13 December, 2010
Members of ICEM affiliate Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), in dispute with management of Visy Pulp and Paper now for two weeks, resorted to peaceful civil disobedience early today at one company facility. Thirty strikers staged a sit-down across the entry to Visy’s Dandenong recycled containerboard mill near Melbourne.
They were arrested and charged with undue obstruction and besetting a work premise.
Some 500 AMWU members took a 24-hour industrial action on 29 November over Visy’s foot-dragging in reaching a new enterprise agreement. On 3 December, that action became an open-ended strike when 370 paperworkers at two mills, Dandenong in Victoria state and Visy’s Smithfield mill in New South Wales, walked out.
Central among issues in talks has been Visy’s insistence to vastly increase the number of casual workers employed in its mills, converters, and recovered paper worksites. In deliberate moves to frustrate the bargaining process, Visy seeks to create a whole new casual classification rate of A$15-per-hour, less than the current casual rate and about half what full-time workers earn.
The AMWU is seeking a 5% wage increase for each of three years, improvement to the wage base for casuals, and a heat policy for work during the current hot summer months. In a provocative move, the company approved a 15% wage increase to workers over three years in its non-union operations.
The AMWU has been fruitlessly negotiated with Visy for three months and a prior enterprise labour agreement expired 30 September. “We have tried to engage and negotiate with Visy, (but) they have closed the door on the negotiations,” said AMWU National Print Division Secretary Lorraine Cassin.
The company has “tried everything in (its) power to whittle down the job security of our members and introduce a cheaper casual workforce across the country,” she added. Besides the Dandenong and Smithfield mills, the union’s 24-hour stop-work actions occurred at converting and recycling centres in Carole Park, Queensland, and O’Connor, West Australia.
Visy did succeed in gaining a court injunction banning union officials from participating on picket lines. But that did not prevent paperworkers employed at Dandenong from lifting the strike to another level. Today’s peaceful sit-down strike is evidence of union frustration against a company fiercely bent on trying to avoid enterprise collective agreements.