Sydney Woolies workers striking while it’s hot

The Woolworths warehouse strike in Sydney’s west continued to heat up through its fifth and sixth days as the city’s temperatures rose in tandem.

The United Workers Union (UWU) coordinated and organised the indefinite strike at Erskine Park distribution centre and four other warehouses in Victoria. Another warehouse in Queensland took action last Friday, 22 November. The 1,500 strikers nationwide appear more determined than ever to win above-inflation pay rises and terminate the company’s “coaching and productivity framework”—a new system that disciplines anyone falling short of a management-defined “100 percent” target.

Monday, day five at Erskine Park, was stinking hot. The sun lashed the backs of necks and boiled the bitumen. The liquid soap in the portaloos was half-scalding. Those who stood at the barbeque over sizzling onions to keep everyone fed deserved a 21-gun salute.

The sight of 100 members in UWU-branded hi-vis on the main driveway at the peak of the day’s heat discussing their next steps was a sign of unity and commitment. UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings, reporting on Woolworths’ offer of a “reduced framework”, had barely finished her sentence when workers erupted in cries of “No framework!” to the bangs of a big drum. “Put your hand up if you want to stick to no framework”, Sharon said. One hundred hands went up.

Next order of business: the bosses only want a handful of delegates at negotiations. Cries, drums and one hundred hands: all delegates must be at the talks for maximum democracy and opposition.

The union also demands that all six warehouse agreements expire simultaneously and be negotiated together. This is an effort to counter a fragmented system of “enterprise bargaining” introduced by the Hawke-Keating ALP government of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced industry-wide bargaining and weakened our side’s collective strength.

By now, striking workers have been getting calls from supervisors and managers.

“‘Just doing a welfare check’, they say”, one reported. “I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fantastic mate’. It’s intimidation and mind games.”

“Welfare” didn’t cross management’s collective mind until profits started going down the drain.

After the meeting, Roger* and Jay* spoke about a case a few years earlier, when a Pakistani employee had his fingertips on both hands crushed by a closing van door.

“You know what [management] did?” Jay asked. “They said it was his own fault, and gave him a warning”. Two warnings and you’re out of a job. Later, they say, the man tried to cover up a mistake to avoid a second warning and dismissal. Management found out and sacked him on the spot.

According to picketers, the top manager at the time (“the biggest psychopath ever met on the job”, Roger said) is now overseeing the rollout of a new 66,000 square metre semi-automated facility in the southwest Sydney suburb of Moorebank.

Warehousing must be some of “the lucky country’s” most sweated and unsafe labour. The parallels with Amazon seem striking. As with the American logistics giant, very high turnover is part of the Woolworths business model: employing casuals through labour hire, working them to the bone, and then moving on to another batch.

“When you’re casual, it’s non-stop”, Roger said. “The last intake was 100 people over a couple of weeks, and by the end of it, there were probably five to fifteen left.”

The “framework” is yet another attempt to intensify the labour process, after everything companies like Coles and Woolworths have already done to make this work more dangerous, exhausting and dehumanising. That’s why the workers say they won’t stop until it’s dead.

And it’s why Janet*, one of the oldest workers here with 26 years’ experience, stayed all through the night on Saturday to guard the picket and was back again Monday.

“Myself, maybe I’ve not got too many more years here. But I’m fighting for the young people”, she said as we caught some shade under a gazebo. “They’ve got young families—[management] shouldn’t be pushing them so much, getting injuries to their back and shoulders.”

Sitting next to her was one of those young workers, Lisa*. In her home country, trade unions aren’t even legal. The pace of work is severe and workers have no right to speak out. Yet it’s only after moving to Australia and working at Woolies that she suffered her first workplace injury.

A workmate interrupted to ask Janet for some of the sweet dessert drink she made for the picketers. He wanted to take some home to his kids. After sampling some, I could see why. I sampled continuously as she talked me through the recipe.

Janet says she’ll stay out “as long as it takes” because she’s confident they can starve Woolies out. “In the next few days, there’s gonna be empty shelves for sure”, she said. “Because we move a million cartons a week and this is day five.”

Another mass meeting on Tuesday reported back from Monday’s negotiations.

Stonewalling and condescending, Woolworths insisted the meeting was only to “educate” workers about the framework. “They’ve never picked a box and they’re trying to educate us”, someone cried out.

Management offered a 75 or 85 percent target instead of 100 percent, which delegates roundly rejected.

“If we agree with a number, they can change it; they always have things [to get] around it”, one delegate argued at the meeting. “Version 2.0 involves following you around like puppets. Meetings every few weeks to monitor performance. If you’re not picking what they think you should, then they’ll still get rid of you. We want to come here, work and go home. Fuck their framework.”

With negotiations going nowhere, UWU organiser Sharon proposed an escalation. Hoxton Park Distribution Centre, which supplies Woolworths’ Big W stores, is fifteen minutes away. Did workers want to go there and stop trucks from getting in and out?

“At first, not a lot of people jumped [at this prospect] because they'd never done it before. This is the first strike for many workers”, said Cherish Kuehlmann, a student activist organising carloads of young socialists to come to show support every day. “Then one worker asked, ‘Are the uni students coming too?’ And of course we were like, ‘Yeah!’”

Convinced, dozens of workers and supporters drove over to shut down Hoxton Park DC. The strike at Erskine Park is so solid that active picketing is usually unnecessary. So this was the first opportunity many workers had to block the movement of goods physically. Waving big red union flags and chanting in a line blocking the entry, the workers stopped ten trucks in an hour. “One day longer! One day stronger!”

Managers came trotting out but, failing to scare off the strikers, slunk back into the warehouse as the picket line jeered: “Go back to the aircon!”

One manager, Dylan, has moved from Erskine Park to Hoxton Park while the strike continues. Workers heckled and taunted, advising him to get back inside before the sun charred the top of his shiny head.

Meetings with management were held again on Wednesday. If they went the way of Monday’s dead-end discussions, then surely Woolworths deserves many more escalations such as this.

But even this first small escalation showed how a strike can begin turning things the right way up in our topsy-turvy rich man’s world.

Harassed, bullied and demeaned by managers day in and out, workers can finally get a serve back.

Trucks arriving at a remorseless pace, hungry for stacked pallets, can be turned away.

Decisions, usually made only by managers in air-conditioned offices, are made in the blazing heat, discussed and voted on by union members.

The isolation of the headsets, the unknowable efficiency targets and a fragmented warehouse floor—forklift driver pitted against pallet stacker, permanent against casual, morning shift against day shift—can be undone for a while by the workers’ unity.

And the people called replaceable, disposable, a number or a cog, show that they are in fact indispensable.

A colleague of mine, with almost 50 years’ experience in our transport industry, reminded me of this as we chatted in the lunchroom. After I described the conditions in the warehouse, he paused, turned and said:

“You know, we go about our everyday lives and we totally forget how the food gets on the shelves, and who is putting in what kind of backbreaking labour to get it there.”

It’s only because of the strike that we are talking about it at all. And if Janet is right and Woolies shelves soon start running empty, then many more people might begin pondering the same question: who’s really creating all the wealth in this country?

One thing’s for sure: it’s not Dylan and his toasted scalp.

* Names have been changed at the interviewee’s request. Except Dylan’s.