BY STEPHEN O'BRIEN
NEWCASTLE — Mining company Colrock has followed in the nefarious tradition of National Textiles and Steel Tank and Pipe (STP) by sacking workers without paying them their entitlements.
Colrock, whose parent company is the German-based industrial giant Thyssen, owes 250 workers some $9 million after it collapsed on January 11. More than $4 million should have been paid to 130 workers at Southland Colliery, near Cessnock in the Hunter Valley.
Jeffrey Newman, the Southland Miners Federation lodge president, said that workers had only recently fought to have their superannuation deductions paid to their super fund. However, when the mine closed on January 11 they found out that nothing had been paid in to the fund since before Christmas. The Miners Federation has pledged to wage a national industrial campaign on the Colrock members behalf.
Meanwhile, the STP workers, who picketed their factory at Carrington in Newcastle, look like receiving only a quarter of the more $3 million owed to them.
A peace settlement brokered between the union, the receivers and the owners broke down just before Christmas when the bosses, Stephen and Bradley Weeks, baulked at paying the workers from the proceeds of resumed production and family money. The STP workers have won widespread public sympathy in Newcastle by exposing the wealthy lifestyle and opulent waterfront mansions of the Weeks family.
Most of the STP workers have been sacked and the remaining machinery at the factory is being readied for auction.
Kim Greenland, a sacked STP worker and their spokesperson, told Green Left Weekly that workers needed a government trust fund, to which employers are forced to pay into, to ensure that entitlements owed to them by unscrupulous bosses are paid.