Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are getting a lot of Christmas wishes and a lot of valedictory speeches today in parliament. But what I want to put on the record in this debate is that for many Australian workers all they want for Christmas is job security and a job they can count on. For many Australian workers, their future and their job security is becoming less and less certain. We see daily in our news reports how insecure work and casualisation of the workforce are becoming the norm.

I want to highlight three particular cases that are unlikely to be resolved between now and Christmas. These people will be spending this Christmas out on the picket line calling on their multinational employers to do the right thing and give them back their job security and, in some cases, their actual jobs. I first want to highlight CUB 55, who are maintenance workers at the CUB Abbotsford facility. It is coming up to summer, when people like a beer when they are watching the cricket over Christmas, yet work at the factory has slowed. How did they become CUB 55? Well, they were working for a labour hire company that lost the contract with CUB 55. On a Thursday they were asked to go to a hotel not near the site. Their jobs were posted on pieces of white paper around the meeting room they were in, and they were told that they could write down their names and reapply for their jobs. What these workers found out was that they would be working for a new company with a 65 per cent pay cut—a 65 per cent pay cut! It is simply unfair and outrageous that a contract company could do this to hardworking Australians, blue-collar workers in maintenance. We call on CUB to do the right thing, the moral thing, and re-employ the CUB 55 so that they can have job security this Christmas.

I would also like to acknowledge Anglo American's mineworkers at German Creek, which is about three hours west of Rockhampton in Central Queensland,. They too have been taking industrial action—for more than 103 days. Again, it is about job security. We found out this week from Fair Work that, while they have been out fighting for their own job security, their company can proceed with redundancies. Therefore, again, another large multinational that is not paying a lot of tax here in Australia has chosen an outsourced labour hire workforce over its own workforce. This is a site where, at the start of the dispute, there were about 280 directly employed mineworkers, and there were 116 labour hire workers, who were on less money.

What we have now seen is Anglo American being given the green light to force redundancies on their permanent workforce. It could be the death of this regional town to lose that many more people from the mine. The school is worried that it will close. The mums are worried about what this means for the community. The sporting clubs are worried about losing this many local workers to drive-in drive-out workers.

The final group of workers who this Christmas are calling on a large multinational to do the right thing and ensure their job security are maintenance mineworkers in WA in the town of Collie, at the Griffin coalmine. This is another example of how maintenance workers have been told that, if they do not agree to the conditions set out by the company, they will receive a 43 per cent pay cut.

This is where we are at. We are talking about the rhetoric that we hear from the government, who say they want a high-wage, high-skilled economy. Well, these are high-skilled, hardworking, blue-collar Australians who have been offered 65 per cent pay cuts and 43 per cent pay cuts. It is not on. I call on these multinationals do the right thing by these workers and give them job security for Christmas and jobs that they can count on.