An indefinite strike by more than 50 workers at the Pampas pastry and flatbread factory in Melbourne, Victoria is now halfway through its fourth week. Workers at the Footscray plant walked out on November 21 after rejecting the company’s offer of a 4 percent per annum pay “rise.”
While workers initially demanded an annual wage increase of 8 percent, the United Workers Union (UWU) bureaucracy has advanced a meagre claim of around 6 percent, less than the official inflation rate of 7.3 percent and far short of the rapidly increasing cost of living.
The union’s dismissal of the workers’ original pay demand as unrealistic illustrates that a sell-out was being prepared even before the strike began.
What the UWU leadership claims is a “fair pay rise” is in fact a pay cut on top of already low wages. Most Pampas workers are paid just $27.61 per hour, a product of successive sell-out deals imposed by the union bureaucracy.
Workers are also demanding permanency for Pampas workers who are engaged as casuals by a third-party labour-hire firm, in some cases working full-time hours, in the same role, for up to 20 years. Under these precarious employment conditions, the use of which has been endorsed by the UWU and its predecessors in previous enterprise agreements, workers have no guaranteed hours or leave entitlements.
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