‘Stress’ money to part-timer at education board

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 1

‘Stress’ money to part-timer at education board

By

MARITA VANDENBERG

A Canterbury Education Board clerk who works about three hours a day is to get the $2OOO Tomorrow’s Schools "stress” payout, while most of the board’s trades staff, some with 30 years full-time service, will not.

This anomaly, and differences in redundancy packages between the board’s waged and salaried staff, caused strike action over the last fortnight by 30 waged workers. Waged staff have their redundancy negotiated by the State Services Commission, while salaried staff are covered by a Public Service Association agreement. All but four of the board’s 130 staff were told last Friday they no longer had jobs from September 29 as a result of restructuring. The secretary of the Canterbury, Westland and Nelson Building Trades Union, Mr David O’Connell, said the workers at the centre of the dispute would continue to fight for a better deal.

The Canterbury board, with workers at depots in Greymouth and Timaru, was the worst affected because of the large number of waged staff, said Mr O’Connell.

Auckland employed only two waged workers and Wellington none. Store work, grass-cutting and carpentry work was mainly contracted out, he said.

The bottom line was that the tea lady in Christchurch was getting the lump-sum payout, but the tea lady in Nelson was not, he said.

The general manager of the Canterbury Education Board, Mr Keith McNeil, said it was iniquitous that waged and salaried staff working alongside each other, and in some cases performing the same jobs, were being treated differently. Mr McNeil said the $2OOO payout for keeping the system going and implementing the reforms was going to a lot of education board and education department staff who were not performing these functions.

He said there had been a traditional linkage in terms of pay and conditions between waged staff at the Ministry of Works and waged staff with the education boards.

“The Ministry of Works redundancy deal for waged workers is the equivalent of what we have for our salaried people. If that’s the case our waged people should be linked to that rather than to the normal building industry one (redundancy deal).” Nothing moved from the board’s depots last week. On Friday the board received many calls from schools anxious to know if they would get supplies in time to do maintenance and cleaning work during the school break.