**Broken Link(s) Removed**Working at a BHP coal mine in Queensland under union conditions, on a ten hour overtime shift on Sunday night, I am on around forty four bucks an hour, plus coal bonus, and height and dirt money, I expect to get around five hundred bucks for the shift, working as a rigger, variously on an oxy acetylene torch and driving the crane, doing demolition on night shift, preparing the coal wash plant for an upgrade.
I was working with an experienced welder, who had spent at least twenty years in the industry, I arrive on the site at the start of night shift, the pay clerk who was just knocking off gave me my pay slip for the previous week.
Later in the shift, the guy I was working with asked for a look at my pay slip, I gave it to him and when he read it he started crying, his tears had washed the coal dust from his face, I said "…what’s up Mate," and he broke down and told me ...a contractor had rang him about this job, he declined on the grounds that he was only gonna pay eighteen dollars hours an hour, flat rate, no overtime rate, no coal bonus, no height money, no nuthin’.
The contractor then rang his missus, and told her there was a job if he wanted it, where upon she presented him with the ultimatum of going to work or moving out, so on union rates on that shift I got around three hundred and twenty dollars more than him...
No wonder he was crying!!
I gave him my undertaking, that I would be sponsoring a union motion that all trade union people, at all BHP coal mining operations, thence all BHP hard rock mining and on shore facilities, cease work until this pay claim which has existed since 1995, and all other similar pay claims are met.
2008: This union proposes that the Australian workforce drop their tools, and walk off the job on strike, in protest at the lack of police and government action, in relation to killings, the thuggery and the scabbery, in Australian Construction and Mining sector unions.
Western Australian Mining Union Elections November 2008.
The election came and went, nor was one syllable of coherent discourse received from any of the union operators!!Yo Readers...**Broken Link(s) Removed**... who gets to spruik from the back of this baby, that's what the electors will decide on November 4!!
Check the latest union technology... **Broken Link(s) Removed** this item is made in Russia, it has the same coil pickups as Eric Clapton's guitar, guaranteed to 99 decibels at five hundred meters, then get a pair of brass knuckles, and you are ready for a career as a Western Australian trade union leader!!
None of the candidates had any policy on this type of thing, the unions dropped the ball, then go public at union meetings, describing men that have been forced by domestic pressure to take jobs, as scabs for goin' to work!!
The kids are starving, the only job I can get pays twenty an hour below the award, and the union hung up the @#&! phone.
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