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Byline: Katrina Nicholas
With levels of dissent among subcontractors running at an all-time high, so is union membership. Unions are once again finding favour as a means to fight back.
With levels of dissent among subcontractors running at an all-time high, so is union membership. Unions are once again finding favour as a means to fight back.
Max Catania and Geoff Marsh weren't always union men, but now they're as loyal and staunch supporters as they come. They are telecommunications subcontractors whose new union fervour has severely embarrassed the pay TV provider, Foxtel.
Last month, along with some 800 of their fellow Foxtel subcontractors the workers who install pay TV in subscribers' homes around Australia they walked off the job. Their 48 hour stopwork was exquisitely timed. Less than 12 hours earlier, Foxtel chief executive Kim Williams had hosted 400 A-list celebrities and media types at a gala event at Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens to launch Foxtel's 130 channel digital offering.
The subcontractors' decision to strike was a major setback for Foxtel, which counts Telstra, Kerry Packer 's Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd and Rupert Murdoch 's News Corp as shareholders. Essentially, it had committed $15 million to a nationwide marketing campaign advertising a product it could not guarantee could be installed in people's homes.
In all its planning, Foxtel had overlooked a critical ingredient: the mood of the men whose job it was to put their product on air. The subcontractors had become so disenchanted with the contractors who did the deals with Foxtel that they had been heading back, in numbers, to the union.
This was the reverse of what was supposed to happen.
When Telstra started making its technicians redundant and subcontracting out the work in the mid 1990s, it was part of a grand plan of cost-cutting. The trouble is, the cost-cutting worked too well and enraged the subcontractors. They looked around in anger and found the Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union, which was only too willing to help out. Now these men who had been working outside the union are back inside and are more than happy to strike, and they have done so, naturally, at the most awkward of moments.
To end the burgeoning dispute, Foxtel, which has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons, was, through its contractors Areva and BSA , forced to increase the subcontractors' rates, negating the very rationale for using an outsourced workforce in the first place.
Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union officials like NSW organiser Shane Murphy , Victorian branch secretary Len Cooper and national industrial research officer Tony Absolom all three hard-bitten union men must have been trying hard not to smirk.
After years of sitting across from pinstripe-suited executives at stuffy Senate Estimate Committee hearings, after years of being called troublemakers and accused of scaremongering, their prophecies were coming true. Things out there are tough too tough for subcontractors. Levels of dissent have reached fever pitch. It's make or break time for men like Catania and Marsh. CEPU officials have figured it out blow the whistle and they will come running. Sometimes, in their thousands.
According to Murphy, union membership applications from telephony technicians and network maintenance workers are now at their highest in years. ``Out there, they used to be so disorganised,'' he says. ``There was this divide and conquer mentality Telstra had, but now we've been getting up to 200 new members a week. Union membership was in decline for some time, but it's definitely back on the rise.''
Murphy estimates that about 95 per cent of Foxtel's subcontracting workforce in NSW is unionised, versus about 70 per cent for Telstra's telephony workforce.
``A lot were Telstra employees who were made redundant and have been out there working as individuals getting hammered on rates and hours and they've had enough,'' he says. ``Three to four years ago, these guys wouldn't talk to me, they were all too scared, but now it's gone the other way. They're calling us. The attitude of companies like Telstra and Foxtel has paved the way for us. It's opened the door.''
The CEPU, which has now attracted 170,000 workers, is not only attracting former union members. Increasingly, the workers who fix Telstra's copper network around Australia are not old hands in their 50s, but young men, often migrants and often new to the union movement.
``A lot come from ethnic backgrounds and they've never had unions in their own countries,'' Murphy says.
``For example, we have a lot of Vietnamese guys on the cable side. But we now have union guys who speak Vietnamese and we find they are more than happy to talk to us, more than happy.''
CEPU Victorian branch secretary Len Cooper meanwhile tells stories of everyone from couriers working in the telecommunications industry to door-to-door Foxtel salespeople knocking on his door.
``There no question about it . . . I think what the federal government expected would happen with the Workplace Relations Act was that people would move onto individual contracts and it would become deunionised,'' he says.
``For some time it worked, but now the wheel's turning, now we're creating pressure points companies like Telstra and Foxtel have to take notice of.''
Finding new and innovative ways to connect with a changing workforce has, however, become part and parcel of a union organiser's job brief.
Ron Callus , director of the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training , says the traditional forms of union organisation, like having an on-site union recruiter, have changed.
``Unions have been forced to think of smarter ways to get to workers . . . they have to be a bit more creative,'' he says.
``Also, at one time, there was a strong, committed base. That's lapsed but now it's being reborn.''
Not that there's anything new in that, as Callus points out.
