AMWU members at Tenneco in South Australia have taken a stand against company plans to cut their paid working week to four days.
The company claims that it needs to cut hours because of the financial crisis but it has refused to open its books or to implement a training program to replace the fifth day, even though the AMWU assisted in getting funding from the Federal Government to do so.
AMWU organiser Derek Thomas said that the company had been trying to reduce working hours and making workers take one day off funded by their own leave.
“While we’re willing to consider any reasonable proposal, the company has not been co-operative at all, and so we have maintained that they have no right to reduce the hours.
“Since October last year, delegates at the site have lobbied State and Federal Governments to access funding for training to be provided to workers whom could not be gainfully employed due to the down turn in the automotive industry.”
The AMWU had made submissions to the Bracks enquiry into the auto-industry and shop delegates from Tenneco had travelled to Canberra to lobby members of federal parliament. Officials and delegates had also met with many members of the state parliament to put their case.
After much consultation, the union’s position was that access to training under the Structural Adjustment Package (SAP) should be allowed prior to redundancies.
“For this to go ahead, the Federal Government criteria (SAP) had to be amended and after a lot of hard work by the AMWU officials and members, a contract was offered to Tenneco consisting of $3.1 million to be spent on training on industry down days.”
Mr Thomas said that this was the point at which the company resisted.
“Once the contract was presented to the company, the delegates swung into action to progress the training plan, but management have just sat on it.”
“They have come up with all sorts of weak reasons about why they can’t sign the contract and why they can’t implement the plan.”
The company then decided they would implement the plan but only offer workers 50% of their pay on the training day.
The AMWU took the case to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission where the Commission recommended that Tenneco implement the training package and open its books to the union to ascertain whether their financial situation justified this move.
The company is still resisting and according to Mr Thomas, is just sitting on $3.1m of government funding.
“The company has ignored the Commission’s recommendation to open its books to us and instead met with small groups of workers in an attempt to get agreements to reduce their working week,” he said.
“I can’t understand the company’s resistance. I think they are lazy. They want a solution that’s easy for them where they don’t have to do anything. They don’t seem to care about workers losing out.”
National Secretary Dave Oliver said it was very disappointing that Tenneco was behaving this way after all the work the union had done in securing the funding.
“In other countries, management and workers are cooperating on solutions so that workers don’t suffer financially through the recession. In this case, the union has done all the work, has presented the company with the solution and the company is still resisting. It’s disgraceful.”
Mr Thomas said the workers intend showing up for work every day and will not accept cuts in their working week.