redundancies

Newstalk ZB

A suggestion that Progressive Enterprises is winning the supermarket wars.

Its competitor Foodstuffs, will make more than 100 employees from their lower North Island bases redundant resulting in cost savings of more than $4 million.

National Distribution Union general secretary Robert Reid says Progressive isn't having the same problems post the recession.

"We are also the union in Progressive and all we see at the moment in that company is expansion of their operations right throughout New Zealand," he told Newstalk ZB.

Robert Reid says the supermarket wars are quite brutally fought between the two main chains. None of the NDU's members are affected in the recent Foodstuffs layoffs.

Foodstuffs Wellington region CEO Craig Wilson says the redundancies will give the company more head room to compete even more vigorously. He says it's been a hard slog for its co-op members who own their stores, so it had to review internal costs.

Mr Wilson says the market has been very slow recovering from the recent downturn.

Foodstuffs owns Pak 'n' Save, New World and Four Square, while Progressive Enterprises owns the Foodtown, Countdown and Woolworths chains.

New Zealand’s wood processing workers have been losing their jobs in
droves due to the exceptionally high international prices for raw logs
and there’s no end in sight says the National Distribution Union.

General Secretary Robert Reid says the record global prices makes
logs too expensive for New Zealand’s value-added wood processing
industry and more than 1100 workers have lost their jobs since 2008.

The high prices make it more attractive for wood producers to export
internationally and means domestic value-added processors lose money on
their final products. 

Robert Reid says it might be time for the government to consider
copying New Zealand’s international competitors who operate dubiously
legal two-tier pricing systems for logs – a domestic price separate and
lower than the global price which allows local processors to secure
logs. 

“All of our competing countries have that. We’re not necessarily in
the end an advocate of that except by saying if we’re not doing that,
and we’re not doing the same, then the people who lose out in new
Zealand are our wood manufacturers and the workers, who lose their jobs
because their mills are closing.”

220 textile workers are to lose their jobs, as Godfrey Hirst subsidiary Canterbury Spinners announces the closure of its plant in Bromley, Christchurch, following last month’s earthquake.

The National Distribution Union, which represents many of the workers, said that although there were satisfactory union negotiated redundancy provisions, the announcement came as a heavy blow for workers already reeling from the effects of the earthquake.

New Zealand is at risk of having a jobless economic recovery, the National Distribution Union warned today.

Latest jobs statistics show unemployment has risen to 6.8 per cent in the December quarter.

“Despite recent upbeat noises from forecasters and economists, there are still 158,000 New Zealand workers officially unemployed.”