Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Supermarket workforce

Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (19:13): (927) My adjournment tonight is for the Treasurer and Minister for Industrial Relations. The action I am seeking is for the Victorian Labor government to finally crack down on the supermarket duopoly which is squeezing more and more from their workers and their customers. Two days ago pick and pack staff walked off the job at Woolworths centres across the country, including a liquor room here in Melbourne and a distribution centre in Wodonga. Workers only took this action because they have been pushed to the brink by a punitive, dehumanising monitoring system. It is called the ‘coaching and productivity framework’, and it turns human beings into data points for the profits of a big corporation.

Woolworths introduced the framework earlier this year to force their already oversurveilled workers into meeting universal pick rates or face disciplinary action. Pick rates are calculated by dividing the total number of items you pick by the amount of time that you have worked. Years ago Woolworths started forcing staff to wear headsets to track their pick rates in real time. Imagine being monitored every moment at work. That means on toilet breaks, in lunchbreaks and during tiny moments of rest you are monitored. Then you get a score at the end of the day like a video game, and your boss has access to that score. That is a system that creates unsustainable levels of stress, making workers less happy and less safe in some dangerous work environments. The framework is now on hold thanks to industrial actions throughout the year, including a Fair Work complaint, but let us be clear: Woolworths and Coles want to squeeze as much from workers as they do from customers.

At the same time as warehouse staff were striking, Coles was having its annual general meeting. The chair, James Graham, opened by expressing how disappointed he was to see cost-of-living issues politicised and targeted at supermarket operations. He may have been talking about the Greens-led inquiry across Australia into supermarket price gouging, or our bill here in Victoria for the Essential Services Commission to cap profits on groceries, or maybe how the ACCC itself is suing both Coles and Woolworths over their dishonest discounts system. Coles do not like this scrutiny, but they can cry into their $1.1 billion of profit that they have made during the cost-of-living crisis. Supermarket profit margins in Australia are some of the biggest in the world. They are making more profits than almost all their global counterparts, but they are making those profits off the back of exorbitant grocery prices and underpaid, over-surveilled workers.

Labor does have the power, including here in Victoria, to bring the supermarket duopoly to heel. That means capping the prices of essential groceries and protecting the workers who pick them, pack them and deliver them. It is really the least that we owe the community, who are just trying to put food on the table.