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Picketing Joy

Rowan Cahill chronicled the definitive dispute of 2000 for Workers Online. He looks back on the battle and the lessons to be drawn from the workers at Joy.

Moss Vale, population 7592, is a semi-rural town in the Southern Highlands of NSW. During the era of steam-rail it was a major stop-off on the long haul between Sydney and Albury. Today it struggles for relevance.

Between the wars the State Governor maintained an apartment over the station's refreshment complex; an Edwardian rest-over whilst awaiting the chauffeured automobile to his nearby rural estate.

On a rise overlooking town, behind a huge photinia hedge, is Trelm, a prominent political address during the Menzies era of Liberal Party politics, site of much head kicking, number crunching, and the go-ahead for Australia's Korean War involvement.

Somewhere in the area is the railway bridge under which Cold War Soviet defector Vladimir Petrov allegedly collected clandestine materials secreted by his alleged Australian network of informants; a post-box in espionage parlance. As to which bridge, well take your pick; there are a few that fit the bill.

North some ten kilometres, across the algae clogged Wingecarribee River choking its way through the tax dodge rural holdings of Sydney's elite, before ending up in the Sydney water supply, is affluent Bowral, headquarters of the Sir Donald ("Don't Use My Name") Bradman cricket marketing machine. The town also hosts the residence of the high-flying lawyer and smooth neo-liberal acolyte, Federal Finance Minister John Fahey, "the invisible member" according to some locals.

On the northern outskirts of Moss Vale is the former rural campus of the exclusive girls' school SCEGGS. Here, one morning in November 1961, Lennie Lawson, former prolific comic book artist and creator of the long-running Lone Avenger series, broke up a pre-examination chapel service; he was armed with a rifle. By the time he was overpowered by the headmistress, five shots had been fired, and a schoolgirl was dead. The surviving senior girls were ushered off to commence their Leaving Certificate.

Not far away as the crow flies, and also on the outskirts of town, is a factory; Joy Mining Machinery. Since 1994 it has been part of the global empire of American mining machinery multinational Harnischfeger Industries Inc. In 1998 Harnischfeger commenced what its website terms "aggressive' and permanent global downsizing, cost-cutting and "headcount reduction".

For 205 days during 2000, the Moss Vale factory, which also houses the headquarters of Joy's Australian operation, was the focal point of a bitter industrial dispute, played out away from the attention of the city-based mainstream media, but arguably with national importance nonetheless.

The dispute began following the collapse of five and a half months of negotiations for a new Enterprise Agreement. The main contentious issue was the company's insistence on replacing the one agreement with four separate agreements and treating each individually. In context with other events at the Moss Vale factory during 1999, including 41 redundancies which effectively culled union activists with enterprise bargaining skills, workers regarded this as an attempt to undermine their unity and bargaining power, a prelude to deunionisation and casualisation.

The company warned that failure to reach agreement would result in factory closure or lockout. The Joy style throughout seemed intent on closing unions out of negotiations, and at the end of March unfinished work started to move off-site.

A picket line was established, to which the company, relying on Peter Reith's Workplace Relations Act (WRA), responded with a three-month lockout. This was the first of two lockouts, linked and extended by Joy workers with strike action.

Throughout the greater part of the year, the 63 men involved, members of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union (AMWU), the Australian Workers' Union (AWU), and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU), maintained a 24 hour picket line, 7 days a week.

Originally 73 men were involved, but some broke rank, while personal circumstances compelled others to withdraw from the industry. Supreme Court injunctions restrained activity on the line as the company continued to shift work off-site, 70 kilometres away, to non-union workshops in Wollongong employing the breakaway workers. The move from Moss Vale commenced with a large and heavy handed, out-of-district, police presence, and continued with clandestine truck movements under cover of darkness.

Union solidarity protests, swelled by students from Wollongong University, took place outside the relocated workshops, and occupations occurred. The regional media became interested in the dispute.

The company responded to protests; in the months that followed, personal damages claims were issued against key unionists totalling a reported $1.7 million, and hundreds of subpoenas, possibly 250, were issued to stifle opposition.

Throughout the dispute the Moss Vale factory continued to function, albeit in a greatly reduced capacity. Management, supervisory, and office personnel functioned in capacities well beyond original job descriptions, their efforts bolstered by the employment of non-union contractors. Stress counsellors were reportedly called in. Physically, the site took on the appearance of a penal institution.

Nature threw its best at the picket line, and there was a particularly harsh Winter: temperatures at night hovered around zero; there were storms, oversized hail, and snow. The WRA also brought harshness, encouraging industrial behaviour more in keeping with Upton Sinclair capitalists than Business Review Weekly types.

Perhaps it is the case that sophisticated information technologies, designer clothing, designer offices, tertiary IR and management courses, and glossy profiles in business journals, do not really change the conflict that is at the core of the relationship between capital and labour, something the Reith legislation, with its first belligerent tryout in 1998 during the Waterfront dispute, helps cut to the quick and make abundantly clear.

