Red & Black Notes || Back in December, Woolworths distribution workers took a deal after 17 days of strike which cost the company upwards of $140 million dollars. The strategy of organising undertaken by the United Workers Union (UWU) demonstrates what it means to walk the daggers edge between exercising workers power by fighting bosses and avoiding union deregistration and government fines. We think it’s an interesting case study to discuss whether or not it represents a viable strategy for a fighting workers movement longer term.
On the 21st of November 2024, 1,800 Woolworths and Lineage workers kicked off indefinite strikes across three states, a total of five distribution hubs and cold storage units run by Primary Connect, the supermarket giant’s supply chain arm. Organisers remarked that it was a 10 year process leading up to the strike action. The strategy was to line up the EBA negotiations for the five shops and strike to demand an immediate pay rise of 25% with further rises indexed to inflation, as well as changes to an AI productivity “framework” that scores workers according to a speed metric, so management can discipline and even fire those who fail to meet 100 percent targets. Woolworths is one half of Australia’s supermarket duopoly and controls 37% of the country’s grocery market. Striking workers managed to shut down 75% of Woolworths output.
To further crank up the pressure on Woolworths bosses, the strike action coincided with the holiday season across Victoria and New South Wales. News coverage showed shelves notably empty of essential items like toilet paper, nappies, bread, meat, dairy, frozen food, with drinks at Dan Murphy’s and BWS also affected. Every night, corporate news stations found people to sook about the strike and blame the workers for ruining Christmas, while Christmas-themed ads for Woolworths played in the ad breaks.
The Dandenong South warehouse saw 200 workers on strike. It’s responsible for 40% of Woolworths output and 85 percent of the workforce had joined UWU since the warehouse opened. Only 10 workers in the whole warehouse were in the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), a notoriously yellow union. Notably, Woolworths moved distribution to the location after shuttering it’s Hume store which was heavily unionised, gutting 700 jobs all up and promising an increase in ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’ with half the employment rate at the new site.
Community, left-wing groups and other unionists showed out in support. Victorian Socialists were prominent early on. Over the length of the strike the picket was maintained by a small but committed group of militant unionists (not in UWU) parking their cars in front of the driveway and playing uno on the nature strip.
Woolworths’ strike-breaking tactics are worthy of note. They locked workers out, erected bollards over the main driveway, and installed Wilson Security guards who occasionally reported the movements of workers and supporters to management. Worryingly, there was a police solar trailer with cameras surveilling workers and supporters for the duration of the action – which was also noted at the Webb Dock picket earlier this year.
Labour hire company ‘Programmed’ came to the aid of Woolworths, keeping what picketers dubbed ‘alternative workers’ in an abandoned building down the road until they could be piled onto buses at a moment’s notice when security reported a sufficient opening in the picket.
Woolies bosses left no stone unturned, sooking to the pro-boss FairWork commission, which ruled against the workers, arguing that UWU was not bargaining in “good faith” with Woolworths, and that the picket lines were “obstructive” and a “metaphorical gun” that undermined the bargaining process. The possibility of protected action for unions stops just short of disrupting companies like Woolworths from continuing business as usual with scab labour. Strikes are permissible, but not pairing them with a hard picket of the workplace would gut the bargaining power of the strike and render it futile. In this scenario, striking would be akin to quitting en masse.
The capitalist class has been clear that it would prefer if workers came to the bargaining table and asked politely for a raise, so workers could be rejected without it affecting their companies’ bottom line. With arbitration laws and unions placed into administration, they get ever closer to that reality every year. In the bosses ideal world, unions would be functionally useless advocacy bodies for workers that can do little more than ask nicely, and give the illusion that real bargaining is happening and workers have a say, when in reality they don’t. The worrying thing is, union bureaucrats can be sold on this reality too. A passive funding base of workers dues and no hard organising work risking fines or deregistration. The bosses hand out the union sign up sheets with workers contracts. The union gets their funds, the bosses get their profits and the workers get shafted. This is the strategy of yellow unions like the SDA.
