The announcement by the giant Japanese restaurant chain Saizeriya that its has finally scrapped its remaining investment plans for food manufacturing in Australia, is the end of one of the most disastrous industrial relations debacles witnessed in this country.
Saizeriya is a 500-plus chain of Italian style restaurants serving quality food to the Japanese at reasonable prices. It is now expanding into China, is a high profile leader in Japanese food retailing and closely watched by the Asian investment community.
Saizeriya has always had its meals prepared by external contractors. It decided, however, to centralise its food manufacturing operations to a state-of-the-art, purpose built facility at Melton on the outskirts of Melbourne. It was the most important development to date in building the vision of turning Australia into a value-adding, food-manufacturing hub for Asia.
If completed, the Saizeriya complex would have involved more than $350 million in investment, with eight large factories and direct employment of more than 1,200 people.
But it went sour even before a spade was lifted to begin building the first plant. In one of the worst examples of the destructive culture of Australian unionism, the National Union of Workers was given the enterprise agreement rights over the running of the complex.
The Australian Manufacturers Workers Union claimed they should have been given coverage, declared war, and co-opted the CFMEU to attack Saizeriya during construction, hoping they could leverage control over the enterprise agreement and future potential membership.
The ensuring construction fiasco caused the construction to have massive cost overrun, delayed opening by some two years and at one point triggered a slide in Saizeriya's share price.
The Victorian government, which had promised the Japanese smooth construction and operation phases, worsened the problem by high-level ineptness. The consequent loss of face for Australia from the perceived, persistent lies has been an investment wrist-slitting exercise inflicting incalculable damage.
It seems that deals with Australian unions have the reliability and strength of sodden tissue paper.
Further, it highlights the fact that the continuing public pretence by many governments, their bureaucracies, some political elites and industry groups -- that sour industrial relations cultures are not killing job creating investment -- is a problem in itself.
In this Saizeriya example, the victims are the thousand and more people who are denied secure jobs opportunities who have been thrown to the wind, farmers who have lost millions of dollars in fresh food supply opportunities, construction workers who have seven fewer factories to build and every Australian for the loss of millions of dollars in investment, export and tax income.
What compounds the issue, is that signs abound of further impending disinvestment in food manufacturing over the next few years.
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