Unions will be meeting with Westport Mayor Martin Sawyer today at 1pm to try and save jobs in Wesport following decisions last week by Postie Plus Group and Holcim to leave the small town.

National Distribution Union Southern Regional Secretary Paul Watson, whose union represents Postie Plus workers will be joined by representatives of the EPMU, who represent the Holcim worker’s in today’s talks.

Postie Plus and Holcim both made a decisions last week to relocate a significant amount of work currently performed in Westport.

Mr Watson said that many mainly woman workers at Postie Plus will have their incomes either stopped or significantly reduced in late October as a result of the Postie Plus decision.

“The decision by Postie Plus to quit the town is a huge blow to the Westport Community and in the Unions view was absolutely avoidable. We are not convinced that there was no other alternative option.”

Mr Watson said that the Westport Distribution Centre has an efficient & hardworking workforce that has been loyal to the company. It’s regretful that the loyalty & productivity shown by the work force hasn’t been returned in kind by the employer keeping loyal to the West Coast community, he said.

“This business decision has been decided around a boardroom table in Christchurch - it’s a commercially driven one to maximize the return of investment to shareholders – but I ask where’s the commitment to investment in the people that are helping create that wealth.”

Mr Watson said that Postie Plus needs to review its decision and take the needs of its workers and the community into account.

ENDS

CONTACT

NDU Media Liason Simon Oosterman on 021 922 551
NDU Southern Secretary Paul Watson 021 618 395
NDU Delegate Erica James 03 789-7729 (work) 03 789 8856 (home)

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

Of concern to the NDU at this stage is;

• The company are giving preliminary notice of closure of School Tex operations in Westport but appear not to offering potential alternative work for those workers.

• The company is calling for voluntary redundancies now and want to close that off in a week. This is despite no employee being in a formal redundancy situation yet. Doing it this way may cause some panic among people & whilst perhaps well intended this may be legally questionable. (The Union has today requested the company review its approach on this matter.)

• The Union will also be raising a number of concerns already identified by our membership relating to the way the company intends to offer jobs and call for voluntary redundancies.

• On 31st October for those staff remaining they will fall back to their original part time hours. In some cases that is as less as 10 hours per week and that will significantly impact on an income earner who is currently working on average 30 hours per week or more .

• As a sole bread winner in the family or even in a two income family there will be significant impacts on families.

• Because of the lack of hours to provide a living wage I predict a numbers of workers will be forced to look elsewhere for jobs & if they did that they wouldn’t currently be entitled to any redundancy compensation.

• The Union has been given little notice (2 days) of the intended restructuring. We would have expected much earlier consultation so we could have engaged in constrictive talks before any final decisions were made.

Our view is that PPGL must take some corporate responsibility around these impacts and do all it can from here on in to work with the Community & the Union to preserve as many jobs as possible. They owe it to the workers and they owe it to the Westport Community.

After all this is where it all began!!