The royal commission’s hearings into the CFMEU resumed in Brisbane on Monday, with Universal Cranes group managing director Albert Smith saying how his company suffered from the union’s alleged boycott among Queensland clients, after refusing to sign an enterprise bargaining agreement in 2012.

The enterprise bargaining agreement comprised a clause forcing Universal Cranes to pay contributions to the union’s preferred redundancy scheme – the Building Employees’ Redundancy Trust, more widely known as BERT.

When Smith explained he preferred using his own arrangement to pay workers redundancy monies, he said the union began a boycotting campaign against Universal Cranes designed to force it to sign the EBA and become a financier of the BERT.

“The process was that the union would advise the clients not to hire us,” he told the Commission.

“The clients wouldn't use Universal Cranes, so we lost several customers; in some cases, customers that we already had, the union made it clear to the clients that they wouldn't allow us to be on the site.”

Thinking that taking up the case to Fair Work or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would be too lengthy, Smith eventually gave in and signed the agreement.

In addition, to being forced to sign the EBA – in exchange for the CFMEU to lift the ban on Universal Cranes – Smith alleged the CFMEU requested that all companies associated with Universal Cranes sign the same form of agreement.

Senior Counsel assisting the Commission Jeremy Stoljar also told the Commission of how Smith was allegedly asked to exert pressure on his employees to become union members.

“Unless 100% union membership was arranged, there was ‘no deal’; that is, the ban would not end,” Stoljar said.

As the hearing continued, the BERT scheme was later found to have been used by the union to make false redundancy payments to workers at Christmas time or Easter, after their employers supplied fake certificates of redundancy to avoid paying holiday pay and enable their workers to compensate the losses by accessing their own funds from BERT.

The fund was also found to be used by the union to make hardship payments to workers on strike.

On this matter, while employer representatives on the board of BERT believe these payments be illegal and a tool for the union to promote industrial campaigns, fund employer representative Tony Hackett conceded the payments may not be illegal as they were only made to workers who were union members and using these workers' own money.

He said striking workers are entitled to receiving hardship payments from BERT.

The hearing continues.