CFMEU admits stop-work meetings at Gold Coast Commonwealth Games site were to force new enterprise agreement

A MILITANT union has defiantly admitted that it timed a series of stop-work meetings at a Commonwealth Games worksite to cause maximum disruption to the $126 million taxpayer-funded project.

CFMEU official Scott Vink at the Carrara Sports Precinct Commonwealth Games construction site. Picture: Scott Fletcher

THE CFMEU admits that it deliberately set out to cause maximum disruption on a $126 million taxpayer-funded Commonwealth Games worksite, but defiantly says “so what”.

The powerful construction union’s lawyers yesterday told a Federal Court hearing it was entitled to hold almost 70 hours of stop-work meetings in May, which put critical deadlines for the Carrara Sports and Recreation project at risk and cost the head contractor $700,000.

CONSTRUCTION: Workers ‘doing as little as two hours a day’

Fair Work Building and Construction claims the union should face hefty penalties as the meetings, held twice daily for two hours each time, were “nothing more than a sham” and a “clumsy and unsophisticated attempt to disguise industrial action as legitimate meetings”.

On the final day of the hearing, the CFMEU’s barrister Warren Friend QC agreed that the ­timing of the meetings was deliberate to put “maximum pressure” on head contractor Hansen Yuncken to sign a new enterprise agreement.

“We say yes, but so what?” Mr Friend said. “That’s the way the world works, that’s what happens.”

Mr Friend said the meetings were in the structural workers’ contracts and it was “quintessentially a union activity to put pressure on an employer to make an agreement”. The argument represented a backflip on the union’s previous position that the meetings were held at the Gold Coast site to ­discuss the Federal Government’s new Building Code.

But Mr Friend said the union would no longer argue that point because it could win the case regardless, as the meetings were legal.

A union meeting at Carrara. Photo: Jessica Elder.

“They (Fair Work) may not like what was done to Hansen Yuncken, but it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong,” he said. “Unions came into existence to have strikes and do this sort of thing.

“Why all of the sudden is the rug being pulled out from under the union?”

Fair Work’s barrister Jim Murdoch QC said the CFMEU abused the clause allowing the meetings and there was a “systematic pattern of employees lounging around forlong periods” at the site. “(The meetings) were nothing more than a sham to disguise the true state of affairs,” he said.

“(It was) a clumsy and unsophisticated attempt to disguise industrial action as legitimate meetings,” he said.

The court has been told virtually no work was carried out between the meetings, which were held from 7.30am to 9.30am and 11am to 1pm every work day except Saturdays. Subcontractors pulled about 70 employees from the site.

The CFMEU argued the subcontractors’ actions in ­diverting employees to other projects was responsible for delays on the site.

Justice John Reeves has ordered the meetings be limited to one each week until he hands down his decision on whether they were held ­illegitimately.

Originally published as CFMEU admits stop-work meetings at Gold Coast Commonwealth Games site were to force new enterprise agreement