AMWU: Supermarkets and Rosella

AMWU Secretary Tim Ayres writes:

This barbecue season, spare a thought for your tomato sauce. Western Sydney workers who produce the Rosella brand tomato sauce got the fright of their lives when they turned up for work last week.

Receivers had moved in. They had no idea whether they'd have jobs as of the end of the day, let alone by Christmas.

When we turned up, one worker was physically sick. He had a family, he'd been made redundant before and he didn't want it to happen again.

Thankfully, it looks as though the Rosella workers will make it through, at least in the short term, as receivers work towards selling the business as a going concern.

Do we want a future where we don't have the manufacturing capacity to make our own tomato sauce using Australian-grown tomatoes and safe processing techniques? Where we rely on imported, tomato-free "ketchup"?

Or do we want a future where Australian workers produce quality food products for our own tables as well as exporting to the booming Asian market?

Australian food manufacturing is under enormous pressure from cheaper imported food products, from the high Australian dollar and from the two major supermarkets who use their market share - as much as 80 per cent of the grocery market, up from 50 per cent in the 1990s - to squeeze maximum profits from every link in the food distribution chain. NSW has shed thousands of food processing jobs over the past decade as manufacturers buckle under these pressures.

Losing food production facilities like canneries doesn't only hit jobs on the factory floor, often in regional communities, it's a blow to local food growers who lose an important market.

There are no quick fixes. We need consumers to actively seek out quality Australian-made products, or risk not having them available in future. But we shouldn't expect consumers alone to bear the cost of supporting a homegrown food industry.

We need action to curtail the supermarkets, who use their market dominance to aggressively undermine our favourite brands with cut-price private label brands.

"Home brand" products produced for the supermarkets whose market share has risen from 15 per cent to 25 per cent of supermarket sales over the last 10 years are increasingly imported. Supermarket private label brands are more than twice as likely to be made from imported produce as market-leading brands. There is a direct correlation between the increase in private label share of supermarket sales and increasing food imports.

We need a vision for a vibrant food manufacturing industry in Australia, led by government and supported by smart policy.

These should include clearer country-of-origin labelling laws so Australians can make informed choices about buying Australian; co-investment in innovation and research and development; and applying the same quality and testing standards to imported food as to food grown and processed in Australia - currently not the case.

Australia also needs to sustain and build its manufacturing industries and food is a critical part of that mix. If we put our minds to it, we can be a high-tech, high-quality food processing hub for the growing domestic market and Asian markets.

And Rosella, once it emerges from the turbulent weeks ahead, is well placed to take advantage of the opportunities.

Rosella has a range of products, including soups, curries and chutneys, and an impressive, modern processing facility in western Sydney that it would be a tragedy to lose. Rosella is about much more than nostalgia for a brand of tomato sauce.

It's about whether we're willing to step up to the challenges of building modern, sustainable manufacturing industries to propel our economy into the future.