other workers, to preserve low-cost housing, to win equal rights for women, against the Vietnam War, for Aboriginal Land Rights and against Apartheid in South Africa. 
This tradition of industrial action was deliberately <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-7266">broken</a> by the Labor governments of the 1980s. The result of this defeat has been the decline in union density and living standards. Along with that, the low level of strikes had led to a breakdown in the sense of solidarity and common interest on display at the picket lines outside distribution centres right now.
It is this solidarity that, when able to develop fully, points to a new and different sort of society, one which puts ordinary people in the driver’s seat. Workers can become so used to accepting society’s injustices and atrocities because they feel deprived of the power to change it. Strikes, and the solidarity they spark, can lead in the other direction, by demonstrating in practice that workers actually do have power, and that there is an alternative to this resignation. Any serious strike shows this potential power of our side. And once conscious of this power, workers are not necessarily content to stop at a wage rise or better conditions. 
The outcome of the warehouse strikes is still in play. But it’s clear that the warehouse workers and their struggle are an inspiration, and an education, to us all.

Hope on the picket line

The Woolworths warehouse strike in Sydney’s west continued to heat up through its fifth and sixth days as the city’s temperatures rose in tandem.
The United Workers Union (UWU) coordinated and organised the indefinite strike at Erskine Park distribution centre and four other warehouses in Victoria. Another warehouse in Queensland took action last Friday, 22 November. The 1,500 strikers nationwide appear more determined than ever to win above-inflation pay rises and terminate the company’s “coaching and productivity framework”—a new system that disciplines anyone falling short of a management-defined “100 percent” target.
Monday, day five at Erskine Park, was stinking hot. The sun lashed the backs of necks and boiled the bitumen. The liquid soap in the portaloos was half-scalding. Those who stood at the barbeque over sizzling onions to keep everyone fed deserved a 21-gun salute. 
The sight of 100 members in UWU-branded hi-vis on the main driveway at the peak of the day’s heat discussing their next steps was a sign of unity and commitment. UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings, reporting on Woolworths’ offer of a “reduced framework”, had barely finished her sentence when workers erupted in cries of “No framework!” to the bangs of a big drum. “Put your hand up if you want to stick to no framework”, Sharon said. One hundred hands went up.
Next order of business: the bosses only want a handful of delegates at negotiations. Cries, drums and one hundred hands: all delegates must be at the talks for maximum democracy and opposition.
The union also demands that all six warehouse agreements expire simultaneously and be negotiated together. This is an effort to counter a fragmented system of “enterprise bargaining” introduced by the Hawke-Keating ALP government of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced industry-wide bargaining and weakened our side’s collective strength.
By now, striking workers have been getting calls from supervisors and managers. 
“‘Just doing a welfare check’, they say”, one reported. “I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fantastic mate’. It’s intimidation and mind games.”
“Welfare” didn’t cross management’s collective mind until profits started going down the drain. 
After the meeting, Roger* and Jay* spoke about a case a few years earlier, when a Pakistani employee had his fingertips on both hands crushed by a closing van door.
“You know what [management] did?” Jay asked. “They said it was his own fault, and gave him a warning”. Two warnings and you’re out of a job. Later, they say, the man tried to cover up a mistake to avoid a second warning and dismissal. Management found out and sacked him on the spot.
According to picketers, the top manager at the time (“the biggest psychopath ever met on the job”, Roger said) is now overseeing the rollout of a new 66,000 square metre semi-automated facility in the southwest Sydney suburb of Moorebank.
Warehousing must be some of “the lucky country’s” most sweated and unsafe labour. The parallels with Amazon seem striking. As with the American logistics giant, very high turnover is part of the Woolworths business model: employing casuals through labour hire, working them to the bone, and then moving on to another batch. 
“When you’re casual, it’s non-stop”, Roger said. “The last intake was 100 people over a couple of weeks, and by the end of it, there were probably five to fifteen left.”
The “framework” is yet another attempt to intensify the labour process, after everything companies like Coles and Woolworths have already done to make this work more dangerous, exhausting and dehumanising. That’s why the workers say they won’t stop until it’s dead.
And it’s why Janet*, one of the oldest workers here with 26 years’ experience, stayed all through the night on Saturday to guard the picket and was back again Monday.
“Myself, maybe I’ve not got too many more years here. But I’m fighting for the young people”, she said as we caught some shade under a gazebo. “They’ve got young families—[management] shouldn’t be pushing them so much, getting injuries to their back and shoulders.”
Sitting next to her was one of those young workers, Lisa*. In her home country, trade unions aren’t even legal. The pace of work is severe and workers have no right to speak out. Yet it’s only after moving to Australia and working at Woolies that she suffered her first workplace injury.
A workmate interrupted to ask Janet for some of the sweet dessert drink she made for the picketers. He wanted to take some home to his kids. After sampling some, I could see why. I sampled continuously as she talked me through the recipe. 
Janet says she’ll stay out “as long as it takes” because she’s confident they can starve Woolies out. “In the next few days, there’s gonna be empty shelves for sure”, she said. “Because we move a million cartons a week and this is day five.”
Another mass meeting on Tuesday reported back from Monday’s negotiations.
Stonewalling and condescending, Woolworths insisted the meeting was only to “educate” workers about the framework. “They’ve never picked a box and they’re trying to educate us”, someone cried out. 
Management offered a 75 or 85 percent target instead of 100 percent, which delegates roundly rejected.
“If we agree with a number, they can change it; they always have things [to get] around it”, one delegate argued at the meeting. “Version 2.0 involves following you around like puppets. Meetings every few weeks to monitor performance. If you’re not picking what they think you should, then they’ll still get rid of you. We want to come here, work and go home. Fuck their framework.”
With negotiations going nowhere, UWU organiser Sharon proposed an escalation. Hoxton Park Distribution Centre, which supplies Woolworths’ Big W stores, is fifteen minutes away. Did workers want to go there and stop trucks from getting in and out?
“At first, not a lot of people jumped [at this prospect] because they'd never done it before. This is the first strike for many workers”, said Cherish Kuehlmann, a student activist organising carloads of young socialists to come to show support every day. “Then one worker asked, ‘Are the uni students coming too?’ And of course we were like, ‘Yeah!’”
Convinced, dozens of workers and supporters drove over to shut down Hoxton Park DC. The strike at Erskine Park is so solid that active picketing is usually unnecessary. So this was the first opportunity many workers had to block the movement of goods physically. Waving big red union flags and chanting in a line blocking the entry, the workers stopped ten trucks in an hour. “One day longer! One day stronger!” 
Managers came trotting out but, failing to scare off the strikers, slunk back into the warehouse as the picket line jeered: “Go back to the aircon!” 
One manager, Dylan, has moved from Erskine Park to Hoxton Park while the strike continues. Workers heckled and taunted, advising him to get back inside before the sun charred the top of his shiny head. 
Meetings with management were held again on Wednesday. If they went the way of Monday’s dead-end discussions, then surely Woolworths deserves many more escalations such as this.
But even this first small escalation showed how a strike can begin turning things the right way up in our topsy-turvy rich man’s world. 
Harassed, bullied and demeaned by managers day in and out, workers can finally get a serve back. 
Trucks arriving at a remorseless pace, hungry for stacked pallets, can be turned away.
Decisions, usually made only by managers in air-conditioned offices, are made in the blazing heat, discussed and voted on by union members. 
The isolation of the headsets, the unknowable efficiency targets and a fragmented warehouse floor—forklift driver pitted against pallet stacker, permanent against casual, morning shift against day shift—can be undone for a while by the workers’ unity. 
And the people called replaceable, disposable, a number or a cog, show that they are in fact indispensable.
A colleague of mine, with almost 50 years’ experience in our transport industry, reminded me of this as we chatted in the lunchroom. After I described the conditions in the warehouse, he paused, turned and said:
“You know, we go about our everyday lives and we totally forget how the food gets on the shelves, and who is putting in what kind of backbreaking labour to get it there.”
It’s only because of the strike that we are talking about it at all. And if Janet is right and Woolies shelves soon start running empty, then many more people might begin pondering the same question: who’s really creating all the wealth in this country?
One thing’s for sure: it’s not Dylan and his toasted scalp.
* Names have been changed at the interviewee’s request. Except Dylan’s.

