Australian Unions Pledge to Fight Down Foreign Labour Use

The Maritime Union of Australia has passed a motion regarding the ‘Crisis in Coastal Shipping’ as Australian Council of Trade Unions Executive (ACTU) members that met today in Melbourne.

The resolution reaffirmed ACTU’s support to MUA’s shipping campaign and maintenance and growth of an Australian domestic shipping industry.

“Australian unions will strongly defend maritime cabotage, believing that reservation of a proportion of domestic cargo for Australian ships, supplemented by conditional access to residual and emergency cargoes by foreign ships, is in Australia’s national interest,” the resolution reads.

 “ACTU will strongly resist efforts to replace Australian seafarers with foreign labour, in conjunction with the maritime unions, and will not accept the use of foreign seafarer labour operating in the coastal shipping trades, a domestic industry, being employed under terms and conditions of the nation of supply of the foreign seafarer labour.”

The resolution comes in the wake of the decision by Caltex to terminate Australian employment on the petroleum tanker the Alexander Spirit, a move condemned by ACTU.

“Executive agrees that this latest loss of an Australian ship from the coastal trades represents a wider crisis in Australian shipping, and that the ACTU cannot stand by without taking steps to identify the opportunities to redress this crisis and lack of appropriate industry policy response from the government,” the resolution adds.

As a result, the ACTU leadership, in conjunction with the maritime unions, political representatives and stakeholders representing shipowners/operators and shippers, decided to organise a shipping industry summit, aimed at:

  •  Finding solutions that stem the loss of Australian registered and Australian crewed ships from the Australian domestic seaborne freight trade;
  • Identify longer term regulatory and fiscal arrangements that attract investment in ships and builds the industry through reformed shipping legislation, and a wide ranging shipping industrial policy package;
  •  Developing coastal shipping policy options to put to government as an alternative to the government’s Shipping Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 currently before the Parliament which if passed will wipe out the remaining domestic shipping industry.

Fuel tanker Alexander Spirit was supposed to head for Singapore today, however; based on the latest vessel tracking data from Marine Traffic, the ship remains at anchor in Devonport, Tasmania.

Image: MUA