Industrial action at two Victorian plants operated by Nestlé was shut down after just one week by the unions covering the workers, although management has met none of their demands.
Nestlé has six factories in Australia, but all are covered by separate enterprise bargaining agreements (EBA) and only two were involved in this dispute. Industrial action took place at Campbellfield, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and Broadford, in rural Victoria.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) and the Communications Electrical and Plumbers Union (CEPU) sought to undermine the struggle from the outset. While more than 90 percent of workers voted for an indefinite strike, the unions restricted workers to token one-hour stoppages at the start of each shift.
On March 11, the unions declared an end to the dispute, on the basis of an in-principle agreement containing wage increases of 5 percent this year, 4.5 percent in 2026 and 4 percent in 2027. This is only slightly higher than the company’s initial offer of 3.5 percent per annum and far short of the 8 percent workers demanded.
The in-principle offer is totally inadequate. It will not allow workers to keep pace with the still soaring cost of living, let alone catch up after years of real wage cuts under the previous union-management enterprise agreement. Over the course of the three-year deal, pay increased by a total of just 10 percent, while the consumer price index over the same period rose more than 14 percent.
The median price of rent for a house in Campbellfield has risen 13.3 percent, and for an apartment 14.7 percent, in the past 12 months alone.
The union-management deal also fails to protect workers from the company’s plan to implement a rotating 24/7 roster with 12-hour shifts, which will make family life almost impossible for many.
Nestlé, headquartered in Switzerland, is the largest food and drink corporation in the world, with around 450 factories in 189 countries staffed by nearly 300,000 workers. Products include coffee, confectionery, infant formula, dairy products, frozen foods and pet food. Nestlé has annual sales of more than $US100 billion.
In January, the company announced a $30 million upgrade of the Campbellfield plant. The company also engaged “shift consultants” to redesign the factory’s roster system, with the aim of increasing productivity, that is, cutting costs.
The more than 450 workers at Campbellfield currently work eight-hour shifts, with starts at 6:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Monday to Friday. Weekend shifts are currently filled on a voluntary basis.
The company is seeking to change this arrangement to 12-hour shifts, in a four-on, four-off pattern. This would mean workers would, on average, get only one full weekend off work each month.
Workers strongly opposed this measure. Those with families fear they would be forced to quit, as the 12-hour rolling shifts would make it impossible to juggle childcare, school and social activities.
The in-principle agreement pushed through by the union allows Nestlé to implement the new rostering arrangements, unless enough workers volunteer for weekend work to enable round-the-clock production.
Shortly before the strike was shut down, Socialist Equality Party members spoke with several workers at the Campbellfield plant. Their comments have been anonymised to protect them from reprisal.
One worker, who voted against the in-principle agreement, said: “The addition of a voluntary work clause in the EBA opens the way for the company to claim the clause hasn’t worked in any future EBA negotiation, by claiming workers wouldn’t voluntarily fill shortages or meet rising demand.”
A worker who has a young child, said: “I don’t know why they’re trying to change it [the roster]. Everyone’s happy with how it is now. I couldn’t do four days straight; maybe two, three days max. If you’ve got kids you’ll still have to come in on weekends and public holidays.”
A worker who is new to Nestlé, but has worked at other food companies before, said: “If you see the inflation, the rates go up and everything is so expensive, all the house needs. I’m very scared. It’s hard to get a job.”
Another, who has worked at Nestlé for more than 20 years, said: “Despatch and the chocolate lines have tripled production, with some workers doing an unsustainable 60 hours of overtime a month. The company wants a new roster so it can tell investors their new machinery will be able to be run 24/7.”
Other workers explained that the level of overtime was already onerous: “For people with kids to pick up, it’s impossible.” While weekend work is currently voluntary, the company has only “missed maybe two shifts out of four years.”
Many workers are under enormous financial pressure with mortgage and rent payments and currently work unsustainable amounts of overtime. If accepted, the union-management in-principle agreement will only add to this pressure, as workers will have the threat of a punishing new roster hanging over their heads if all shifts are not filled.
Only a handful of workers have been at Nestlé in Campbellfield long enough to remember the bitter seven-week lockout by the company in 1996. This was part of a move to cut the workforce in half and demand massive productivity gains.
The AMWU enforced the imposition of Nestlé’s demands, actually signing up workers for redundancy. Workers News, a predecessor of the WSWS, explained in June 1996:
[F]or seven weeks the locked-out workers were isolated by the AMWU. Together with the ACTU and the Victorian Trades Hall Council, the union ensured that production continued entirely unhindered throughout the rest of the Nestle’s empire.
As a result, on May 8 the workers were finally worn down by the union’s leaders into accepting an agreement which implements the company’s core demand—a 25 percent across-the-board productivity increase throughout the plant by December. To secure the company’s terms, the union collaborated with the company to pressure some 200 workers into taking redundancy packages…
Almost three decades later, Nestlé workers face the prospect of yet another sell-out by the AMWU and CEPU bureaucracy. But this does not have to be a foregone conclusion. Workers can resume the fight to defend eight-hour shifts and for real pay rises, so they no longer need to undertake punishing levels of overtime just to get by.
However, Nestlé workers cannot take their struggle forward under the leadership of the AMWU, CEPU, or any other union. As the 1996 sell-out illustrates, the corporatised trade unions have had no right to call themselves workers’ organisations for decades.
Instead, workers will need to take matters into their own hands and build a rank-and-file committee, democratically run by workers on the factory floor.
This committee should lead the campaign for workers to reject the in-principle agreement when it is put to an official vote. It must demand that the unions reinstate the campaign of industrial action workers voted for, this time with full-shift strikes to shut down production, and fighting for demands based on workers’ actual needs, not what the bureaucracy says is possible.
The rank-and-file committee should fight to expand their struggle, throughout Nestlé’s Australian and global operations, as well as to broader sections of the working class. All over the world, workers confront similar attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions. This poses the need for workers globally to mount a unified struggle against the corporations, the betraying trade union bureaucracies and the capitalist profit system itself.