Chris Corrigan, the 1998 scourge of the wharfies, is back with a vengeance. If last week’s audacious stockmarket play succeeds, he will once again, after a decade’s absence, be a major employer on the rapidly-developing and increasingly automated Australian waterfront. Maybe that’s why his old enemy, the Maritime Union of Australia, is running, with its (declining) 11,000 membership (and its $40 million in assets) into the welcoming arms of its equally militant big brother (with about 100,000 members) and star turn at the Royal Commission into union misbehaviour, the CFMEU. They are old friends in militancy; a couple of thousand construction workers (illegally) bolstered the MUA picket lines against Corrigan’s Patrick Stevedores in the 1998 battle of the wharves – a saga that paved the way for the wholesale reform of the waterfront under the Howard government. This merger, of Australia’s two most virulent anti-employer hard-line unions, is to be determined at meetings next February – although it could be affected by whatever recommendations (deregistration?) emerge from the Heydon Royal Commission which has heard of the CFMEU’s persistent unlawful behaviour, with fines of $1.2 million over the past year. Such a merger is regarded with horror by government, with Employment Minister Michaelia Cash describing it as ‘a threat to jobs, productivity and the economy’ while Adelaide University’s Professor Stewart called it ‘a scary proposal for some employers’.

One employer unlikely to be scared is Corrigan; he could be one of the ‘great threats’ facing the union movement that MUA secretary Paddy Crumlin says have prompted this proposed merger. Having lost his Patrick stevedoring company to takeover in 2006, Corrigan is now chairman of Qube, a strikingly successful logistics company that plans a game-changing intermodal terminal in Sydney’s Moorebank where containers railed from Port Botany can be transhipped to whatever mode of transport is required. Last week, on the last day available and funded by two huge North American investors, Qube spent $1.7 billion to buy 20 per cent of the shares in Asciano, enough to block, at next week’s shareholders’ ‘approval’ meeting, a Canadian $9 billion takeover offer for the company that now owns his old Patrick Stevedores operations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle. Corrigan, who wants Patrick back for Qube while his partners seek other elements of Asciano (like its train operator Pacific National), has an enviable negotiating position whoever ends up in control of Asciano.

So Corrigan and the MUA-CFMEU will soon be testing each other’s will to win. Corrigan’s old political ally in the 1998 wharfies war, then Industrial Relations Minister Peter Reith, does not discount tension with the MUA, but doubts Corrigan would seek another battle, largely because the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government’s pro-union legislation has made things much worse for employers than under Howard. In a clear message about the Turnbull government’s need to strengthen its IR credentials, Reith added ‘You don’t have individual agreements in the armoury which we used on the waterfront so I’ll be surprised if there is a real contest’.

Following the Howard-Reith waterfront reforms in 1998, waterfront labour productivity doubled before stagnating under the changed industrial relations climate of recent years. Already the ACCC has warned of the risks to productivity performance on the wharves from the outcomes of renegotiating EBA’s, particularly as unit labour costs in real terms have risen over the last five years to reverse the downward trend since the waterfront reforms of 1998. It is also concerned about the ‘long history of industrial disputation on the Australian waterfront’.

Back in 1998, Corrigan had the support of the Howard government which had promised to ‘fix up the waterfront…and fully support employers who share our reform objective’. If union intransigence blocks Corrigan’s determination to restore productivity growth on the wharves (stagnant despite the doubling in capital investment in the last couple of years) to bring it closer to the hugely more productive major ports in our region, then something will have to give – and the government will have to rediscover its IR nerve.