Employment Court throws out Port of Napier injunction

The Employ­ment Court in Welling­ton today declined to put an injunc­tion on pos­si­ble pick­ets by work­ers at the Port of Napi­er as pick­ets loom over the sum­mer.

Moves by the Port of Napi­er to con­tract out steve­dor­ing work threat­en 25 per­ma­nent and 60 casu­al jobs, with work­ers to be thrown on the scrap heap just before Christ­mas.

The case was heard yes­ter­day under urgency, and the Employ­ment Court today ordered par­ties back to medi­a­tion.

The two water­front unions, the Mar­itime Union of New Zealand and the Rail and Mar­itime Trans­port Union, both appeared at the hear­ing, and were pleased by the result.

Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Trevor Han­son says the issues at stake are far wider than one Port and the sit­u­a­tion had already gone inter­na­tion­al.

“The issue here is whether employ­ers can use con­tract­ing out to dis­man­tle secure jobs, to attack wages and con­di­tions, to casu­al­ize jobs — and work­ers are going to take it to the wire.”

The work­ers whose jobs are threat­ened are Mar­itime Union mem­bers.

Mr Han­son says Port of Napi­er CEO Garth Cowie was bad­ly mis­tak­en if he thought the issue was going to fiz­zle out.

“This sit­u­a­tion is going inter­na­tion­al, and the dam­age to the rep­u­ta­tion of his port is already being done. This is line in the sand stuff for work­ers and we won’t be back­ing down.”

The Union had high lev­el sup­port from the Coun­cil of Trade Unions, the Mar­itime Union of Aus­tralia, and the Inter­na­tion­al Trans­port Work­ers’ Fed­er­a­tion, which rep­re­sents 4 500 000 affil­i­at­ed trans­port work­ers glob­al­ly.

Mr Han­son says the ITF are con­sid­er­ing declar­ing the Port of Napi­er a “port of con­ve­nience” ? a first for New Zealand.

“This means the Port of Napi­er will come under a major inter­na­tion­al spot­light as part of an ongo­ing ITF glob­al cam­paign to pro­tect secure jobs, which will have a major impact on their abil­i­ty to suc­cess­ful­ly func­tion as an inter­na­tion­al port.”

The port com­pa­ny was already the tar­get of an inter­na­tion­al email cam­paign based in Lon­don  (www.labourstart.org/munz) with mes­sages pour­ing in from around the world.

Mr Han­son says that sub­stan­tial sol­i­dar­i­ty del­e­ga­tions of work­ers will be arriv­ing in Napi­er short­ly to sup­port their fel­low work­ers, includ­ing a group from Aus­tralia.

RMTU Organ­is­er Todd Val­ster says his mem­bers are stand­ing strong on crit­i­cal issues of health and safe­ty.

“This is a Port with a very poor safe­ty record, and con­tract­ing out to under trained work­ers puts every­one at risk”.

“We are not going to train up a under­skilled work­force to take the jobs of peo­ple who already do a great job.”