Day-long stoppages planned

Press, 1 July 1983, Page 3

Day-long stoppages planned

Pulp and paper production will stop at Kawerau on Monday as unions strike for 24 hours in support of the Federation of Labour’s campaign for a $2O a week wage rise.

Union delegates from the Tasman Pulp and Paper Company’s plant and the nearby Caxton Paper Mills met yesterday and decided to hold day-long stoppages once a fortnight indefinitely, said the secretary of the Northern Federation of Pulp and Paper Workers, Mr John Murphy. Mr Murphy said that about 900 pulp and paper workers at both plants would be involved in the strike.

A Tasman spokesman said later that all the main unions involved in production and maintenance, including clerical workers, would be out on Monday. It is not known whether this also applied to Caxton

Paper Mills, but at least 1500 workers are expected to strike.

Meanwhile pulp and paper workers at N.Z. Forest Products’ Kinleith, Penrose, and Mataura mills have voted against taking action in support of the Federation of Labour’s campaign, according to a company spokesman. The spokesman said Penrose and Mataura pulp and paper workers this week rescinded earlier votes to strike. The 900 Kinleith pulp and paper workers decided not to take action, other than to support the F.O.L.’s call for a resumption of free wage-bargaining, when they

met recently.

The Penrose workers originally voted in a secret ballot that each shift should strike for 16 hours, but after one stoppage a second secret ballot overturned the original decision.

The company spokesman said the same thing happened “totally independently” at Mataura, except that there was no stoppage between the first and second votes.

He thought that many workers could have missed the first ballots because of the difficulty of getting shift workers together at one time.

The reports coming back to the company indicated that support for the F.O.L.’s $2O claim was half-hearted, he said.

The Pulp and Paper Workers’ Federation Kinleith secretary, Mr Keith Chailender, would not comment when asked if it was true that Kinleith members had voted against action supporting the campaign.

The federation’s national president, Mr Michael Conroy, said he was unable to comment on the campaign until he had finished collating information from the federation’s various branches.