Cleanaway juggles Covid vaccination demand amid lockdown earnings hit
Cleanaway says some of its key customers were now demanding truck drivers are vaccinated before they enter sites.
Waste-management operator Cleanaway said on Friday hospitals and aged-care homes had demanded its truck drivers were vaccinated before picking up waste supplies as it battled an earnings hit from the extension of NSW’s Covid-19 restrictions.
The move marks a new front in the debate over workplace vaccinations, with a push by some workplaces for compulsory jabs filtering through the broader economy and raising expectations providers who come into contact with those companies may fall into line with the same strict policy.
Qantas this week became Australia’s biggest company to mandate the Covid-19 vaccine, ordering frontline workers to get the jab before November 15 or leave the aviation industry. That followed fruit and vegetable processor SPC which was the first Australian company outside of healthcare to demand Covid-19 vaccines for not only its staff but anyone who enters its cannery.
Cleanaway said it was strongly encouraging all of its drivers to get vaccinated given many of the healthcare sites it services now require either a single or full vaccination before they can enter the grounds of hospitals or aged care homes. It’s also servicing some of the vaccination centres operating through NSW and Victoria.
“We provide the yellow Sharpsmart containers you see in just about every hospital ward, but normally the loading dock is as far as we go. So we need to make sure the drivers doing those runs are vaccinated,” Cleanaway’s chief operating officer Brendan Gill told The Australian.
That requirement means Cleanaway could be forced to stand down any workers who remain unvaccinated and could not be redeployed to other less sensitive sites. It employs 6000 staff with 4800 workers out in its plants or servicing workplace sites.
“We do respect it‘s a choice, but people understand that some jobs may require it and you’ll be asked to vaccinate if that’s the case. If you have a reason you don’t want to be or you can’t be, we will look for alternative duties where we can. But if it comes to the occasion where there is no work, then we’d have to take that decision to stand somewhere down ultimately,” Mr Gill said.
The Business Council of Australia has stopped short of advocating compulsory vaccinations but backs high-risk industries taking action, such as healthcare and aviation.
The Berejiklian government‘s extension of a lockdown until the end of September has crushed Cleanaway’s business momentum a few months into the 2022 financial year.
Restrictions are cutting $4m from Cleanaway’s earnings every month due to weaker construction activity and industrial demand and the closure of most of the state’s container deposit scheme. The shutdown of Sydney’s construction industry across its western suburbs has also cut business activity.
“Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle in NSW. The construction that was taken out six days ago. But 50 per cent of the workforce, one person per four-square-metre rule and if the worker comes from certain local government area that have added restrictions. So construction is far from back to normal,” Mr Gill said.
It employs 100 truck drivers on the container deposit scheme alone which normally remove 2.5m containers a day from Newcastle down the coast through Sydney to Wollongong.
“That’s a lot of trucks that aren’t emptying those machines because they are not operating and a lot of drivers who don’t have work,” Mr Gill added.
Some of those drivers have been reassigned to work servicing vaccination sites while others have taken annual leave if work was not immediately available. It’s also introduced seven days of pandemic leave for workers who may have been close contacts of people that have contracted the virus.
The company on Friday lifted its annual net profit after tax by 2.1 per cent to $153.2m while earnings rose just under 4 per cent to $535.1m. The company increased its dividend payout by 11.9 per cent to 2.35c per share.
Cleanaway in May named Origin Energy gas boss Mark Schubert as its new chief executive with a generous pay package including a $1.8m signing-on bonus.
Mr Schubert will start in the role on August 30 and replaces Vik Bansal who departed after a bullying scandal.
Chairman Mark Chellew has been taking on executive duties to fill the void over the last few months, but will return to his board role once Mr Schubert starts.
Cleanaway has endured a rollercoaster year with Mr Bansal defending charges of improper behaviour towards staff, issuing a grovelling public apology and at the same time taking a public reprimand from his board amid a bullying scandal.
Despite the ructions, Mr Bansal presided over a more than three-fold jump in Cleanaway’s share price since being appointed chief executive in August 2015.
Its year-long bid to own all of France-based Suez’s Australian assets was officially binned in April, triggering Cleanaway’s $501m buyout of Suez’s Sydney-based post-collection assets which include two landfills, at Lucas Heights and Kemps Creek, and five waste-transfer stations at Artarmon, Auburn, Belrose, Rockdale and Ryde in Sydney. The deal is scheduled to be wrapped up in January 2022.
Cleanaway rose 3.9 per cent to $2.66 on Friday.
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