BY PAUL BENEDEK
SYDNEY — "When the boss wanted orders to stop us picketing, it took less than a day. But we are now into our seventh week without pay, after being unfairly sacked, and still there is no decision."
Seventy-two sacked Metroshelf workers are still picketing the shelf-construction company's Revesby factory while their case makes its way through the Industrial Relations Commission — and their frustration is growing.
The dispute began in mid-May when the majority of Metroshelf workers, unsatisfied with the Australian Workers Union's close relationship with management, joined the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
The delegate supplied management with a list of workers who had joined the AMWU. The following business day, the company gates were locked, and 50 workers, 46 of them AMWU members, were sacked. The sacked workers, accompanied by a further 22 AMWU members who refused to scab, began to picket the factory.
Within two weeks, management sacked all the workers on the picket line. The Australian Workers Union has since opposed the workers' right to reinstatement and directed its members to cross the picket line.
On July 5, nearly six weeks after the AMWU lodged an unfair dismissal application, the Industrial Relations Commission rejected the workers' case, referring it to a further hearing. The commissioner who heard proceedings, Bob Redmond, was an ex-AWU official.
"The judges and commissioners don't know what it's like to have their pay stopped as the proceedings unfold, inch by inch", Community support organiser and Socialist Alliance activist Sam Wainwright told Green Left Weekly.
Wainwright argued, "If the Metroshelf workers are to win, we can't rely on the IRC — it's shown itself to be much more amenable to the bosses' profits than to the rights of workers. The battle will be won on the ground — through community support and industrial force."
The company is offering to re-hire the 22 workers sacked for refusing to scab, although it has "doubts" about two "difficult" workers. The other sacked workers would be "nominally" rehired — but will almost certainly be immediately retrenched again.
The workers have rejected similar deals previously, arguing "we all go in together, or none of us go in at all".
Meanwhile, Metroshelf workers have both received and extended solidarity to other union struggles in the area.
Just two streets away, 150 Amcor workers, also AMWU members, are on strike over their enterprise bargaining agreement which the company wants to make site-based, but the workers want to keep national. The Amcor workers have marched to the Metroshelf picket line, and vice-versa, to lend weight to each other's struggles and swap experiences.