However, plans by Hillside union workers to boycott a visit from KiwiRail chief executive Jim Quinn at Carisbrook this morning, are likely to amount to little, given the expected confirmation of job cuts from the 172-strong workforce, later today.
Mr Quinn said he is not planning to attend a meeting this afternoon, where a KiwiRail management team will inform employees about the likely fate of 40 jobs at Hillside.
The KiwiRail CEO and his senior managers are in the midst of a visit to 19 of the State-Owned Enterprise's branches, as part of a yearly financial review to update employees and inform them about the national rail carrier's planned operations.
Mr Quinn's party met KiwiRail's Dunedin-based freight and railway employees yesterday afternoon and is scheduled to talk to Hillside workers at Carisbrook this morning - a meeting Rail and Maritime Transport Union members plan to ignore.
RMTU organiser, John Kerr, said Hillside's union members would boycott Mr Quinn's "roadshow" given a significant number of Dunedin workers were "staring down the barrel" of redundancy.
"Our members . . . have told us, in no uncertain terms, they are in no mood for a presentation on the same day KiwiRail [management] will announce its final decision on the proposal to slash 40 jobs," Mr Kerr said.
Mr Quinn said he was aware of the planned boycott - a move by union members, which he described as, "their right to make".
"I will respect whether people choose to come to the meeting, or don't. It is their right to make a choice about whether they choose to engage or not," Mr Quinn said.
A KiwiRail management team, which has been involved in consultations with Hillside's union delegates about the proposed staff cuts, would deliver the news to employees, he said.
He took umbrage when questioned why he was not delivering the decision himself.
"I'm not ducking any responsibility at all. I am offended at such a suggestion, which is entirely inappropriate and out of line," he told the Otago Daily Times.
The consultation team had been involved throughout negotiations with the RMTU, and it was appropriate they were the ones to continue the process and inform employees, Mr Quinn said.
KiwiRail also proposes to cut 30 jobs at its Woburn workshops in Lower Hutt, and engineering design office in Wellington, as part of an overall downsizing of the SOE's rail manufacturing and maintenance operations - outcomes the RMTU blame on decisions to outsource contracts worth more than $500 million to overseas firms.
Supporters of a Keep Kiwis Working campaign, which has sprung up alongside a Save Hillside movement, intend to picket Mr Quinn when he arrives at Carisbrook today.
• Union workers will picket the expected arrival of a KiwiRail consignment of 135 Chinese-built flatdeck wagons after they have been unloaded at the Port of Tauranga this evening, RMTU national secretary Wayne Butson said.
Picketing union members would not disrupt the portside unloading of the wagons, but a line would be formed once the consignment was delivered to a nearby KiwiRail depot, he said.
