Miller’s factory on strike

Press, 15 December 1977, Page 1

Miller’s factory on strike

About 350 clothing workers at the Wairakei Road factor.* of Millers, Ltd, yesterday voted to strike’ today after five workers were dismissed for failing to meet production quotas. The clothing workers will meet again at 9 a.m. to decide whether to prolong the strike. The secretary of the Canterbury Clothing Trades Union (Mr H. McCrory) said last evening that the strike action had been taken because the five dismissed workers had been set production targets that were impossible to meet. Nearly two weeks ago the management had "hung the threat of dismissal on 10 per cent of the workers in that factory,” said Mr McCrory. Last Wednesday two workers were dismissed and yesterday another three were dismissed. At a stop-work meeting yesterday morning the clothing workers voted to strike if the management did not reinstate the sacked workers by 3 p.m. yesterday. Miller’s issued a statement regretting the stopwork action by employees and saying that the dismissals were justified. The managing director (Mr R. B. Miller) refused to comment further last night saying that the issue was being handled by the factory manager who would return to Christchurch this morning from Auckland. Several of those dismissed were unable to reach their production targets, said Mr McCrory, because there was a shortage of work in some sections of the factory. "They just did not have enough to meet the production quota,” he said. The situation had been growing over the last five months, said Mr McCrory. The workers had been “hammering away” at the company to get more realistic production targets.