Govt hopes Air N.Z. domestic service will improve

Press, 28 August 1986, Page 8

Govt hopes Air N.Z. domestic service will improve

By

GLENN HASZARD,

industrial reporter

The Government hoped that Air New . Zealand would become as efficient in its domestic air service as it was in its international operations, said the Minister of Transport, Mr Prebble, yesterday. He agreed that the Government’s approval of the Newmans Ansett Brierley consortium plans to provide a main trunk air service would in effect force Air New Zealand to be more efficient. Mr Prebble was in Christchurch at the invitation of the Engineers’ Union, which has 550 members working for Air New Zealand at the engineering base at Christchurch Airport and 16 at the Newmans base at the airport.

Mr Prebble said that the Government’s insistence that the Newmans consortium build a heavy engineering base

two years was good news for the engineers. It would definitely mean more jobs. One of the big concerns of the Engineers’ Union was that Air New Zealand might close its Christchurch engineering base, but Mr Prebble said that Air New Zealand had said in the last two weeks that the base was profitable, and he saw no reason why there should be any redundancies.

“I personally think the engineers are in a good situation,” he said. The secretary of the Canterbury branch of the Engineers’ Union, Mr Bob Todd, was not so sure.

“We will just have to wait and see,” he said. Asked if the consortium might get a form of subsidised training by recruiting engineers already trained by Air New Zealand at a cost to Air New Zealand, Mr Prebble said that he expected the con-

sortium would fairly quickly want to train its own engineers.

Air New Zealand’s engineering base does some contract engineering work for other airlines, and Mr Prebble said that the consortium too would have to seek international work to help make its engineering workshop. profitable. The consortium had indicated it was confident it could attract fresh work, he said, and that would mean some foreign exchange earnings for New Zealand. He agreed that there was bound to be some duplication of resources, but he said that a .likely outcome would be that the Newmans consortium would tend to specialise in an engine type different from that used by Air New Zealand.

, He spent more than an hour with engineering workers from both Air New Zealand and Newmans, explaining what the Government was doing

and fielding questions. He told reporters after the meeting that Air New Zealand would now have to take a hard look at the ways it did things and would have to find more efficient ways to do those things. Efficiency sometimes translates into fewer jobs, and it is this concern which still hangs over engineers at the base. While Mr Prebble may confidently say that there will be no redundancies, he has not said that there will be the same number of positions in Air New Zealand in one, two, or three years. The Canterbury Hotel Workers’ Union is also uneasy about the consortium.

Its secretary, Mr Martin Moodie, said yesterday that it was seeking a guarantee from the consortium that it would not undercut Air New Zealand in its catering.

Air New Zealand a

flight kitchen with 42 staff at Christchurch Airport, all of whom are members of the Hotel Workers’ Union. They have an Air New Zealand flight kitchens agreement which gives them about $7.24 an hour.

Newmans has its present catering needs provided by a contract with Continental Caterers, of Rangiora. The staff employed by that firm are paid $5.75 an hour, under a different award. Mr Moodie said that now that Ansett was involved in what was to be a bigger-scale operation, the union was worried that the consortium could undercut Air New Zealand in its catering and that this could have a flow-on effect on Air New Zealand’s flight kitchens.

The Air New Zealand flight kitchen already catered for some other airlines and could cater for the Newmans consortium, he said.