Rubber workers strike over industrial bill

Press, 23 November 1983, Page 9

Rubber workers strike over industrial bill

Rubber workers in Christchurch are striking for 48 hours in protest against the Industrial Law Reform Bill. Most of the city’s 700 rubber workers work at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company factory in Papanui and at various Skellerup Industries factories in Woolston. About 500 met at 8 a.m. yesterday and voted to strike until tomorrow at 8 a.m., when they would meet again. The president of the Canterbury Rubber Workers’ Union, Mr C. A. Hanson, said after the meeting that the union had asked rubber industry employers in Canterbury to meet to discuss the implications of the legislation for the industry. It would take only one or two rubber workers to opt out of the union after the bill was enacted for there to be chaos in the industry, Mr Hanson said. Regardless of the penalties that might be imposed, most rubber workers would refuse to work with nonunion labour, he said. They

were also concerned about the proposal to take away the right of entry of union officials into workplaces, the abolition of automatic union fee deductions, and the incorporation of youth rates into awards. Mr Hanson said that the rubber workers were reasonably well informed about the legislation, but when they had the details explained to them they were irate. The union’s members had voted about 98 per cent in favour of the unqualified preference clause when a ballot was held in 1979, he

said. The bill did not provide for any procedure for a union member to leave the union, so that a member could leave one week, then join the next. “From week to week you could have 700 in one week, then none the next. The thing is chaotic,” said Mr Hanson. He said that submissions had been made in Wellington on behalf of rubber workers to the Parliamentary select committee on the bill, although the Canterbury union had not made its own submissions.