Because Fair Work is not a court, there would be no impact if workers decided to continue picketing anyway. Woolworths would have to bring proof that the Fair Work order was not being complied with before seeking enforcement in Federal Court. They would do this by trying to get scabs in and upon workers or community picketers turning the scabs away, they would have a case, serve the strikers with an injunction, and eventually that would lead to police removing picketers by force.
Upon the Fair Work ruling alone, community picketers were warned not to talk to workers or organisers, in order to not be seen to be colluding. Workers seemed to be staying away from the picket line from this point. It was as if the injunction had already been served and everyone was waiting for the picket to be smashed by police, but no order yet existed.
At a particularly weak point in the picket one morning, a bus had arrived and managed to get some workers in. A garbage truck had been turned away from entering by a group of about 10 community picketers linking arms, which seemed to be the excuse for Woolworths to go to court to request police intervention to end the picket. The news media was conveniently right there to snap photos of the affair.
With no plan, no coordination or briefing with organisers at all, the defense of the strike was about as organised as could be expected. Community picketers discussed what would happen if the police came, what people would be prepared to do to defend the strike. $142k had been raised in a community strike fund, $50k donated by the ETU, and the muscle of the strike ended up being a skeleton crew of committed randoms, eating from the local servo because they couldn’t eat the food provided by union funds for fear of accusations of collusion. Expecting police to roll in soon, some on the picketers concluded they’d be willing to hold the picket beside workers risking arrests and fines, not get arrested and fined in their place. All tentative plans were interrupted by the workers taking a deal.
Not long after we heard news about NSW distribution hubs accepting a similar deal, the workers voted to accept an agreement which included around an 11% percent wage increase over three years, along with some cash and gift-card payments to workers. Related to the AI productivity changes, workers in VIC had won “No disciplinary action solely on performance”, which is legally ambiguous at best and begs the question whether bosses could find ways around the agreement. UWU Secretary Tim Kennedy worded it slightly differently in an official statement, saying about the clause that it “ensures workers will not be disciplined for the speed they can work at”. The statement also says that Woolworths made “an acknowledgement that not everyone can pick at 100%’.
Woolworths has been known to use deliberately misleading language in other negotiations. For supermarket workers, the SDA endorsed a deal that mapped pay rises to Fair Works’ new award rates and this was sold as a massive concession on behalf of the bosses.
Is this really the future of unionism?
The efforts the union made to maximise workers power, coupled with the caution and self-preservation practiced by the union at the strike would lend itself to the idea that union officials were interested in costing Woolworths as much as possible in a short period of time to put the pressure on the company to wrap the dispute before there would be time to serve an injunction and rack up fines – Whatever the workers can get in that time period would be what they get.
But to expedite negotiations by bleeding Woolworths out, organisers and workers had to spend 10 arduous years organising multiple job-sites, to go on strike together and at the first whiff of an unfavourable Fair Work ruling their campaign had to be brought to homebase by disorganised community members the union didn’t communicate with, plan with or fund. Community members that had to patch together a hard picket and incur potential risks to themselves, in order for the union and workers to avoid the same. If what we saw here is the piece de resistance of union strategy in the modern day, then we have a problem.
What this implies is that unions that want to fight are trying to balance wins for workers and also the survival of the union entity itself, but because of current anti-union laws, these things eat into each other. If this same strategy is emulated, it won’t be long before bosses realise that no matter the costs to the company, they can call a union’s bluff by waiting for an injunction so the union folds like a house of cards, and likely that wasn’t long away for UWU strikers.
Bosses get to act like entitled children, but workers, unionists and community members are trying not to swear on the picket line cos it might be picked up on a hired goon’s body camera, police surveillance tower, or featured on the 6 o’clock news. Even slightly masculine or tattooed people were followed around the picket by cameras so the news media could play the “union thug” card the bosses love so much.
