- Svitzer Australia declares lockout of all harbor towage workers covered by its 2016 National Towage Enterprise Agreement over wage dispute
- Maersk subsidiary and workers’ unions trade accusations of disrupting supply chains
- The unions say Svitzer for the past three years has been refusing to finalize a new labor agreement that will give the workers a fair pay, work safety and job security
Cargo shipping in 17 seaports Down Under will stop from November 18 after tugboat operator Svitzer declared a lockout of Australia port towage crew, which unions call a sabotage of supply chains.
The subsidiary of A.P. Moller-Maersk said the action will affect towage workers covered by its 2016 National Towage Enterprise Agreement, whiich expired in 2019. It invoked the provisions of the Fair Work Act in response to the unions’ work stoppages.
Svitzer said the indefinite lockout will impact operations at the 17 ports in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia where it operates.
Svitzer said the lockout will not affect its terminal operations that support the oil and gas sector or those in other states and territories.
The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers (AIMPE) and Australian Maritime Officers Union (AMOU) are accusing Svitzer of stalling negotiations.
“Our goal all along has been to reach a new enterprise agreement and we have exhaustively negotiated in good faith to try to do this,” Nicolaj Noes, managing director of Svitzer Australia, said in a press statement.
“We had hoped it would never come to a lockout – but we are at a point where we see no other option but to respond to the damaging industrial action underway by the unions.”
He said Svitzer has an obligation “to ensure imports and exports, and our nation’s trade and supply chains run without disruption”.
Noes citedmore than 1,100 instances of industrial action notified by the unions since October 2020, about a year after the previous agreement lapsed. He said since October 26 this year alone, there have been more than 250 instances of protected industrial action amounting to nearly 2,000 hours of work stoppages.
Paddy Crumlin, MUA national secretary and International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) president, said in a media release on Tuesday that Svitzer Australia was “sabotaging the supply chains … by doggedly avoiding signing” a new employment agreement with the unions.
Crumlin called the lockout “a massive escalation of the simmering industrial conflict being waged by [Svitzer’s] Australian management against local tugboat crew… effectively destroying its capacity to deliver towage services and throwing Australian supply chains into disarray”.
He said the Australian management team has spent the past three years refusing to finalize a new employment agreement to cover tugboat crews at the 17 ports, effectively freezing their wages “amid soaring inflation and massive corporate profits during a COVID-boom for shipping and logistics companies”.
Svitzer said it has been bargaining with the maritime unions, but, despite its best efforts to reach a reasonable agreement, the parties remain apart on key threshold issues.
Svitzer is seeking to remove restrictive work practices from its enterprise agreement that are critical to its future sustainability and competitiveness.
The workers are represented by MUA, AIMPE and AMOU depending on the work they performed. Crumlim said the three unions have been working together to negotiate for a fair pay, safety at work and job security for the skilled and experienced seafarers.