April Holcombe

Sydney Woolies workers striking while it’s hot

One hundred and thirty-seven staff at the University of Wollongong are facing the sack by Christmas. According to information provided to the National Tertiary Education Union local branch, these sackings are the first of three rounds. To add insult to injury, the union was told that some staff will receive their letters on 20 December. 
On 8 November, students received an email from management announcing that 25 study disciplines were facing cuts under the “UOW Transformation” plan. These cuts are being forced through under the managerial leadership of Interim Vice-Chancellor John Dewar. The former chair of Universities Australia has a notorious track record of slashing jobs and streamlining courses, including sacking hundreds of staff at La Trobe University when the pandemic hit. Dewar also helped implement the “Melbourne model”, in which 96 undergraduate courses were reduced to just six when he was provost of Melbourne University in 2011.
The UOW Transformation plan stipulates that cuts will be made to entire study disciplines, such as cultural studies and human geography. Languages will no longer be offered in 2025, forcing an entire cohort of staff out of a job, and leaving students already enrolled in language courses in the lurch. Additionally, the university plans to reduce subject offerings and jobs in disciplines including history, maths, statistics, physics and engineering. 
These cuts are part of a longer-term plan to overhaul UOW’s degree structure. This overhaul, set to be implemented by 2026, will create a new type of “comprehensive” degree for non-accredited courses. The degree will be more generic and standardised, and follow an 8-8-8 subject structure: all students enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts will be required to study eight of the same core subjects, regardless of their chosen major and minor. This will limit the amount of specialist subjects the university needs to offer at any given time. Disturbingly, the document outlining the restructure flags a potential “no-major option” for degrees. The university is likely to cut professional staff numbers as part of this process, citing that the current degree structure is “complex for UOW staff to administer”. 
These attacks are part of a longer-term trend in the commodification of degrees and the corporatisation of universities. Scandalously, Dewar is a partner in consultancy firm KordaMentha, the same firm that has been awarded two contracts to advise the UOW in its slash and burn policies. Universities function like any other corporation, primarily interested in raising revenue, undermining staff pay and conditions, and gaining lucrative research partnerships. Citing a loss in revenue of $35 million less than forecast due to lower international student enrolments, management is attacking staff and students to boost margins. 
NTEU members held a rally to protest the cuts on 20 November to coincide with the university’s academic senate hearing. Student activists are planning to fight the cuts into the new year.
Follow @fight_uow_cuts on Instagram to get involved in the campaign.

