03:47 a.m. Jun 23, 1998 Eastern
By Michael Stapleton
MELBOURNE, June 23 (Reuters) - Australia's bitter waterfront dispute headed to a close on Tuesday when union dockworkers in Melbourne voted to accept a settlement deal.
``We have achieved overwhelming support for this document,'' Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) chief John Coombs told reporters after a five-hour meeting with members in Melbourne.
The MUA and Australia's second largest stevedore Patrick have locked horns for the past six months in what has been the country's most divisive industrial dispute in decades.
The agreement requires the full support of Patrick's union workforce around Australia but Coombs said he was confident other MUA members would fall in line with the Melbourne vote.
``I do expect other states will support the agreement. Melbourne always leads,'' he said.
The dispute reached a head in April when Patrick sacked its 1,400-strong workforce in an attempt to break the union's monopoly and boost the efficiency of its wharves.
The union's reaction was to blockade Patrick's wharves through most of April causing a pile-up of about A$500 million (US$305 million) worth of goods.
Patrick's workforce was reinstated by court order last month bringing the union's blockade to an end. Patrick's corporate owner is the listed Lang Corp.
Coombs said if the deal passed its remaining hurdles about 400 full-time Patrick employees would be made redundant and all outstanding litigation between the parties would be dropped. That includes a court action being waged by the MUA against Patrick and the federal government for an alleged illegal conspiracy against the sack workers.
The agreement also lets Patrick outsource contract waterfront jobs, but in an important concession MUA members will win the important maintenance contract. The deal also sees dockers' pay cut and higher productivity targets set to bring Australia's wharves in line with world-best practices.
But Coombs warned the deal would not be signed until the monopolies watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) dropped legal action relating to the dispute against the union.
``If they don't settle there's no agreement,'' he said.
The ACCC said in April it planned to take action against the MUA alleging it had breached trade laws by calling for an international boycott of ships loaded by non-union labour.
A settlement has the potential to change the landscape of industrial relations on the wharves with Australia's largest cargo handler P&O Australia likely to seek similar concessions from the union when it negotiates a pay deal later this year.
Patrick's dispute with the union was backed by the federal government whose Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith has run a campaign to reform work practices on the waterfront.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting Australian Council of Trade Unions assistant secretary Greg Combet rejected claims the deal represented a defeat for the union movement.
``Peter Reith or the government can't claim any success from this -- this deal should have been negotiated as a settlement a year ago,'' Combet said.
Combet said the union movement had always been willing to negotiate productivity improvements and he believed the government's strategy to break the union had completely failed.
``It's a battle we would have rather not had but it has given the union movement a lot of determination,'' he said.
((Melbourne bureau 61-3 9286-1435, melbourne.newsroom+reuters.com))
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