Woodside wanted to read emails from the Offshore Alliance to workers on Woodside’s gas platforms who were voting on whether to back the union to negotiate an enterprise agreement for them.
Woodside wanted to access emails of more than 100 of its offshore workers.Woodside
A Woodside spokeswoman said it wanted to be sure its employees wanted the union to act for them.
“That’s why we are taking the actions we are in the Fair Work Commission to ensure the process is thorough and robust and the legal requirements for bargaining have been met,” she said.
However,on Friday a full bench of the industrial court rejected an appeal by Woodside against a July ruling by deputy president Melanie Binet that said it was the commission,not the employer,that had to be satisfied that most workers favoured bargaining.
Offshore Alliance spokesman and AWU national secretary Daniel Walton said he was not surprised by the decision.
“But I am surprised that Woodside would be so persistent with such a hostile and odd tactic,” he said.
”Seeking access to employees’ private communications with their union is the kind of suggestion that’s strange when raised informally during negotiations,but to actually pursue it through the Fair Work Commission is quite bizarre.”
While Woodside’s request was only for emails from the union it is understood that email chains that included workers’ responses to the union could have been caught in the net.
The Offshore Alliance is a four-year-old partnership between the Australian Workers’ Union and the Maritime Union covering the offshore oil and gas industry that now has more than 2000 members.
It recently scored a major victory on Shell’s Prelude floating gas vessel when management agreed to pay increases and job security provisions after 11 weeks of industrial action that caused lost production valued at up to $1 billion.
In June,the Alliance applied to the commission for a determination that a majority of more than a hundred workers on three Woodside platforms off the WA coast wanted an enterprise agreement and supplied signed petitions as evidence.
Woodside claimed the petitions were secured using “fundamental and material representations” from the union to its employees and applied for copies of the signed petitions and every communication from the union to the workers over a five-month period.
The July ruling upheld last week said Woodside provided no evidence the petitions were fraudulently completed and its request to see correspondence from the union to workers was “an unprecedented invasion into the privacy of employees”.
The full bench said Woodside’s concerns were “no higher than speculation” and the information it sought “plainly discloses the fishing nature of Woodside’s request.”
Walton said he hoped Woodside would agree to sit down and negotiate an agreement.
“These ultra-aggressive union-busting tactics might occasionally work in the US,but they have no place in Australia,” Walton said.
The Woodside spokeswoman said it genuinely considered the union’s request to commence bargaining but “it would represent a departure from how we have worked for many decades,which is direct engagement with our people.”
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