IAN KIRKWOOD: Contractual differences

Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union district president Peter Jordan was not the happiest of men on the phone from Melbourne, where he was attending the annual ACTU conference.

  Jordan said my quoting him as saying the contractors were on more than $100,000, when the Chandler Macleod pay rate implied earnings of $80,000 made it look as if he didn’t know what was going on in his own industry.

If readers did think that, it was not my intention.

I  used a 35-hour week as the basis for my calculation, rather than the 44hours that Jordan rightly says would be an ‘‘apples with apples’’ comparison with the direct BHP employees.

In the end, though, the gap between what direct employees and labour hire contractors earn is still substantial – I’d call the difference massive – and it’s not a difference that Jordan disputes.

It’s just that Jordan blames the companies, the industrial relations system and those who are unprepared to fight collectively for their rights for the situation that mineworkers are in right now.

After years of covering industrial relations for the Newcastle Herald, two unions stand out from all others for their success in winning wages and conditions, and their determination to adhere to collective bargaining as an act of faith so powerful that it trumps all other considerations.

They are, of course, the CFMEU and its waterfront sibling, the Maritime Union of Australia.

To the conservatives, the CFMEU and the MUA are despised as “militants”. Conversely, the unions condemn the multinational owners and the “fat cat” managers who do their utmost to drive down wages and conditions while lining their own pockets with performance bonuses.

This was all very well in the good old days, when closed shops and all that went with it gave the unions an incredibly strong hand at the bargaining table.

They still have that hand, as the $150,000 a year that Jordan acknowledges is a typical amount to earn at Mount Arthur.

But the growing ability of employers to hire contract labour, often without union involvement, at dramatically lower rates has given rise to the situation at the centre of Wednesday’s article.  

Jordan acknowledges workplace tensions over the contractor issue.

The contractors are envious of what the permanents earn, but the highly unionised direct workforce looks at the contractors and sees people who in many cases are prepared to take the pay and conditions won by the union – both historically and in current negotiations – without contributing their bit through paying their union dues and taking part in the union’s activist agenda.

But as Jordan acknowledges, the employers  have the contractors over a barrel.

“They get the contract guys in, one by one, and say if you keep your head down, don’t join the union, when the opportunity arises you’ll get a permanent position,” Jordan says.

“But two years, three years later, where are they? They’re still casuals.

“Our permanent guys get annoyed with the contractors, they say why don’t they rally together, why do they vote to accept these rubbish deals, and we have to say to them, put yourself in their shoes, what would your position be.

“It’s not something I am happy with, but the casual guys will say to you, after they’ve voted, that it was a bad deal, they knew it, but they wanted to keep their jobs and for the time being they were prepared to stick with it.” 

Both sides want to bridge the gap.

The only problem is the CFMEU is determined to do it by bringing the contractors up to the level of the direct employees,  but the  companies want to do it the other way around.

 They see having everyone on $80,000 – or $100,000 or thereabouts – as the target, rather than the $2800 a week, or more than $145,000 a year, that is the most recent measure of average weekly earnings in the NSW coal industry.