G&K O'Connors - Dispute For Years

In the last months of 1998 a dispute began at the Packenham Abattoirs, G&K O'Connors, that has run for more than three years. In September 2001 Justice Conti gave a decision in the Federal Court that resulted in significant amounts of back pay for the workers who had withstood a reign of terror at G&K O'Connor for the previous three years. 

At 4.15pm on Tuesday 29^th May 2001, Mr Justice Conti of the Federal Court had ruled that the Federal Meat Industry Award had not replaced the 1992 Enterprise Bargaining Agreement at G&K O'Connor and that O'Connor was not entitled to decide to pay time rates rather than on a tally system.  This was a victory for the workers at G&K O'Connor who had refused to sign an Australian Workplace Agreement. The differences between Time Rates under the FMIPA and the Tally rates for an eight hour day under the 1992 Agreement were between $150 and $600 a week depending on classification.

This was two and a half years after Kevin O'Connor went to the workforce with a 'take it or else' proposition for a new agreement containing pay cuts of between 10% and 17%. It was twenty-seven months since he locked out these workers to starve them into accepting these pay cuts. It was twenty-one months since Kevin O'Connor decided that he did not want a collective agreement but that the workers would remain locked out until they signed AWAs with up to 30% pay cuts. 

It was eighteen months since the Union had won the case in the Industrial Relations Commission that resulted in O'Connor being ordered to take back the union members who refused to sign the AWA and pay them the appropriate safety net. It was eighteen months after O'Connor decided to pay these workers on the time rates of the FMIPA that had never applied in Victoria which was, in effect, pay cuts of up to 60% as punishment for not signing the AWA.  It was nine months since the Full bench of the Federal Court ruled that the 1992 Agreement was still in force in November 1999 when O'Connor was forced to take back the Union workers who refused to sign an AWA.

Despite the decision in May 2001 O'Connor's they had not paid the back pay five months after the Federal Court injunction ordering that the Union workers be paid on the 1992 Agreement. It was also five months since O'Connor instituted a form of industrial apartheid by creating the small boning room to place the Union workers who had not signed AWAs. The conditions were more dangerous in the small boning room than the main boning chain.

This was not the end of the matter.  The Union had another case before Justice Marshall for Duress that was putting workers under extraordinary and illegal pressure to sign AWAs.  Clearly, the fact that the courts found that O'Connor was illegally underpaying people since the lockout, was a powerful argument in this case.  The other evidence that would have been hard to ignore was the IRC transcript from a member's unfair dismissal in which the gamut of dirty tricks were exposed with spies being employed in a futile bid to destroy the Union organisation in the workplace.

It was an indictment of the current workplace relations system that workers should have to consider it a victory when the Court ruled that they must be paid on an agreement that was negotiated ten years ago!  But that is where five years of the Howard Conservative government had taken Australia.  The workers at G&K O'Connor did not sign AWAs did eventually get back the entitlements that their employer had sought to deny them only because they have been strong and courageous enough to resist the outrageous pressure that they have been placed under and because the AMIEU has been prepared to fight for their rights in the Courts

Prime Minister Howard promised that no worker would be worse off under his Workplace Relations Act.  The workers at G&K O'Connor who signed AWAs are paid between $100 and $200 a week less than workers were paid 10 years ago at G&K O'Connor.  This is what John Howard's promise to workers means.  Nobody in even their wildest flight of fancy could consider that the workers who were coerced into signing AWAs are not worse off as a result of an unscrupulous employer working with an coercive government law.

In June 2001 the lawyers for G&K O'Connor approached the AMIEU and asked for mediation to put an end to the legal cases that the Union has lodged against O'Connor's. The mediation did not start until after the back payments had been made. Eventually the Union withdrew the Duress case and the O'Connors reached a confidential settlement with the Union and the members who had not signed AWAs at Packenham.

Later the Industrial Relations Commission came down with a new FMIPA for future wages and conditions at O'Connors. This issue has not entirely gone away.