
Issue No 70		07 September 2000

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News

Fairfax Joins Ferals

By Hill Fredmer

The Fairfax media group has become one of a select few employers in this country in the past week by thinking that a lock-out of workers is a good way to resolve an industrial dispute.

Until now, only the notorious Joy Mining company at Moss Vale, NSW, and GK O'Connor's abattoir at Packenam in Victoria, have used lock-out provisions available since 1997 under Peter Reith's Workplace Relations Act, against their workers.

What Fairfax's chief executive, Fred Hilmer, thought he would achieve by locking 1,200 journalists, photographers and artists out of the company's headquarters in Sydney and Melbourne may never be known. If there was a strategy it wasn't clear.

Maybe Hilmer - whose appointment to head Fairfax was a mystery to many after his career as a time-and-motion academic and not a hands-on company boss - thought he could instil fear in the hearts of employees whose professional work he apparently still fails to appreciate, as well as failing to understand their united position.

And yet the lock-out, for all its lack of forethought and subtlety, was the catalyst for what is now a settlement of Fred's dispute with staff after he discovered that a lock-out can rebound on a newspaper company that wants to publish without the talented people who put it together.

A dispute at Fairfax has been simmering for months in the lead-up to the Olympics after management refused to improve a pay offer or discuss resourcing issues such as staffing. On Wednesday, 30 August, staff of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The Sun Herald and Business Review Weekly voted nationally to exercise their right, after three days formal notice during a bargaining period, to take legally protected strike action.

Some of the group's newspapers did not return to work after the meeting vote - but a general strike was held the next day, as well as a picket outside Fairfax's Sydney offices. On Friday 1 August, staff returned to work but began a campaign of rolling stoppages in which certain sections of the papers were to walk out at times to coincide with production deadlines.

Fred obviously didn't like this and, using what Fairfax called its own right to take industrial action, informed staff in writing that they were to be locked out. Management was to put out the papers on its own.

In Sydney and Melbourne staff stayed at their desks awaiting advice from their union, The Media Alliance. It was decided in Sydney to walk out en masse at 6pm. It was in Melbourne, though, where the actions of staff were critical to the outcome of the dispute. Unlike Sydney, where the printing presses are far away from the media offices in the city, The Age still prints and distributes newspapers in the same building as its media staffs in Spencer Street. After eventually leaving the building The Age's editorial staff set up a picket outside and refused to allow trucks carrying papers for Saturday's AFL Grand Final Day to leave the building. Even a court injunction obtained by Fairfax to stymie the picket did not work following support at the picket from printers and the wider trade union movement.

Fred Hilmer and his executives had a rethink. They re-entered negotiations with staff negotiators, ended the lock-out by Sunday and agreed to make an improved pay offer, as well as committing to negotiations on better resourcing of the group's newspapers.

By Wednesday, September 6, the scheduled end of a company-union truce, Fairfax was offering staff pay rises averaging 9 per cent over three years, plus a profit share agreement of about 5 per cent over the same period. The company also agreed to a summit on resourcing newspapers that would involve staff.

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Issue 70 contents

Interview: New Internationalism
In its battle with Rio Tinto the CFMEU has pioneered global campaigning. National Secretary John Maitland talks to Workers Online about globalisation, a union response and using new technologies to organise .

History: Pickets and Police
S11 protestors would do well to be wary. Fred Paterson, CPA member of the Qld Parliament, was bashed by the Queensland police on St Patrick's Day 1948, when a Labor Government was in power in that state.

Education: The WEF -Why Should We Care?
An event like the World Economic Forum attracts all the spin doctors for every interest, often obscuring real issues. For educators the issues may seem remote but a closer look shows that services like public education could be dramatically affected by the unfolding agenda of global trade liberalisation says Rob Durbridge.

Economics: A Vandalised Economy
Since New Zealand was opened up to the forces of globalisation, it has performed dismally, both economically and socially. NZCTU Economist Peter Conway reports.

Unions: Our Vital Role in Society
Eight months into his new role as ACTU Secretary Greg Combet reflects on the challenges facing Australian unions.

International: Turning Up The Heat
John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO says the union movement can and will reform the global economy, for as Dr Martin Luther King taught us, the moral arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.

Satire: Threat to withhold pocket money derails S11 protest
MELBOURNE, Tuesday: Members of the activist collective S11 announced today that they had decided to cancel their protest at the upcoming World Economic Forum meeting at Crown Casino.

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» Get Organised! NZ Unions Tell Army