By Alexandra Marriott
The AMWU and the AWU have formed a manufacturing alliance and will co-host a conference in Canberra on Wednesday 28 October. The intention of the conference is to deliver a paper titled A Country That Makes Things, written by the AMWU’s Dave Oliver and the AWU’s Paul Howes.
The paper proposes a seven-strand framework to facilitate ongoing productivity, and labour force participation, in the manufacturing sector.
The framework consists of:
- Building firms with the management systems and organisational capabilities required to win international business opportunities;
- Ensuring policy-makers get the economic fundamentals right;
- Improving global engagement, requiring both a revival of manufacturing export growth as well as greater success in competing against imports;
- Boosting the performance of key manufacturing industries, including steel, aluminium and processed foods;
- Developing a new generation of fast-growing technology and knowledge-intensive manufacturing businesses, with much of the work won likely to be done by traditional manufacturing firms that have been around for a long time and seize the opportunity for strong growth in renewable energy and other “new industries”;
- A cooperative, collaborative approach to building better businesses and workplaces; and
- Improving the perception of manufacturing from the old-fashioned “smokestack”, “dirty” and “repetitive” image, in order to attract and keep “the best and brightest” people.
The issue of Australia’s manufacturing sector has been uppermost in much public discourse around the global financial crisis – particularly in the component parts manufacturing sector, where many companies have significantly reduced the number of days on which the plant operates, and in turn, have implemented leave reduction strategies, and reduced, in some cases, employees’ hours of work.
A Country That Makes Things is likely to be controversial for businesses engaged in manufacturing.
It is also likely to provoke broader discussion around innovation and infrastructure, regulation and red tape, and inform our imagining of what the future holds for the sector. As ever, considerations about, and models of, industrial relations, training, and human resource management are tightly woven into the discussion.
Do you think the seven-pronged approach is likely to tackle the many challenges faced by the Australian manufacturing sector? We’d love to hear your views.
