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Picketline at Port Botany over Hutchison sackings

A picket line was set up at Port Botany in Sydney after nearly 100 workers were sacked by email.

Last night Hutchison Ports Australia used email to inform the 97 employees their positions had been terminated with no opportunities for redeployment.

40 of those workers are employed at the Port of Brisbane, and 57 are employed at Port Botany.

Employees were told that their final day of work was Friday August 14, but they were not required to attend from August 6 onwards, according to the Daily Telegraph.

I realise that this is a lot of information to take in,” the email read.

“Accordingly you are will not be required to attend work effective immediately.

“We will of course pay you your normal salary to your last date of employment.”

The email also said employees personal effects would be couriered to them.

Hutchison’s gates were blocked by security guards, and ABC reported an altercation started after a security guard told a worker he could not enter to retrieve his possessions.

Police have intervened to keep picketers and security guards away from each other, and border security have also joined to control the situation.

Some 200 employees have picketed Port Botany in support of the terminated workers.

Hutchison blamed the redundancies on several issues, including downsizing of its offerings to Australian customers.

The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) said it “utterly rejects” claims the company had to reduce its operations due to a lack of competitiveness .

“We believe this is a strategy to increase automation as there are no logical reasons why the company would otherwise give away profitable contracts as they have done recently,” a spokesman for the MUA said.

“The union is seeking a fair and objective process where all labour data and modelling are put on the table to determine the true nature and scope of the problem.”

MUA NSW assistant branch secretary Paul Garrett said the redundancies were related to moves towards automation.

"It's clear that the company's got a move to automate and this is just one of the steps along the way to automating but there shouldn't be any automation without negotiation and they certainly should enter into meaningful discussion with the workers and their union, not just sack them at midnight," he said.

Sacked cranage team leader Craig Hancock said the company had threatened to close down without notice.

"Bottom line is we bent over backwards, we tried our hardest we're a really good workforce…but they're trying to pick on us all the time," he said.

"They've got nastier and nastier…we don't really know why we've been sacked.

"They started threatening us a while ago about 'we'll close down whenever we like', or 'we'll make you redundant for no reason'… they kept saying stuff like that but we kept battling away.”

LMH has approached Hutchison Ports for comment.

Image: ABC

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