Shipping Australia thoroughly supports the comments about unions made by the Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently, on 15 November 2021, at St Marys, NSW.
In response to a reporter’s question about supply chain problems, the PM said:
“it’s very important that we don’t allow the unions on the wharfs to do the wrong thing by our farmers and our manufacturers who need critical supplies coming in and they need critical exports going out”.
We agree. Unions must not be allowed to dictate what happens on the wharf, or what ships can dock where, or when.
And they must not be allowed to dictate who can be hired to work on the docks.
Ocean shipping and the waterfront is a part of your life
Our waterfront is too important to be held to ransom by any one union. Ships, shipping and the waterfront are a part of your life no matter how far away you live from the sea.
About 99.9% of everything that comes into, or out of, this country moves by sea. That’s over 1.1 billion tonnes of cargo. The everyday stuff you buy in shops, and gifts for the kids, is moved in sea-going twenty foot containers – about eight million of them every year.
Ocean-shipping, and logistics, are extraordinarily valuable to Australia
The value of sea-going logistics in Australia dwarfs nearly every other sector.
The farm gate sector is worth AUD$73 billion in a “best ever” year according to the National Farmers Federation. Mining exported about AUD$234 billion in 2019, according to Geoscience Australia. These are valuable sectors, but they come nowhere near close to the value of shipping and international trade. Sea-going ships moved AUD$692.86 billion of cargo pre-pandemic. Today, that figure is likely to be much more because of the cargo-boosting side-effects of the pandemic.
And shipping is, in fact, much more valuable than the AUD$692.86 billion figure we quoted above. That figure is ‘just’ the value of the cargo. About 45.7% of our gross domestic product is accounted for by imports and exports. About 35% of our GDP is accounted for by merchandise trade (goods brought into the country for sale or permanent use). About 9.5% to 10% of the whole Australian workforce is employed in logistics, which is primarily driven by sea-freight.
But the wharfies’ union doesn’t care
The wharfies’ union doesn’t care if all that is thrown into disruption. The wharfies’ union doesn’t care if you can’t buy presents for your kids. The wharfies’ union doesn’t care about you.
The wharfies have been striking every few days recently. They’ve had to stop for a while because of legal action but that cease-fire is only guaranteed to hold until December 10 this year.
Meanwhile, the wharfies’ union would have you believe that they are protecting workers’ rights and job security. But wharfies are already very highly paid AND they are very secure in their jobs.
Wharfies earn a lot and have high job security
Wharfies earn an average of near AUD$161,000 a year! Some of the top-earning wharfies earn over AUD$185,000 a year, which means that, statistically, they’re in the top 10% of earners in the country! They’re also being offered a 2.5% year-on-year increase for the next four years.
And they’re striking for more money ?!?
Wharfies work a lot less than you do too. The average Australian adult worker works 233 days. The average wharfie works 179 days. That’s a 26% difference*.
Wharfies have a lot more job security than you do. They’re being offered guaranteed job security with no forced redundancies and caps on the usage of casual labour. And they still won’t accept the enterprise bargaining deal being offered by their employers ?!?
This situation must be resolved
Shipping Australia calls for:
- enterprise bargaining to have short, strict, timeframes
- compulsory arbitration if the parties cannot agree in time, followed with an immediate settlement of the dispute
- start and expiry dates of waterfront enterprise bargaining agreements to be staggered so that they cannot all be expired at the same time
- an absolute prohibition on any industrial action that prevents stevedores from working sub-contracted ships
“Uninterrupted trade is vital to the interests of all Australians. Ultimately, this union-induced disruption hurts the Australian economy, which means it hurts everyday Australians. It’s about time that there is a sustainable solution to these frequent, repeated and ongoing disputes on the waterfront. There needs to be some controls so that waterfront disputes are sensibly resolved in a speedy timeframe,” said Shipping Australia CEO, Captain Melwyn Noronha.
* Note: office days of work are calculated as (((5 working days × 52 weeks) -7 public holidays ) -20 days annual leave)). Percentage difference: the 26% figure is a percentage difference and is not a percentage increase. Percentage difference is used to show the difference between two similar (but not identical) things at a point in time, whereas percentage increase is used to show how one thing has changed over time. Percentage difference is calculated as (((value 1-value 2) / ((v1+v2)/2)) x100) whereas a percentage increase is calculated as (((new value – old value) / old value) x 100).
