Big Business Attack On Weekend Rates Of Pay – Give Them An Inch, They’ll Want A Mile, But They Won’t Get It

Ned K.

One of the key battlegrounds in the class struggle at the moment is the attack on weekend rates of pay by big business. Big business and their parliamentary friends led by Abbott frame this attack to make it seem that weekend rates of pay are a “penalty” on hard working small businesses.

The working people in Australia are not impressed by this argument and can see that it is yet another case of transferring a greater share of the wealth from wages to profits.  

 South Australian workers lead the way

In the last SA state election campaign in March 2014, progressive workers in their unions conducted a very visible campaign against Nick Xenophon’s attempt to win votes for his SA team by promoting a cut to weekend rates of pay as equating to an increase in jobs! The public response to the campaign against cuts to weekend rates was extremely successful. In fact the ALP Premier Jay Weatherill said words to the effect that the workers’ campaign was the ‘game changer’ in the election outcome. Abbott and his big business masters have not learned from this recent history. Relentlessly they continue with their line that weekend rates of pay cost jobs and hurt small business.

Is It Small Business Or Big Business Leading The Charge Against Weekend Rates Of Pay?

Big business is focusing on the retail industry to spearhead its assault on weekend rate of pay in general. Most small retail businesses pay workers under the award minimum standard (General Retail Industry Award) and have done so for decades.

The rates of pay in the award for Saturday are 25% more than Monday to Friday rates of pay. For Sunday the rates of pay are double time. Small businesses have factored this in to their cost structures for decades. It is not wages that have increased astronomically for small retail businesses, but increases in running costs of utilities and their supplier costs.

Take bread for instance. Woolworths and Coles pay a significantly lower unit cost for a loaf of bread than does the small cafe struggling to survive in a shopping mall or main road shopping strip where they have to pay exorbitant rent to a parasitic landlord like Westfield.

In fact it is big business retailers who have been leading the charge against weekend and other shift rates of pay for over two decades.

In the late 1980s and 1990s the big department stores like Myer and the big food retailers like Woolworths and Coles made applications to reduce Saturday rates of pay from time and one half to time and one quarter, the current 25% Saturday rate of pay in the award.

Then along came enterprise bargaining which these big retailers used to whittle away weekend rates and extend ordinary hours of work, thereby minimising higher shift pay rates.

How were they able to get away with this?  Enterprise bargaining divided the retail workers in an industry which is characterised by thousands of inexperienced young workers, some still at school. The introduction of enterprise bargaining coincided with an employer class attack on preference to unionists clauses in awards and ‘outlawing’ of the ‘closed shop’.

This situation weakened the bargaining power of all unions in collective agreement making, not to mention the anti-strike laws in the country. In the retail industry, the retail workers’ union, the SDA, entered bargaining with each of the big retailers having the ability to quickly de-unionise the industry if they chose through the withdrawal of pay roll deductions of union dues. This would not only have crippled the SDA financially but weakened the SDA’s right wing faction of the ALP with a history of Industrial Grouper influence within it.

In one sense it suited the big retailers to maintain strong membership numbers in the SDA as this indirectly helped to maintain right wing tendencies within the ALP.

Big Retailers Have Already Attacked Saturday Rates Of Pay

However competition between the big retailers and the motivation to maximise their profits has seen them use the enterprise bargaining process to take away weekend rates of pay for Saturday work.

The existing Enterprise Agreements of Aldii, Coles, Bunnings and Woolworths to name a few already have no additional rates of pay for Saturday work between 5am or 6am and 10pm in the late evening.

These big business Enterprise Agreements also have taken away overtime rates of pay by enabling the boss to roster a retail worker up to 48 hours in a week without the payment of overtime.

Not satisfied with this redistribution of wealth from wages to profits, the big retailers are now after workers’ Sunday rates of pay which are still at the standard of double time won by workers many decades ago.

 Workers United Will Defend Weekend Rates Of Pay

In 2015, retail workers have many workers in other industries who will unite with them to defeat the general ruling big business class offensive to transfer more wealth from wages to profits through an attack on weekend rates, Sunday rates in particular.

