By Sue Boland
Everybody is talking about waterfront reform — the federal government, Patrick Stevedores, P & O Ports, the ALP and the ACTU. "The need for waterfront reform" has been hammered in the media for so long that for several months, opinion polls have shown a majority of Australians supporting it.
The most recent poll, by Herald-ACNielson, published in the April 21 Sydney Morning Herald reports that 74% of respondents support waterfront reform. However, 52% of those respondents disapproved of the government's handling of the waterfront dispute, including 32% who said they were less likely to vote for the Coalition in the next federal elections.
In arguing for "reform", the minister for industrial relations, Peter Reith, and chairperson of Patrick Stevedores, Chris Corrigan, repeat the same line constantly: "Wharfies earn $90,000 for only 14 hours work per week, and they only lift 18 containers an hour, compared to world's best practice of 25 containers an hour."
What they are careful not to say publicly is exactly what they propose to do to increase productivity on the waterfront. After all, their "solutions" might lose them public support, especially since the government is planning to replicate its attacks on the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) in other strongly organised sectors of the work force.
On April 8, the day after the lockout, Reith launched the government's "seven objectives for waterfront reform", after gaining the agreement of Patrick and P & O. The objectives focus almost entirely on workers doing more; they have little to say about bosses doing more.
Reith's objectives are to: end overstaffing and restrictive work practices; increase container movements from an average of 18 to 25 containers an hour; reduce industrial action and eliminate disruptive work practices; reduce injury and fatality levels; lower costs through logistics; improve the use of technology; and establish a government company to fund redundancy pay-outs.
In enterprise bargaining negotiations with the MUA just prior to the lockout in Sydney, Patrick refused to include award entitlements in a new agreement. Corrigan has been quoted as saying that Patrick would only need 500 to 700 of the former 2000-strong work force. P & O has also indicated that it wants big job cuts, perhaps as much as 40%, and the elimination of "restrictive work practices" when it negotiates an enterprise agreement with the MUA.
In essence, Reith, Patrick and P & O's seven-point program for the waterfront is a three-point program of sackings, attacks on working conditions and breaking the ability of the MUA to defend its members' rights.
If increased productivity and reliability were the only aims of the program, it would include benchmarks for management, how the waterfront is organised, the amount of money being raked in by top management and for opening the industry to other major competitors besides Patrick and P & O.
Bob Mills, in the April 20 Financial Review, points out that Reith makes no assessment of the vast range of factors which affect crane rates and service reliability. He said: "Few of the many factors at play have much to do with industrial disputes. Inaccurate ship arrival times, availability of pilots and tugs, and of cargo for loading, are the other critical factors ... as are availability of cranes and the reliability of the equipment, which has been a particular problem in Sydney's Port Botany."
The only aim of the seven-point program is increased profits for Patrick and the other stevedoring companies.
Health and safety
Waterside workers don't receive "privileges". Wharfies' working conditions are based on ensuring safe work practices and an employment system in which work is spread amongst all workers rather than just the boss's favourites.
Sackings and ending "restrictive" work practices will automatically lead to an increase in work accidents and illnesses among workers.
One of Reith's more outrageous claims is that "crane drivers on the docks earn $90,000 a year for 14 hours work each week".
An article in the April 11-12 Australian Magazine examined the hours and earnings of an average crane driver at Fremantle in the second quarter of last year, based on information from Patrick. Such a driver works 50.3 hours, not 14.
Under occupational health and safety regulations, crane drivers alternate for 2.5-hour periods with a worker on the deck who directs the driver — the "two-up two-down" system. The stevedoring companies want to eliminate the position on the deck, saying that the two-person safety arrangement is "overmanning" or a "restrictive work practice". Already, one of the un-unionised workers at Port Botany, working without this system, has crashed a crane into a ship.
The two-up two-down system is necessary because driving a crane requires high levels of concentration to deal with a moving ship's deck and swinging equipment. MUA national secretary John Coombs points out that in some Third World countries where crane drivers are stuck in the cabin for eight-hour shifts, the accident rate is much higher.
Staffing levels
If the waterfront was over-staffed, the workers wouldn't be required to do massive amounts of overtime. As a result of the Waterfront Industry Reform Agreement (WIRA) 1989-1992, 57% of wharfies (4900 workers) were made redundant. This resulted in the remaining workers being forced to work up to 70 hours a week.
Further staffing cuts would result in lower safety levels and further casualisation of the industry. Patrick and P & O's goal is to employ only a tiny number of full-time workers and have everyone else contracted out or employed on a casual basis, as has occurred on New Zealand's wharves. A well as being cheaper, a casualised work force would also be more compliant, for fear of losing their jobs.
Reith claims that wharfies go slow during their regular shifts in order to get overtime. If this was the case, the MUA wouldn't have a policy of limiting the amount of overtime per member to one double-header (15 hours) or weekend shift, plus one extended shift (two to three hours) per week. Since double-headers were never worked prior to the mass redundancies, it seems that any "overtime culture" on the wharves is a direct result of the bosses' policies.
Coombs says the union "wants to get back to a 35-hour week as a matter of principle, and a good annualised salary". This would roll all the penalty rates and allowances into an annual salary which would be averaged out into the same amount each week.
Overpaid and unproductive?
