Many Kiwis see Australia as a land of high wages and great opportunities. But as the Australian economy has slowed down, workers there have had to struggle to maintain their relatively good terms and conditions, even in well-unionised industries. Employers have put up increased resistance over the renewal of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBAs), the main form of collective agreements in Australia.

To get a result, workers took a 21-day strike at Laing O’Rourke, 18 days at Thiess, and two weeks at Lend Lease. In response to the strong resistance from employers there has been a lot of worker determination to secure agreements, particularly ones which include a subcontractor clause and job security benefits.

In early October, construction workers won an eight-week strike at Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. Early in the dispute, union officials had been served with injunctions by Abigroup (part of Lend Lease), and prevented from accessing the site, so they called in Bob Carnegie, a community organiser and a former Builders Labourers Federation stalwart. The strikers had to work around the anti-union laws and build new forms of organisational support for their struggle. [Read more…]

“I’m getting too old to work lots of hours a night, I’ve been working all my life with a low wage and I can’t afford anything.” Those were the worlds of Jaine Ikurere, 63 years old, she works two jobs to make ends meet, and one of those jobs is cleaning offices in parliament. She is paid just $14.60 an hour, and that’s as a supervisor, most of her colleagues are paid just $13.85, just 35 cents above the minimum wage.

One of the offices she cleans belongs to John Key, the wealthiest member of parliament with a net worth of over $50 million. The union that represents the cleaners, the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU) is campaigning to have parliaments cleaners paid a minimum of $15 an hour. With a pay rise Jaine Ikurere would quit her second job and spend more time with her grandchildren.

Parliamentary Services sees cleaner’s wages as an issue between them and their employer- Spotless Services, who is contracted to clean parliament.

By Josh Glue

Earlier this year an attempt to contract out union work at Ports of Auckland (PoA) led to a strong union fight-back, to which management responded with a lockout. The lockout dragged on for months, management refusing to back down on its demands for individual contracts and greater ‘flexibility’ of labour. During this time port workers were stretched to the limit, eating up savings and strike funds to survive without regular wages, while the Ports of Auckland management eat up Auckland ratepayers’ money on fighting the union with advertising and PR advisers. Though the lockout ended in April, with the Maritime Union of New Zealand and PoA management agreeing to return to good-faith bargaining, little has happened since then.

As sole shareholder in the Ports through the ACIL Company, the Auckland City Council called for ACIL to face its Accountability and Performance Committee in September.

After the Employment Relations Authority rejected the union’s request to take the dispute to court, many were hopeful that ACIL CEO Gary Swift would at least be held accountable by the council for prolonging the lockout and refusing to accept the union’s opposition to contracting out work at PoA.

Instead Swift fronted up with the bureaucratic equivalent of the middle finger, saying that ACIL owns the port, not the council, even though the council owns ACIL. Despite a leaked email showing his high-level involvement in management of the lockout crisis, Swift refused to reveal how much fighting the union cost the company, and hence the council, claiming it was inappropriate for the council to be told those figures.

In the absence of a new collective agreement, the status quo of following the old agreement will expire by the end of September, leaving PoA workers more vulnerable than ever to out-sourcing work to those on individual contracts with lower wages, less guarantees of conditions and less security of hours and employment.

It is highly suspicious that bargaining since April has moved so slowly, especially with the union agreeing to many of managements demands for higher flexibility in work hours, despite the damage such employer-dictated terms may do to their conditions and work-life balance. One suspects ACIL has simply stalled negotiations to get past the collective’s expiry, meaning the coming months will be telling. Though PoA management will not want strikes or lockouts over the Christmas period, further attacks on collective negotiation are possible and it will be up to the Maritime Union of New Zealand, the wider union movement, and all concerned New Zealanders who don’t want their fellow workers sold up the river, to militantly fight any attacks on workers’ rights on the streets and docks of Auckland.