Australia: Meat inspectors and vets strike over pay
The meat industry says it will take days to recover after hundreds of workers walk off the job around Australia today.
Plant veterinarians and food safety meat assessors — from the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAF) respectively — will strike for the last hour of their shifts today.
The strikes are part of broader industrial action taken by public servants after they rejected the federal government’s pay offer of 11.2 per cent over three years earlier this year.
Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC) chief executive Patrick Hutchinson said the strikes will cause a backlog of work for meat processors.
He said meat is required to be inspected in order to export to international markets, so some products will have to be sold domestically instead.
“[The domestic market] is already burgeoning under the weight of huge livestock increase in supply,” he said.
“Don’t think for a second that they won’t also take the lunch break and they won’t also then be looking to then try and extract overtime from this process.
Patrick Hutchinson said there were 86 registered export establishments in Australia.
“If you’re a lamb processor of a certain magnitude you could be processing ten a minute, all of a sudden that’s a number of lambs that you then can’t process within that [strike action] hour, especially if you’re bulk export,” he said.
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