Megan Guy

University of Wollongong to sack 137 staff by Christmas

On an average day, 200 people enter the round-the-clock Erskine Park Distribution Centre (DC) in western Sydney and bust their gut packing goods that end up in Woolworths supermarkets. But on Saturday 23 November, the two dozen in high vis turning up at the site weren’t there for the 5am morning shift. They were starting day three of an indefinite strike.
That is already a day longer than their last strike in 2017, and this time, it seems they are just getting started. The picket line looks built for long-haul, 24-hour operation: portaloos, a big box trailer of supplies, gazebos, barbecues, even a flat-screen TV powered by a generator. They are also joining five other warehouses in Victoria and Queensland. 
So far, the pickets are working. One worker said that the morning truck drivers don’t come to cross the picket line; they just come to greet and support the strikers. For Woolworths—whose shelves might start running empty later this week—the screws will turn tighter the closer we get to the holiday season.
“[We don’t care] if it takes one, two, three months—even if we’re here in the New Year”, a worker, Tee,* told Red Flag in an audio interview, as chill R&amp;B played from a nearby speaker. “And if anyone’s listening [to the recording in the future], happy New Year, merry Christmas. If you’ve got empty shelves in your local Woolies store, blame Woolies, not us.”
Almost all Erskine Park DC workers are members of the United Workers Union (UWU), and almost all voted for the indefinite strike. That sense of unity against management is a major point of pride. “I haven’t seen people in this high spirits in many, many years here”, Jamie, a UWU organiser, said. Despite the weekend’s heat wave, which could already be felt by 8am, workers kicked a ball around on the street, or crowded around a mate’s motorcycle.
The strike’s key demand, alongside higher pay, is to “<a href="https://unitedworkers.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Disciplinary-Power-in-Aust-Grocery-Warehouses-UWU.pdf">abolish the framework</a>”. Every worker seems determined to kill and bury it before they walk back inside the gates. The framework allows management to discipline any worker that fails to meet the “100 percent” target: a pick rate that the company can set and adjust with no oversight, rationale or accountability. “It’s trying to manage us for every second that we work, 24/7 non-stop”, Tee said.
At the best of times, work inside a Woolworths warehouse is rushed and strenuous. Workers on foot weave around forklifts, lay pickers and pallet movers in a mad rush to grab stock from aisles. 
With management constantly forcing the pace, Jamie, who worked for years at Erskine Park, described how extreme accidents are waiting to happen. “There’s a big risk of getting hit by machinery. Someone lost their life <a href="https://7news.com.au/news/nsw/woolworths-worker-killed-in-horrific-pallet-accident-remembered-as-beautiful-man-c-11173079">only a year ago</a>”, he said. “My first year on the job, I was a few inches away from being crushed by a machine myself.” But the recently introduced “framework”, Jamie said, “is gonna create chaos in there”.
The chaos is already starting. “We’ve got a lot of people that have been here for years, been doing their job perfectly fine, and now just last week, we had two people injured on Friday”, Tee said. “One of the guys had to leave in a wheelchair and they actually had to drop him home; he couldn’t go home in the vehicle he came in. On one day we’ve had more injuries than in the last couple of months.”
“Even those who can reach 100 percent, they can’t maintain it”, Jamie said. Humans cannot do what the AI program in their work-provided headset demands, such as moving 18-kilogram boxes every five seconds. “How can one person do this all day, every day? It’s 800 to 1,000 boxes per day”, another worker, Craig,* said. 
At the same time, the robot appears unable to do what human workers can, such as make sensible decisions about how to stack physical objects on a pallet. That creates even more work for employees. “The program is telling us to put medium-weight things on light things; it doesn’t work. So we have to take it all back off and repack it”, Craig explained.
Another striker who has worked here for more than a decade said the pressure to meet 100 percent every day adds a new layer of fear, stress and anger that’s affecting home and family life. “You don’t want to take work home with you; everyone will agree with you on that”, Ajay* said. “[But] when you go home to your families, you’re thinking about how you gotta do that again tomorrow.”
100 percent is not a fixed amount of work—it’s an efficiency aspiration. Management can continuously adjust it and reset working conditions to ensure that more profits are squeezed from the workforce. People are stressed about falling behind the target and losing their job. A few minutes lost here or there, and workers can be called in to meetings. 
“I’ve seen people hauled into the office for going 20 seconds, 30 seconds over their lunch break”, Jamie said.
“A lot of the guys have gone in there for a meeting and they haven’t come back out, you just see them getting walked off site”, Tee said.
That was all before the framework, which is giving managers even greater powers to bully and victimise. According to Jamie, management pushes workers harder if it wants them gone. “We’ve got ladies who’ve been with the company for 25 years, yet on a daily basis, they have to pick a lot more than others. It’s almost as if the company is trying to force them out, getting them to crumble and give up and walk out of their own accord.”
The union is also fighting for a proper wage rise to combat inflation. Woolworths says its pay offer is above the current inflation figure of 2.8 percent. But UWU members say this ignores the financial pain felt after years of rising grocery prices and housing costs, which are still worsening. 
“Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world”, Tee said. Like most workers here, he is renting and has only just now been able to move out and find a place for his growing family. “It’s $600 a week, so I asked the real estate agent, does it have two swimming pools and a Ferrari out the front?”, he joked. 
Those workers with mortgages are suffering from thirteen consecutive interest rate hikes. For each of the past two years, average wage increases have fallen behind average mortgage increases by around $1,000, according to Guardian economics editor Greg Jericho. Meanwhile, the big banks (as with their mates at Coles and Woolworths) are celebrating superprofit bonanzas. Little wonder that Reserve Bank governor Michelle Bullock came in for colourful rebuke around the picket line.
The pay claim is also about fairness. Across the country, wages differ from one Woolworths warehouse to the next. Erskine Park is praised by management as the most efficient distribution centre in Australia. Yet its hourly rate is much lower than at Minchinbury DC, just fifteen minutes’ drive away. “Align us with the other sheds”, one delegate demanded, echoing the union’s green placards cable-tied to the warehouse gates: “Every site, same rights at Woolworths!”
The first few days have seen a rock-solid shutdown, but it’s just the beginning. Workers at Erskine Park are assembling for an all-members’ meeting on Monday to discuss the next steps. 
Whatever comes next, Woolworths warehouse workers are prepared for a long, hot summer strike against one of Australia’s most hated companies. The rest of us workers should be offering moral and material support—and learning a thing or two. 
* Names have been changed at the interviewees’ request.
If you live in Sydney, show solidarity with strikers at their round-the-clock picket of Woolworths Distribution Centre, Sarah Andrews Close, Erskine Park.

