The votes of just four steelworkers stopped Port Kembla from shutting down.
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On Monday and Tuesday BlueScope workers at the main plant and the Spring Hill site – which makes Colorbond – were both voting on whether to accept their respective enterprise agreements.
The BlueScope board decided to keep Port Kembla open as long as both of these agreements were ratified.
If one voted went down – the steelworks closed.
And, at the Spring Hill site, it very nearly went down.
The agreement was accepted by a margin of just seven votes – 142 to 135.
That means if just four more people had voted no, the campaign – and the steelworks – would have been lost.
“We were right on the end of the precipice, right on the edge of the cliff,” said Australian Workers Union Port Kembla secretary Wayne Phillips.
Last week, there was anger from workers about BlueScope’s decision to hire casual labour, which threatened the successful passage of the two agreements.
After high-level negotiations between the union and the company, those issues were fixed and it was thought the crisis was averted.
“It was close, a hell of a lot closer than anyone thought,” Mr Phillips said of the eventual vote.
“Four votes could have cost the closure of the steelworks. That was extremely disappointing in that I still have this view that workers support workers.”
The vote at the steelworks site was 726-136 in favour of accepting their agreement.
Mr Phillips claimed workers at Spring Hill were “misled” by “a small vocal group” into voting no.
“People who were under the misapprehension they could put up the big protest vote at Spring Hill could have led to the closure of the steelworks,” Mr Phillips said.
“I don’t think people fully appreciated that. I know we’ve got a lot of people working in Spring Hill who have relatives that work in the main works. What do they say? ‘Oh sorry mate, voted you out of a job’.”
Professing relief that the battle to keep the works open has been won, Mr Phillips said they now have to wait for improvement in the steel market.
“We’re in a low at the moment,” he said.
“It’ll pick up and when it does we’ll be in a better position to claw back the things that we’ve put on hold for now.”