Joy increased site security with guards who boasted of previous anti-union experience. The picket line was constantly under video and photographic surveillance, with special interest taken in recording supporters who came by, a number of whom ended up on the receiving end of subpoenas. Agents variously posed as media representatives, and a private detective was hired, to identify picket line supporters. Company lawyers tried to subpoena the photographic, paper, and mobile phone records of those on the line, which led to circumspection in regard to the making of photographic and paper trails.

Wives of picket line unionists were recipients of anonymous correspondence apparently aimed at driving a wedge between them and their husbands, with a view to ending the dispute in the company's favour.

When the company contacted the workers, it was by letter to home addresses, such correspondence characterised by 19th century paternalism and industrial threats.

A classic throwback to American style baseball-bat industrial relations, not surprising given the company's ownership, was the hiring of a team of interstate contractors, put together by an agency that had done similar work for Patrick Stevedores in 1998. Flood lights appeared, and video surveillance intensified; some of the contractors seemed intent on provoking the men on the line, taunting, teasing, and acting in a macho-bullying manner, as though inviting violence.

When the dispute ended, and the contractors had left, unionists returning to work found their lockers had been gone through, personal items removed, work clothes and boots trashed, and at least one incident of industrial sabotage.

Overall a vast amount of money must have been spent by Joy during the dispute. This, together with the length of the dispute and the energy with which it was prosecuted, suggested to some union observers that more was at stake than the conduct of a small-town industrial dispute. The seeming inexhaustible money supply raised questions, and there was speculation as to its origin: a neo-liberal fighting fund of some kind?

Increasingly union leaders came to believe the Joy dispute was being watched by related industry employers all over Australia, the possible defeat of the unions providing both inspiration and an example of what was possible when employers creatively took advantage of the WRA. The tacit approval and support of the Howard government was suspected.

The picket-line workers were a mixture of young and old men, many with dependent families. One young newly wed worker returned from his honeymoon to find himself on the line. Some had been with the company for decades before it had become a multinational pawn.

Emotionally and financially the dispute hit them and their families hard as they adapted to surviving on anorexic budgets, personal savings, the contributions of family and friends, family allowance payments, credit, Strike Fund payments, and any work the wives could arrange. At the outset of the first lockout, the workers found themselves blacklisted with Centrelink and prevented from collecting social security benefits. Within families there were personal and psychological strains and tensions. As one young wife explained to me, these were the sorts of tensions you can't directly attribute to the dispute, but which you know are somehow related, like the young child who unaccountably started wetting his bed at night.

The fact the dispute was a family affair partly explains the eventual union victory. Despite great pressures, families remained firm, and there was a lot of inter-family mutual support and assistance. The more Joy was perceived as attacking the fabric of family life, the greater the resolve to struggle on. Families visited the line regularly. When major union decisions had to be made about the conduct of the dispute, mass meetings involved the workers and their wives.

For the men on the line, 205 days was a lot of picketing. Physically the task was made easier by union provision of a site-shed and portable toilet facility on the roadside outside each of the two factory entrances. Caravan park and camping skills made these encampments habitable; tent annexes with pallet floors, garage furniture, a couple of old television sets, generators, camp kitchens, and the ubiquitous 44 gallon drum brazier, became part of the scene. By Spring, one of the union flag bedecked picket encampments even had its own thriving vegetable garden.

Union delegates drew up attendance rosters, and the men came to regard picket line duty as defacto work, for which they drew Strike Pay. Men came and went with the punctuality of regular shift work; whilst on duty there was work to be done: explanations for the umpteenth time to interested passers by; donations to be accounted for; intelligence to be gathered about what might be happening inside the factory by monitoring traffic flow, what trucks were hauling, and general yard activity; leaflets, media releases, placards to be prepared; individual and collective morale to be maintained; firewood to be collected; surrounds to be kept clean; food to be prepared.

Events helped relieve tedium and generate morale. Visiting groups of unionists from Wollongong and Sydney resulted in festive occasions, with speeches and barbeques. As the dispute lengthened, picket line delegations toured worksites in NSW and interstate, explaining the dispute and successfully soliciting financial support. A delegation dropped in on Chase Manhattan Bank in Sydney, getting as far as the boardroom before being evicted; the workers were interested in the financial status of American parent company Harnischfeger when they found out the Bank was helping bankroll it out of debt.

The resilience of the line had a great deal to do with the trade union organisational practices and attitudes evident during the dispute. Joy's union delegates were intelligent and respected shop-floor colleagues; they took on the organisational/leadership roles the situation demanded locally; it was not an elitist role assumption, but based on necessity, ability and skill, reflecting workshop attitudes of recognising someone who can do a job, and respect for the skills involved; everyone on the line had a point of view, an opinion, some level of understanding, the sophistication of which increased as the dispute lengthened; there was a lot of discussion and communal decision making, over coffee, around the brazier, especially after the gossipy picture weeklies had been exhausted of diversion, and during miserable days of boredom, hunched against the cold in old lounge chairs with the stuffing coming out, dodging rain that managed to work its way through the annexe roof.

