Union chalks up win in bargaining battle with Woodside
Fair Work upholds union’s bid to bring the oil and gas giant to the negotiating table.
Woodside is being forced to collectively bargain at its North West Shelf platforms for the first time in 30 years after the Fair Work Commission upheld a union bid to bring the oil and gas giant to the negotiating table.
The significant decision is a major win for the Australian Workers Union and the Maritime Union of Australia and a big defeat for the company that had fought the application for months.
The commission found the two unions had secured the majority support of 200 production workers on Woodside’s Goodwyn, North Rankin and Angel platforms for a collective agreement.
The workers have been engaged under individual employment arrangements since the 1990s, and the company maintained the model produced superior outcomes to a collective agreement. In approving the application, commission deputy president Melanie Binet said: “The fact that Woodside prefer to negotiate individually with its workforce does not weigh against the granting of the determination.
“In fact, this is the precise reason why the statutory power to make the determination exists, to compel employers who would prefer not to negotiate collectively to do so.” She said Woodside’s assertion that it offered employees “industry-leading terms and conditions” also did not weigh against granting the determination.
“The granting of a determination does not require the parties to conclude an agreement,” she said. ‘If Woodside’s current model for determining terms and conditions of employment does in fact produce superior outcomes as asserted by Woodside, then the workforce are unlikely to vote to approve any proposed agreement.” AWU national secretary Daniel Walton, who is spokesman for the unions’ Offshore Alliance, blasted Woodside’s legal tactics.
“Woodside tried every trick their lawyers could think of to frustrate their employees’ desire to bargain for a collective agreement and in the end they only delayed the inevitable,” he said
“It’s been a campaign of corporate lawfare – four applications, two appeals to the Full Bench, a stay application, an application to the Federal Court, and an application for an injunction in the Federal Court. All lost.
“A massive Australian company like Woodside should not be allowed to stack up meritless claims to put pressure on a union’s resources with the sole intention of bullying its workforce. Woodside knew its bizarre tactics, like seeking to cross-reference petition signatures against non-existent company records, were likely to fail. But the purpose was just to clog the gears to try and get union members to lose hope of negotiating a collective agreement that locks in industry terms and conditions.” In a statement, a Woodside spokesperson said the company was reviewing the decision requiring the company to commence bargaining for an enterprise agreement. “Woodside highly values our people. We have directly engaged with our workforce for decades, and continue to do so on an ongoing basis to ensure we have the right settings in place to support the best outcomes for our teams and for the company.”
Ms Binet said that while bargaining in a hotly contested industrial environment would be expected to be often robust, “aspects of communications by both Woodside and the AWU to date might be characterised as emotive and hyperbolic and unhelpful in achieving the object of the Fair Work Act to establish harmonious workplaces”.