Australian miners' victory: strike forces debt pay-off

ICEM Update, No. 46, 19 August 1999

In a signal victory for Australian miners' union the CFMEU, workers from the closed-down Oakdale mine are now to receive the 6.3 million Australian dollars owed to them in entitlements. Reached on Tuesday night, this decision follows a 24-hour nationwide coal strike last Friday over the Oakdale case.

The pay-out marks a major about-face by Australia's right-wing federal government. The money is to come from the industry's existing centralised long-service leave fund. The government had been intending to abolish this fund and hand all the money in it back to the employers. This policy was part of its plan to make all such provisions enterprise-based, and therefore dependent on employer patronage.

Oakdale closed in June after its owner was declared insolvent. Entitlements owed to the miners there included accrued sick leave, annual leave and redundancy pay. In such situations, Australian employees are regarded as unsecured creditors. Often, they receive only a few cents in the dollar after all assets have been sold and secured creditors paid.

Following the outcome of the Oakdale case, there are now proposals for some kind of national scheme - perhaps insurance-based - to stop the same thing happening to other workers in other industries.

Overall, this is a major victory for the labour movement, and a particularly big win for the CFMEU, which at the global level is affiliated to the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM).

The biggest loser is Peter Reith, Australia's union-bashing Minister for Workplace Relations. The strike forced him into a very public climbdown, and his conservative colleagues now feel that his anti-union crusade has substantially damaged the government's standing with the electorate.

As Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition Labor Party, pointed out, it took a strike costing 33 million Australian dollars in lost output to convince the government to allow miners access to 6.3 million dollars' worth of owed entitlements.