coles and woolies workers on strike this weekend
![“Retail workers in Australia have historically been low-paid. This is due in large part to a lack of industrial militancy. But a change is sweeping through the industry. Over the past two years, retail workers have taken industrial action at bookstores Better Read Than Dead and Readings, and even gone on strike nationally at Apple stores.
“Now this new phase of union action is set to hit Australia’s supermarket duopoly. Coles and Woolworths together dominate roughly 70 percent of the market. On Saturday, October 7, workers at both chains will undertake the first ever national strike of Australian supermarket workers.
“Coles’s and Woolworths’s profits for the last financial year were $1.1 and $1.6 billion, respectively. But its employees are some of the lowest paid people in the country, and must now spend over 81 percent of their income on rent if they want to live in a capital city in Australia. Supermarket workers were praised as “essential” during the pandemic, but in practice […]](/posts/attachments/53c75abc-535c-478b-8fab-0713a3d50589/image.png)
![“[…] twenty you only get a percentage of the adult rate. This can go as low as 46 percent — less than half of the adult wage!”
pull quote: “The higher rate isn’t normalized in warehouses because the job is harder, it’s normalized because the union is stronger.”
“Coles completely relies on these junior rates. Many workers don’t realize how much less they’re getting paid — it can be difficult and embarrassing to talk about. But people are starting to get how shocking this is and are taking action to change it. Abolishing junior rates is one of our big goals in this dispute. We also want the base rate moved closer to what somebody would get in a warehouse, which can be around $30 an hour. This higher rate isn’t normalized in warehouses because the job is harder, it’s normalized because the union is stronger.”](/posts/attachments/f10bc8dc-b64e-4bf9-af3b-f108ee6171ef/image.png)
![NELIO DA SILVA: “In theory, our part-time days and hours are set and guaranteed. But functionally there’s no such thing as permanent roster work. This is because Coles uses the catch-all term “business requirements” to call for “roster resets” to change people’s hours. For example, they can just say “October roster reset, let’s do it!”, bring you in for a meeting, and move you from the night shift to the evening shift. This means you lose money.”
“There’s nothing in the current agreement that protects you from this or guarantees no loss of pay after a reset. Obviously not everyone can just change their working hours whenever Coles demands it. If there are lots of union members at a store, the union can try to influence this process. We have close to ten people disputing this at my store right now. We can win good outcomes when union members stick together, […]](/posts/attachments/6918b596-2a4b-4611-a9bc-2aae259733a4/image.png)
together these supermarket chains account for over 70% of the market. fuck yeah
workers with the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) are striking for:
- better pay
- abolition of junior rates
- protections against “roster resets”
- full-time contracts for full-time work
- the right to a safe workplace
donate to the strike fund: https://chuffed.org/project/superstrike