BY BOB AIKEN
SYDNEY, Australia - A fight by bauxite miners against union busting in Weipa has won wide support in the labor movement here, including a nationwide solidarity strike by 20,000 miners. Five pickets were arrested November 24 as some 75 strikers continue their floating blockade of Weipa port, using small boats to disrupt the shipping of bauxite, in defiance of a November 21 federal government back-to- work order.
The miners walked out October 13, demanding wage parity with the majority of the workforce, who are now on individual contracts, and the right to collective bargaining. The blockade began soon after the walkout.
Weipa, in far north Queensland, is a company town of 2,500 dominated by the Comalco bauxite mine. Workers have been resisting a union-busting drive for the last two years by CRA Ltd., Comalco's parent company and the fourth largest corporation in Australia. Four unions are directly involved, with most of the strikers recently having voted to belong to the United Mineworkers Division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).
The Weipa strike escalated into the most significant confrontation between the bosses and unions here in recent years, following a November 10 injunction granted to CRA by the Queensland Supreme Court to stop the blockade.
CRA moved to serve writs for civil damages totaling millions of dollars on 49 strikers and 3 unions. In response, CFMEU-organized coal miners in Queensland and New South Wales led the way, shutting down all CRA coal mines November 11 for 48 hours and again November 15-16. Some 20,000 coal miners shut down the entire industry November 20-22, as part of a planned seven-day national strike, which cost the coal bosses some $A26 million ($US19 million) per day in lost production.
Maritime Union of Australia members shut down most main ports November 16-19, stalling 120 ships and delaying 5.4 million metric tons of cargo. Among other actions that took place was a picket line of up to 150 workers that shut Comalco's Boyne Island aluminum smelter near Gladstone, Queensland, November 21.
"We're seeing the emergence of a form of militancy which we've been free of for a long time," complained Ian Salmon, the president of the Business Council of Australia, November 19.
CRA's anti-union drive at Weipa, according to John Maitland, president of the miners union, has "happened with the current Industrial Relations Act," brought in by the Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating. The law permits non-union individual contracts.
When Keating's attempt at a directly brokered settlement fell through, Justice Deidre O'Connor, president of the Industrial Relations Commission, called a compulsory conference of Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) officials and CRA executives November 18, where it was agreed to put the strike to binding arbitration. About 200 supporters of the Weipa strikers rallied outside the commission's offices and packed the hearing two days later.
The full bench of the commission ruled November 21 that all employees at the Weipa mine who were not on individual contracts would get an 8 percent wage rise backdated to March 1994, with applications for further increases by individual workers to be heard beginning the next day. O'Connor ordered all industrial action to cease immediately, which the ACTU agreed to in exchange for the pay rise and CRA agreeing to drop its suit for damages against the strikers.
Union members at Weipa, while welcoming the 8 percent raise, resolved to continue their fight to win equal pay with the contract workers at the mine. The strikers at the Weipa mine are a minority of the workforce. A total of 635 workers are now on individual contracts. Some have maintained their union membership and strikers say they have received financial support from some.
At Weipa, CRA has offered wage rises estimated at between $A7,000 and $A20,000 a year as an inducement to switch to the "staff" contracts, which place most conditions - from work hours to sick pay - at the discretion of the bosses and deny workers their right to strike or be represented by the union. All new hires are forced to take the nonunion contracts.
Striker Carla Borgfeldt, a plant operator at the mine for three years, told the Australian that her bosses had pressed her to sign a staff contract saying "the company would be fighting any pay rise that involved the union." Simon Keuther, a striking electrician, told the Sydney Morning Herald he disagreed with the individual contract offered by the company because "it gives the boss power over everything and it's wide open to abuse."
"There has been a positive response" to the strike from people in the town, according to Bob Richardson, an ACTU industrial officer who spoke to the Militant from Weipa. "People have been giving money, food, helping in things like that," he said.
Strong support has come from the nearby aboriginal community of Napranum. Some 300 Aborigines signed a petition in support of the strike and they have allowed strikers to use Bicentennial Park, on aboriginal land, which has been renamed Picket Point. CRA's contempt for workers' rights is seen by many Aborigines as no different from the company's treatment of them since mining began in the early 1960s.
Solidarity has come from other quarters as well. Nigel Gould, secretary of the CFMEU lodge at Weipa, responded to a letter of support received by the strikers from the Bougainville Freedom Movement in Erskineville. He wrote back November 23, "Some of our managers are ex- Bougainville. Our experiences with some of them have given us some inkling of the way they would have behaved in a situation where CRA's repressive philosophies could be implemented away from scrutiny." CRA's copper and gold mine at Panguna in Bougainville, one of the world's largest, was closed in 1989 by an armed rebellion of traditional landholders who had protested its presence from its inception in 1969. It remains closed.
Bob Aiken is a member of the AWU-FIME union at the Capral Aluminium mill in Sydney. Doug Cooper, a member of the same union, contributed to this article.