Butchery employees to hold meetings

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32708, 10 September 1971, Page 12

Butchery employees to hold meetings

Retail butchery assistants will hold stopwork meetings in various centres throughout the country during the next fortnight to hear reports on the breakdown in negotiations with employers for a new award.

Negotiations between representatives of the meat shop employees, who are part of the New Zealand Shop Assistants’ Association, and the employers broke down on Wednesday after almost two days of talks in Wellington. The main point at issue was the hourly rate, said the association’s secretary (Mr B. Alderdice). The employees were claiming $1.51 an hour, while the employers offered $1,466 an hour. The rate claimed seemed to be the “tradesmen’s rate” from recent settlements, said Mr Alderdice. It was the same as that which painters received recently; until then, butchery assistants and painters had been on the same rate. The stop-work meetings would be held at times to cause as little inconvenience to employers as possible, said Mr Alderdice. The meetings were an attempt to practice correct unionism, the assessors to report to members on progress, he said. Retail meat shop employees would be asked to decide whether to accept or reject the employers’ offers. The New Zealand Shop Assistants’ Union has a membership of about 17,000, cf

■ which a little more than 10 1 per cent is in the retail meat ' employees’ section. The Canterbury stop-work f meeting on the new iwarj 1 negotiations would be held 1 in the Trades Hall on the morning of September 21, 1 said Mr Alderdice.