A big majority of the strikers, who are members of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), are immigrant women from countries in Asia and the Pacific. Low wages and an atmosphere of intimidation by the bosses in the factory are key issues in the strike. The company also wants to take back a condition, won in 1993, in which the normal 38-hour week is worked Monday through Thursday, with any Friday work paid at overtime rates. The workers at the plant have never had an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (contract). They work instead to the industry-wide Award, which sets out a range of minimum wages and conditions, negotiated by unions and employer associations in the Industrial Relations Commission. The company wants to impose a nonunion Australian Workplace Agreement.

“They show [us] no respect,” Sarita Singh said, describing conditions in the plant before the strike. Another striker, Marina Pomare, said there was a “big speed-up over the last year or so.” For instance, there is only one setter across three lines instead of one setter on each line, and one woman palletizing at the end of the drum line where previously there had been two. Pomare, who works on the line making 20-liter (roughly five-gallon) cans, said, “We get $12.50 an hour [$1A = $0.60U.S.], but we make seven pallets of cans an hour, 80 cans a pallet, and the company gets $20 a can.”

The company has hired scabs through a labor hire agency, Frontline, Bridge said, and about 20 Morris McMahon workers have crossed the picket line since the beginning of the strike. The big majority of drivers coming to the plant, however, were honoring the picket line, he stated, and a Transport Workers Union sign and flag features prominently on the picket line.

Police escort one or two trucks and strikebreakers on a boarded-up bus through the picket line each morning into the plant and each afternoon as they come out. The pickets give the scabs a rowdy “welcome,” including banging loudly on several drums—a din that has become a signature of the strike.

The strikers have been reaching out for support. They are traveling to Moss Vale in the coal fields south of Sydney to meet workers at Joy—a mine machinery plant struck by the AMWU for several months in mid-2000. Workers at Joy are been making regular contributions to the Morris MacMahon strike fund. Support for the strike has also come from AMWU members at HPM, veterans of a strike to win equal pay for women at that plant. A large contingent of construction workers from a nearby building site came down to the picket line during their lunch break May 9.

A layer of dockworkers in the Maritime Union of Australia have also become strong supporters of the strike, with wharfies visiting the picket line in ones and twos, and in groups, on a number of occasions. A contingent of 13 MUA members strengthened the picket line May 8. Amidst chants of “the workers united will never be defeated,” a sit-down protest that day held up a scab truck for about 30 minutes before the cops cleared a way through.

Two wharfies were arrested when the MUA members joined the picket line May 12. The cops released them about half a mile from the plant after holding them in a police van for half an hour.

A widening layer of wharfies are discussing how to bring their union more solidly behind the strike. The Morris MacMahon strikers were invited to send a representative to speak at a union “yard meeting” at the Patrick terminal May 19, as part of building a union mobilization at the picket line May 22.

Doug Cooper and Ron Poulsen, members of the Maritime Union of Australia, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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