Warehouse workers in Laverton North have joined more than 1500 across Victoria and New South Wales in a strike for better wages and working conditions.
The Woolworths Melbourne Liquor Distribution in Laverton North is one of the four sites across Australia where the indefinite strike against the major retailer’s “framework” has reached its second week.
The United Workers Union (UWU) described the ‘framework’ as a high-risk management approach that pushes workers to work faster and undermines safety.
The union said the framework allocate workers a certain time for a task, then ranks their performance out of 100, which workers said puts undue pressure on them and has a negative impact on wellbeing.
The strike action has seen supermarket shelves across Victoria stripped, with scenes akin to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Customers can expect to see ongoing empty shelves after the union failed to agree to allow workers to return to work as a result of the ongoing strikes, Woolworths said.
UWU National Secretary Tim Kennedy said workers were striking for a cost-of-living wage increase and to be paid the same rate of pay for doing the same work under a national agreement.
“Workers do not want to feel pressured to cut corners and work unsafely for fear of losing their job,” he said.
the company and union returned to the negotiating table on Monday.
“We are hopeful of a breakthrough because our workers deserve to be safe at work,” Mr Kennedy said.
In a statement attributed on behalf of Woolworths said the framework being criticised by the union has been developed with safety as an inherent component.
“The measure of work which sits behind the framework has been developed based on the time it should take a person with reasonable skill, applying reasonable effort, working at a safe and conscientious pace, that can be maintained for the duration of a shift, to complete a task,” the statement said.
“Over the past seven years, team members at these four [distribution centres] have had pay rises above inflation, and the most common earnings for full time team members is between $85,000 and $95,000. Our latest offers would have taken hourly rates at these sites to approximately 40 – 60 per cent above the Storage Services Award, and well above inflation.”
Jaidyn Kennedy, with AAP
