Individual contracts
The choice is ... no choice

by Tom Pearson

Around 65 workers producing air conditioners and heaters at a plant in the 
southern Sydney suburb of Kingsgrove have effectively been gagged and bound 
after being forced onto individual contracts (Australian Workplace 
Agreements — AWAs). The contracts contain far inferior wages, conditions 
and benefits than under the workers' former situation, and none dare speak 
out for fear of losing their job. Under the contracts their job status has 
gone from permanent to casual.

The foisting of the AWAs onto the workers at the F Muller plant was 
achieved in a sly and underhanded tactic that sets a precedent for 
employers to squeeze out the union and force lower wages and conditions 
onto their workforce.

At the same time it has demonstrated how employers can exclude any militant 
workers using deceit and invasion of privacy.

F Muller was owned by Email, the company which recently announced that it 
is going to close its Sydney whitegoods site in the suburb of Meadowbank 
and throw that plant's 474 employees out of work.

The F Muller operations were put up for sale in their entirety late last 
year.

When no satisfactory offer was forthcoming Email split the operations in 
two, firstly selling one half to air conditioning manufacturers Kirbys.

The other half, which produces car heaters and air conditioners, was bought 
by US corporation Tripac International. The sale included F Muller's 
production contracts with Ford and Holden.

But they didn't tell the workers about the Tripac takeover, maintaining 
that the intention was to close down the automotive section altogether.

They announced the closure just weeks before Christmas last year and paid 
the workers their redundancy entitlements. The Australian Manufacturing 
Workers' Union (AMWU) had got wind that Email had sold the plant but the 
company continued to deny it.

Then, one week before Christmas most of the former F Muller employees 
received a letter from body hire company E L Blue inviting them to "join a 
new and exciting workforce" at the very same F Muller site.

The union took Email to the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) but the 
company kept on ducking the question of the sale, claiming that they had 
only hired E L Blue to find the redundant workers new jobs.

In fact Email had commissioned the body hire firm to negotiate AWAs with 
the workers, and signing the contracts was a condition of being employed.

A further "incentive" to sign was that rejection of the contract meant that 
they would not receive unemployment benefits because they had actually been 
offered a job. The choice was no choice at all.

The IRC rejected the union's claim that the workers should be employed 
under their former conditions.

The contracts are a boon for new owner Tripac, with workers now having no 
maternity leave, sick leave, holiday pay or overtime pay. They now earn $80 
less a week.

The picking and choosing of those to be re-employed was made easier by the 
handing over the personal files of all the employees to E L Blue.

The union took this incident to the NSW Privacy Commissioner, claiming a 
breach of the workers' privacy. Email denied handing the files over, and 
claimed not to know how they came to be in the hands of E L Blue. No action 
was taken by the Privacy Commissioner.

The union is currently arguing a case in the State's Department of Fair 
Trading that the whole process breaches fair trading laws. Tripac is now 
supplementing its workforce with casual, non-union labour, such as 
backpacker tourists.

"People are frightened to talk to us when we go there", AMWU organiser, 
Harry Delaney, told The Guardian. "With the new employer they've got 
hardly any entitlements, and they're not building up any entitlements.

"What we're saying to the workers is that it's not going to get any better 
until they agree to meet with us somewhere and get united. But that's not 
easy." The union has access to the site during the lunch break.

"One thing that concerns us is that this is a new model where you close 
down, pay the workers out, re-hire them all on individual contracts, slash 
their conditions and take their on-the-job democracy away from them", said 
Mr Delaney.

"If anyone dared put their hand up to be a shop steward there at the 
moment, they suddenly wouldn't be needed. They'd be sent off somewhere 
else. They'd say, `we haven't sacked him, we've offered him a job in the 
Blue Mountains'. That's the difficulty; it's a new model that others can 
run off."