The law has been continuously weaponised against workers and unions. Understanding what class war looks like makes it obvious that the answer is to defy these laws, not to go over them with a fine-toothed comb with highly paid union lawyers to find a sneaky little opening. The reality is that the bosses want unions to heel so they can pay workers peanuts. If the contemporary union movement keeps playing the bosses’ games, it won’t be able to organise its way out of its own grave before too long.
Anti-union laws mean unions screw workers so bosses don’t have to
There was a distribution centre strike at MLDC back in 2015 called by the workers themselves after bosses broke part of their EBA in saying all new hires would be from labour hire companies. Other warehouses joined them in solidarity. The strike action outlasted threats of fines and dismissal and an order from the Fair Work commission. Workers burned the Fair Work order and restated their demands. ‘No labour hire, and no repercussions for striking.’ The National Union of Workers (NUW) marched down to the unauthorised picket and tried to shut it down, convincing workers the only way to avoid “$10,000 fines and jail time” was to authorise leadership to meet with bosses and cut a deal. The deal the union struck banned the right to strike, in direct contradiction of the workers stated demands, and the union agreed with the bosses that an independent investigator would be instated to facilitate retributive action against the three workers that instigated the strike. The union didn’t want to risk repercussions and sold the workers out to save itself, to the point of collaborating with the bosses. The workers were pressured to take the deal despite the disapproval of a minority of militants invol
The MLDC strike proves the function of anti-union laws – to incentivise union bureaucrats to turn against workers to save themselves. Still, the strike showed the kind of militancy that Anarchists argue for. Militancy for us means defying bosses, bad laws and, if necessary, union leadership to exercise workers power. Power built on the rank and file level flows upward into stronger unions and more accountable leadership. Bosses are a threat from above, pressuring unions to capitulate, and so the workers must be a threat from below, able to embarrass or undermine or even replace unions that refuse to fight for the workers.
How we fight backlash when we break anti-union laws
Since the recent Woolworths strike, two workers have been dismissed and other employees are being investigated for alleged ‘unlawful picketing’ during the strike action. An UWU spokesperson has issued a statement saying “United Workers Union is representing members in these matters with the goal of ensuring members are heard and they receive fair outcomes.” No subsequent strike action has been organised to demand the reinstatement of the dismissed workers or an end to the bullying investigations by Woolworths bosses. Time will tell if UWU’s representation amounts to anything substantive.
When workers defy anti-union laws, there will be backlash from the state and bosses. Historically power that has been capable of forcing the hands of bosses and the state has also been capable of protecting organisers from such backlash. Builders Laborers used to ensure that contracts guaranteed the re-hiring of lead organisers of previous strikes in order to encourage the leadership of future militants. Tramway Union secretary Clarrie O’Shea was jailed for his refusal to pay fines built up from unprotected industrial action in the 1960’s. As a result, twenty-seven unions and up to a million workers undertook a general strike which led to O’Shea’s prompt release from prison and ensured the anti-union laws of the time were never used again. We must build toward the same goals today if we want a strong workers’ movement that protects those willing to take the necessary risks to push the struggle forward.
$140 million in losses is substantial for a two week strike. Shutting down our workplaces is clearly a stronger bargaining chip than arbitration or that too would be illegal. Imagine what we could bargain for if all workers in all industries were prepared to stop work to defy bad laws, coordinate actions and make demands of those in power. As unionists have done in the past, we could win more than wage raises, but a better world altogether.
All unionists and workers need to make a choice, or have it made for you. Continue to fight in rigged fights landing whatever punches you can, or take the gloves off and make unionism a real, lasting threat to the bosses and to any unions that would sell workers short.
Discover more from Class Autonomy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
![[Aggregator] Downloaded image for imported item #3354](https://i0.wp.com/classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/jeremias.jpg?fit=300%2C225&ssl=1)
