Diary of a construction worker: The dreams are different

Conversations with my workmates now, as a traffic controller on construction and civil engineering sites in Queensland, Australia, are completely different from what I had before as a seafarer and a construction worker.

We are employed by traffic-control contractors which function like labour-hire companies, and there are almost no conversations with the workers directly employed on the sites. Traffic controllers want to talk about traffic. There’s almost no talk of politics.

There are a lot of complaints about how we are treated by management — by the labour-hire companies, that is, not the main site management — complaints are about getting hours of work (it’s a zero-hours job) and about the time and cost to get to sites when we have jobs. I’m signed up with three companies just to try to get two days’ work a week.

But so far I’ve found only one other traffic controller who’s interested in trade unionism. The others aren’t hostile to unions, but unions are not part of their world, yet.

There are probably 100 traffic controllers, at most, in Queensland, who are on EBA [union-negotiated] pay rates, but maybe 10,000 others, on varying rates of pay, none much more than the award [legal minimum].

The ute drivers, who set up the signs and so on, complain most, although they get more hours than the rest of us, they are paid a little more than us per hour, and in practice they are the supervisors on the worksite.

Some of them act like tinpot dictators, though some are helpful and friendly. Every two hours we are supposed to get ten minutes’ break, but often we don’t get it.

A lot of traffic controllers are workers in their 50s and 60s, and then there are some young women and men in their late teens and early 20s, some of whom seem to have got into the job because other family members have worked in traffic control. Often the older workers are in the job as a result of marriage breakdowns or such.

Their dreams and thoughts are different from those of workers in the better-paid unionised jobs I’ve worked in before.

These are people fighting to get enough money to rent a house and to pay the bills, where better-paid blue-collar workers think about buying a nicer house or even buying an investment property. Maybe because of the lack of union presence, there is far more pettiness among workers than on a unionised site — much more of one worker trying to embarrass another worker by telling them they’re doing something wrong.