The heads of Australia’s biggest blue-collar unions are in South Australia today meeting workers at the ASC, a submarine and ship building company, as part of the two unions’ Manufacturing Alliance jobs campaign. The Manufacturing Alliance is calling for better government procurement policy and policies to encourage innovation in Australia’s manufacturing industry to create jobs.
The Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) represent over 250,000 workers and have members in almost every town in Australia.
AWU National Secretary Paul Howes and AMWU National Secretary Dave Oliver said that the inner, north and south Adelaide regions had been hit hard by the global economic crisis suffering 8,000 manufacturing job losses in financial year 2008-09, and that recovery was far from complete in an industry that has lost 77,000 workers nationally over the past year.
“The most important thing we can do is to make sure we have a fair go procurement policy in place to give Australian manufacturers the ability to supply large-scale infrastructure projects and tenders,” said Mr Oliver.
Paul Howes said that unions and workers had a lot to contribute to the debate about improving innovation, investment and skills.
“The Alliance campaign is about creating jobs in critical manufacturing industries after the damage done by years of economic degradation and neglect by the previous government,” said Mr Howes.
“The ASC has a new contract from Defence to provide materials for navy ships and also build them, which illustrates what government procurement can achieve and the beneficial effect it can have on jobs and the surrounding community,” said Mr Howes.
“We want to work with the company to ensure we have world’s best practice there and if there are any productivity issues we want to know about them so solutions can be found.
“The Rudd Government has indicated that they support a co-operative approach between workers, industry and government in order to bring about the changes and we are determined to play our part,” said Mr Oliver.
