Union Leader Attacks Harbour Boards’ Move

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31540, 30 November 1967, Page 9

Union Leader Attacks Harbour Boards’ Move

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, November 29.

The decision of the New Zealand Harbour Boards’ Association to advise Chambers of Commerce to resist increased wharf ingering and stevedoring charges is “subterfuge,” according to the secretary of the Wellington Amalgamated Waterside Workers’ Union (Mr J. Hoy).

“Its aim is really to direct attention away from the board's own inefficiencies and continual bungling, and to hide from the real situation in which the boards are hopelessly at sixes and sevens in their separate endeavours to win the Conference Lines’ ships for their own ports,” Mr Hoy said. Some boards, he alleged, were falling over backwards, making promises to the Conference Lines and the Union Steam Ship Company and raising huge loans to build modern wharf facilities. "Such a policy will not contain the mounting cargo handling costs,” Mr Hoy said. If the harbour boards wanted to control wharf

operations, why had the the Wellington board relinquished its wharfingering franchise to the Waterfront Industry Commission and the Conference Lines, he asked. Mr Hoy said the president of the Harbour Boards’ Association (Mr A. Kirkpatrick) had displayed “either ignorance or contempt” for lawful agreements between the waterfront unions and the employers, and for the Waterfront Industry Tribunal, which had laid down conditions regulating pay and conditions of work on the waterfronts.

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