Court finds union case ‘seriously arguable’

The Mar­itime Union of New Zealand wel­comes the Employ­ment Courts writ­ten rea­sons, released today, for Tuesday’s grant­i­ng of an injunc­tion stop­ping the Ports of Auck­land con­tract­ing out.

The Court found there is a ‘seri­ous­ly arguable case’ that the Ports of Auck­land has breached the Employ­ment Rela­tions Act and Under­mined the Col­lec­tive Bar­gain­ing. It also found it like­ly oth­er aspects of the Act have been breached.

It was on this basis that the court issued the injunc­tion.

“This deci­sion reit­er­ates the fact that the Port Board is not able to man­age the port in the man­ner required by law,” said Mar­itime Union Pres­i­dent Gar­ry Parsloe.

“The crime here is the work­ers at the port have suf­fered five weeks with­out pay because their legal right to bar­gain was under­mined. The busi­ness­es and peo­ple of Auck­land have suf­fered severe loss­es and the Coun­cil has lost mon­ey through both lost rev­enue and the huge costs the port com­pa­ny has incurred attempt­ing to imple­ment these ill thought out plans.”

“It is time for this to stop now. We are ready to nego­ti­ate a col­lec­tive agree­ment. We want to return to work and we want this attack on our work­force to stop.”