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  Issue No 34 Official Organ of LaborNet 08 October 1999  

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Unions

Tally Ho!

By Justin Dooley - AMEIU national industrial officer

A landmark meat industry decision might not have the impact the reith cheer-squad hopes for.

 
 

The Australian Industrial Relations Commission has decided to remove the tally system from the Federal Meat Industry (Processing) Award 1996, the national award in the meat processing industry.

This is a direct result of the Federal Liberal governments award stripping. Some of the reasons the Commission gave for removing the tally system was that the tally:

� was not user friendly,

� lacked the flexibility to meet the variety of work methods employed in the various plants covered by the award,

� did not operate as properly fixed minimum rates of pay as required under subitem 51(4) of the Workplace Relations and Other Legislation Amendment Act 1996 (the WROLA Act); and

� did not comply with the award simplification requirements outlined in subitems 51(6) and 51(7) of the WROLA Act.

Despite the fact that the Union offered to negotiate and vary those parts of the tally system which were seen as deficient the entire system has been stripped from the award.

However tallies themselves are still an allowable award matter and this decision in fact relies on tallies remaining an allowable award matter in order that the Commission has the jurisdiction to fully implement its decision. The Commission conceded that a replacement system would have to take account of the need to protect workers from disadvantage. The Commission said that there was "some evidence of employers moving from tally systems to time work in the context of negotiations on tallies or taking other strategic action such as slowing down the chain speed or not putting up stock and putting downward pressure on earnings".

The Commission realised that without some form of a safety net to protect workers employed on a piece work basis then the potential existed for the exploitation of abattoir workers. Claims by employer groups and Peter Reith that the tally system has been abolished miss the point that there are many enterprise agreements that currently use a tally or incentive/bonus system because both employees and employers choose to work under this system. The tally system that was removed is little used and the main aim for the Union in defending this particular tally system was that it provided the safety net for agreements containing tally systems. The Commission recognised the need for a safety net when it asked the parties to design a system to replace the one removed.

A tally system was first introduced into awards in the mid-1960's, ironically at the instigation of the employers and in the face of opposition from the Union. It came about once a chain system was introduced into abattoirs. This allowed the animal carcass to be hung from a chain and workers to perform the same task on each carcass as it moved on the chain around the slaughter floor. A slaughterman was no longer solely responsible for dismembering and dressing the beast but could now perform an individual task such as fronting out the beast or removing the legs.

The tally system introduced into the award contained units of labour (the result of a time and motion study) used in a formula which takes into account the number, size and condition of a beast, the size of a work team and the prescribed amount of labour input per head to calculate how much a slaughterer should be paid. The fairness of the system lay in that you were paid for the work that you performed. There was an incentive payment made for reaching and continuing beyond a number of beasts processed in a day.

In the meat industry this allowed for a quick killing and dressing of a beast so that it would reach the chillers as quickly as possible while maintaining quality standards in performing slaughtering jobs.

Commenting on the Decision the AMIEU Federal Secretary, Tom Hannan said that if employers interpreted the Decision as letting employers lower the rate of pay in future certified agreements then industrial unrest will be sure to follow.

"It endangers everything that we have tried to achieve over the last six or seven years. That is to give proper wages and conditions to get flexibility in the industry and make the industry profitable. It could fly in the face of all that. We could go back to the battlefields".

However Tom Hannan said that he believed most employers would be sensible as they realised that if they tried to take advantage of workers they would be quickly done over. Employers had thought they had a great victory when tallies were introduced into awards in the 1960's only to find workers adapted to and took advantage of the tally system. There is nothing to say that removal of tallies will not see meat workers adapt once again.

The Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith, called it a landmark decision for the meat processing industry. He said it was a great win and an example of the real benefits of the government's award simplification policy. He made no comment on the fact that workers were now potentially facing the prospect of losing between $150 and $250 per week. He also failed to mention that the Commission had recognised the need for a replacement to act as a safety net for workers employed under incentive systems.

The National Meat Association HR manager Garry Johnston called it the beginning of the end for the tally system. This ignores the fact that the vast majority of employees in Australia will continue to operate under the tally system because this is what employers see as the most profitable manner of operation. There are many variants of the particular tally system removed from the award which employers use because they want to, not because the award forces them to. It is only people on the periphery of the industry who do not operate abattoirs, who are bleating about a new golden era in the meat industry due to the removal of the tally system. Peter Reith and the National Meat Association (the employer representative) are simply more interested in gaining glory for themselves rather than the abattoir workers and long term future of the meat industry.

As Tom Hannan said it is the employers (not Reith) who know that they have to be sensible enough to pay workers appropriately, to give workers the right incentives to do the productivity required to the quality that employers want. Otherwise there will be industrial unrest and employers will suffer.


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*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 34 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: A Crack to the Skull
Rail, Tram and Bus Union state secretary Nick Lewocki took on the Carr Government�s radical rail refrom agenda and walked away a winner. He looks back on the week the trains stood still.
*
*  Economics: Green Backs and Dirty Dollars
Paul Ehlrich says the real culprit behind the environmental crisis isn't so much the huge numbers of people in the world or conspicuous over-consumption in the West but an economic system that confuses price with cost.
*
*  Unions: Tally Ho!
A landmark meat industry decision might not have the impact the reith cheer-squad hopes for.
*
*  History: The Western Express
West Australian historians are undertaking a project to chronicle that state's rich rail history.
*
*  Republic: The Referendum: A Spot of Reading
John Passant looks a the propaganda passing as information in the lead-up to the referendum.
*
*  Indigenous: Australia Snubs Nose at the UN
The United Nations General Assembly will be told that Australia has breached an international convention on racial discrimination that Malcolm Fraser�s Government ratified 24 years ago.
*
*  International: Desert Flashpoint
The United Nations has confirmed that demonstrations were suppressed in Western Sahara last month.
*
*  Review: Temper Democratic
Humphrey McQueen has been a fearless critic of received opinions across a range of subjects for many years, and as a consequence has been criticised or more often ignored in debates in Australia.
*
*  Satire: Tax Cuts Come in the Nick of Time for Struggling Packers
Welfare groups have called upon on the Federal Government to bring forward the date of proposed capital gains tax cuts.
*
*  Labour Review: What's New in the Information Centre
Read the latest issue of Labour Review, a resource for union officials and students.
*

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Columns
»  Guest Report
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»  Sport
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»  Trades Hall
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»  Piers Watch
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Letters to the editor
»  Off With Their Funds!
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»  At the Child Care Coalface
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»  Walsh Bay Development Backed
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