Down, down, tools are down at Coles warehouse strike

It’s a David vs. Goliath battle. On one side, the Coles supermarket chain, one of the giants of corporate Australia, with profits of $1.78 billion last year. On the other, the nearly 700 workers at the Polar Fresh warehouse in the western suburbs of Melbourne, who walked out on indefinite strike yesterday morning demanding better pay, conditions and job security.

The strike began in the early hours as nightshift workers prevented stock being unloaded from the warehouse. By 6am, they’d been joined on the picket line by hundreds more workers from the day and afternoon shifts.

It was a typical Melbourne winter morning – wet, windy and bone-chillingly cold. But the mood among the strikers was fiery determination.

“The workers united will never be defeated!” The familiar chant rang out as a contingent of workers arrived from Carlton United Breweries, who are involved in their own dispute. What’s the connection between their respective struggles? One CUB worker commented simply: “We’re all fighting this battle against the big corporations”.

As daylight broke, the mood became more festive. Music blasted from a portable stereo. Sausages sizzled on the BBQ. An impromptu game of touch rugby started up. The workers know they could be in for a long fight, and they’ve prepared well to keep their spirits up on the picket line.

At the first mass meeting of the strike, 300 workers gathered to get an update on the morning’s events and plans for the rest of the day. The warehouse had been completely shut down. Groups of workers had been sent off to other nearby warehouses that Coles was rumoured to be using as back-up.

Curtly, a delegate with the National Union of Workers (NUW), summed up the feeling among many of the strikers: “If we don’t fight now, we’ll always live on our knees … we just want to be treated fairly, with dignity and respect”.

According to another worker, the strike had been brewing for some time: “People will only take so much for so long. Polar Fresh employees have had enough … they’ve got record profits coming out of this place, but they’re only willing to offer us somewhere around 63 cents”. The workers, he said, will fight it to the end.

Polar Fresh is part of Coles’ outsourced distribution network. It was established in 2004 as a joint venture between the companies Costa and Swire – both notorious for their anti-union management. The Melbourne warehouse was set up as a so-called “greenfields site” under the Howard government’s WorkChoices laws, with wages and conditions significantly below other distribution centres.

The workers and their union, the NUW, are demanding an immediate increase in the base pay rate from $27 to $30 an hour. Like many other workers across Australia, they’re also sick of their job security being undermined by the increasing use of labour hire and casuals.

In conversations on the picket, it was a recurring theme. Casualisation, said one, is “like slavery, but financial slavery”. One casual worker, Lacy, said that the lack of hours over Christmas meant she couldn’t afford to have a real holiday with her family.

Curtly explained: “The luxuries of life, like taking your family to the movies … are things that employees aren’t able to do, because they have no sense of security, they wake up in the morning unsure if they’ve got a shift”.

Added to this is the immense pressure on labour hire and casuals not to stand up and fight for their rights. In the lead up to the strike, Polar Fresh management pulled individuals into meetings to try to scare them out of it. They told them they’d be loading buses with scabs that would be brought onto the site with a police escort. Casual workers were told that if they didn’t get on these buses, they’d be sacked.

The bullying only made the workers more determined to fight. Lacy reported a discussion she’d had with other casuals, who were worried that joining the strike would mean losing their job. She told them: “If you don’t get walked back in the gates, we stay out here, and we stay out here until you guys have walked back, and that’s a promise we’ll keep”.

The situation at Polar Fresh is typical of workplaces across Australia. A committed workforce that keeps the place running 24/7, delivering 1.4 million cartons of fresh produce and chilled goods a week to 216 Coles stores across Victoria and Tasmania. It’s the kind of largely unseen work that keeps society running, day in, day out, every day of the year.

This work helps generate billions in profits for the bosses. Coles’ profit is up more than 50 percent since 2011. Its new CEO, Ian Durkan, enjoyed a salary of $4.5 million in his first year on the job. Yet when the workers who make all this possible put their hand up for a small increase in their share, they’re hounded, denigrated, and threatened.

There’s a class war going on, and at the moment, the bosses are winning. Wage growth has stalled. Decent, secure employment is harder and harder to come by. Increasing numbers are losing hope of ever owning their own home. The healthcare, education and social services we depend on are being cut. Meanwhile, the richest few have never had it better.

That’s why the strike at Polar Fresh is a strike for all of us. These workers have made a stand. If they win, it will be a source of hope and inspiration for workers everywhere.

But it won’t come without a fight. “They’ve got legal advisors, accountants and all that”, said Curtly. “We understand that … big business, they have money. Us, as unionists, we have people. Our power lies in the people.”

The bosses will throw everything at this strike. The workers need all the support they can get.

Picket visits are welcome. The address is 18/12-18 Distribution Drive, Truganina, near the intersection of Boundary and Mt. Derrimut Road. Donations of food – fresh meat or produce, home cooked meals or pizza deliveries – are appreciated. And you can also donate to the strike fund here: chuffed.org/project/support-coles-workers.