‘Impossible situation’ on Huntly site

Press, 23 October 1980, Page 13

‘Impossible situation’ on Huntly site

PA Auckland Cers, Ltd, the CanadianKew Zealand engineering company building the boilers at the Huntly power station, has made its first public comments about the labour dispute on the site. The company has not made its views known since its instant dismissal of one-third of its workers on September 5. The Public Sendee workers at Huntlv have worked on, but Cers’ remaining 200 men are on strike in protest against the dismissals. They dem.—d the reinstatement of all the workers who wish to return. For its part, Cers says that reinstating the dismissed men is out of the question. Nothing, the company says, could persuade it to go back to the “intolerable” state of affairs which existed on the job before September 5. The company maintains that it must cut its losses on the Huntly job and that, in the meantime, the srike has actually slowed down the rate of its losses. Industrial observers agree that the Huntly dispute is increasing in national importance faster than details of the Cers work practices are unfolding. Mr J. Hardie, a Scot who was appointed in April as Cers’ project manager and who is regarded as a bigsite "s; ecialist,” said it was obvidus that the job

had worked like clockwork at first, but in the last 18 months had collapsed. The company stood to lose “millions.” “Carrying the overheads that we have now —- all of the supervisory staff and administrative staff, all the equipment lying idle, and every other thing — we are losing less money a month than we were when we were working,” said Mr Hardie. He drew a picture of a job wracked by calculated disobedience and “hopeless” productivity. If the job output had continued at the pace achieved in August, he said, it would have taken 2.3 New Zealand workers to match the output of one Canadian worker. When the job was first planned. Cers allowed 75 per cent more man hours because of the particular problems of employing New Zealand workers. On the job, the union delegates were out of the control of the union secretaries, said Mr Hardie, and were given the power (“which they used”) to call automatic 48-hour strikes if any union member was "victimised.” From a log of grievances, Mr Hardie noted that workers were “refusing to use the smoko huts allocated to them, choosing to walk long distances or use the site lift unnecessarily, thereby creating a reason for challenge by the supervision.” Stricken with 15 to 20

per cent absenteeism (50 per cent on Saturdays) the company dropped its “honour” system of relying on workers to declare their honest work hours. From July, it started a campaign to dock every worker who put his tools away and was absent from his place of work before 4.40 p.m. Strikes and stop-work meetings increased with the company campaign. In 1980, Cers workers have taken parts in 197 stoppages — 162 stopwork meetings and 35 strikes — and the job was subjected to black bans and continuous pressures. Supervisors were constantly challenged. On one occasion, a supervisor ordered workers out of a smoko hut and back to work. Some workers refused and one of them later admitted that they had been instructed by a union delegate to refuse. “We were openly told that the almost continuous meetings and protest strikes were designed to hurt us — and they did,” said Mr Hardie. The small stop-work meetings seldom stopped the job totally, but a stopwork by trades assistants would prevent boilermakers from working, and a boilermaker’s stopwork would prevent the trades assistants from working. If riggers were stopped, the fitters and boilermakers could not work. If the storemen

were stopped, no building materials could be issued. “Measuring the effects of that sort of action is almost impossible,” Mr Hardie said. “We sometimes had three or four stop-work meetings a day and, bear in mind, work stops w’ell before the meeting. “Out of a nine-hour day, we were getting an average of 3.6 to four hours of work. “On average, the job was stopped every 7-J hours.” In Mr Hardie’s personal analysis, the trouble was that Cers was too amenable and too co-oper-ative. “There has been a group running the job and another group allowing themselves to be run. There are a lot who want to work but they don’t make their feelings known. They just follow,” Mr Hardie said. However, the. dispute would be solved, said Mr Hardie, before it reached the proportions of a “Mangere bridge or Bank of New Zealand” type stoppage. “The unions have taken a total stance. They want their men back on the job. We feel we have been forced to take our stance. We were in an industrially and financially impossible situation and we cannot go back to it. “The site was so bad that we dare not go back,” Mr Hardie said.