Picketers send message to KiwiRail boss

Rail and Maritime Transport Union national secretary Wayne Butson, centre, leads a picket line of...
Rail and Maritime Transport Union national secretary Wayne Butson, centre, leads a picket line of hillside union delegates outside Carisbrook today. Photo: Gerard O'Brien

Hillside union delegates have labelled a visit by KiwiRail chief executive Jim Quinn to Dunedin this morning as "morally repugnant'' given the expected confirmation of 40 job cuts at the South Dunedin engineering outfit later this afternoon.


Union workers formed picket lines outside meetings which Mr Quinn conducted at Carisbrook at 8am and noon, to stop KiwiRail employees from attending the CEO's travelling roadshow - an annual tour of the State Owned Enterprise's national outfits to report on the organisation's operations.

Rail and Maritime Transport Union national secretary Wayne Butson said the picket lines had "absolutely'' served a purpose, despite the expected announcement confirming 40 jobs will be lost at Hillside.

"We find it morally repugnant that Quinn is undertaking a roadshow to report on how well [KiwiRail] is going when workers [at Hillside] are going to be laid off'' Mr Butson said.

The union picket line turned away a group of four KiwiRail workers from Mr Quinn's meeting at noon, when the Otago Daily Times visited.

The KiwiRail employees, were the only "rank and file'' workers who had shown up at Carisbrook to meet Mr Quinn, he said.

A group of about 11 "senior managers and supervisors'' from KiwiRail's Dunedin operations team, had broken the picket line to enter an earlier meeting, Mr Butson said.

Mr Quinn told the Otago Daily Times yesterday, KiwiRail was starting to see results from its ''turnaround plan'' - a strategy which has been described as ''a last roll of the dice for rail in New Zealand''.

KiwiRail had added 27% more capacity to its freight operations and rail was ''still the best freight option in New Zealand to access shipping routes and vessels,'' he said.

The national rail carrier's customers had seen the benefits of creating accessible hub freights linking road operations to rail and several transport companies were building freight hub networks at KiwiRail yards to take advantage of the increased capacity, he said.

About 535 new wagons are scheduled to come ''on track'' during the next financial year - 35 of these wagons were recently built at Hillside, while construction of the remaining 500 was contracted to Chinese firms.

KiwiRail's policy of outsourcing the manufacture of its rail engineering contracts overseas is blamed by the RMTU on the resulting decisions to cut 70 jobs from its workshops at Hillside and Woburn, Lower Hutt.

KiwiRail receives about $250 million of funding from the Government, each year, and while the results of turnaround plan were ''pleasing,'' there was still more work which was needed to improve the organisation's commercial viability, Mr Quinn said.

''I am proud of the improvements we have made, but we are still a long way from being sustainable,'' Mr Quinn said.

A meeting between KiwiRail management and Hillside employees takes place at 2:30pm in the South Dunedin workshops, where the 172-strong engineering workforce expect to hear confirmation that 40 jobs will be cut.

 

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