CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
Australia’s most beloved supermarket giant says that they are once again facing unfair criticism for just trying to have a go.
Woolworths, which is one of the two supermarket chains that dominate the Australian grocery duopoly, is now enduring unfair backlash from within.
This time it’s not coming from the exploited Australian farmers, or the furious price-gouged customers – but their own workers
The UWU (United Workers Union) members have taken industrial action and are now picketed Woolworths distribution centres, preventing stock from being delivered to stores during the usually very profitable Christmas rush.
The union has concerns about the productivity “framework” Woolworths is proposing for warehouse staff as part of pay negotiations, something that they say will result in unsafe work.
The framework, which requires warehouse staff to achieve a 100 per cent performance target when picking up items at speed, is likely to cause injury and exhaustion. It’s a struggle that none of the Australian newspapers are even slightly interested in, because Woolworths pays big dollars in advertising and their shareholders make up a good portion of the Liberal voter base whose wants and needs have been prioritised above all else by the media ever since their messiah Scott Morrison was unfairly ousted as Prime Minister by a Labor government.
But even the Labor government appears sympathetic to Woolworths woes, despite the fact that their plummeting opinion poll numbers can be directly blamed on how fucking hard it is for everyday Australians to survive off the extortionate prices for groceries.
The government has urged the UWU to end their dispute, which has led to empty shelves at supermarkets across Victoria, NSW and the ACT – because all of this workers rights stuff has the potential to ruin Christmas.
Woolworths has disputed that claims made by the unions, insisting their new productivity framework is “fair”.
However, following 12 months of catastrophic blows to the Woolworth’s brand, it seems that neither the farmers nor the customers that they routinely fuck over would believe they treat their own workers any better.
