Railways’ good fortune Ministry’s loss

Press, 12 June 1987, Page 5

Railways’ good fortune Ministry’s loss

By NIGEL MALTHUS The good fortune of Dunedin’s Hillside railway workshops is bad fortune for the Ministry of Works in Christchurch, which is laying off 44 staff. The 44 lay-offs, at the Ministry’s Sockburn mechanical workshops, were caused by the downturn in heavy steel manufacturing in the South Island, said Mr Brian Kelly, deputy manager of the property maintenance group.

The same problem was facing the private sector, he said.

Mr Kelly said, however, that the lay-offs would “most likely” have been

avoided had the Ministry won a lucrative contract for new waggons for the Railways Corporation. The Ministry’s Sockbum workshops were to have been the sub-contractor for a Hungarian firm which had tendered for the work. The contract instead went to the Hillside railways workshops. Announcing it at the workshops on Tuesday, the Ministry of Railways, Mr Prebble, said that Hillside won against international competition “fair and square,” with a tender price marginally lower than the rest. Hillside’s initial con-

tract is for 50 of the new HK class container waggons, for $450 million. Up to 300 of the waggons might eventually be built there.

The Acting Commissioner of Works, Mr Peter Fage, said that the waggon contract was one of a number of projects the Ministry had hoped for. “We were holding off (on redundancies) for as long as we could,” he said.

However, the timing of the announcement was, in the end, coincidental, he said.

“We had reached the point where something had to be done anyway.”

A small number of staff might even have been taken on at Sockbum had it won the tender, said Mr Fage.

Mr Kelly said that redundancy notices had not yet been issued to the surplus staff at Sockburn. In consultation with the two unions involved, the P.S.A. and the New Zealand Workers’ Union, they would be offered a standard Public Service severance package, with options such as redeployment and voluntary severance.

That would be done as soon as possible, said Mr Kelly.