Woolies warehouse workers keeping Sydney picket strong

Viraj Dissanayake is a former delegate at the Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre, one of the Woolworths warehouses where workers are taking historic indefinite <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/woolies-distribution-workers-strike-for-everyone">strike action</a>. He helped lead an extraordinary four-day legally unprotected <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/inside-melbourne-warehouse-strike">strike at MLDC in 2015</a>, which succeeded in stopping management from introducing labour hire. 
Viraj was back at MLDC last week, one of many supporters who turned up in solidarity with striking workers on the first day of a new strike. Red Flag asked Viraj to share his reflections on warehouse work, organising and the 2015 strike.
--------------------
We’re on the picket line at MLDC. You worked here for quite a while. Tell us about what it’s like to work inside one of these places.
I started as a picker here in 2008 and worked till 2019. When we call these fast-paced distribution centres, they’re really like a big, automated machine where the workers are treated like just part of that machine. You come to work, you clock in, and then you need to go to either start picking or driving a forklift.
But if you spend one to two minutes extra between the clock-in and signing into the machine, there will be a team leader behind you asking why you took so much time. I think it gives you a sense of what this work’s going to be like. 
So when it comes to picking, that means you’re driving a transporter—you got two pallets behind that. And sometimes those two pallets can go to two different stores, which means you need to make sure you put the product onto the right pallet. Also, you’re wearing a headset pretty much telling you everything you have to do. And if you get stuck in the traffic and took ten minutes extra to wrap the pallet, you need to go to a manager. So that’s how this distribution centre works.
This is even before the new regime that management just introduced, which states that you have to hit 100 percent productivity 100 percent of the time?
Yes. I left this place five, six years ago. But at that time, what some of the health and safety reps did, we tried to get more gaps—they call them gaps, like you spend a few minutes in the toilet or if you spend a few minutes extra on the wrapping machine, we get some gaps [in the picking chain]. But it seems like now management will want to be harsh on you. They’re not giving you any gaps, but they’re expecting everyone to pick 100 percent. 
But when it comes to “100 percent”, this number is not a realistic number. It’s coming from something called “engineering standards”. Every six months, some people who’ve never picked in their life come here, looking at all the tasks, looking at how long it takes on average, and they’re doing this ridiculous time [estimation].
And then that “100 percent” needs to be aligned with this engineering standard. But I can be younger. Someone can be older. Someone can be taller. Someone can be shorter. But their [management’s] percentage seems like 100 percent for everyone. It’s very, very unrealistic. I’ve spoken to a few workers here—and the data, even five years ago, was the same—they said to me pretty much every worker here was injured at least once at work. That’s how bad the injury rate in this place is.
You spent a few years here as a delegate with the National Union of Workers [which merged with United Voice to form the United Workers Union in 2019]. Tell us something about some of the challenges of organising in this sort of a place.
I think the first and biggest challenge is that we don’t have an opportunity to talk to every worker. Even when it comes to EA time [when the company negotiates a new contract, called an enterprise agreement, with the workforce], we didn’t have mass meetings. But we had shift meetings. So if you’re in the afternoon shift, you’re having a meeting with other colleagues in the afternoon. But there was no chance for you to talk to your day shift colleagues about what your claims are.
This is an opportunity for management to divide the workplace. They’re trying to divide the workplace between permanents and casuals, between day shift and the afternoon, between the ones who have been here longer and the ones who have been here shorter. So one of the challenges is building a group. Like I said, the tasks are very time managed, so sometimes you don’t even have time to say hi to someone. So it’s very hard to find people interested in the union who want to do something.
So that was the first challenge, because there’s no toolbox meetings [where all workers on site can chat together before or after work or in a shared break] at these sorts of jobs. And there’s no permanent start time. From 5am to 5pm, people start every hour. They come, they grab their headset or go to their forklift and start work. So the first challenge: how are we going to build a group of workers interested in what’s happening around us, what’s happening to our conditions?
A lot of the workers here were part of the strike that happened in 2015 that you were involved in. Tell us about that.
Roughly a year before that strike happened, we had the official EA negotiation. Management wanted a claim to have labour hire [where they hire workers indirectly through a separate company to save money and undermine permanent company positions]. Somehow, we were better organised compared to the previous EA, so we knocked down the claim and management went quiet. They didn’t talk about that in the whole negotiation time.
But one thing we missed: there was an MOU [memorandum of understanding] that they can’t use labour hire. Somehow, it’s scrapped after six months, seven months I think. A few months after the EA, the distribution centre manager came to us casually and said, “I’m going to bring the labour hire”. There was shock and surprise. We didn’t want any labour hire people to come here, work with us doing the same task, not only taking some of the permanent people’s jobs, but also undermine the union site we built. Also, we didn’t want to treat them as second-class citizens.
We didn’t know what to do. There were no concrete plans. So the first small step we took: all of us came together. By this time we were lucky. We had built this small group between the shifts among all workers and we decided to wear a small pink sticker on our uniform saying “No labour hire”.
