Streets workers’ prospects melt as ACTU’s Sally McManus turns up heat

The timing was exquisite. As Bill Shorten was attacking the government for so starving federal police of money that it was hampering their ability to do their job, the coppers were off to raid the offices of the Australian Workers Union in Sydney and Melbourne.

With blinding speed, Labor and the unions pivoted from casting the coppers as victims to tools of an evil Malcolm Turnbull, shifting the focus from questions of improper donations during Shorten’s time at the union to improper use of police.

Just as ironic, and just as laden with the potential for dire consequences, on the day the last ­Holden rolled off the assembly line, ending seven decades of car production in Australia (which Shorten also blamed on the Prime Minister), the scariest woman ­outside parliament was threatening a local manufacturer with a ­national ­boycott.

Even if they win both battles, as they usually do, unions are losing the war. Two sets of numbers prove it. The falls in manufacturing and union membership have left the ACTU and Shorten’s Labor Party clinging to, and inexcusably defending, the discredited Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, home to people who bully other workers by threatening to rape their children.

With calls to fight them on the beaches (geddit), ACTU secretary Sally McManus was preparing last week to mobilise an army against Streets ice cream, while again ­pitting herself against the scariest woman inside parliament, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash. They could not be more different in appearance or philosophy, but each of them carries the T-X stamp. Terminator fans will get the reference. They are driven, ambitious and deeply committed to their causes.

A looming flashpoint is the dispute between Streets and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union over an application by the owner, British-Dutch multi­national Unilever, to the Fair Work Commission to terminate a September 2013 agreement covering workers at its Minto plant ­outside Sydney.

The union says the company’s actions would see workers suffer a 46 per cent pay cut, which the company denies, while Unilever warns that a boycott over summer could drive the company holus-bolus out of Australia.

In a conversation with this columnist on Tuesday, the chief executive of Unilever Australia and New Zealand, Clive Stiff, made clear he has no interest in a political bash against unions but was equally clear about the consequences if the boycott proceeded and succeeded.

The company ­employs 1800 people at its Australian factories, including 149 permanent jobs at Minto. That doesn’t include local suppliers like dairy farmers. Streets, founded by Edwin “Ted” Street and wife Daisy, began making ice cream in Corrimal, NSW, in the 1920s, well before the first Holden was made.

Between 1953, when it was introduced by Streets, until the end of the past century, the Paddle Pop had sold 90 million units. ­Reputedly, per capita, it is the world’s bestselling ice cream. The dilemma faced by the company is really no different from the ­dilemma faced by local carmakers, driven out of business (despite the billions in taxpayer subsidies) ­because consumers in their millions chose cheaper and/or better imported products.

The dilemma faced by workers is as difficult. They can accept cuts to wages and conditions, do whatever they can to keep the plants going and keep their jobs longer. Or they can dig in, organise a campaign that could drive the company out of Australia, then look for jobs elsewhere. Good luck with that. Union officials get to keep theirs regardless.

According to its submission to the FWC, the company says Minto has the highest operating cost of any Unilever factory in Britain, Germany, France, Hungary, ­Poland, Indonesia, The Philippines and India. Minto costs ­almost double those of similar factories in Europe. No surprise, then, that it is ­almost 30 per cent cheaper to make, then ship 16,000km in frozen transport, the Magnum classic from Europe to Australia than to make it at Minto.

The company says the Minto enterprise agreement has a number of “highly restrictive clauses” not found in other agreements. There are minimum staffing levels on production lines that can render them inoperable if employees are on leave or on a break; permanent staff are not allowed to move around the factory to work on different parts of the production process even if properly trained; there are tight restrictions on the employment of casual, fixed-term contractors and seasonal staff, making it more difficult to run what is in essence a seasonal business, while shift patterns ­remain fixed in the agreement and impossible to change.

The company and the union bargained over 16 months in 20 sessions. An in-principle agreement was subsequently voted down by employees, whose pay is 25 per cent higher than average full-time weekly earnings for Australian adults, forcing Unilever to lodge its termination application with the FWC.

In Friday’s edition of this newspaper, McManus accused Streets of an abuse of power, warning the entire union movement would be mobilised to show Streets that “working people will not tolerate being blackmailed with massive pay cuts”.

Stiff still hopes a new agreement can be forged, and ­nego­tiations are continuing, but he insists significant concessions will have to be made.

Surprised by the extraordinary timing of the union’s announcement of the proposed boycott, Stiff waits to see if the boycott will proceed, is concerned about its potential to damage the company, and predicts if it does it will precipitate a decision on the company’s future operations in Australia. He admits he has to argue strongly with sup­er­iors at Unilever headquarters abroad that it should continue to manufacture ice cream here.

Likewise, if the FWC finds for the union, it will leave the company up the proverbial creek without a Paddle Pop and looking harder offshore.

If Streets abandons Australia, Stiff reckons it would be only a matter of time before its main competitor, Peters (also foreign-owned), follows suit. “Just like the car industry,” he says. “The same maths will apply to them, at a ­lesser degree.”

Cash, appalled by the threatened boycott, told The Australian: “If these jobs are ultimately lost then the responsibility will lie ­solely with the union leaders ­responsible. It is difficult to imagine a worse ­betrayal of workers by their representatives.”

McManus complained on the ABC that Bob Hawke didn’t understand that the world had changed when he advised the Labor Party and the ACTU to cut ties with the CFMEU. Scary? Definitely. Smart? Not so much. What would Labor’s most successful prime minister and former ACTU president know about unions or jobs or politics or business — anything really?