James Vassilopoulos, Melbourne

A 15-day strike at Australian Envelopes ended on September 28 with occupational, health and safety representative and union delegate Matthew Stephen losing his job, but with union activism stronger at the factory.

Jimmy Reid, secretary of the printing division of the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, told Green Left Weekly: “It cost management $3 million to get our delegate out, yet now there are more delegates and more opposition to management. It was a costly defeat for them.”

Stephen told GLW, “We won the dispute, but it was not a win for me personally”. The union is committed to finding Stephen another job.

The dispute at Australian Envelopes erupted when Stephen was sacked for taking a stand on occupational health and safety issues. Seventy per cent of the workers employed at the factory in the Melbourne suburb of Notting Hill walked out and established picket lines in solidarity with Stephen.

An Australian Industrial Relations Commission injunction barred union officials, including Stephen, from participating in the picket, which then became a community picket.

Under financial pressure, more and more workers returned to work; 45% of workers were back at work after the second week of the dispute. Stephen told GLW, “The wife of one striker told him that unless he went back to work he should not come home, because of the financial pressure that picketers were feeling”.

Unionists allege that a feature of the picket was management-organised violence and intimidation. According to Reid, “I have never seen anything like it in my time in the union movement”. In one incident, management-hired thugs, so-called private security guards, drove a forklift at full speed towards the picket line. They threw buckets of urine at the picketers.

Once the strikers went back to work, one worker was allegedly told by a company-hired thug that he would be “fixed up in a concrete box”. Police are investigating the incident.

From Green Left Weekly, October 12, 2005.
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