Builders ban overtime and freeze staffs

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33934, 29 August 1975, Page 1

Builders ban overtime and freeze staffs

Carpenters and other building workers will not be given overtime work from Monday, and no extra staff will be taken on, the Canterbury Master Builders’ Association decided last evening.

rhe decision arises from a strike by Auckland riggers for a separate redundancy agreement. Because pf the dispute, about 4000 building workers in the Auckland district are working out a week’s notice.

The president of the! Canterbury Master Builders' Association (Mr W. W. Sullivan) said that the demands on the building industry by the redundancy payments would cause such widespread financial chaos that they would precipitate the situation they purported to cure. About 200 Christchurch members of the building trade met yesterday to discuss the redundancy claims by the

Builders’ associations in other centres also met, and the industry throughout the country will revert to an eight-hour day, five-day week from Monday. "The contingent liability created by the meeting of such demands as the riggers’ would render hundreds of otherwise-sound companies insolvent overnight,” Mr Sullivan said.

‘Held to ransom’ As members of an industry that successive Governments had used as an economic regulator, builders believed it was unjust and inequitable that they and companies already working in an extremely competitive market should be called on to underwrite the social security fund, let alone be “held to ransom by socially irresponsible elements.” '

“We have been castigated by Ministers in both Governments for yielding under! pressure to demands which' have forced up building costs! and consumer prices,” said Mr Sullivan. “We now seek the support of these same gentlemen in resisting thfe massive impositions and their extreme con-| sequences for the industry’s customers.

Industrial ‘anarchy’ “We are aware that in other industries huge sums have already been paid out in situations where the. word, ‘redundancy,’ is reduced to a farce. We see this as a form iof industrial anarchy which we are not prepared to condone,” said Mr Sullivan. The industry was at pains to preserve employment in the face of dwindling reserves of work, and to delay the onset of true redundancy. The association applauded

the efforts of the New Zealand Master Builders’ Federation in the dispute, and offered its full support in any action it took, Mr Sullivan said. The Federation of Labour and the national builders’: federation remain in complete deadlock on the redundancy issue. Builders have been informed by the president of the F.O.L. (Mr T. E. Skinner) that their attitude is not acceptable to the trade-union movement, reports the Press Association. Only emergency projects and those in the national interest will be exempted by builders from the overtime ban.