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By Adam Bennett and Richard Lawson
CANBERRA, Feb 11 AAP - It seemed like a good idea at the time: blame the trade unions for Holden leaving Australia and for the Abbott government's decision to reject a $25 million plea from SPC Ardmona.
But Treasurer Joe Hockey pushed the argument over the edge this week when he revealed details of a private meeting he had with Toyota's Australian president Max Yasuda in December.
Hockey let it be known the car maker was "very concerned" about the employment conditions and union militancy at its plant in Melbourne.
Toyota was having none of it, issuing a statement a few hours after Hockey made his comments. It had never privately or publicly blamed the union for its decision to quit making cars in Australia from 2017, the company insisted.
It said there was no single reason for the decision to close its local manufacturing operations.
Labor and the unions, unsurprisingly, seized on the difference, casting it as proof the government is waging a campaign against manufacturing workers.
But the government is not on its own in suggesting the unions have to shoulder some of the blame for Toyota's decision.
Industrial relations consultant Grace Collier, who spent eight years in the trade union movement, reckons Toyota is leaving Australia because it knows there is no hope of changing its "terrible" enterprise bargaining agreement.
And the company must share some of the blame, along with the trade unions because, she argues, it locked itself into a substandard, expensive and restrictive agreement many years ago.
"It was a pay-off to the unions for getting it taxpayers' money," Collier said in the immediate aftermath of Toyota's decision to quit Australia.
Like Hockey and Prime Minister Tony Abbott, she is also scathing of the enterprise bargaining agreement SPC struck with its workers, saying the ailing fruit processor's management had lost its leadership position.
The unions had been allowed too much control and were now in the driver's seat.
"Until there is major change the business is doomed; the union will drive it into the ground."
Qantas boss Alan Joyce faced a similar situation in 2011 before he controversially grounded the airline during a long-running dispute with unions over the outsourcing of jobs, and pay and conditions.
Coincidentally, Joyce was in Canberra this week talking to government MPs about the company's future. He said that taking on the unions was part of a transformation that reduced unit costs by 20 per cent over four years.
He also defended his decision to ground the airline, saying it was necessary to make sure that Qantas was not locked into industrial arrangements that would prevent it from modernising.
And he flagged more hard decisions for the airline in the future.
"Few of the decisions we make will be popular," Joyce warned.
Collier also laments the influence of trade unions in the construction sector, where "jump-up" clauses in EBAs are used to set and control high wage levels on all big projects.
Independent contractors wanting to win contracts on those projects are required to pay their own employees the same rates big construction companies negotiate with the unions.
The sector is in strife because it is rife with businesses telling other businesses what they have to pay their staff, Collier argues.
All the big employers are union compliant and use their commercial power to force their sub-contractors to comply.
"Our entire construction sector runs on the basis that employers collude with unions to price fix labour and impose that price fixing on other businesses," Collier says.
The end result of this routine price fixing was that consumers and the taxpayer pay too much for apartments, hospitals and roads.
Boral boss Mike Kane knows a thing or two about the power of the construction union.
His cement company is collateral damage in a spat between the CFMEU and builder Grocon group in Melbourne.
Since the middle of 2012, the union had run an orchestrated and very costly campaign against Boral, Kane said this week.
"We have refused to give in to demands by the union that we stop doing business with one of our long-standing clients."
As a result of what Kane says is an unlawful secondary boycott, Boral's trucks have been stopped and its workers harassed and threatened.
"Many of our clients in Victoria have had a friendly visit from union officials essentially warning them not to do business with us," he wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week.
On many occasions, Boral trucks turned up at sites and had been barred from carrying on their lawful business by "union heavies" at the gates, supposedly on health and safety grounds, he says.
"It also means there are many other occasions where we have simply missed out on work because our traditional customers don't want to take on the union," Kane says.
Boral estimates the union campaign has cost the company more than $10 million in lost sales and legal fees as it battles the CFMEU in court.
CFMEU national secretary Dave Noonan declined to comment on Kane's claims because the matter is before the courts, but he did take a swipe at Abbott and Hockey for blaming over-generous EBAs for the problems at Toyota and SPC Ardmona.
He noted both companies had refuted the claims.
"I won't call them a liar, because those companies already have," he said.
