60 REFUSE TO STOP WORK

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31343, 13 April 1967, Page 1

60 REFUSE TO STOP WORK

The 60 members of E railway cargo shed at Christchurch will defy the national council of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants by refusing to attend the scheduled stop-work meeting on Tuesday afternoon of the society’s Canterbury branch.

The E shed delegate of the branch (Mr M. - Yeatman) claimed yesterday that, as things stood, workers at the shed, and a few shunters around the area were being victimised. Mr Yeatman said that if the national council was going to “pull the branch out” for a stop-work meeting, it should pull the whole branch out and not half the branch. “You cannot have half the branch not getting paid while a stop-work meeting , is on and the other half being paid, because they are out of Christchurch doing a job on' full pay,” he said. Instructions Given Under the directive of the national council not all railway transport will stop. Instructions sent out by the society’s national council to the 58 branches say that longdistance passenger trains and buses on their way through a branch holding a stopwork meeting will continue their journey and will be worked by AS.R.S. members. Mr Yeatman Mid that the only condition on which E shed members would attend a stop-work meeting of the Canterbury branch would be if the time of the meeting were changed to enable the other members to be present

He said that he wanted to make it quite clear that E shed agreed that stop-work meetings should be held. It was the only way that railway workers would get the 6d an hour margin-for-skill issue agreed.