Boeing Australia does major services and modifications on the RAAF’s 71 FA-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, most of which are based in Williamtown. Australian FA-18s were deployed in Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion.

Since the Air Force contracted out this work to Boeing four and a half years ago, the technicians there have been working under individual contracts, with wide differences in pay within the workshop, and lower pay and conditions than other aviation tradespeople, pickets said.

This is “the first picket line that I know of outside a military base in Australia,” Adam Burgoyne told Militant reporters during a picket line visit August 14. This has to do with the fact that over the past decade the military has shifted to contracting out. Burgoyne was an aviation engineer in the Royal Australian Navy for eight years before starting, as a civilian, at Williamtown when Boeing won the Hornet servicing contract.

About half of the workshop is on strike, said Ben Swan, a national industrial officer with the Australian Workers’ Union. The strike is effective. With Boeing struggling to keep up with the contract even before the strike, “they’re hurting,” he said.

In response to their picketing, the number of replacement workers Boeing had brought in from its workshop at the Amberley RAAF base near Brisbane has dwindled from 23 to 8, Burgoyne said.

With the federal Liberal-National Coalition government preparing new antiunion laws to further weaken collective bargaining, the leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party, Kim Beazley, has joined the “national unity” chorus in accusing the bosses of undermining the safety of “frontline fighters” by refusing to negotiate a union contract with the Hornet maintenance workers. AWU national secretary Bill Shorten said, “The government should not let its antiunion bias for individual contracts damage our national security.”

In response, Prime Minister John Howard has declared his government’s support for Boeing, saying that “what the company is doing is entirely lawful and entirely within its rights.”  
 
 
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