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Redundancy – how do unions measure up?

Don Franks

The article “Who moved my job?” in the April issue of The Spark eloquently voices a worker’s experience of redundancy threats. How can workers fight back against this blight on their lives?

Organised workers threatened with redundancy look to the union they belong to. It would make sense for all the unions in the country to have an agreed overall strategy against redundancy.

Such a document does exist. The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) policy book, copyright 2006, sets out an approach to redundancy for all unions.

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Who moved my job?

Rachel Tay

2007 did not get off to an auspicious start at Dynamic Controls. Fraud and subsequent law changes in America and the high Kiwi dollar led to low sales. This in turn led to low orders, leaving most of the factory staff in Christchurch with little to do for the first three months.

Staff that had been with the company for a while were aware that with all Invacare’s (the US-based parent company) competitors already in China, and Invacare having shifted respiratory production to China some two years previously, this state of affairs could not continue.

The first blow fell in early April with the announcement of five redundancies from the factory floor. Any job loss is painful, but we thought we’d got off lightly, until May 16.

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