That was the first step, and it really pissed off the management. Everywhere they walked, they can see people wearing “No labour hire”. And then management tried to put more pressure. We tried to do a car park meeting. But management really intimidated the workers. Some of them were just finished at work, but management intimidated them not to go—so it wasn’t very successful. 
So then we decide no, this is not going to work. We can’t wait and ask for a proper meeting officially. Some of us decided to call a meeting on that Sunday. So out of 500, 600 people, 100+ turn up, which is a great number on a Sunday, on their own time, some of them with their family. One of the delegates starts talking to the people. He said, “We can talk about what we’re going to do, but I believe company’s not going to budge, not going to change their mind unless we picket the joint tomorrow”. Everyone put their hand up in support. That’s how we started the strike.
Obviously Woolworths didn’t see it coming. It had a huge impact. Your two demands were no labour hire and no repercussions for striking workers—and you effectively won those demands. What are some of your favourite moments?
There are a few. But the one thing I need to talk about is how we worked together. That night, after the mass meeting, we went home. Some people voluntarily rang their colleagues and they all worked together. That night, within a few hours, we decided who is going to man the gate, who is going to supply the tents, who is going to run the BBQ. Everything came from the workers—that’s the beauty of that strike.
But you ask me the favourite thing? We started the picket line on Monday 4:30am—we shut down the place. None of the workers wanted to go past their work colleagues on the picket line. Almost all joined us. But my favourite thing is next day. We all know the Australian laws about strikes, and especially about wildcat strikes. So the management went to Fair Work [Australia’s workplace court]. I don’t know what happened there. I wasn’t interested—we were more interested in organising the picket line.
It was a cold day. We had fire barrels everywhere. Management got some order from Fair Work—pretty much the commissioner asking us to go back to work. So they put that [notice of the ruling] everywhere inside. They stick these things on our union notice board without our permission. And these supervisors came out with the order to go back to work. Workers read it, laughed at it, put all [the notices] into the fire barrel. That’s my favourite moment of the whole strike.
What would your top bits of advice be for anyone going out on strike?
It is a simple one. It is always the ultimate truth. We had a big win, but I remember, some of us were hesitating that time. I remember some of us were on the fence. So it is clear: one thing you can do is withdraw your labour. Stick together. It might take a few more days. It might take a few weeks. We might lose some money. But just imagine how much money the company is going to lose. 
[Management] can take it to the Fair Work Commission, they can talk—but they can’t do the work you’re doing. They can’t pick the cartons like you’re doing. They can’t drive the truck like you’re doing. So just withdrawing labour shows them that you’re running this place.
Second, the need for an active strike. Finding ways to keep members engaged, and reaching out to other workers. That was really important for us.
A lot of people will be reading this who never worked in one of these places. Why should they support the workers on strike?
Injury to one means injury to everyone. Touch one, touch all. So you might be at the other end—the consumer buying the products from Woolies. But you need to remember we’re talking about a warehouse worker packing and picking these products for you and half of them injured their backs or they got another injury. So this is the time for you to show solidarity. That product is coming in time to your table because of what these workers are doing, not the advertisement you’ve seen on the TV. 
And these workers are standing up against this corporation, which takes the profits from fuelling the cost-of-living crisis. If the workers win against this company, it’s a message to workers everywhere that we can all win. 
So you need to show solidarity to these workers. You need to support them whenever you have a chance. If you’re in Melbourne, come here to the Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre in Leverton or go to the Dandenong warehouse. Or if you’re in Sydney, go there, show them support [<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/support-striking-woolworths-warehouse-workers-this-week-and-next">addresses here</a>]. Just <a href="https://chuffed.org/project/117264-emergency-bill-and-food-relief-while-workers-strike-for-safety-at-woolworths-warehouses">donate if you can</a>, whatever the support. Show these workers that we are with them.
You’re a socialist. What’s any of this got to do with socialism?
This is exactly what socialism is about. This is about who is running this world. This is about who is running this warehouse. I don’t have the numbers [about] how much the CEO took last year. But we all know how much these workers are taking home. Some of these people are performing 94 percent [efficiency] and [management are] not happy; they’re harassing the workers. They’re harassing you because you are an individual person. But you stick together here, they can’t harass you. That’s a tiny example of what socialism is all about: working together, collectivity, showing them who is running this world.
Finally, you’ve got a CFMEU shirt on. You’re a CFMEU delegate and you led a terrific strike where you are now at Knauf a couple of years ago. Any final reflections on that?
I’m very humble to become a health and safety rep and shop steward at Knauf plasterboard. And very proud to say in 2022 it was the same struggle. Knauf management wanted to bring labour hire, where they can use the second-class citizens. We spent 40 days [on strike]. We got great support from the CFMEU. We got great support from the socialists—Victorian Socialists were there all 40 days supporting us. We got what we wanted and we stopped labour hire there. So the struggle continues.

