BY BOB AIKEN AND MARNIE KENNEDY

SYDNEY, Australia - Seventy-seven workers at CRA's Comalco bauxite mine in the far north of Queensland struck the company March 27 to press their fight for union recognition.

In the course of a seven-week strike late last year the members of four unions combined in the Weipa Industrial Site Committee won active support from tens of thousands of working people across Australia, including national solidarity strikes by the coal and maritime unions.

CRA, one of the largest corporations in Australia, has been on a union-busting drive over several years, signing up an estimated 11,000 of its 16,000-person workforce to individual, nonunion, contracts with the lure of large pay raises. Workers who refuse to sign these contracts at sites where they have been offered have remained on lower pay, and face ongoing company harassment.

A small minority of the workforce at Weipa is fighting for the right to union representation and for wage parity with workers on individual contracts. It is the most significant resistance to CRA's offensive so far.

"When we went out on strike on October 13 we didn't think it'd explode the way it did," Richie Ahmat, president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) lodge at Weipa, explained at a union reception in Sydney, February 21. After "two years of intimidation, discrimination and harassment by the company, we thought, `This is the bottom line!' That's when we stopped and went out indefinitely."

"The fight against CRA has just begun. It's not finished by a long shot," Ahmat said, but the strike had dealt a blow to "CRA's long-range strategic plan."

The mine workers at Weipa ended their strike November 29, following a return-to-work order eight days earlier by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC), which included an 8 percent pay raise backdated to March 1994.

On January 23, the AIRC handed down an interim order ruling that Comalco must "extend the terms and conditions available to staff" to the award employees. Awards are union- negotiated contracts. The decision also stipulated that, to gain wage parity, award workers must "work in accordance with all the requirements of the staff contracts."

A Sydney Morning Herald editorial January 24 described this as "a sting in the tail of the decision." These requirements include management-determined work hours, pay rates set through a Personal Effectiveness Review (PER) system, and no overtime rates.

Laws brought in by the Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating opened the way for the bosses to replace collective bargaining arrangements with individual contracts. The Liberal/National coalition government of John Howard elected March 2 has pledged to help the bosses deepen this process.

The AIRC ruling directed CRA to negotiate a new award with the unions based on its ruling, which would apply to all workers at the mine.

Two unionists from Weipa, Lloyd Roots, a fitter, and Rob Grinstead, a crane driver, gave an interview to the Militant at the February 21 reception about the strike.

"Everyone understands that technically we have a victory" with the January 23 ruling, Roots stated, "but nothing's changed. We're still getting intimidated, we haven't got the money, we haven't got the conditions yet. There's still a fight."

In the negotiations that have taken place since the AIRC decision, CRA has stalled on every issue, Grinstead said, and is also disputing the ruling that pay raises should be backdated to when staff contracts were introduced two years ago.

Beginning October 26, during the strike last year, "floating picket lines" were set up on Weipa harbor aimed at preventing pilot vessels and tugboats from escorting the huge bauxite carriers into dock. On two occasions bulk carriers were forced to do a U-turn on the harbor by the strikers' flotilla of dinghies.

Within a week, four bulk carriers were banked up outside the harbor and, with the support of members of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) on the bulk carriers and on the Weipa wharves, the pickets had successfully prevented the loading of A$6 million worth of ore.

Grinstead laughed as he described how the strikers responded to the company filming them with video cameras, threatening to use the scenes as evidence against them. "We were waving" back at them, he said, "saying, `My name's Robert Phillip Hillary Grinstead, this is my boat and I'm about to attack that tugboat.' We just didn't care no more...enough's enough!"

"There's no nicer feeling than to be able to just flaunt your nose at a company like that" Grinstead said, "especially after they have just pushed you into a corner."

"They tried to scare us," Roots noted, "and I really think that if we hadn't been intimidated for so long, if people weren't so angry, and if they had done it earlier, the company might've succeeded."

The company won an AIRC ruling November 10 allowing it to begin legal proceedings against 48 strikers and their unions for losses during the walkout. The same day CRA won an injunction in the Queensland Supreme Court to stop the harbor blockade, which the strikers ignored. Roots recalled the days before legal writs were served on the strikers saying, "The company was having meetings with [contract] staff [to say] that the strikers would be back at work in a day or two and should be `treated with respect even though they were defeated'!"

Queensland Police reinforcements had arrived in Weipa by the second week of the strike and six arrests took place. CRA also brought private security guards in and spread rumors that the strikers planned sabotage. Union supporters still working at the mine kept the strikers informed of the company's misinformation campaign.

"I think they were about to show what they could do to the union movement, how they could crush it at will." Grinstead said.

In a phone interview April 3 Roots said that in the first few days of the new strike the union members have reestablished their strike headquarters camp at Picket Point but had not resumed their floating picket line. Negotiations had taken place with the company, he stated, and Comalco had backed down from demanding that the union members sign individual contracts, or individually sign their acceptance of the company's working conditions. However, the strikers were not satisfied that the right to union representation had been guaranteed, he said.

MUA members who crew the giant bauxite carriers have been attending the strikers' daily meeting while they were in port, Roots said. With calls of support coming from many unions around the country, "The solidarity is still there."

Bob Aiken is a member of the AWU-FIME union and Marnie Kennedy is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union in Sydney.  
 
 
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