In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organisations with aging assets and increasing environmental regulatory compliance must constantly adapt to remain competitive. This often involves restructuring, downsizing, or making other difficult decisions like closure that can have enormous affects on workers. While such changes can be challenging, having a robust enterprise agreement (EA) in place, particularly one with strong redundancy provisions, can provide significant benefits to employees and ease the transition to a new job or early retirement.
When Alcoa’s American based CEO William Oplinger announced in January of 2024 that after 60 years of continuous operation, production of Alumina at the aging Kwinana Alumina Refinery in Western Australia would cease and the plant would be shut-down, members knew they had the protections of their EA and representation from their Union.
The Alcoa Electrical Trades Agreement sets out a very clear process and redundancy provisions, which include asking for volunteers first (capped at 70 weeks pay, reached at 21 years service), offering redeployments to other refineries if someone wanted a redundancy at another location and lastly, forced redundancies (Uncapped e.g. 136.5 weeks pay for 40 years service).
With every Alcoa site in Western Australia fully unionised and not just the electrical trades but all classifications, unions have a genuine seat at the decision making table to ensure that redundancies would be as painless for the workers as possible.
The fact that Alcoa has been unionised for so long means the company was accustomed to talking to unions whenever there was something that was going to affect workers. Make no mistake all Unions have had blues with Alcoa over the years and provisions like good redundancy clauses are not just handed over willingly.
By having a seat at the table we could negotiate additional items that were not part of the agreement like training for our members that were exiting the business. We knew that the training could not be delivered in the time workers had left. It was agreed that any electrician that was made redundant would get the nationally recognised HV Switching and EEHA training paid for by Alcoa with a six month window after their last day of employment to undertake the training. These two courses would greatly aid in members ability to gain new employment.
Every blue collar worker got what they wanted, either a redeployment, redundancy or to stay on for the next phase of the closure. This is a testament to what a good Union EA can deliver and what can be achieved when unions and a business can have meaningful discussions that deliver real outcomes for workers.
Some of our longest serving members 40+ of years continuous membership got an early retirement and the younger members got a nice redundancy package and moved onto new employment.
Having a good Union EA in place and a fully unionised workforce meant that when the music stopped workers got looked after.
Alcoa honoured the EA without question and gave a little extra when pushed. Be under no illusion, if there was not a Union EA in place and union membership was low the closure would have played out in a much less favourable way for workers.