When workers beat Woolies last time

With each passing day, it increasingly appears as though Chris Minns has a personal vendetta against nurses and midwives. Just over a year ago, the NSW premier and his government appeared to be the light at the end of the tunnel for members of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association—many even campaigned for him, knocking on doors and handing out how-to-vote cards on election day, mobilised by his promise to introduce safe nurse-to-patient ratios and lift the Liberals’ public sector pay cap. 
Today, he is a hate figure. At strike rallies, his face is displayed on larger-than-life placards, adorned with devil horns, large red crosses and screeds and symbols some would consider inappropriate to reproduce in print. 
The association took historic industrial action on 10 September—the largest single strike day in our history. Ten and a half thousand rostered nurses and midwives walked off the job to attend an angry rally at state Parliament. This was followed by a four-week period of “intensive negotiations”, during which the association agreed to a set of recommendations put forth by the Industrial Relations Commission to suspend industrial action in exchange for an interim 3 percent pay rise. By the third week, it was clear that the government was not prepared to offer anything more. These negotiations were clearly an attempt by the government and the commission to destroy the momentum we had built. Fortunately, they failed. On 13 November, we struck again, beating our previous record: 13,000 nurses and midwives went on strike. 
The strike took place just days after an extraordinary pay-rise agreement was reached with the NSW Police. The anger in the hospitals was palpable. An increase of 22 percent to almost 40 percent for some officers, to be paid over four years and back paid to July, made the NSW Police the best paid force in Australia. Meanwhile, Minns says he can’t find the money to pay nurses and midwives in line with the rest of the country. This means more money for the officers that the government sics on Palestine solidarity and climate justice protesters, but nothing for those who care for the sick. It’s money for a male-dominated profession, but for the women in caring professions, dedication is expected to pay the rent.
Minns is digging his heels in. He complains that we are being unreasonable because he already gave us improved nurse-to-patient ratios. This is absurd. For one, safe nurse-to-patient ratios are a fantasy if the staff cannot be hired and retained to implement them—there is only one emergency department in one
hospital that has reached adequate staffing. And whose choice was it to make improvements in patient safety come out of our pockets? As one speaker at the rally put it: “Should we be pitching in for hip replacements and pacemakers?” 
As long as the government remains intransigent, we need to be on the front foot. We have the momentum, we have the public on our side (and always will), and we have thousands of union activists who are willing to put in the work to win what we deserve. It’s time to push on with more strikes, it’s time to close beds, and it’s time to cause a crisis for Minns and his increasingly unpopular government until he folds to our demands.

A NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association member

Nurses and midwives take historic strike action for a 15 percent pay rise

Like most workers, employees at Woolworths distribution warehouses watched their real wages decline while their bosses took home fat pay cheques over the last few years. But rather than shrug and accept falling living standards, they’re doing something about it.
At four sites today, hundreds set up picket lines and went on strike for a pay rise and equal pay for equal work across the distribution network. They are also fighting against a recently introduced performance management program, referred to by Woolworths as the “framework”, which is designed to monitor and evaluate the workers’ every move to increase the pace of work dramatically.
“This program utilises engineered standards to enforce a universal and highly standardised measurement of worker movement and speed”, the United Workers Union, to which many of the workers belong, <a href="https://unitedworkers.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Disciplinary-Power-in-Aust-Grocery-Warehouses-UWU.pdf">noted in a report</a> earlier this year. “Engineered standards assumes that every task of a warehouse worker can be pre-determined, categorised, and assigned a time limit. Should a worker fail to meet the designated speed of work at 100% capacity of every measured minute of their shift, they are placed on a twelve week ‘coaching’ program.”
That the company is being unreasonable is an understatement. Whatever way you look at it, Woolies has done better as its employees’ real wages have declined and as its customers have had to <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/coles-woolies-secret-pricing-deal-undercuts-inflation-claims/">pay more for groceries</a>.
Profitability, as measured by the ratio of earnings to sales, has risen by nearly one-third in recent years—from 4.7 percent in 2018 to 6.1 percent last financial year, according to the company’s annual reports. (Compare <a href="https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/content/dam/wwg/investors/reports/2018/195396_annual-report-2018.pdf">2018’s figures</a> [page 16] with <a href="https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/content/dam/wwg/investors/reports/f24/f24/Woolworths%20Group%202024%20Annual%20Report.pdf">those of 2024</a> [page 31].) The return on funds employed, another measure of profitability, has increased similarly—from 24.8 percent in 2019 to 32.2 percent more recently. And the company’s “cost of doing business”, the expenses incurred to keep its operations running, has declined.
But as the old capitalist adage goes, too much is never enough. Not for CEO Amanda Bardwell and other overpaid managers. Incentive payments for “key personnel” make up one-third or more of their total pay—and most of those incentives relate to increasing profitability and shareholder returns. Just 20 percent of short-term incentives relate to worker safety; none relate to lifting workers’ living standards or giving them a better return for the countless hours they have invested in keeping the company running.
Yet, despite being paid generously, key managers last year each could have “earned” several million dollars extra had the company increased its margins by even more than it has. Woolworths’ 2024 annual report shows that the managing director of the supermarket division, Natalie Davis, was paid $1.67 million of a possible $4.57 million. Outgoing CEO Brad Banducci was paid $3.97 million of a potential $10.9 million.
From management’s perspective, there is much room for improvement—among those they boss around, at least. Is it any wonder that distribution workers are fighting to tread water with their wages and face the imposition of this odious “framework”? Clearly, the worse it is for them, the better the managers’ pay will be. 
But this should surprise no one: workers create the company’s value. The harder they are made to work and the less they are paid, the greater the profit for the owners. That’s true of all companies, which is one reason the whole union movement should support these striking Woollies workers. If they can secure a win, then maybe others can too. The whole working class desperately needs a pay rise after the last two years of inflation­. These workers are setting an example for everyone to follow, if only our side gets organised and confident. 
Many socialists have joined the picket lines in solidarity with the Woolies workers and are helping to raise funds for and awareness of the strike. Several have sent in reports, which are published below.
Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre, Laverton North
By sunrise, Interchange Drive is a sea of hi-vis. Around 70 warehouse workers and dozens of supporters stand together over coffee and breakfast, an hour into their indefinite strike against Woolworths. 
Strike placards line the warehouse gates. Beyond them looms the gargantuan Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre (MLDC). About 500 workers are employed here to pack supplies for Woolworths. Ninety percent of these workers, as many proudly tell Red Flag, are United Workers Union members. 
There is a mood of assured defiance. Speaking to them, it is not hard to understand why. They know their conditions of work––where surveillance, intimidation and injuries are norms––must change. “It is inhuman to make us work like this”, Mitch* says. 
He has worked at MLDC for sixteen years. When he started, he did ten-hour shifts. Chronic injuries sustained on the job, made worse by ever-increasing, impossible performance standards, have left him unable to work for more than six-hour stints. And even now, it is a struggle to go back day after day. “Management want to break you”, he says.
In a typical shift starting at 6am, he has exactly eight minutes to start packing supplies. If he is late, he risks a reprimand. Each hour, he is expected to pack one pallet, which usually holds one ton of goods. He is made to carry around a device to record how long each packing step takes. 
His efficiency rate––measured by AI calculations––is constantly displayed. If he finishes his shift with an efficiency rate of less than 100 percent, the team leader will reprimand him. If it happens several times, he risks being fired—especially under the draconian new “framework” introduced by management.
“We’re not robots”, he says. Woolworths thinks otherwise. 
Kit*, who has worked at MLDC for fifteen years and can now also work for no more than six-hour shifts, has many memories of workplace injuries. “The ambulance has come here too many times”, he says.
Making warehouse work safer and more sustainable is a key reason for his decision to strike. Pay rises matter, he says, but the conditions are key. “We’re doing this for future generations of workers, so they don’t have to face what we do”, he says. 
*Names changed 
Erskine Park Distribution Centre, NSW
At what is reported to be the most efficient distribution centre in the country, 50 to 60 workers are lined up against the outer fence in camp chairs. After a breakfast barbeque organised by the union, the vibes are good as the day progresses. One worker brought a big drum, which provides some rhythm between a few trucks honking their horns in solidarity as they pass. 
“We’re fighting for our rights and for good conditions—such as no ‘framework’—and a fair pay rise”, Mohammed says. “It’s really intense [working here]. They call you up on the PA, where everyone can hear and they will call you by your pin number to come to the handout room. And yeah, it's like a Squid Game here [the South Korean survival horror/thriller Netflix series]. 
How does he feel to be out on strike?
“I’m really excited, it feels like a vacation [laughs]. Yeah, but hopefully, I have trust in the union, and we’re gonna get what we want. The whole shed is out and we still have afternoon shift coming. So it’s gonna be a good turnout.”
Another worker, Nithi, says that he has lost some of his hearing from having to wear a headset for the entire shift. Out of the earphones comes an automated voice, which tells pickers “where to go and how long [to] be at any given station”, he says.
“Also, at this shed, they only hire casuals. After you prove your performance, you can get permanency. Some people waited two years. It’s an open secret that if you claim workers’ comp you won’t get a permanent position.”
Some of the workers here are thrilled to be on strike for the first time and say they hate the company, hate the team leaders and hate the “framework”.
“We do everything; we feel unrewarded”, says one. 
“They can’t do anything without us”, says another. 
Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre , Dandenong South
The mood close to midnight is excited but reserved. Some are nervous—this is the first distribution centre to walk out. Some workers stand around and chat; others dance to 2000s hits.
One of the main things people talk about is the bosses’ surveillance and obsession with productivity targets. The workers say that managers never actually disclose to them the exact rate of packing needed to reach “100 percent efficiency”.
Automation is also topsy-turvy: people are often forced to carry heavy boxes while automated forklifts carry the light ones. This, and the constant harassment to meet KPIs, is exhausting, they say. And they are often unable to take the time to properly sanitise their stations for fear of falling behind, compounding the problem.
All are keen for a pay rise. They call the initial offer by the bosses of 3 percent plus a “sweetener” of $500 cash “insulting”.
Matthew, a student and part-time night shift worker, says he wants a pay rise in line with other warehouses in the area, some of which make up to $7 an hour more. “It’s Woolworths, you know, they can afford to be more giving”, he says with a wry smile.
“I’ve always wanted to go on strike”, he continues. “It makes me proud—96 percent of us voted to reject the company’s offer.” He sees political potential in the strike. “Labour is a gateway to more progressive ideas ... regardless of who you are, who you vote for, we all have to work, y’know?”

