LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
IT is time for the Gippsland community to learn some of the real facts about the union dispute which threatens to disrupt the plant supplying half of Victoria’s gas.
The gas plant is under siege due to a business decision by ExxonMobil to change a maintenance contractor to UGL.
For weeks now, an active union protest has convened on the steps of the plant.
There are reports of workers facing threats and intimidation for choosing to go to work and earn their living.
A giant inflatable rat known as ‘Scabby’, and a sign naming and shaming individual workers, are examples of such union tactics only just removed by court order on July 21.
Yet the intimidation continues.
On July 26, even in the face of that court order, the union had the guile to replace Scabby with a similarly menacing oversized inflatable ‘Greedy the Fat Cat’.
The merits of any industrial dispute are simply not relevant — because a resort to lawlessness can never be justified.
That said, this dispute is not about low paid and ill-treated workers.
To list just a few basic facts:
The work won by UGL is a five-year maintenance contract, meaning five years of employment for local Gippsland workers; and the base rate of pay offered by UGL is high — offshore workers will earn in excess of $180,000 per year for 22 weeks’ work, for a base trade position, the same level as oil and gas workers at other operations right across Australia.
It is true that the offshore roster is new. Indeed, it provides an extra 13 days of leave each year to these workers.
The grim reality here is that we have a union which sees fit to resort to illegal activity when it does not get what it wants.
It is not true, as the union would have readers believe, that local jobs were strategically replaced by fly-in fly-out workers.
All local workers were offered these high paying jobs.
If they chose not to accept, that is their choice.
The tragedy is for those who made such choice in blind faith, or having regard to union rhetoric.
It is not true that UGL is offering a “sham” agreement.
To the contrary, this enterprise agreement was independently checked by the Fair Work Commission against Bill Shorten’s bargaining laws, made in his former capacity as Workplace Relations Minister of the former Labor Government.
Rather, this is an example of the union resorting to unlawful intimidation and bullying because it didn’t get what it wants.
In no other part of society would we tolerate a protest of this nature.
I rather imagine if there was a protest preventing or intimidating people going to see Geelong play Carlton at Etihad on Saturday, there would be community outrage.
For this to all end, we need the unions, and the broader Labor movement to stop playing these industrial games and start acting in the interests of the Australian community.
Workers need these jobs and Australia needs the gas.
