Meat strike ends in compromise

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 3

Meat strike ends in compromise

By 1

PATRICIA HERBERT

in Wellington

The strike that shut down most New Zealand meat works ended at midnight last night. The national secretary of the Marine and Power Engineers’ Institute, Mr Glenn Harris, said the decision to call off the bans had been taken to allow a meeting on Friday between meat companies and unions to go ahead. The employers had said through the Meat Industry Association, that they

would not attend unless all their plants were working. The meeting will be held at the Federation of Labour’s office in Wellington and was set up at the F.O.L.’s request to find a solution to the wages dispute. It seems the shift engineers may have seized upon it as a means of returning to work without having to concede defeat.

Mr Harris acknowledged yesterday that "certain things had mitigated against an action” — the availability of feed

on farms and “the mon-keying-about over schedules.” The second was a reference to Federated Farmers’ campaign urging members to boycott freezing <- works unless companies paid $l6 for an average-sized lamb against the $l3 to $l4 now being offered. Linked with these difficulties was an apparent leaking of support among the membership. Shift engineers at Southland Frozen Meat’s Mataura plant returned to work on Mon-

day until directed to leave by their national office, and in Invercargill last week, there was a highly publicised protest march by wives against the stoppage. The strike was also probably unsustainable because, while the institute has only about 240 members, about 18,000 workers were laid off as a consequence of their going out.. The shift engineers are claiming 18.5 per cent and have been offered 4.7 per cent, but Mr Harris said the wage claim was

not as important as “some other things on the table.” This aside, the potential is there now for the unions to band together and negotiate on an industry basis. They have all declared 15.5 per cent as the basic entitlement but privately the more pragmatic among them admit that this is unachievable while the cards remain stacked in the employers’ hands. For this reason, the unions now seem to be looking to the award talks to settle only the wages

question with the idea of referring broader issues such as new technology to a proposed meat Industry summit meeting. This would in turn allow them to accept less than 15.5 per cent on the grounds that they were conceding nothing in conditions. The Government has yet to come back with a reply on the conference but is expected to support it even if only as a parachute to allow the parties to a potentially bitter and disastrous dispute to bale out with dignity.