Comments made by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today about waterside workers and their legitimate right to negotiate with their employer are an unhelpful and inaccurate intervention into a lawful bargaining process that has been underway for almost two years.
The MUA and Patrick Terminals have been negotiating a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement for waterfront workers at the four sites around Australia. The Union has approached this process in good faith and with the expectation of a result that both sides can be happy with.
The ACCC should not recklessly conflate the astronomical international shipping costs, port congestion and COVID-19 related pressures on Australia’s supply chains with waterside workers seeking fair pay, job security and safety at work.
Patrick Terminals, like all major players in the Australian shipping industry, have been the beneficiary of a massive surge in international shipping movements and the recent shift to household consumption of imported goods rather than services or tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not an industry or a business in distress or crippled by industrial action.
The ACCC’s role is to examine the regulatory and economic circumstances affecting Australian shipping, not to comment on the lawful right of workers to negotiate their employment agreements.
Presently, the ACCC provides an exemption for international shipowners from restrictions on cartel behaviour under Part X of the Competition and Consumer Act. This provides a direct inducement to monopolistic international shipowners to price gouge and manipulate the market.
International shipping cartels, which register their vessels in land-locked tax havens, are expert tax avoiders and have systematically exploited the world’s most vulnerable workers on their ships.
In the meantime, on the cusp of the Christmas season, the price of shipping a container around the globe has increased by 700% – 1000%, while seafarers struggle to access vaccinations or return home to their families because of government inaction, regulatory failure and shipping company greed.
These are all factors which contribute to the growing price of imported goods but which the ACCC is completely silent on.
The ACCC’s report also contains several contradictions and errors of fact. They have compared Australian shipping terminals to New Zealand equivalents and quoted benchmarks (eg Tauranga supposedly processing 85 TEU per hour) that have simply never been met by any Kiwi Port ever.
They have also benchmarked Australian shipping terminals using the “length of time ships are at berth” metric, which is subject to so many variables as to be completely unhelpful, especially as the volume of containers carried on each ship has increased due to shipping line mergers and in line with the overall volume growth at each port. Naturally, this requires ships to spend longer at berth.
The ACCC’s union bashing is unhelpful and unwarranted when in fact it is the impacts of COVID-19 and entrenched shipping company cartel behaviours that are affecting Australian consumers’ access to imported goods.
These economic realities only reinforce the importance of the MUA’s call for a strategic Australian fleet of cargo vessels to protect our sovereign capabilities.
