BY NICK EVERETT
SYDNEY — The 350 workers employed by the Marrickville-based car components maker TriStar Steering and Suspension won victory on August 8 in their dispute over pay and the protection of their entitlements. Militant action forced the company to agree to contribute $1.4 million, over the next two years, to an insurance bond to safeguard the workers' $17 million worth of entitlements.
At the heart of the dispute, which forced a stoppage of car production in three states, was the question of who should control the funds set up to guarantee workers' pay-outs in the event of a company collapses.
The dispute has a long history. When Arrowcrest took over TriStar (then called TRW Steering) in late 1999, management refused to lodge a new bank guarantee for workers' entitlements. The company backed down after a four-day strike in March 2000. But this agreement was withdrawn after the expiry of the enterprise bargaining agreement in June this year.
The company had been sold to Arrowcrest extremely cheaply, making the workers suspicious that TriStar could be operating as a shelf company (a company with no assets) for Arrowcrest, and that their entitlements were not secure.
A TriStar worker explained to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly: "After the takeover, I undertook a little investigation on the internet. I discovered that Arrowcrest had a bad industrial record, so I printed off some information and took it to work. The boss confiscated it. The next time I went back to the site, I could no longer access it."
Arrowcrest owns small companies in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, including metal shelving manufacturers Brownbuilt and Steelbuilt, engineering components manufacturer Unicast, and ROH Wheels. Most of these companies have been involved in recent industrial disputes.
At an Arrowcrest factory in Adelaide, the unionised work force was replaced by casuals following a lock-out. At Kockum, in Melbourne, half of the work force was sacked last year after winning a 13.5% pay rise over three years.
In October, Brownbuilt locked out 60 Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) members for seven weeks after rejecting the union's claim for a 15% pay rise over three years.
Manusafe
So when the TriStar industrial agreement expired, union members were ready for a fight. The dispute coincided with the AMWU's campaign for employers to sign up to the Manusafe Industry Trust Fund, which would guarantee workers' entitlements.
Manusafe is a pivotal part of the AMWU's Campaign 2001, protecting employee entitlements in future enterprise agreement negotiations. The campaign began with an overtime ban in July. In Sydney, several hundred Maintrain workers, responsible for the maintenance of State Rail trains, took to the streets last month in support of Manusafe.
Campaign 2000 (now Campaign 2001) was launched by the militant Victorian branch of the AMWU to introduce industry-wide conditions for workers in the manufacturing industry.
As AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron explained: "Hundreds of thousands of workers are concerned at the recent spate of company collapses that have seen millions of dollars of workers' entitlements disappear overnight. HIH, One.Tel, National Textiles, Cobar Mines and STP are all fresh in the minds of workers who already face an uncertain future due to the increasing pressures that are resulting from Australia's obsession with free trade and globalisation. The AMWU alone has had 900 members lose about $9 million in the last 9 months."
TriStar workers voted on August 2 for a four-day strike. This was in response to the company's demand that the workers pay for protection of their own entitlements by contributing 2% of a 10% pay rise — or $700 per worker — towards a company insurance bond. TriStar was also seeking to cap redundancy entitlements at 26 weeks' pay, even though 92% of TriStar workers would be entitled to more.
The unions involved in the dispute — the AMWU, the Australian Workers Union, the Electrical Trades Union and the National Union of Workers — demanded that 1.5% of wages be paid by the company into the Manusafe fund.
Marty Peek, who has worked at TriStar for the past 30 years, told the August 8 Sydney Morning Herald that he was alarmed by big recent corporate collapses. "We saw HIH, One.Tel. Our future seemed uncertain. TriStar is a loss-making company. It is losing contracts. How would John Howard feel if it was his entitlements in doubt?"
After 30 years, Peek's entitlements are worth $122,000, including 22 weeks' long service leave, two weeks' holiday pay and 128 weeks' redundancy entitlement. Under a scheme proposed by the federal government, only $10,000 of entitlements would be protected, with a further $10,000 available if state governments agree to join the scheme. Employers would be under no compulsion to contribute.
Referring to the federal government's bail-out of National Textiles, where Howard's brother was chair of the company, Peek observed, "It's one law for John Howard's family and one law for everyone else".
Stand-downs
Following the TriStar workers' four-day strike, car manufacturers Ford, Holden and Mitsubishi stood down thousands of workers without pay. This was a consequence of the car-makers' policy of stockpiling only sufficient parts for a day's production.
On August 6, the Industrial Relations Commission terminated the bargaining period for the TriStar enterprise agreement and ordered the workers to return to work by 3pm the next day. Under the Workplace Relations Act, the strike would have become illegal after the deadline and the workers and their unions could have faced fines of up to $10,000 a day if the strike continued. In addition, they could have been sued by TriStar and the car manufacturers for millions of dollars in damages under common law.
After protracted negotiations between TriStar/Arrowcrest and the four unions on August 8 and 9, TriStar workers agreed to accept the company's offer of a 10% pay rise over two years and an insurance bond that will protect the workers' entitlements.
On August 9, Cameron stated that the agreement "does not offer the guarantee that a proper independent trust fund like Manusafe would offer, but the concessions made by the company give the workers increased security".
"The fight to protect manufacturing workers' entitlements in a trust fund like Manusafe, is not over," Cameron promised. "The TriStar workers have managed to put the issue of workers' entitlements firmly on the national agenda, and they know that many Australian workers will thank them for that."
The issue of protecting workers' entitlements will remain prominent in the lead up to the federal election. The Labor Party will no doubt seek to win mileage out of workers' anger at the federal government's refusal to make employers contribute to a fund to safeguard workers' entitlements.
However, the Manusafe campaign has placed on the agenda a system to protect entitlements that is managed by the workers. As Cameron noted: "We do not believe that it should be simply left to the politicians. It is only through courageous struggles and sacrifice by working people that entitlements will be protected."