Stevedoring company Patrick Terminals says the Maritime Union of Australia has agreed to immediately end its industrial action at Patrick terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle.
The breakthrough came on Thursday after two days of negotiations in the Fair Work Commission.
Industrial action had been holding up cargo at Sydney’s Port Botany Terminal.
Patrick CEO Michael Jovicic said he was pleased the union had “called off the damaging actions around Australia”.
The union had inflicted unnecessary pain across the supply chain and had now walked away with nothing, Mr Jovicic said in a statement.
“Having lost in the court of public opinion they decided to retreat to fight another day,” he said.
During negotiations on Thursday the MUA had rejected a 1.5 per cent pay increase for each year for four years with no changes to their current conditions or rosters, he said.
On Wednesday the union said was prepared to end its action if the current pay agreement for a a 2.5 per cent pay rise.
Patrick says it offered to hire 50 new workers at Port Botany to help clear the backlog of containers and improve productivity, as well as job guarantees with no forced redundancies for the life of the agreement.
Mr Jovicic said he was amazed the MUA had rejected the offer.
“At least now we can get on with clearing the backlog which exceeds more than 100,000 containers around Australia. My operations team estimate it will take between two and three months to return to normal.”
“Hopefully this means we will avoid shortages of goods at Christmas time.”
Patrick said it had been contacted by a freight forwarder seeking help to find and move a container containing essential diabetes medication.
It said there was now a critical shortage of the drugs after the ship was delayed by three weeks due to the industrial action.
“We have located the container and it will be discharged from Port Botany tonight,” the statement said.
The MUA will brief the media later on Thursday.
