BY RON POULSEN
SYDNEY, Australia - At a mass meeting July 20, some 400
paperworkers, most of them members of the printing division of
the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, voted to return
to work after winning an important victory through a two-week
strike.
The dispute over attacks on union rights and working conditions began July 7 at two Visy Industries cardboard plants in western Sydney. The strike began to win wider union support after media reports of cops physically battling picketers. The pickets were trying to stop strikebreaking trucks and buses of scabs under police escort from entering the struck sites. A picket line meeting of strikers from both sites July 19 voted unanimously to defy an Industrial Relations Commission return-to-work order until the company lifted the suspension of eight workers and dismissal notices against three others. More than half of the workers targeted over alleged "misconduct" on the picket lines were union delegates.
The termination notices, complete with final payments, were sent out less than a week after Visy Board New South Wales manager Andrew Gleason claimed in the press that "nobody has been sacked" and everybody was welcome back to work.
In the face of the workers' determination and unity, the company was forced to back down, lifting all final warnings and dropping the eight original suspensions. The three sacked workers were also reinstated, albeit at different plants, after two weeks' paid leave, with the right to return to their original positions after six months.
Brian Henderson, secretary of the printing division of the AMWU, told the meeting that while "the dispute" was resolved, it was back to negotiations over the enterprise agreement or contract.
The strike erupted when enterprise agreement negotiations broke down. Workers replied to company intransigence by first imposing work restrictions. The workers then voted to strike when the company stood down (suspended) two forklift drivers for refusing to handle flat board boxes and two other employees for wanting union representation over the issue.
They set up round-the-clock picket lines at the main entrances to the plants at Smithfield and Warwick Farm, complete with picket shacks.
`The unity is fantastic'
"This is the biggest strike in the history of Visy Board,"
Mick Milutinovic, who has worked at Visy altogether for over
10 years, told this reporter in a picket line interview.
"There have been disputes before, but nothing like this. The
unity is fantastic." Strikers often mentioned that this was
the first time workers from the two sites, 20 minutes drive
apart, had walked out together.
The striking workers also included forklift drivers covered by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and some electricians in the Electrical Trades Union. Ho Chew, a 13-year veteran who works in the mill, said he thought "the company is trying to break the backbone of the union."
One issue in the enterprise agreement negotiations was the introduction of a third shift with the subsequent loss of overtime payments. "We don't object to another shift," Milutinovic said, "but we should be compensated" for the reduction in pay. The unions are calling for a pay raise of up to 16 percent over two years to make up for lost income.
Milutinovic was one of the 48 workers listed on a Supreme Court order, secured by the company a week after the strike began, to refrain "from hindering or preventing access" to the plants or "assaulting or threatening to assault" anyone.
"This is worse than where I came from" in Yugoslavia, declared Milutinovic. "I went to anti-NATO demonstrations here without harassment [earlier this year], but here on the picket line, I get a court injunction against me."
Strikers face guards, cops, courts
Visy Industries' billionaire owner, Richard Pratt, dubbed
"Australia's cardboard king" by the big-business press, threw
considerable resources against the strike, even using
helicopters to bring in the strikebreakers. Private security
guards, the New South Wales police, and both the Industrial
Relations Commission and Supreme Court were all enlisted to
back Visy's strikebreaking attempts.
More than one picket, however, asserted the picket lines were effective. While normally 140 to 150 trucks a day went in and out fully laden, they said, this was reduced during the dispute to 10 or so full truckloads, with other truck movements largely for "psychological effect." At the Warwick Farm picket line, the unionists were joined by a number of owner-drivers under contract to Visy, who had walked out in support of the strikers. As a result, the company tried to impound their trucks. The picket lines also turned away numerous delivery trucks after negotiations with the drivers.
Several strikers explained how many workers had been intimidated by the company for years into working shifts of up to 14 hours with only one 15-minute meal break. They were "basically forced to eat while working on the machine," said Milutinovic. "They didn't realize they were entitled to paid meal breaks" until the new union organizer told them.
Wayne Peacock backed this up, explaining that "workers here don't matter to them any more than the way they treat the Third World countries." The fight at Visy "is bigger than the people here on strike," he said, it's for "the whole union movement."
Bob Vucicevic, senior delegate and one of the three workers who received termination notices, said that because of speedups and understaffing, there had been as many serious accidents in the past six months as in the previous 10 years. Greg Murray added that the machines were "understaffed by design" and that "health and safety is a fundamental issue" in the EBA negotiations. He and other workers spoke of the most recent serious accident where more than 600 pounds of hot paper was dropped onto a worker on the floor below, badly injuring him. Injuries involving limbs caught in presses are common, they said.
The strike received support from other unionists and students. When a forklift driver, who is the afternoon shift union delegate at the Hoover plant in Sydney, refused to unload a truck with scab cardboard packaging from Visy, the company threatened to sack him. When faced with support for his action by other workers on the shift however, the company backed down and ordered packaging from a rival supplier to Visy.
On July 13 two busloads of students and supporters chanting "workers and students will never be defeated" swelled the morning picket line to more than 200 people to forestall the cops' picket-line breaching. When the student buses left, however, the cops blocked pickets' cars and sent the scab convoy in through another gate.
This reporter was on the picket line of the Mountain Maid cannery workers at Batlow, July 9, when someone read from a newspaper quoting Visy NSW manager Gleason, who had denounced picketing as "un-Australian." Immediately, an older, Australian-born worker responded, "We should fax them a letter of support from fellow foreigners down here!" to a round of applause. The next week, a copy of the message of support from the Batlow strikers was on a picket shack notice board at the Visy Smithfield plant. "From fellow un-Australian picketers," it read, followed by a dozen signatures.
"We've won it!" was the enthusiastic response of Ricky Caruana, a worker for 10 years at Visy Board, after the final vote to return to work. Inspired by the unity shown by workers of many different national backgrounds - from eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and many parts of Asia and the Pacific - he explained, "We all stood together for this." Earlier a line of pickets had jubilantly emulated a Maori worker who did a haka, a traditional war dance.
The result of the strike was best expressed by one picket's comment, echoed by others, "Before, the bosses used to terrorize most workers, now they are afraid of us."
Ron Poulsen is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia.