National port strikes loom over MUA row with Patrick

A dispute with the MUA is set to culminate in the first national strikes to befall Patrick Stevedores since 1998.

14/01/2016 : Patrick executive Alex Badenoch pictured at Patricks in Port Botany. . The Australian / Renee Nowytarger

Patrick Stevedores has blasted ­“extreme forces” within the ­Maritime Union of Australia for escalating a dispute over wharfies’ pay and conditions, set to culminate in the first national strikes to befall the company since the 1998 waterfront turmoil.

The company yesterday warned of a hit to Australia’s trade reputation and lamented the nat­ion’s “illogical” industrial relations framework, ahead of the looming shutdown on Monday of Australia’s four biggest port terminals, which form a critical part of the national supply chain.

Alexandra Badenoch, a senior Patrick executive involved in the process, told The Australian enterprise bargaining talks in train since March had stalled over ­“unrealistic” union claims.

The union’s demands for a minimum 32-hour week, paid at a 35-hour week rate, and reinstatement of weekend penalty rates were “out of touch with community standards of what is considered acceptable in an Australian workplace”, Ms Badenoch said.

Patrick and the MUA clashed over the company’s drive to use more casuals, prompting the union to insist all employees be made full-time permanent in the interests of “job security”.

Talks were progressing “co­operatively” last year at ports in Fremantle, Melbourne and Brisbane, Ms Badenoch said, but the process had been “derailed” over the company’s Port Botany operation and the “more extreme representatives at that site driving unsustainable asks”.

Those claims alone could cost the company a 53 per cent rise in labour costs, it estimated.

The MUA’s demand that Patrick reinstate “significant” weekend penalty rates was “turning the clocks back a long way”.

“Our industry is a 24/7 industry and we need to accommodate that, and it has to be at a cost base that is sustainable for us,” Ms Badenoch said. She blamed highly combative officials within the MUA’s Sydney branch for disrupting talks.

“Unfortunately, a very small contingent of the MUA’s most militant officials appear intent on winding back the clock to a time when their power to intimidate and interfere in proper commercial arrangements in the narrow pursuit of their own self-interest, and to act with total disregard for their members’ best interests or that of the broader community, was as indisputable as it was unacceptable,” she said.

“The motivation (of officials) is rebuilding the manning hours at Port Botany … They are driving membership, and getting more members on the books.”

The MUA, which is poised to vote on a merger with the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union at its national council starting on February 29, is accusing Patrick’s parent Asicano of seeking to slash labour costs as it prepares to sell the stevedoring business to logistics firm Qube.

One of the union’s claims would force a future owner of the business to keep 100 per cent of the workforce.

As about half the nation’s containerised imports and exports flow through Patrick’s four container terminals, the company warned of “consequences well beyond our terminals’ gates” from the strikes.

“The fortunes of countless businesses, both big and small, and the families and communities they support Australia-wide will be adversely affected without timely access to containerised goods,” Ms Badenoch said.

“The broader economic harm inflicted will include many immediate and direct costs as well as longer, difficult-to-predict consequences for the nation’s trade activity.”

Ms Badenoch said the disruption was also hurting Australia’s reputation among overseas investors.

“This does nothing for our trade reputation ... we get pretty direct feedback from our customers about service and cost of doing business in Australia,” she said.

“Given the rates that our labour costs drive, they express dissatisfaction with that. How easily our operations are disrupted is another source of dissatisfaction.”

The union has applied to the Fair Work Commission for protected industrial action for 24 hours on Monday and four hours on Tuesday.

MUA deputy national secretary Will Tracey said: “These stoppages are about ensuring job security as Asciano attempts to sell the Patrick’s business. The MUA wants to make sure jobs are not put on the line as part of trying to maximise the asset or share price in this corporate restructuring process.”