Unions demand CSL directors resign from RBA board

Unions want CSL directors Carolyn Hewson and Alison Watkins to quit the RBA board due to CSL’s ‘corporate bastardry’.

Paul McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the biotech company CSL at the White House.

Unions are demanding CSL directors Carolyn Hewson and Alison Watkins resign from the Reserve Bank board due to the “corporate bastardry” of Australia’s third biggest company.

The Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union said it was inappropriate for Ms Hewson and Ms Watkins to hold positions as RBA board members and non-executive directors of CSL, the vaccine and blood products supplier.

The CSL board is responsible for the oversight and strategic direction of the company, monitoring operational and financial performance, human resources policies and practices, and approving the company’s budgets and business plans.

The ETU and AMWU said CSL devised a secret plan, revealed by The Australian, to shift workers on to lower pay and conditions and make them redundant if they refused to relocate to the biotech giant’s new $800m hi-tech plant in Melbourne.

At the same time as being on the CSL board, the unions said Ms Hewson and Ms Watkins had been members of a RBA board “responsible for crippling Australian households with 13 interest rate rises at a time when corporate profits are driving up inflation and the cost of living.”

Unions also seized on claims by the Centre for International Tax Accountability and Research that CSL shifted up to $5bn in revenue to Switzerland over the past five years in order to crush its tax bill here.

CSL is heavily supported by the taxpayer, receiving federal government contracts worth $4.4bn in the past five years, as well as orders for 50 million doses of Covid vaccine.

“Directors responsible for a strategy to cut Australian workers’ wages and a global tax avoidance plan cannot be allowed to sit on the board of the Reserve Bank – It’s time for them to resign,” the unions said.

ETU Victorian secretary Troy Gray said: “Here we have two of the most significant players in the Australian economy, the RBA and CSL, linked by two directors. In one board meeting, they endorse strategies to avoid tax and undermine workers’ conditions at CSL, and in the other meeting, they raise interest rates, making our housing crisis even worse. They both must go.”

AMWU Victorian secretary Tony Mavromatis said CSL was taking money out of the hands of Australian workers, cutting wages and conditions and treating their loyal workforce with contempt.

“It’s time for Jim Chalmers to remember he is a Labor Treasurer and get Alison Watkins and Carolyn Hewson off the board of the RBA and replace them with people with real experience of the cost-of-living pressures,” he said.

“The board of the RBA has shown that it’s pretty bad at economics recently, with 13 interest rate rises costing working families thousands of dollars a month more on their mortgage.

“Everyone knows corporate profits, price gouging, and global factors are the real drivers of inflation, not households. Now that we have seen that two RBA directors are also directly responsible for undermining wages, attacking workers and extraordinary corporate behaviour, this seems like a good time for a refresh of the board of the RBA.”

CSL, which declined to comment on the latest union attack, has previously defended the company’s tax practices, saying the majority of CSL’s tax was paid in the countries where it had the most significant operations.