Reith says wharfies are paid between $90,000-120,000. In fact, wharfies are paid an amount which is equivalent to other skilled workers. Their wages range from $24,034 (Grade 1) to $35,027 (Grade 6). However, because of the amount of overtime they work, and the various allowances they receive, such as the danger allowance, their wages are brought up to $70,000-80,000 per year.
The waterfront bosses would like to remove all penalty rates, but these rates were fought for by the trade union movement for a good reason: they're a penalty on the boss for forcing employees to work anti-social hours. Workers in any industry based on shift work experience more health problems, family breakdown, and drug and alcohol abuse than other workers.
Wharfies' wages could be compared to those of Patrick's executives. Corrigan, last year's top earner in Lang Corporation (the owner of Patrick), receives $480,000 a year — that's $1318 a day! Peter Scanlon, the largest shareholder in Lang Corporation, collected $899,000, or $2469 per day!, in management fees and a share of the profits.
Even the scab wharfies, who are still in training, are being paid $55,000 a year — $30,966 more than trainee wharfies under the previous enterprise agreement with the MUA.
Reith and Corrigan assert that Australian workers only lift 18 containers per hour, compared to world's best practice of 25-30 containers per hour. But even conservative commentator Alan Ramsey admits in the April 25 Sydney Morning Herald that "the government's mantra on crane rates is one of the hardest to pin down. Neither Reith nor Howard has substantiated the international comparisons, nor issued any comprehensive figures on Australian rates. They simply assert them."
Ramsey points out that no official figures have been collected since the Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics report in 1995. That report showed a crane lift average of 25 an hour in the five major ports, with a peak average of 28 an hour.
Productivity is higher in many ports overseas, but that is not because of Australian wharfies' work practices. Rather, compared to overseas ports, Australian ports handle smaller ships, use fewer cranes per ship, have a lower number of container movements per ship, and have older and slower cranes and more breakdowns in equipment.
In hub ports such as Rotterdam or Singapore, all the containers will be removed from a ship by five cranes and loaded onto the next ship. In Australian ports, only two or three old cranes will be used to unload only part of the container load at each stop. This often requires the rearrangement of containers in order to unload those required.
A report by the London-based Drewry Consultants found that the most important factor in wharf productivity is the proportion of containers unloaded at each port. It pointed out that large hub ports, such as Antwerp and Singapore, had higher productivity because all of the containers were unloaded when ships came in.
On this basis, Clive Hamilton from the Australia Institute estimates that Australian ports could significantly increase productivity only by establishing a single, large container terminal in each port.
A former supervisor from Patrick's Melbourne terminal, Alan Knight, outlines other problems affecting productivity:
- poor terminal lay out at East Swanson dock means that containers have to be moved long distances before being loaded or unloaded;
- mis-allocation of maintenance workers, with electricians being sent to work on equipment they haven't been trained to repair;
- the poor condition of some ships, with lashings and container-locking systems malfunctioning, delaying cargo unloading; and
- frequent crane breakdowns and equipment failures because management generally refuses to take equipment off-line for regular maintenance.
The dishonesty of Reith and Corrigan's productivity arguments is also underlined by the fact that stevedoring charges amount to a mere 3% of the cost of moving a full container from the United States to Australia.
Union membership
Reith and Corrigan's key accusation against the MUA is that all waterside workers are union members; that is, the wharves are a closed shop. In an attempt to undermine public support for the MUA, Reith and Corrigan describe this as a "labour monopoly".
In reality, it is Patrick and P & O which want a labour monopoly on the wharves. They want total control over what workers are paid, how work is organised and how many workers are employed. And they want workers to swear total allegiance to the company, not the union. (Rio Tinto has been quoted as also arguing that any loyalty their employees owe to the union is at the cost of loyalty to the company.)
It has irked waterfront employers for decades that the MUA and its predecessors managed to abolish competition between workers on the waterfront. The old labour pool system meant that all workers received an equal share of the work. When a company needed workers, it had to take the next person on the roster. It couldn't discriminate on the basis of someone's race, level of trade union activism, or so on.
Employers hated that system because they wanted to discriminate in favour of the most subservient workers and against union activists, or simply workers they didn't like.
Although the labour pool system for waterside workers was lost in the WIRA in 1992 and workers are now tied to one employer, the union still controls the roster for supplementary workers.
After the WIRA, when thousands of full-time permanent workers left the industry, supplementary workers had to be employed during busy periods. Supplementary workers are all members of the MUA. Through controlling the supplementary roster, the MUA can ensure that work is fairly distributed amongst workers and that the companies can't increase the number of supplementary workers in comparison to full-time workers.
In a period of high unemployment, when employers pit worker against worker, such a roster system would be useful for other unions. Along with the demand for a shorter working week to fight unemployment, a roster system to share the work around and prevent competition amongst workers should be supported and campaigned for in other industries.
Scapegoating
The vendetta being waged by the government and stevedoring companies against the "privileges" of waterside workers is similar to that being waged by the government, the One Nation party and the media corporations against the "privileges" of migrants and Aboriginal people.
It is the politics of scapegoating — an attempt to convince us that other sections of the working class are rorting the system and not suffering in the same way as we are, so we should participate in the government's drive to attack their rights.
The main aim of this ideological campaign is to distract us from the fact that, in order to drive down the living standards of all workers and increase corporate profits, capitalist governments must pick workers off group by group. If they fail — as they have so far failed against the MUA — their austerity project will be much weaker and working people will have won an important victory.