Exactly right the Napthine; govt in Victoria held the paramedics up for two years over their new contracts. As soon as Andrews took over he gave it to a independent umpire for resolution.

Foxy, the most incompetent thing industrial management have ever done was pay process workers on assembly lines in places like car factories over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Unions & management who have given in to union demands because of the gun held to their head have cost us dear.

We have basically lost our shipping industry, steel industry, abattoirs, the whitegoods industries, & the car industry among others.

We are about to loose the last of our ship building, petrol refining, & any further growth in the mining industries.

Any honest student of history can see we are following exactly the same path that led to the loss of so much industry that the UK had invented & where they led the world. Their unions destroyed their blue collar industries, replacing them with the welfare that is sending them broke, with us racing to catch up on the same path.

Still it will all be fixed after the Asian takeover of the basket case we are becoming. I hope you like rice.

It is easy to criticise 'management'. I wish that some here could follow a manager or the small business owner for a day. It is a highly competitive world out there.

I wonder how many comprehend the immediate and flow-on effects of a construction stoppage?

The gutless, bullying, bloodyminded CFMEU bosses know but they don't care.