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Union pressures Air New Zealand workers to accept loss of jobs and conditions
New Zealand’s national airline, Air New Zealand, announced on April 2 that it would rescind a plan to outsource airport services after the country’s biggest private sector union agreed to concessions that include 300 “voluntary” redundancies, a more flexible rostering system and cuts to pay and conditions amounting to more than $NZ7,000 per worker a year.
The outsourcing plan had threatened 1,700 airport jobs at Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The proposal, announced last October, to contract the work to Spanish company Swissport was to save Air NZ $100 million over five years. The company reached an agreement with the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) after lengthy negotiations and court-ordered mediation, on the basis that the cost-cutting would be on a par with the potential savings achieved through outsourcing.
The deal lays the basis for imposing further cuts across the airline. Three hundred check-in staff, members of the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU), at the country’s largest airport, Auckland International, are the next in line.
Presented with no alternative, nearly 78 percent of union members voted to accept the settlement. The airline hailed the decision as an opportunity to make its airport services division “globally competitive and world-class”. The agreement offers no permanent job guarantees and only defers the outsourcing plans for two years.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/nz-m02.shtml
The deal lays the basis for imposing further cuts across the airline. Three hundred check-in staff, members of the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU), at the country’s largest airport, Auckland International, are the next in line.
Presented with no alternative, nearly 78 percent of union members voted to accept the settlement. The airline hailed the decision as an opportunity to make its airport services division “globally competitive and world-class”. The agreement offers no permanent job guarantees and only defers the outsourcing plans for two years.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/nz-m02.shtml
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I'm a member of one of the unions John Braddock slams in this article and I was involved in this dispute. His analysis is just plain wrong, in fact he even gets the basic facts wrong more often than not (example "APM" should actually be APN, 917 engineers were not sacked;just over 200 took voluntary redundancy, there are more than "300" news positions in TVNZ (Aotearoa's public broadcaster), and so on and so on). Braddock seems to have cobbled a story together using excerpts form the corporate media, his own remarkably odd analysis and a few facts he seems to have just made up. I find it offensive that an attack on my fellow unionists from such a flawed and marginal perspective has found an international forum without anyone checking it's veracity. Please don't believe this trash represents the true state of labour in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Mike
Mike
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