Extra holiday annoys Fletchers head

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 8

Extra holiday annoys Fletchers head

PA Auckland Tuesday’s unofficial public holiday should not be allowed to happen again, says the managing director of Fletcher Challenge, Ltd, Mr Hugh Fletcher. It was impractical and potentially disruptive to have just one working day between Easter weekend and Anzac Day, he said.

Thousands of people around the country took the extra day off. Teachers, lecturers and pupils had the day off, many factories were not working and many companies and Government departments worked with skeleton staff. Mr Fletcher said that Fletcher Challenge, the country’s biggest employer, had foreseen the problem and recommended that where feasible staff take a

day less annual holiday at Christmas so they could have Tuesday off. In Christchurch, the executive director of the Canterbury Manufacturer’s Association, Mr lan Howell, said most Christchurch manufacturing firms arranged for staff to take a day off as annual leave. “To my knowledge this arrangement worked quite satisfactorily,” he said. “From a production point of view it was a good idea, and was welcomed by a lot of companies.” A big influx of people into city and suburban shopping areas combined with a fault in the Ministry of Transport computer controlling traffic lights caused a lot of traffic congestion in Christchurch on Tuesday. Senior Traffic Sergeant R. J. Dellow said a “hiccough” in the computer late on

Tuesday morning caused all the traffic lights to become unsynchronised. “It caused quite a bit of congestion, and it was unfortunate it happened on a day in between holidays when everybody wanted to do some shopping,” he said. The Ministry used radio broadcasts to ask people not to drive into the city, and pointsmen controlled several important intersections. The computer fault took about an hour to fix. Christchurch retailers reported a big increase in trading on Tuesday. One store manager said the day’s trading was “just like Christmas.” The South Island controller of the Farmers Trading Company, Mr Geoff Maxwell, said Farmers’ stores in the city and the suburbs had an “extremely good” day.