National Cabinet has resolved to expand reduced isolation requirements to a raft of ‘critical’ or ‘essential’ industries, including fuel distribution and fuel retail.
By Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association CEO Mark McKenzie.
Fuel distribution and fuel retail businesses have consistently reported concern about the rising proportion of staff being removed from the available staff pool lost to Covid – in terms of being both physically infected and because of being required to isolate for seven days as a ‘close contact’ of someone who contracted Covid in their household.
These reports suggested that the rate of loss of workers to fuel retail and fuel distribution businesses was on the rise in the wake of dramatically increased rates of Covid contagion relating to the Omicron variant. Further, the shortages in the retail sector were occurring at a time when retail workforces were already weakened by the absence of visa workers (particularly, international students) created by the 20-month closure of Australia’s international borders.
While ACAPMA had been advocating to government to remove the 40-hour fortnight cap imposed on international students, we were concerned about reports of an increasing rate of workers being furloughed in fuel distribution and fuel retail businesses as a result of the Omicron variant.
Of most concern were reports that some businesses were losing two staff to isolation as close contacts for every one staff member who contracted Covid. While most businesses were keeping their businesses open in the face of these worker losses via the use of increased overtime and/or reducing opening hours, it was clear there was a need to act now to avoid serious supply chain issues in the future.
Our key challenge, however, was to articulate the urgency of the need to put measures in place for our industry now to protect supply chain operation without unduly alarming the broader community and creating panic buying and a supply problem of itself.
Rather than focusing on the problem, and who was responsible for it, ACAPMA chose to focus on a discussion of the actions considered necessary to reduce the risk of any serious interruption to supply chain operation.
Read the article in full in the January-February issue of Convenience World.
