Order To Woolston Rubber Workers

Press, Issue 30997, 1 March 1966, Page 3

Order To Woolston Rubber Workers

The Canterbury Rubber Workers’ Union had ordered its members at Dunlop’s Woolston factory not to handle any orders for retread rubber normally handled by the company’s Upper Hutt factory, said the union’s secretary (Mr T. Fletcher) in Christchurch yesterday.

He said the Woolston Dunlop factory, for the last 12 months, had done a certain amount of retread rubber production normally done by the Upper Hutt factory. This was because the Upper Hutt factory had been unable to cope with the volume of work.

•’The union has resolved that till such time as the Upper Hutt dispute has been resolved, the Woolston workers won’t handle any Upper Hutt work with ‘a 40ft pole',” said Mr Fletcher.

Mr Fletcher, who is also national secretary of the Northern, Wellington and Canterbury Rubber Workers’ Industrial Association of Workers, was commenting on the dispute in the Upper Hutt factory over attempts to introduce time and motion studies.

The association, he said, had forbidden all rubber factories in both Christchurch and Auckland from carrying out work normally handled by Dunlop’s Upper Hutt plant.

"My advice to the Dunlop company is to get around the conference table with the Wellington Rubber Workers Union and solve this matter at present in dispute.” said Mr Fletcher.

“A well-disciplined and controlled union like the rubber workers’ union, could make Dunlop production from the Hutt Valley as black as their carbon black.”

Not Understood

Mr Fletcher said he found it difficult to comprehend the thinking behind the Dunlop company spokesman who had said the Dunlop Upper Hutt tyre factory expected to layoff employees within the next few weeks and more than 100 might be affected. A dozen agents from Indus trial plants, from Pe’one to Upper Hutt, were at present in the main street of Upper Hutt hiring workers for labour-starved Hutt Valley plants, saiu Mr Fletcher. The agents had heard there was a dispute at the Upper Hutt Dunlop plant, said Mill etcher.

"They are already active trying to recruit Dunlop labour. They arc “hanging around* the Dunlop wrks and recruiting openly.

"I was accosted myself in Upper Hutt’s main street on Friday afternoon at 5.30, and asked if I wanted a job.”

Mr Fletcher described the activities of the hiring agents in the Upper Hutt as like “vultures hanging around a carcase.”

“If they sack 100 workers it will be no good for their productivity,” said Mr Fletcher.

“If they go, how long are the remainder going to stay” Mr Fletcher said that in all his years as a trade union leader, he had never heard of an industrial dispute being resolved by an employer threatening to dismiss 100 workers.

“1 am firmly of the opinion that if this threat is to be put into operation, it will only aggravate the position,” he said.

Mr Fletcher said the workers at the Dunlop Upper Hutt plant had been instructed to work strictly to the award. “The men are still refusing to be subject to the time and motion studies,” he said. “They won’t have it on.” The Dunlop Upper Hutt plant employs about 250 men and the Woolston plant employs about 150 men.