NEWS that Danish-owned tug company Svitzer has threatened to lock out its entire 580-strong workforce across 17 Australian ports from Friday has unsurprisingly revived memories of one of the most controversial battles in this nation's modern industrial relations history, the Patrick waterfront dispute of 1998.
While the notion of the strike, in most minds, is of a working person withdrawing their labour, the Fair Work Act also allows employers to effectively do the same, but in reverse, to deny their employees access to the workplace.
This is what Svitzer, a subsidiary of the giant Maersk shipping line, has threatened to do in this dispute, which has erupted after three years of negotiations to replace an enterprise bargain struck in 2016, and which effectively expired in 2019, just before the arrival of COVID.
In a statement announcing its intended lockout on Friday, Svitzer says the parties remain apart on key threshold issues.
It does not name them, but does say it is seeking to remove "restrictive work practices" which it says "impede (the) managerial and operational decision-making" abilities that are "typical of most industries".
Svitzer also implies that its claimed inefficiencies are responsible for the loss of three port contracts in the past 12 months - leaving it with the 17 ports that are now involved in this company-wide action.
The waterfront and the coal industry are the two industries, more than any others, who have retained their high levels of unionism in an age when just 15 per cent of Australian workers are unionised.
Wage levels in both industries are also well above the rest of the blue-collar sector, and the unions and their members are within their rights to try to maintain their positions of relative advantage.
So, too, is Svitzer within its rights to threaten to shut down the bulk of Australia's commercial ports in what is now the lead-up to Christmas.
But at a time when employer groups are making loud noises about the supposed threat of multi-employer strikes they fear will be introduced through Labor's proposed industrial relations changes, it will not pass unnoticed that the multi-site threat here is proposed by the employer.
The unions call it "supply chain sabotage".
Both sides have brought this to the brink.
For the national good, they should walk things back, and resume their talks in good faith.
We will learn more about the intentions of all parties at an urgent hearing in the Fair Work Commission, scheduled to resume at noon today.
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