The Sydney Morning Herald Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk http://www.smh.com.au/news/9812/21/text/national14.html Miners' jobs fight for High Court Date: 21/12/98 STORIES by BRAD NORINGTON, Industrial Editor The coalminers' union plans an appeal to the High Court after suffering a defeat in its campaign to overturn a waterfront-style model of union-busting. The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) said yesterday that it would appeal immediately after the Industrial Relations Commission threw out an earlier ruling that retrenched workers at the Gordonstone mine must be rehired first. The Gordonstone case, regarded widely as a test of management's right to sack a workforce and replace it with hand-picked non-union recruits, has run since October last year, when the American-owned company ARCO sacked all 312 CFMEU members at the north Queensland coalmine. In August this year Commissioner Errol Hodder ruled that ARCO had used an "elaborate strategy" to reopen its mine by advertising for non-union contract workers after the sackings. He ordered the company to offer the jobs to former CFMEU employees. A Full Bench of the commission ruled by a 2-to-1 majority on Friday that Commissioner Hodder had exercised a miscarriage of discretion. The Bench found that the sacked miners should not be entitled to the "double benefit" of being rehired at the mine after they had already received a $6 million payout for unfair dismissals in February. The mine is now changing hands, with its sale to the mining company Rio Tinto expected to be finalised in a fortnight for the relative bargain price of $260 million. The CFMEU must now battle Rio Tinto over the issue of which miners take jobs, against a background in which the union already regards the company as its chief enemy in the coal industry. The CFMEU's national secretary, Mr John Maitland, said preliminary legal advice indicated that the union could win a court challenge. He said the issue of "double benefit" was misleading, because sacked miners were paid compensation on the basis of the mine closing. "The point here is that it was a contrived arrangement [to get rid of a unionised workforce] even if you have to pay the workers to get rid of them," he said. The original Gordonstone sackings were regarded by observers as a trial run for the kinds of tactics that were later used against workers in this year's waterfront dispute involving Patrick stevedores. Rio Tinto stressed yesterday that it was not interested in pursuing individual agreements with workers and was not seeking to obliterate the CFMEU from the mine. A spokesman for Rio Tinto said the company wanted a collective agreement. Recruitment would be in line with Friday's decision, which allowed management to hire on merit. Of more than 20 miners already hired, a number were from among the sacked Gordonstone workforce. The CFMEU has picketed the Gordonstone entrance road since October last year. The mine, near the isolated Bowen Basin town of Emerald, attracted national publicity at the time because ARCO used security guards and dogs to monitor CFMEU members. Rio Tinto has bought Gordonstone for its high-grade export coal resource following development costs by ARCO believed to be $650 million. Unions lose more members Just one in five workers in the private sector now belongs to a union - further evidence that the ACTU's efforts to stem union decline are failing. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in the private sector - which employs most workers - the proportion of union members fell by 1.9 percentage points to 21.4 per cent in the year to August. Overall, the proportion of workers in unions fell by 2.2 percentage points to 28.1 per cent - a drop of 72,800 people. About 2 million still belong to a union. Unions remain a force in power, transport, communications, coal mining and the public sector, but membership in the service, finance, property and agriculture sectors is suffering. Despite a recruitment drive, every sector recorded a fall in membership over the year. Total union membership has slipped from 39.6 per cent in 1992. An ACTU assistant secretary, Mr Greg Combet, said unions had to focus on issues such as job security, working hours and the difficulties of making ends meet. 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