Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Jet Planes Leaving

Span and some commenters have pointed out some of the problems with the EPMU campaign against the 600 job losses.

John and Tenor Horn both pointed out the racism of the campaign. This poster is basically 'you can't trust those nasty brown people to fix our planes.'

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:24 am

    It gets worse.
    Telling stuff below from
    Alliance co-leader Len Richards.
    He says the unions have buckled under to
    the blackmail of the company, which is cynically using the threat of a
    complete closure of the repair workshops to extract "voluntary"
    concessions from the workers.

    The unions have hired Michael Stiassny of the accountancy firm Ferrier
    Hodgson who has come up with a plan that will mean far-reaching changes
    in work conditions in the hope that enough money can be saved to
    convince the company to save 300 engineers' jobs.

    The Alliance says Mr Stiassny is not known as a workers' champion. He
    specialises in company restructuring and insolvency. He chairs the Board
    of the lines company Vector and Auckland's corporatised water company,
    Metrowater. He also holds directorships in a number of other companies
    including Metlifecare, a major player in the aged care industry
    currently under attack in a corporate takeover bid by the Australian
    McQuarrie Bank.

    He told the NZ Herald it was "phenomenal" and an "amazing surprise", to
    see "how far the [union] delegates and members have moved on labour
    reform". It is "unusual", he crowed, "to see a union make those ...
    deliverables" and Air NZ should take advantage of these concessions.

    Andrew Little, the national secretary of the EPMU, described the
    accountants' plan as a viable alternative, but in selling workers'
    conditions in return for an unenforceable undertaking that some jobs
    will be saved, Mr Little and the unions are playing right into the
    company's hands, Mr Richards says.

    The company that Mr Stiassny works for is known as a "corporate
    undertaker", having dealt with several high profile company
    receiverships. In one, a so-called "Phoenix" scheme in 1998, a
    stevedoring company went into receivership and then arose from its own
    ashes under a new name.

    "This was done to cheat laid-off wharfies out of their holiday and
    redundancy pay," Mr Richards says. "The wharfies, through the
    liquidator, successfully sued Ferrier Gibson for nearly $2 million. To
    think such a company would act in the interests of Air NZ engineers, as
    Andrew Little obviously does is, at the very least, the height of
    naivety."

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  2. i kind of read it as more you can't trust those yellow people, but good point. it would be better to talk about the high quality of the work that the Air NZ engineers do - making your point and big upping your members at the same time.

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