Vic Building Workers Snub Actu Over Wage Claim
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday March 20, 1987
MELBOURNE: Victorian building workers voted yesterday to press for an$80-a-week wage rise and an extra 4 per cent in a rebuff to the ACTU leadership which backs a package aimed at winning the workers a $52 rise.
A meeting of about 65 Melbourne shop stewards from the Building Workers'Industrial Union voted to reject the $52 proposal which was supported by the union's assistant federal secretary, Mr Stan Sharkey.
While the push for a big claim outside the wage fixing principles reflects some real dissatisfaction with the national wage decision, yesterday's vote was also a deliberate attempt to undermine the BWIU's Victorian leadership.
Many of the delegates at the stormy meeting were former members of the Builders Labourers' Federation, or sympathetic to the BLF, and are part of a concerted push to displace the existing BWIU leadership at the next election.
There is also a view among more militant building unionists that the plumbers will win their campaign for a $70 wage rises and a 36-hour week, and that BWIU members would be foolish to endorse a claim for less.
The plumbers' union will appear in the High Court in Canberra this morning to challenge a Federal Court judge's order that they lift their industrial ban on 14 Sydney building sites.
They will ask a judge of the High Court to prohibit Justice Murray Wilcox of the Federal Court from hearing allegations that the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees' Union of Australia is in contempt of the Federal Court.
Two major building employers, Concrete Constructions and John Holland, have lodged papers with the Federal Court alleging that the plumbers' union has not obeyed Justice Wilcox's order to lift the bans. A hearing of these allegations is set down for Monday morning in Sydney.
The Herald's Industrial Correspondent, Mr Andrew Casey, was subpoenaed yesterday by Concrete Constructions Pty Ltd to appear before Justice Wilcox in the Federal Court on Monday.
The order calls on him to give evidence and produce all notes relating to any conversation he had with the assistant secretary of the NSW Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees' Union, Mr Glen Batchelor, used in writing two articles which appeared on Wednesday.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
