What? No food! No beer! With an election looming? Yep, these are the kinds of big issues that can get a Workplace Relations Minister like Murray Watt fired up to solve a union strike.
A Christmas with no beer could KO a PM heading to the polls in May or before.
And that’s what happened yesterday as the Woolworths-United Workers Union standoff materialised into supermarkets with low food supplies on the shelves, as well as beer and wine shortages at the likes of Dan Murphy’s and BWS.
The supply problem is centred on Victoria and southern NSW, with four warehouse sites locked in a dispute over pay and conditions with the supermarket giant. To date, 1,500 workers have been on strike for 12 days and now are due to meet Woolworths at the Fair Work Commission on Friday.
This follows Minister Watt meeting with the Union Secretary Tim Kennedy.
The grog supply problem emanates out of the Melbourne Liquor centre that was owned by Woolworths, but the alcohol and pubs business was spun off into a new company called the Endeavour Group.
The big fear for Woolworths and the Albanese Government is the prospect that this dispute might spread nationally, so there are high hopes that the FWC can broker a deal on Friday.
So, what’s the strike about? First, the workers want “cost-of-living wage increases” ranging from 10% to 12.5% annually but Mr Kennedy has hinted lower increases haven’t been ruled out. But the more interesting bone of contention is linked to a problem that’s seen as a national concern and that’s productivity.
Woolworths has an innovative program designed to boost the company’s efficiency and lower average costs, but the workers don’t like it.
“The union is pushing for Woolworths Group’s supply chain arm, Primary Connect, to scrap its Coaching and Productivity Framework, saying it used engineered standards to discipline or even fire people for not meeting company-stipulated speeds of working,” The Australian’s Ewin Hannan and Brendan Kearns revealed.
Not a lot is known about the actual demands of the company with respect to the productivity demands but this is what Tim Kennedy told The Australian: “Business groups may well come out and support the dangerous, inhumane and unsafe productivity framework but you can bet they are not being marked out of 100 in real time every time they perform a task”.
Clearly, the FWC’s job will be to see how realistic the claims are that what Woolworths expects of their workers with their efficiency drive is “dangerous, inhumane and unsafe”, and how reasonable and how truthful it might be that every task is rated out of a 100, as the union claims.
Our country has had a declining productivity for a long time, as the chart below shows.

The causes aren’t just bludging workers. Professor Stephen King of Monash University cited the Albanese Government’s reasoning for poor productivity, which include:
1. Less entry and exit of firms.
2. Less job-switching.
3. A significant reduction in business investment.
4. Mergers leading to increased business concentration.
5. An increase in the markups businesses can sustain.
6. Only few highly productive firms, with the rest increasingly less so.
These all are a part of the explanation, while the Productivity Commission concludes the following: “Productivity fell in 2022-23 as record high increases in hours worked outpaced output growth”.
Population surges with no smarter ways of doing business makes for lower productivity.
Professor King says “…boosting productivity will require measures that cover education, technology, business regulation, taxation, carbon emissions, and more”.
What Woolworths has been doing to boost worker productivity isn’t a bad idea — workers everywhere have to change their work practices to approach world’s best standards — what the Fair Work Commission has to determine is whether what the company imposed was really “dangerous, inhumane and unsafe”.
Given the insurance claims of workers against companies nowadays for injuries and stress, and the law firms happy to prosecute on a no-win-no-pay basis, what we learn about Woolworth’s productivity ‘punishment’ will make interesting reading.
If we have to go without beer and wine over Christmas because workers don’t like new age work practices, it could be a worrying sign for our future productivity.