Mirotone tries to break 35-hour week

BY ANDY GIANNIOTIS

SYDNEY — Paint company Mirotone has extended the lockout of its Queensland and NSW work force for another fortnight in an increasingly bitter campaign to break the 35-hour week and force workers out of the union and onto individual employment contracts.

Mirotone hopes to get about 40 workers in Revesby, NSW and Wacol, Queensland, to work longer hours in an attempt to get a competitive advantage in the paint industry.

Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union paint delegate Ken Phillips told the NSW Labor Council this week of the company's systematic campaign to push workers onto staff contracts after the union members had refused to accept a dilution of their 35-hour working week.

Phillips said that, after workers were given the option of a contract or redundancy in person, the company couriered individual contracts to family homes, where they were received by spouses while the workers themselves were protesting outside the Wacol and Revesby plants.

More than 500 LHMU paint industry members have condemned Mirotone's tactics of attempting to starve its work force into submission through extended lockouts. Meeting at the University of Western Sydney Milperra campus, an industry-wide mass meeting voted to contribute $20 a week to a hardship and educational fund to help see the lockout through.

The LHMU's assistant national secretary, Cheryl Hyde, believes that companies are being "incited" to break down workers' solidarity by federal industrial relations legislation.

"Mirotone has never been a site where we have had huge disputes but the company seems to have imbibed the Reith rhetoric, adopted the Reith tactics, and decided to declare war on its workers", said Hyde, referring to former workplace relations minister Peter Reith, who masterminded the new laws.

A picket line has been established at both sites under dispute and messages of support can be sent to <cheryl@lhmu.org.au>.

From GLW issue 440