Australian Workers Union targets national employers in new bargaining plan

The union’s new bargaining strategy is designed to deliver uniform increases in pay across the operations of big companies.

Australian Workers Union national secretary Daniel Walton. Picture: Grant Wells.

The Australian Workers Union will target major national employers under a bargaining strategy designed to deliver uniform increases in pay and conditions across the Australia-wide operations of big companies.

As the ACTU slammed oil and gas companies for booking super windfall profits while refusing to negotiate with workers, the AWU accused employers of exploiting weaknesses in the current industrial relations system to minimise wage rises.

Unions are pressing Anthony Albanese to use Labor’s jobs and skills summit as a springboard to urgently legislate major changes to the nation’s enterprise bargaining laws, including removing the ability of employers to unilaterally apply to terminate workplace agreements.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus has urged the federal government, unions and employers to “think big” and use the summit in September to strive for agreement on changes to bargaining ahead of Labor introducing an industrial relations bill into parliament before the end of the year.

AWU national secretary Daniel Walton accused Boral and other employers of “using the vagaries of the industrial system to break its bargaining down into tiny pieces and stop our members from harnessing the full power of their strong national union”.

“It’s classic divide and conquer tactics. Our new strategic bargaining approach will, I hope, counter their strategy effectively.” he said.

“We have incredible collective knowledge within our union but have been relying on fairly traditional methods of communication and collaboration.

“By better utilising modern collaboration options, we can present a strong, coherent front to the likes of Boral, John Holland and Hanson.”

Boral, which has 93 enterprise agreements covering 3600 workers, will be the first target of the campaign, as the company has different enterprise agreements with the AWU in every state and there is a 15 per cent wage difference between pay deals.

In a resolution passed at its ­national conference in Sydney, the union said the strategic bargaining initiative was a pilot program that aimed to establish a framework that it says will enable branches to collaborate and strategically campaign and bargain together.

“Boral is the ideal organisation to implement the strategic bargaining pilot. The AWU has a strong membership density within Boral. In recent years, Boral has adopted an increasingly hostile stance at a branch level when dealing with the AWU and our members,” the resolution says.

“Boral is a behemoth, a market leader in its category. It operates at 83 locations across the country. It is a party to 93 enterprise agreements that cover more than 3600 workers. Its size and complexity require that the strategic bargaining pilot runs for a minimum period of three years.”

It says large national companies have capitalised on a changing industrial relations landscape, while “exploiting” the AWU’s current site by site, state by state approach to bargaining.

A Boral spokeswoman said the company was a “national employer with a proud 75-year history of providing secure employment to thousands of Australians”.

“Boral engages in good faith with all of our employees and their union representatives to achieve balanced outcomes, and will continue to do so,” she said.

ACTU president Michele O’Neil accused Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP of posting staggering profits while “fuelling our cost-of-living crisis”.

She said the pay of oil and gas company chief executives was up significantly while their Australian subsidiaries refused to negotiate with workers.

Workers employed by Shell on the Prelude offshore facility have been taking industrial action for the past 53 days after 18 months of fruitless negotiations.

Ms O’Neil said instead of negotiating a fair outcome with its workers and their unions, Shell had threatened workers with a lockout and refused to negotiate since July 13.

She said Woodside was refusing to commence negotiations with its offshore gas workforce despite the majority of these workers indicating they wanted to engage in collective bargaining.