Marcus Greville & Graham Williams, Melbourne
Striking workers at the Amcor Flexibles plant in the northern suburb of Preston were given a big morale boost when workers at 13 other Amcor workplaces around the country took solidarity action during the week of August 4-10, including 24-hour stoppages, providing financial assistance and attending the community picket outside the Preston plant. Workers from the Laverton power plant visited the picket to hand over a donation of $3000.
Around 100 workers voted to take strike action at the packing plant on August 1 and then defied an Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) order to return to work on August 3. The AIRC reaffirmed its return-to-work order on August 5.
Prior to the strike, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) had accepted the need for a round of voluntary redundancies and had negotiated the number of 15. However. Amcor decided to single out five workers who it wanted to get rid of by forcing them to accept redundancy offers. Two of the sacked workers were union delegates. The striking workers are demanding the reinstatement of their sacked colleagues and for the company to offer only voluntary redundancy packages.
In order to provide some justification for its action, Amcor has claimed that the workers were sacked because they lacked experience. To demonstrate this, the workers were put through the humiliation of "score testing". Amcor sacked one of the two delegates on the basis of the test but has refused a request to disclose the test result.
This same worker had been asked only two months earlier to write the training manual for newly installed extrusion equipment. The average amount of time each of the sacked workers has put in at Amcor is 10 years each.
Amcor has tried to break the strike by writing to the workers claiming they have been fined $6000 each, although no worker has yet received any fines. In addition, Amcor has threatened each worker with an additional $22,000 fine and has sent them letters each day and made individual phone calls to suggest that the majority of strikers are ready to return to work.
Readers wishing to support the Amcor workers can join the community picket at 29 Bell Street (between Albert St and Chifley Drive), Preston. Solidarity messages should be sent to <contact@unionsolidarity.org>.