Solidarity at Incat the strongest link

April 11, 2001
Issue 

BY ALEX BAINBRIDGE & ROHAN GAISWINKLER

HOBART — For the first time in the company's 20 year history, workers at boat-building company Incat took strike action on April 3, after management walked away from negotiations on a new enterprise agreement and threatened redundancies.

Workers have been negotiating an agreement for over 12 months and have not received a pay rise since a 1% increase in December 1999. Their unions are calling for a 15% pay rise over three years, a reduction in the work week to 38 hours and an agreement that there be no redundancies.

Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union organiser Greg Cooper told Green Left Weekly that the union estimates that the total cost to the company of a pay rise and shorter work week would be in the vicinity of $2 million per year. The company's latest publicly available profit figures, for 1998-99, reveal that it made a total after-tax profit that year of $53 million.

The company — which specialises in building wave-piercing catamarans — claims to have a cash-flow problem.

Incat chairperson Robert Clifford has made much of the fact that the company has a number of unsold boats and that it is unreasonable for workers to expect a pay rise. Workers will get a rise when the boats are sold, he has claimed.

But Cooper says that Clifford is simply making excuses and that the unsold boats are due to a policy of leasing, rather than selling, them. He also disputes Clifford's tally of unsold boats, saying that one is simply in for a refit, another has been profitably leased out for seven years and that there is interest in two others.

Clifford has also been negotiating a joint venture with a supplier to the US Navy, which will be worth millions to the company.

According to accounts of the negotiations by union delegate Rob Dredge, the company has been playing games with workers, twice walking out on talks just as they neared agreement. Most recently, Incat negotiators broke talks on March 26, declaring that the company was considering redundancies after all.

Clifford raised tensions further on April 2, issuing a statement that said that some workers were "donkeys" dragging down the average intelligence of the company and that "intelligent, thinking workers [are needed for] building better ships". He said that, if redundancies become necessary, he would favour "culling" the "donkeys" and the "weakest links", rather than laying off the last hired.

The message to workers was clear: "intelligent" workers are compliant, while workers who seek to assert their rights are "donkeys" who will be removed. Rather than being cowed, however, Clifford's insults only spurred them on.

But the reference to the popular TV game show, The Weakest Link, may be more revealing than Clifford thought it was. The show pits contestants against each other and encourages back-stabbing, but there is only one winner. Incat workers are quickly coming to realise that, if they abandon a policy of collective solidarity in favour of culling the "weakest link", the sole winner will be Clifford and everyone else will lose — just like on TV.

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