Workers at Omic Australia, a food and pesticide analysis laboratory in Melbourne, are currently negotiating their first collective agreement after the site became unionised in July this year.

Unhappy with meagre annual pay increases and diminishing conditions, workers called the AMWU HelpDesk in June this year after realising that unionised lab workers at other workplaces were better off under collective agreements.

Shortly after, an AMWU organiser visited the site to find 13 of the 20 workers ready to sign up with the union on the spot.

Caroline O’Keefe is a pesticide chemist with Omic, and one of the recent members.

“The main reason I joined was because conditions started deteriorating really quickly after a management change earlier this year.

“They were little things to start with, that just grew bigger and bigger. Like if people needed to take sick leave to go to the doctor’s for a check-up, the company wouldn’t let them take it as sick leave - they’d have to take annual leave. Things like that started to happen more often.

“Then they tried to introduce new contracts for everybody that people weren’t happy with, and that was kind of the final straw. So we asked around to find out what our options for representation were, and the AMWU came up as the best option.

“We worked really quickly, signed all the forms, and joined the union”, she said.

David Vroland, AMWU Organiser, is supporting the workers in their collective agreement negotiations, which are ongoing.

The workers are asking for wage increases to be built into the agreement that are better than annual CPI increases. In addition, members want better annual and long service leave provisions, as well as representation and arbitration rights and training for union delegates.

“The way to win a better outcome is to be better organised”, said Dave.

“Earlier today we went to the Equal Pay Alliance’s Equal Pay Day morning tea, which was organised to highlight the ongoing inequity between men and women’s pay in Australia.

“One of the interesting things which was pointed out is how male-dominated industries tend to have better wages and conditions because traditionally, these industries have been more organised.

“Lab and technical workers tend to have more women workers and they also tend to earn less than, say, construction and trade workers. And this can change, but the only way that this can happen is for workers to act collectively and organise together.”

Caroline agrees.

“Traditionally the sector hasn’t really been unionised, and it really shows.

“There’s a lot of people who’ve been here for close to ten years, and they’ve only been getting pay increases of one or two per cent a year, which is less than CPI for all those years.

 “In effect, they’re getting paid less today than when they first started”, she said.

“The equal pay information Dave gave us was really interesting, because it’s true – doing lab science work, well, you spend four years at uni and get a HECS debt of up to $20 or $30 000, and then you can end up earning less than someone working at Sportsgirl.”


If you want to find out whether you can get a better deal at your workplace, call the AMWU HelpDesk on 1300 732 698.