The Maritime Union of Australia's decision to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1998 war for the waterfront with a four-day strike aimed at the corporate legacy of Chris Corrigan appears to have backfired and done so with lashings of irony.
The target of the MUA stoppage was Qube Holdings, the vibrant national logistics business that grew from the ashes of Patrick Corporation after it was sold to Toll Holdings for $6 billion in 2006. And, fittingly enough, the site of the MUA's anniversary stoppage was Qube's automobile import terminal at Webb dock, which is the facility where some of the darkest moments of the 1998 dispute played out.
When Toll took over Patrick, a cohort of the best of Corrigan's management team left and pretty promptly reassembled under his leadership at the entity now known as Qube. And that fully explains why the MUA's four-day strike ended pretty much the same way as the hostilities of 20 years ago.
That the union might entertain itself with anniversary strike action drew a bemused reaction from Corrigan as he contemplated the events of 1998 in discussion with The Australian Financial Review two weeks ago.
"Now, that in itself seems a ridiculous proposition really," Corrigan observed. "They would be better off celebrating that the nation is far better off because of the productivity gains that we made. It is an odd world."
He was spot on, as it turns out.
Because, as history repeated itself outside the Webb dock gates, so it did inside them.
Rather than pay an estimated $50,000 a day in demurrage for each ship left floating inside or outside Port Phillip Bay through the four days of the stoppage, Qube triggered a now familiar playbook that aimed to service its customers by keeping its terminal running. Mitigation strategy
The strike began at first shift on Thursday, April 5, which was two days before the actual anniversary of the day that Corrigan locked Patrick workers out of the docklands. And the management mitigation strategy swung into action on the preceding Wednesday with 83 managers from around the Qube nation being temporarily relocated to hotels and apartments around Melbourne Docklands.
Through the following four days crews formed from those white-collar workers, who included accountants from Sydney head office, were flown to shifts in helicopters that choppered their way securely and without any particular fuss over any union picketers.
After proper introductions – many of the staff had never actually met before – the Qube managers turned dockers were then given the necessary safety inductions and training to be able to drive the newly imported cars from the ships.
Sources claim that, for all of their inexperience, the staff crews achieved record productivity levels over the four days in what management now recognises as a magnificent, if accidental, team bonding exercise. From what we understand the successful white-collar intervention will be celebrated at Qube at a team event in the near future.
The way we hear it, the only point of tension within the emergency crews was the fight over who got to drive the Maseratis and Porches from the hull on to the wharf. Indeed, there is said to be some little disappointment among some of the Qube middle management that the union moved to end their industrial action early last week and that the dispute appeared headed for enduring settlement after an agreement on Friday.
The agreement that will be taken to a worker ballot at some point over the next few weeks sits in alignment with pretty much every other Qube EA. The arrangements accepted by the union allow the operator to run a roster that flexes with demand. At the car terminal that means the shifts of landing crews will be effectively determined by the shipping lines rather than a formal Qube roster.
Now it is understood that there were a few tweaks made last week to the original Qube offer that were aimed at giving the union some comfort that working in a rosterless environment will be safe and sociable enough for the workers. But the pay rise of 2.5 per cent annually for the life of the agreement is consistent with other Qube settlements with the MUA. It has been estimated that it will take several years of that pay rise to cover the wages that were lost by the Qube workers through their four-day anniversary strike Rallying cry
In the end then, the union has retreated from rhetorical barricades that were being aggressively manned until last week.
As recently as Sunday, April 8, the union held a "community rally" at Webb dock to protest at Qube "anti-worker plans".
The rallying cry delivered by MUA assistant national secretary Warren Smith denounced Qube's plans for agreement termination in the name of a return to fully rostered weeks.
"At the heart of this dispute is the right for workers to have a fair roster system," Smith said.
"Qube workers in Melbourne are forced to work a very harsh roster that creates unsafe fatigue and deprives workers of time with their families.
"Workers at Qube want their lives back but Qube management want to keep punishing them with an unsafe roster and use of the extreme tactics of terminating the agreement.
"Union members and community supporters are standing in solidarity with Qube workers today whose claims are just and reasonable."
Well, whatever concessions the union did secure last week, they did not alter Qube's determination to go back to the future on shift patterns. From Qube's perspective, that determination was born of the fact that ships arrive and leave on their own schedules rather than on the rosters that once governed the working hours of Qube workers right around the country.
The Qube mantra is that it will service customers as they require service. As a result, over the past couple of years it has moved quietly to reform rostering whenever new enterprise agreements fall open to renegotiation. Webb dock was pretty much the last to fall into line with this ambition. Again, Qube has consistently expressed the view that the Webb arrangements were four years out of date and essentially uneconomic.
To be clear, by working to a roster, Qube's Webb dock car unloaders are being paid an estimated $100,000 a year but they were pretty much never kept fully employed through their rostered 35-hour weeks. That is now going to change.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Qube-related docklands, things are not so peaceful.
Over the weekend MUA members at Patrick's Sydney container terminal instituted work bans on the back of protected strike action by members of the same union who work for the company that maintains the robot container straddles and convention cranes that wander Patrick's corner of Port Botany.
Safety issues
The union bunged on the bans in the name of claimed safety issues that flowed from the contractor's inability to populate the docks with the usual number of maintenance workers.
But where the union identified safety issues enough to justify its bans, Patrick management saw only unprotected industrial action that arguably amounted to a form of secondary boycott.
So Patrick, which is now, of course, half owned by Qube, made a beeline to the Fair Work Commission where it earned interim orders on Saturday morning that any union action under way or contemplated must stop until the matter could be further assessed in hearings on Monday.
Now, the people who maintain Patrick's game-changing port machines work for Kalmar, the Finnish firm that helped the stevedore develop the robot straddles back when Corrigan ran the place.
Kalmar is in dispute with the union over a slate of claims that management says will add 40 per cent to its costs. Kalmar claims it has been delivered with a "fanciful statement of settlement" that asks for a 30-hour week with no reduction in take-home pay and for guarantees on job security.
Strike action is likely to resume on Wednesday with the union flagging a stoppage of up to seven days. Apparently it is Kalmar's intention to fulfil its contractual obligations as best as it possibly can using staff employment. How that might wash with the MUA, only time will tell. But I would be betting that at the very least we might see another outbreak of union-inspired community action at the gates of yet another major Australian port.
As Corrigan said, it is an odd world.
QUB Price at posting:
$2.22 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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