Wayne Phillips has seen steel disputes from both sides of the fence - first as an employee then a full-time unionist. He reckons last year's steel fight was the hardest in decades, writes GLEN HUMPHRIES
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On his first day at work at the steelworks, unionist Wayne Phillips was an unintentional strikebreaker.
Now secretary with the Port Kembla branch of the Australian Workers’ Union, Phillips started in the steelworks in August 1978 – in the metal fabrication shop.
And, on that first day of work in August, Phillips found he was virtually all alone.
“The first day I started at the steelworks was a strike day, but I didn’t know about it,” Phillips says.
“I turned up and thought, ‘hey, this is quiet’. In those days we had about 340-odd people that worked in the shop and there was no one except an old boss sitting in the office.
“I asked him ‘what’s going on?‘ He said “there’s a strike on today, you should not be here”. It took me about 10 seconds to get out of the place.”
Phillips headed to the Wollongong showground for a mass meeting – back in the days when a union meeting drew 10,000 to 15,000 workers without raising a sweat.
While Phillips admits he saw the steelworks as a job for life, the union leaders at the time could see the writing on the wall.
Their concern was a lack of investment in the steelworks, which lead to the retrenchment of thousands in 1982, despite a strong campaign by the union. One of those campaigners was Phillips, who had been made a shopfloor delegate just two months after starting at the steelworks.
Phillips was also one of the people losing their jobs – the same job he thought would see him through to retirement.
"We struggled for a bit - probably around eight or nine months,” he says of his time without a job.
“We were a young married couple with one kid. There were many days we went without food.”
While employed at the steelworks he also spent time working as an organiser with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, which he reckons made it harder to find another job.
“My job was to track down contractors and hit them up for pay increases and to unionise the industry,” he says.
“I made a lot of enemies in the contracting industry of course. When I had to go and find another job - I was unemployed for about 12 months because no bugger would put me on because of all the hassle I’d created in the industry.”
He managed to find another job – one using his qualifications as a boilermaker. And to this day he swears it was because two officials put in a good word for him.
“Newcastle survived because they had the aluminium industry growing, they had the mining industry growing.''
He stayed there for a few years before leaving to become a union official full-time. He says being retrenched himself helped him understand how the members he represents go through when it happens to them.
“Yes, I can say I’ve been there and done it,” he says.
“I struggled for about a year to get a job. Retrenchment’s no holiday and you really do personally care for everybody who gets it in the neck.”
The Mercury headlines from those times in the early 1980s like “Crisis in the steel industry” and “steel jobs will go” have echoes of last year’s drama when BlueScope CEO Paul O’Malley said $200 million in cuts had to be made or the steelworks would close.
It’s something Phillips agrees with – he sees the 2016 Save Our Steel fight as the biggest since the early 1980s.
“And the sacrifices our members and the community made this time were a lot harder than what we had to do in ’82,” he says.
“This time we’ve got people taking pay freezes, bonus freezes, a lot of people lost their prepaid overtime so they’re down as much as 15 to 20 grand a year.
“Back in ’82 when we had all the blues and all the issues, no one lost money.”
Phillips, who had suffered a heart attack and had a quadruple bypass a number of years ago, found last year’s fight to save the steelworks personally draining.
“Towards the end of last year I was ratshit,” he bluntly admits.
“I’ve still got health issues and I’m a bit older too so that makes it a bit harder to recuperate too.
“I know I was mentally fatigued so I had some time off over Christmas to recharge the batteries and then went back into it. But it was really, really hard. We had people coming into the office who were going to lose their possessions and homes, panicking and saying ‘If I get retrenched, what am I going to do?’.
“It was a very, very emotional time.”
He says he learned something from last year’s battle – that getting workers to walk off the job isn’t always the best approach.
“It forced us to respond a bit smarter,” he says.
“We took a different stand this time. We’re used to having a blue, having an argument and out we go. I have no doubt if we continued to do that in this case the steelworks would have shut.”
And Phillips maintains the steelworks’ survival is crucial for the region.
“Even though it only directly employs a small number, indirectly there are thousands who feed off it,” he says.
“We don’t have any other industries. When Newcastle, they survived because they had the aluminium industry growing, they had the mining industry growing. We don’t have that, so without the steelworks [everything from] the local cafe to the university’s affected.
“It has its tentacles everywhere in our district, so it’s essential to keep it.”