Almost 20 years ago now I moved from one side of Australia to the other, because I met a nice person and wanted to marry them. When I arrived here on the West Coast I needed a job, and the first one I found was a picker/packer in a warehouse for an automotive chain of companies.
In theory it was simple, steady work, until the human factor got involved. We had a great manager for a long while, until they left and were replaced by the ultimate idiot.
This person took our workplace collective agreement and decided to take a black marker pen to it, erasing anything they did not like. The workplace agreement specified all sorts of things, from uniform pants being black or blue (he crossed out blue), to a new policy he instigated of “no visible tattoos on staff members”. The sticking point of this one was this manager had multiple visible tatts, from a redback spider and web on his neck to prison swallows on his hands. None of the staff were anti-tattoo as we were not a customer facing role, but we strenuously objected to the blatant hypocrisy at play.
Obviously tensions rose, to a point where a HR person was flown across the country from head office to try and calm things. We had a group meeting where they made us feel like we were being listened to, empathised with and our agreement would be honoured. This calmed things down for a little while, uniform policies were back as per the agreement, nobody was being discriminated against for having a tattoo.
Fast forward 3 months later, when our workplace agreement was up for renewal. The HR drone was back to 'answer any question we may have'. One smart soul asked about maintaining things they had agreed to, things that were in the workplace agreement. Only to be met with an indignant “I never said any of those things” from the HR troll.
It is one of my collectively proudest moments that all 50+ employees walked out of that meeting, and kept voting down presented agreements until concessions were won.
(Side note: Yes I am very pro union, but any Aussie will know of the SDA, they were supposedly the one representing us, but were beyond useless).