In 1979 , five men made transport history when they blocked the Razorback Mountain pass just outside Camden in Sydney's west to call attention to the predicament facing road transport operators.
Talking in this month's edition of the Wollondilly Shire Council 's Bush Telegraph , Ted Stevens , one the original blockaders, says that ``as subcontractors for the big boys, who had snavelled most of our work, we had to survive on rates far less than we were used to, sometimes amounting to only half the normal payment, and still fork out for road tax to the government.''
Which begs the question if, as history shows, forcing workers to become subcontractors often backfires, surely Williams or Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski weren't naive or pompous enough to think it wouldn't happen to them?
In the case of the Foxtel digital industrial dispute, it seems it was a case of miscommunication.
``It was clear at the meeting we had with Kim Williams that, unbelievably, he just hadn't been told there were these issues,'' Murphy says. ``The information being fed back to him was incorrect.''
The subcontractors get that impression too. Catania says sometimes there are too many hands in the bucket and not enough understanding of where the money actually goes.
``Kim Williams may well be paying top dollar [to the contractors] but by the time the money gets down to us, the ground force, it's been whittled away,'' he says.
Executives at Foxtel and Telstra, meanwhile, whose nervousness becomes palpable when the topics of unionism and labour cuts come up, instead insist subcontractors' rates of pay are a matter for the contractors.
``Foxtel, as it has done since it began services in 1995, does not directly employ the installation technicians,'' says Foxtel director of corporate affairs Mark Furness.
``The technicians work for companies that contract to Foxtel to provide installations and the workplace relationship is between those companies and the technicians. Foxtel will continue to work with its installation contracting companies in order to ensure reliable installations for its customers.''
The response from Telstra, which also turned down the opportunity to have one of its executives comment on the issue, is similarly bland.
``Telstra's priority is to deliver services to our customers and we have always used a mix of our own workforce and contract labour,'' a Telstra spokeswoman says. ``Any discussions with the subcontractors are carried out through the contractors.''
The contractors are similarly reluctant to discuss union matters.
``BSA has a very good relationship with our subcontractors,'' says BSA company secretary Ian McGregor , adding that he cannot comment on the Foxtel dispute. ``They're like entrepreneurs . . . we just supply them with work.''
McGregor did say BSA has quality assurance managers to deal with any disputes.
Contract conditions turn subbies into card - carrying true believers
Byline: Katrina Nicholas
Quitting a job installing pre-fab kitchens and bathrooms, Max Catania, 35, joined Telstra in 1995, in the telco's pit and pipe division working on the first stage of what would become Foxtel 's $600 million digital upgrade.
Quitting a job installing pre-fab kitchens and bathrooms, Max Catania, 35, joined Telstra in 1995, in the telco's pit and pipe division working on the first stage of what would become Foxtel 's $600 million digital upgrade.
Catania also joined a union for the first time. Most of his Telstra co-workers were members of the Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union. But in 1996, as part of Telstra's drive to cut costs by outsourcing labour, Catania was made redundant.
Along with hundreds of his colleagues, Catania handed over the keys to his white Telstra van, hung up his orange safety vest and joined the ranks of Australia's subcontractors. For the remainder of the 1990s, Catania took work where he could get it.
Forced to contract for companies including Skilled Engineering , Visionstream and Siemens Thiess , he let his union membership lapse and quickly learnt the pitfalls of being self-employed. No sick leave, no annual leave, workers' compensation premiums, public liability insurance, petrol costs, equipment expenses.
It all piled up while Telstra, sitting at the top of the contracting food chain, put the screws on contractors, who in turn pressured the subcontractors, for ever lower rates of pay.
``Then on December 1, 2003, Visionstream lost the [Telstra] contract,'' Catania remembers. ``The two who won it were ABB and Siemens Thiess and the rates they were offering were 20 to 30 per cent lower . . . but we had no choice if we were going to stay in the [installation] game. We either fought together or lost.''
Geoff Marsh grew up in and around unions. His father, a truck owner/driver, was heavily involved in the union movement in the 1970s and when Marsh, 38, entered the business, he signed up too.
But he quickly tired of the union's work-to-rule attitude, figuring he could make more money keeping his own hours. ``Since then, I've spent most of my life out of unions. I got to hate them because of being a truckie,'' he says.
Becoming a subcontractor for Areva , doing Foxtel digital installations, changed all that.
``The thing about subcontracting is that even though you're self-employed, you still have set rates and rules and it's all not negotiable,'' Marsh says.
``We needed an organiser and, in the true sense of the word, that's what a union is. Now I go to all the meetings. Things are totally going the other way . . . by people being forced to become subcontractors, unions are being made popular.''
Publication date: 17-4-2004
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