The three unions involved were able to maximise unity and campaign for common objectives. Union organisers made regular visits to the line, some even camping on a regular basis, sharing the experience of being out in the cold, a factor greatly appreciated and respected by the workers.

Seventy kilometres away in Wollongong, the supportive and imaginative South Coast Labour Council kept the dispute in the regional news, and worked at building union solidarity and support.

Communication was maximised; no one on the line felt isolated, or out of touch with developments; the only 'them' and 'us' in this dispute was capital versus labour.

Sometime after the 1998 Waterfront dispute, the Maritime Union of Australia, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, and the AMWU, agreed that given a significant dispute any was involved in, there would be no standing alone. The Joy workers, via the involvement of AMWU members, had significant support from the outset.

Support grew. While the local Bowral-based newspaper generally ran an anti-union line, regionally the workers received sympathetic media coverage. Moss Vale businesses donated supplies of food, newspapers, magazines, and fuel to the line, while cash donations came from local individuals and unionists.

As awareness of the dispute spread, there were solidarity actions by other Joy workers in Australia, and moral and financial support increased. Trade union publications, the web, the left newspapers Green Left Weekly, the communist Guardian, and the NSW Labor Council's electronic weekly Workers Online, all played important publicist roles. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian discovered the dispute when it was about half-way way through. Kim Beazley made it to the line a week before the dispute concluded.

There were international expressions of solidarity from the United Steelworkers of America, industrial lobbying by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Joy has significant South African interests), while the Geneva-based International Metalworkers' Federation threatened an international campaign against Joy. This support reflected the growing awareness by some Australian trade unions of the need to develop international trade union links and perspectives in the struggle against the neo-liberal agendas of global corporations.

Touching was the donation from boxer Justin Clements. A scaffolder by trade, he apparently found out about the dispute via the net, and donated his $5000 purse from a draw in a Light Heavyweight fight held in Las Vegas.

After months of meetings between the disputing parties, the involvement of the ACTU, legal manoeuvring and numerous sessions in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, the Joy dispute was arbitrated in October by Justice Munro. His decision awarded a twelve per cent pay rise over three years to Joy workers instead of the company's original offer of five per cent over two years. A three year enterprise agreement for all sections of the workforce was stipulated, instead of the company's preferred four separate agreements. Controls were placed on the use of contractors and casuals.

The non-union contractors were sent packing, and legal actions pending as a result of the dispute were dropped..

On a cool Spring morning, to the skirl of bagpipes, the joyous applause of a crowd of well wishers, supporters, and families, the air alive with union flags, the first of the Joy workers walked through the factory gates and back to work. The sun chose the moment to break through the clouds. There were few dry eyes.

The picket line had been the necessary, in a sense theatrical and symbolic, tip of a complex industrial process. It purposefully kept a specific group of workers defiantly together, thwarted the industrial intent of the lockout tactic, and readily provided images of media interest. Beyond this the line was a reminder to managers, who regularly passed through the line behind tinted windscreens of company cars, that decisions made about workers in American boardrooms and Sydney legal offices, in the name of corporate profits and shareholders, affect human beings; Supreme Court injunctions could not restrain the human emotion expressed in faces, nor ease the discomfort caused by the non-violent bearing of witness to hardship. For the town the line was a reminder that an industrial dispute was in progress, affecting people who were part of the town, and a cash flow that was a vital part of the local economy.

The locking-out of employees is an employer right under the WRA. Capable of being dispensed in large time-blocks, the lockout is an aggressive industrial action designed to force reduced wages and conditions on employees. By implication it not only targets workers as individuals, but also their families and dependents; and it does so in a way that employee industrial action, limited and curtailed by a raft of inhibiting and punitive legislation, finds difficulty matching.

The lockout is a tactic harking back to the second half of the 19th century when it was extensively used in the UK and Australia in response to growing union power, with the intention of breaking that power. After a long absence from Australian industrial life, both the lockout and the picket line are returning, in keeping with the old-time intent and implications of the WRA.

The Joy dispute is a reminder that 'old' trade union notions of struggle, and traditional approaches to organisation and mobilisation, are relevant modern responses.

Article reprinted from Overland, Issue Number 162, Autumn 2001. Rowan

Cahill reported the Joy dispute for Workers Online.

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»	Compo Wars: Week Two to the Workers!
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»	IT Workers � We Need You!
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»	Beazley Gives Boost To Bakery Workers
»	Employment, Environment Vital to US-Australia Trade Deal
»	Extra $1.37 Billion Needed for Unis
»	Campaigning Workshop Establishes Local Campaign Initiative
»	Activist Notebook

»	The Soapbox
»	The Locker Room
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	Organising - Dools Causes a Storm
»	Dools Replies
»	Singalong with Della!
»	Compo Forum - A Lib Responds
»	Like a Lamb to the Slaughter

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