Fears $4m fine hit won’t tame CFMEU after Boral’s win

The CFMEU’s black ban of Boral has ended with a $4m settlement but industry says it remains “vulnerable”.

Boral chief executive Mike Kane says ‘we will now be protected against illegal interference’. Picture: Toby Zerna

The bitter dispute over the construction union’s black ban of Boral has ended with a multi-million-dollar settlement but the ­industry says it remains “vulnerable” to threats, intimidation and unlawful industrial action.

The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union said yesterday it would pay the building materials giant $4 million plus costs, more than two years after it targeted Boral, and agreed to “controls” to prevent it from interfering with the company’s business over the next three years.

Mike Kane, Boral’s chief executive, said the agreement was a huge step in the “multi-year effort to re-establish the rule of law on Melbourne construction sites”.

“For the first time in 2½ years we’ll have a fair chance over the next six months to build an order book in the Melbourne CBD on high-rise construction projects,” Mr Kane said. “We will now be protected against illegal interference in serving our customers.”

Wilhelm Harnisch, the chief executive of Master Builders Australia, said it was “only the deep pockets of Boral” that brought about the end of the dispute, praising the “leadership of CEO Mike Kane and the determination of Boral’s board to stand up to the CFMEU’s thuggery”.

However, he added: “Thousands of other building contract­ors remain vulnerable to the CFMEU’s unconscionable tactic of threatening to shut down businesses in order to impose its will.”

Boral claimed in the Victorian Supreme Court that it was the victim of a secondary boycott that began in 2013 after it refused to bow to the CFMEU’s demand to stop supplying concrete to anti-union developer Grocon.

The CFMEU settled with ­Grocon earlier this year, paying more than $3.5m.

The union remains embroiled in litigation on a number of fronts, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission pursuing it over alleged secondary boycott action.

In a statement, Boral said the union faced a bill as high as $9m once legal costs were taken into account, a figure the CFMEU disputed. The agreement also includes a binding clause that penalises the CFMEU if officials attempt to hinder the delivery of construction materials to any construction sites in Victoria.

The penalties include amounts ranging from $50,000 to $200,000 for each breach, with amounts doubling if there are three or more breaches in a year.

But the CFMEU also claimed a win, with Boral originally pursuing damages of more than $20m. The union had previously offered $2.4m to settle the case.

“Mr Kane’s ideological campaign against the union has been damaging Boral’s reputation for that entire time,” a CFMEU spokesman said.

“Shareholders will be breathing a sigh of relief now Mr Kane will be able to spend more time focusing on the financial future of Boral rather than waging ideological wars against the union movement.

“The CFMEU simply hopes that the end of these court proceedings will allow Boral to focus on safety rather than politically motivated litigation.”

Mr Harnisch also used the settlement to call on crossbench senators to pass bills reinstating the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

Brett Hogan, a policy director at the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, said the CFMEU was “fast losing its social licence” and the Boral affair was “yet another example of why the trade union royal commission needs to continu­e to investigate the practices of this rogue union”.