Essential Energy is “holding a gun to the head of its entire workforce”, a union claimed after voting for strike action against plans to end a workplace agreement.
Electrical Trades Union members on Tuesday voted to take industrial action against the New South Wales government-owned electricity distributor, which has applied to the Fair Work Commission to terminate its 2013 enterprise agreement, along with policies protecting staff from forced redundancies.
Unions say the move will expose thousands of workers to possible forced redundancies and threatens to drop pay to the award rate.
In the ETU ballot 95% of workers voted in favour of work stoppages of up to 72 hours, and 96% in favour of bans on a range of work practices, including overtime and training.
The ETU secretary, Steve Butler, said: “Essential Energy management are holding a gun to the head of their entire workforce, telling them to voluntarily accept cuts to their pay and conditions or face an unprecedented legal move that would see workplace agreements and policies simply torn up.
“The result of this ballot shows workers simply won’t accept that kind of treatment, and they are ready and willing to take industrial action and other forms of protest until Essential Energy reverses course and returns to the bargaining table.”
In a declaration to the industrial tribunal the Essential Energy acting chief executive, Gary Humphreys, said it should junk the deal to allow the company to use its workforce more efficiently and reduce its operating costs. This would be achieved by “removing restraints, restrictions and inefficiencies” arising from the agreement.
Humphreys said terminating the enterprise agreement would not prevent the company and unions continuing good faith bargaining for a new deal. His statement also claimed the move would “contribute to sustainable long-term employment” for the company’s employees since it would improve efficiency.
Applying to cancel an enterprise agreement is a rare and aggressive industrial strategy, although unions warned after the rail freight company Aurizon was successful in doing so in 2015 that many companies would be emboldened to do so to remove job security provisions.
Scott McNamara, the energy manager at United Services Union, said: “If Essential Energy succeeds in having the existing workplace agreement torn up, thousands of jobs could be cut across NSW, while wages and conditions for the remaining workforce would be slashed”.
“This is an unprecedented attack by a publicly owned organisation on its own workers,” he said.
Essential Energy has 150 employees, whom the company is obliged to keep and try to redeploy because they have refused to take voluntary redundancy.
The Electrical Trades Union and United Services Union are concerned those staff will be sacked immediately if the company’s application is successful.
The ETU has said Essential Energy’s latest offer in bargaining signalled it wants to cut 800 jobs before 30 June 2018 through forced redundancies. It claimed after June 2018 there would be no limit on forced redundancies as the company moves away from directly employing its workforce and contracting out electrical work.
As part of its application Essential Energy has promised to maintain workers’ current rate of pay for six months, after which their pay would drop to the award rate unless they agree to a new enterprise agreement.
Cancelling the workplace deal and policies would also immediately cut the pay of workers who shifted to lower paid positions to keep secure employment at the company. They now keep their higher rate of pay because of a salary maintenance policy.
Essential Energy and the two unions have been bargaining for a new deal since the enterprise agreement nominally expired in June.
Humphreys told Guardian Australia the company “faces many challenges ... and its employees require a modern, flexible enterprise agreement that enables us to become more sustainable, more efficient, and to reduce unnecessary costs while delivering a safe, reliable, sustainable electricity network for regional and rural NSW”.
When asked about planned job cuts, he said “no business can expect customers to cover the cost of a workforce or pay salaries where the workload simply doesn’t currently exist”.
“This is an entirely separate process to the bargaining which will continue and, we hope, will ultimately be successful,” Humphreys said.
A full bench of the Fair Work Commission will start hearing the agreement termination case on 14 June. The ETU will decide whether and what industrial action to take at a meeting with members later this week.
