Second firm to announce engineering lay-offs

Press, 3 November 1983, Page 1

Second firm to announce engineering lay-offs

A big Canterbury engineering company is expected to announce this week that it will lay off a substantial number of workers, only days after the announcement by Andersons Engineering, Ltd, that 98 workers will be laid off.

The second company told the Engineers’ Union of its plans yesterday, but the union’s Canterbury branch secretary, Mr R. J. Todd, declined to name the company. However, he said that it compounded the problem and was clearly indicative of the plight of the engineering industry in Canterbury. It is believed that the 98 redundant staff of Andersons will work out their notices, leaving the company at the end of this month or early next month. The company has a staff of 263. In the last 11 months it has not replaced 57 who left the company. About a quarter of the redundant staff are administrative personnel, the rest are workshop staff.

Mr Todd said that he was trying to arrange a joint deputation with the Canterbury Manufacturihg Engineering Association to meet the Minister of Labour, Mr Bolger, and the Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr Templeton, to make them aware of the problems in Canterbury. The union was also seeking? information from the Government on the extent to which engineering contracts were being let overseas.

The president of the Labour Party and party candidate for Sydenham, Mr J. P. Anderton, said the South Island was in danger of becoming an industrial desert because of the loss of skilled job opportunities.

The situation at Andersons exposed the fallacy of

the Government’s “think big” strategy as an employ-ment-creating force, he said.

“The only growth industry ‘think big’ has created is unemployment. It was always a fallacy for ‘think big’ to be proposed as a long-term or even shortterm solution to New Zealand’s unemployment problems,” he said.

“This fallacy has now been exposed for the fraud it always was. Even for those relatively few companies that have been directly involved in the large projects, the honeymoon is over almost before it began,” said Mr Anderton. “The 98 workers to be made redundant at Andersons Engineering will join 118,000 other unemployed workers who have never seen any benefit from ‘think big’ except the unemployment benefit.” Mr Anderton said that an example of the sort of industry which could be encouraged and which would provide more jobs was the electronics industry. ■ “This is an industry in its infancy but which has not had the capital investment or encouragement of the Government.” He said that the Government should be prepared to make finance available to firms in such an industry, on a risk basis.

A deputation of local Labour members of Parliament is seeking a meeting with the management of Andersons Engineering early next week.

The deputation would seek to discover what had gone wrong, leading to the lay-offs, said Mr M. K. Moore (Papanui). It seemed that Andersons had had a few big contracts, but then started to run out of work, he said. It might be that not enough of the “think big” engineering contracts had gone Andersons’ way, or been available for the company to tender on. “This is a big company and the Government ought not to be leaving it out in the cold,” Mr Moore said. “These lay-offs will mean more than $20,000 a - week out of the shops of Christchurch. “It seems bizarre that at one end of the North Island the Government is importing tradesmen while halfway down the South Island tradesmen are being laid off,” he said.

The Minister of Labour, Mr Bolger, said last evening that Mr Andertoh’s comments were “nonsensical.”

“What he is saying is that if you cannot guarantee people jobs for ever in a particular job then you should not offer them any. What happens in practice is that all sectors of industry have their fluctuations.

“You simply could not develop a strategy which said that no industry would lose any labour, ever,” said Mr Bolger.

Bleak future for engineering, page 22