Transport's payback for industrial pain

So, how refreshing, or alarming, depending on your viewpoint, to have the maritime industries feature not one but twice on the front page of the country’s national daily newspaper – even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

There was even a photo of Paddy Crumlin.

As any advertising executive will tell you, that sort of exposure is worth more than the $25,000 or so that two front-page advertisements would cost.

That is a saving to the shipping industry and, who knows, with all that extra cash for seafarers with certain skills, school leavers might respond in even greater numbers to the call of the sea.

Of course, much of this was due to The Australian reverting to type with an anti-union scare campaign with which it can also beat the Federal Government.

That newspaper has never got over the fun it had during the Whitlam years and is crossing its fingers that a general wages breakout will ensue – as if absolutely nothing has change in the past 40 years.

The fact that the engineers could gain their new and improved agreement without resorting to industrial muscle might be one of those inconvenient truths of the more recent industrial seascape.

Of course, some themes do carry through over the decades and this offshore energy support wages dispute followed a script that might have been chiseled into a stone tablet.

It goes something but not always like this: deal times out, ambit claim is made, talks go nowhere, strike action is taken, bargaining begins in earnest, deal is reached.

Oh, and plenty of accusations and name-calling indulged in along the way.

So much for the “good” news.

The other side of the coin is the expense and disruption it has caused the companies involved.

While they are obviously enjoying better times due to the recovering price of oil and the dash for liquefied natural gas that is helping fuel the resources boom, especially in Western Australia, it is not as if they will be readily able to pass on extra costs to the customer.

Few drive harder bargains than Big Oil.

Meanwhile, Total Marine Services chief executive Glenn Trigg is just one who has decried the cost of being involved in what is now the Fair Work Australia process.

Some observers have seen the fact that workplace relations minister Julia Gillard did not intervene, despite employers body the Australian Minerals and Metals Association calling for it, as a positive for the new industrial relations dispensation, showing that the system worked.

But without any concession from the MUA in return for the extra pay, it is difficult to say that it is a balanced system in this case.

As for what it means in the long run, local shipowners could be forgiven for thinking that they just can’t win anything come the next round of MUA enterprise bargaining.

Having given such strength to the MUA’s arm, the Federal Government should do the decent thing and present owners with all they otherwise seek when the new transport policy, into which the coastal shipping policy appears to have been folded, is finally released.