De Costi Seafoods recently faced the music for underpayment of workers at a processing plant in Sydney's western suburbs. It was a costly exercise: $1.6 million in back pay and a $60,000 fine.
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The Australian Workers' Union had run the successful case, but its campaign was not all or only about seeking legal redress.
The very public court case was the last link in a chain that began in 2019 with unionising the workforce.
Sectors of the economy like seafood processing are, well, messy.
Firm ownership changes often - indeed, at the beginning of the case De Costi was owned by Tassal; by the time of the fine it was not.
Producers are often subservient to major retailers. Work can be contracted out, and workers engaged on very short-term contracts.
These types of complex work arrangements have transformed the employment relationship over the last generation. This is what American scholar David Weil calls the "fissured workplace": a place where your actual manager and the person with the power to decide your future may well not be the same person.
Think gig work and outsourcing to name two examples.
Workplaces themselves are fragmented too.
In De Costi's Lidcombe plant, as many as 90 per cent of the workforce did not speak English as their first language.
A significant proportion were casuals, and many only had temporary visas. These workers knew little of the Seafood Processing Award that supposedly set their minimum conditions, or of unionism.
Workers in fissured workplaces like this have at times been described as "unorganisable", beyond the reach of unions.
The plight of such workers is attracting more attention around the world. Policymakers are now calling for a return to collective bargaining to improve minimum standards; a debate alive in Australia as Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke prepares for his second round of major workforce reforms.
Others worry about how to enforce whatever standards there might already be.
Low union membership exacerbates those concerns, as does the under-resourcing of state regulators, which brings us back to the question of organising the unorganisable.
Who sets conditions?
And who makes sure those conditions are honoured?
Strategic enforcement is one much mooted solution: a lead company is targeted by regulators to deter wrongdoing by others.
Another is a cooperative approach to enforcement, with strategies that may include formal partnerships between firms and employers.
Both seem a long way removed from the realities facing most Australian workers.
In the case of De Costi, there was an old answer to the question of enforcement.
Things ended up being done how they were done before labour market regulation was upended from the 1990s.
The union was the regulator in effect, if not in law. Had there been no union, there would have been no court case.
How did the union achieve this?
There is a one-word answer, and it is not very fashionable: power.
Policymakers and researchers often think about these issues in a rather anodyne language of general rights or legal duties.
In reality it is about power in workplaces, particularly fissured ones, where the lead company at the top of the supply chain is both physically and conceptually so removed from the workforce.
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Power takes many different forms. Courts can give institutional power to unions, or of course to employers.
Public opinion can give unions power through agreed ideas about fairness.
The production system can give structural power to highly skilled, hard-to-replace workers.
Yet too often this is not enough in the fissured workplace.
The union recognised that reality. It also understood that these types of powers do not work in isolation: each can undercut or reinforce the other.
So, the union went back to basics. It saw that the power these workers got combining with each other to build a union at their workplace was the way to make a change - and to get from there to the media, and to the courts, and ultimately get their money back.
Yet the industry rolls on.
A rapidly growing Canadian firm, Cooke, now owns Tassal.
The labour force turns over. Product markets change.
Fundamentally, here and across the globe, fissuring undercuts - and is in part designed to undercut - the kinds of collective response we saw in this case. Equally it necessitates them.
- Alison Rudman is a PhD candidate studying how unions use their power to regulate the fissured workplace. Bradon Ellem is a professor of employment relations at the University of Sydney Business School.