Woolies distribution workers strike for everyone

United Workers Union (UWU) members in six warehouses supplying Woolworths supermarkets across the eastern states are walking off the job this week. Industrial action of this scale is unprecedented in warehousing. The UWU has led many strikes in individual warehouses across Australia, but never this many at the same time.
The workers are striking for better wages and conditions, and for Woolworths warehouses to be covered under a single enterprise agreement. They also want to get rid of the company’s “productivity framework”, which requires all workers to meet 100 percent of targets unilaterally set by management or face harassment, discipline and, eventually, dismissal.
Warehouse work is difficult and repetitive. Each worker is expected to pick hundreds or even thousands of boxes a day to be stacked on pallets, loaded onto trucks and sent to store shelves across the state. The weight of items varies widely, from packets of chips to slabs of beer and crates of milk weighing up to 20 kilograms each. This repetitive, endless lifting and shifting of often heavy loads significantly strains the body and mind. Forklifts, loaders and other heavy machinery wizz around these pickers at ever higher rates to keep up with productivity targets. 
The workers in these warehouses experience constant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn7GtoiiLNM">surveillance and performance monitoring</a>. They are told by a computer exactly what to do at all times. They are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse">treated like robots</a>. And there is evidence that the drive towards automation may be making things more difficult, rather than easier. According to Amazon’s <a href="https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-crisis/">internal safety reports</a>, the rates of serious workplace injuries are 50 percent higher in warehouses with robots than in those without.
Finding reliable statistics on workplace injuries in warehouses is difficult, as pickers and packers are usually lumped in with truck drivers and other labourers. However, the broader statistics paint a damning picture of the industry as a whole. According to the <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/work-related-injuries/latest-release#occupation-and-industry">Australian Bureau of Statistics</a>, the transport, postal and warehousing industry suffers from the third highest workplace injury rate in the country. <a href="https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-stats-2023">Safe Work Australia</a> has found that roughly 80 percent of workplace injuries are caused by body stress: falls, slips and trips; being hit by moving objects; and mental stress. These incidents are endemic to warehouse environments and will likely only worsen under Woolworths’ drive for even higher productivity.
But it gets worse. <a href="https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-stats-2023">Safe Work Australia</a> has also found that the transport, postal and warehouse industry has the highest number of fatalities of any industry, and the second highest fatality rate. Machine operators and labourers perform the deadliest types of work. 
These statistics were <a href="https://7news.com.au/news/nsw/woolworths-worker-killed-in-horrific-pallet-accident-remembered-as-beautiful-man-c-11173079">tragically brought home</a> in 2023 when Basel “Baz” Brikha was crushed by falling pallets in the Woolworths distribution centre in Minchinbury, NSW. Basel later died in hospital. Two of his workmates suffered head injuries when they tried to help him.
These workplace tragedies result from Woolworths’ endless drive for higher profits. The company squeezes workers at one end by increasing productivity at the expense of safety, and it squeezes consumers at the other by price-gouging in the supermarkets. 
From the perspective of Woolworths investors, the strategy has worked marvellously. <a href="https://thedailyaus.com.au/stories/woolworths-group-reported-a-1-7-billion-profit-for-the-financial-year/#:~:text=The%20Woolworths%20Group%20has%20reported,0.6%25%20from%20the%20previous%20year.">The company reported</a> $1.7 billion in profits last financial year. The four leading Woolworths executives pocketed more than $8.8 million in pay, which was down on their “earnings” of $18 million the <a href="https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/content/dam/wwg/investors/reports/2023/f23-full-year/Woolworths%20Group%202023%20Annual%20Report.pdf">year before</a>. 
No doubt Woolworths’ Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre workers, who earn roughly $66,000 per year if they work 38 hours per week, will be deeply concerned about how these executives will make ends meet after this pay cut. 
Corporate greed is driving the cost-of-living crisis in Australia. Since the COVID crisis, one of the greatest transfers of wealth to the capitalist class in history has taken place. The richest 1 percent now owns half of the world’s wealth. Our side, the working class, needs to start fighting back.
That is precisely why strikes—like those beginning in Woolworths warehouses this week—are so important. Previous strikes have demonstrated the considerable industrial power of these workers. 
The just-in-time revolution has turned warehouses into gigantic logistics factories employing hundreds. All the goods that reach the hundreds of Woolworths supermarkets in each state pass through only a handful of warehouses, and little excess stock is held in the supermarkets. Deliveries from the warehouses arrive daily and go straight to store shelves. This means warehouse strikes can be incredibly disruptive. Store shelves begin to empty within a day or two, or even hours, of work stoppages.
These workers deserve the support of the entire union movement. Come to one of the picket lines in Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane. Bring your workmates, your classmates, your friends and family. Pass motions of support in your union and pass the hat around to raise money for the strike fund or to buy food to bring down to the pickets. 
Let’s show solidarity with these workers as they stick it to a corporate goliath.
--------------------
Workers at the following warehouses will be striking from Thursday morning this week:
From 12am Thursday morning:
Woolworths Melbourne South Regional Distribution Centre (MSRDC), 2 Portlink Dr, Dandenong South VIC.
From 5am Thursday morning:
Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre (MLDC), 1 Interchange Dr, Laverton North VIC.
Logic Wodonga, 28 Bilston Dr, Barnawartha North VIC.
Woolworths Distribution Centre, 29 Sarah Andrews Cl, Erskine Park NSW.
From 2am Friday morning:
Lineage Cold Storage, 60-68 William Angliss Drive Laverton North VIC - from 2am Friday.
In addition, Primary Connect in Heathwood QLD, another distribution centre supplying Woolworths, will be holding stop-work mass meetings from this Friday to discuss industrial action.

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When workers beat Woolies last time

Nurses and midwives take historic strike action for a 15 percent pay rise

Woolies distribution workers strike for everyone

Support striking Woolworths warehouse workers this week (and next)

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