Lisa Jones wrote on Nov 10
th, 2022 at 11:26am:
Peter Reith stated the brutal and uncomfortable truth. And he had the guts to stand up and get our inept waterfront industry back on track too.
It was never going to be an easy roadmap given the unrepentant union thugs involved and who were controlled by the Communist and Labor Parties of Australia.
We could do with more politicians like Reith in Australia. Men who are tough and prepared to jump in and get the job done.
What we have instead are spineless inept dheads who sit around pretending to care about what they do. They're really there to feather their own nests as they prepare themselves for retirement to enjoy unbelievable benefit packages.
Edit : And if it wasn't for Reith putting the frighteners on those lazy bludging waterfront wankers who thought they could get away with what they had been doing for decades...Australis waterfront industry would not be the competitive and efficient one we see today.
Deal with it you lot!
Quote:Peter Reith stated the brutal and uncomfortable truth. And he had the guts to stand up and get our inept waterfront industry back on track too.
No actually he didn't - The government helping the business to work outside the law and morality hurt the industry for no reason.
The basis of the dispute was to swap out the workforce to overseas imported workers on low pay rates and to introduce automated technology.
In the end they had 3 cranes standing at the port unused 25 years later.
This is the technology they wanted to use to supposedly improve productivity. It never got to the point where these cranes could match the workers performance and were never used.
There was also a safety issue that the cranes could not correctly identify the different containers which produced an extreme danger when a crane picked up a container with a different size than it believed. It could literally try to put a container into a slot where it didn't fit or worse still into an area where there were people.
They got improved productivity in the end by negotiating a bonus system with existing workers. They had a set number of containers to unload in a shift with a bonus for extra.
This was the increased productivity and it had nothing to do with the dispute, this was always on the table.
A disappointment to me was that the union didn't follow through with the court case, the court had found that the government had a case to answer. The Gov done a deal with the unions to get out of it.