A company-imposed lockout at a Kawerau mill that has prevented 145 members of the Pulp and Paper Workers union from going to work has taken a strange turn.
Purex manufacturer Essity has launched legal action against its own employees, threatening them with more than half a million dollars in damages.
But their union secretary, Tane Phillips, says the company needs to stop what he calls bullying tactics.
Phillips says the workers had been asking for a consumer price index (CPI) 7.3% increase for the next three years.
“The company offered 3%, 3%, and 3%, with cash upfront. Our members would be losing around $110 a week if they accepted the company’s offer by the end of the third year,” Phillips says.
Phillip says that, if workers accepted that, the company would threaten to leave during negotiations, they might as well have done nothing.
The basis of the $500,000 lawsuit is over the strike action by the employees, which Phillips says will be defended “vigorously”.
“We believe we did everything legally. I think it is a tactic from the company to bully the workers and it is actually something that we have been seeing right throughout this industrial period with this company.”
With the rising costs of living on top of the workers needing to feed their whānau without any pay, support has been coming from all over the country, and across the world in Sweden, the home country of Essity, and their unions "being supportive of our members and their struggle".
“When the company stopped the ability to access their Super contribution, that really galvanised our members because they saw that as bully-boy tactics. The union is very galvanised in this action.”
The members will again be voting on whether to accept or decline re-negotiated rates by Essity, something they have declined four times "because the company hasn’t really changed its offer”.
The next two days will see the union and Essity in “facilitated bargaining,” Phillips says.
“We’re going in there with an open mind to get the best deal we can for our members. Whatever comes out of that, we will take that back to our members to vote on.”
The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the Pulp and Paper Workers Union launched a fundraiser to support the locked-out workers.