This time around, the likes of Coles and Woolworths will not just be confronted by an isolated section of the workforce in a single employer enterprise agreement negotiation in order to try and further reduce pay. They will be confronted by workers and their unions covering not only retail, but hospitality, health, construction and many more.

United in struggle, workers and their unions will defeat big business in this key battleground of the class struggle.

In the milk wars - Coles in farmers' sights

Vanguard March 2013 p. 6
David B.

During Summer Holidays on the NSW South Coast, this writer visited a local family-run dairy farm.

On a previous holiday, a lot of signs were tied along dairy farmers fences denouncing Coles for driving dairy farmers broke. It had piqued my interest and a chance of a tour of one of the farms was an opportunity to see dairy farming up close and get some idea of their lives. On the farm tour they showed off the calves and machinery, as well as the herd in for milking, and took us through the processing.

Technology not the problem

It is clear farmers are right up with technology with some pretty sophisticated computerised recording of each cow, their weight, their production of milk, and a range of other automated systems. They were no slouches in applying science to their production. If you like that sort of thing it was quite interesting, the mix of bug-eyed calves and huge cows to keep the young kids engaged and some clever technologies interesting the older. 

While we enjoyed a chilled refreshment of fresh milk on a hot day as the tour wrapped up, the farmer asked us all to buy Dairy Farmers or other branded milk, and not help Coles and Woolworths destroy dairy farming in Australia.  She explained Dairy Farmers was a brand owned by 80 dairy farmers, who sell their milk collectively. Her frustration, and even anger, with Coles was palpable. Home brands of the supermarkets are ruining farmers.

Her husband now runs a backhoe and bull-dozer contracting company, to keep the farm afloat. She recounted their experience that when Coles started the milk price war, Coles promised that would have no effect on farmers.

Last year, even the Dairy Farmers collectively had to drop the price they paid themselves. For now, they get 45 cents a litre for their milk. A year ago they had to cop a cut getting 45 cents a litre for 80% of their milk and 14 cents for the rest, dropping their average price to 39 cents, an average cut of 13%.

They don’t know what the price will be next year, but they aren’t hopeful of holding up the price. So much for the milk price war not affecting family-run dairy farms!

Half a dozen farmers near Berry have been so frustrated they contracted an independent processor in the Southern Highlands to bottle “premium-branded” milk and yoghurt. They sell them through boutique specialty stores to get a real return, but this is not open to the industry as a whole.

Monopoly kills the co-ops

The co-ops of the past came up, and the question was asked about what happened to them. The farmer recounted how a proposal came for privatisation of the co-op processing, and most farmers at the time were in their late fifties or sixties. They had mortgages on their farms and little chance of any comfort in their old age. When they were offered money for their co-op shares, 70% had to agree for it to go through. With the debt profile added to the age of farmers, it was accepted, and those left now deeply regret it.

The discussion among the 8 or 9 adults on the tour spread to the main processor in NSW National Foods being owned by Kirin Brewery of Japan. Farmers’ economic troubles are being forced on them by the dominance of their industry and markets by huge processing and market monopolies. Fundamentally, they are the same forces exploiting Australia’s workers. We have to support the poor family farmers.

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Further info:  milk facts

Some short facts about monopolies and pricing

• On Australia Day 2010, ironically, Coles lowered the price of its home brand milk to $1 a litre. Supermarket-branded milk has been selling for $1 for two years now. Coles and Woolworths sell their home brand milk at a loss.

• The penetration of in-house branded products is now high. 70% of the milk product, butter, sold in Australia is in-house brands.

• Greenseas tuna and salmon were dropped from Coles in 2011, to the advantage of Coles home brand seafood.

• Coles in-house brands account for 25% of the products in their stores. Woolworths says its in-house brands account for about 11% of products on its shelves. Coles and Woolworths get 80% of money spent on groceries in Australia.

• In the UK just under half the products on grocery store shelves are in-house brands.