Sparks fly over multinational's backward steps

Union official Lou Yukich at the Kinleith mill, where ABB Kinleith won its work-life balance award. Picture / Sarah Ivey

A "work-life balance" award to a Swiss-based multinational has blown up in the company's face, with a revelation that the firm tried to claw back a four-day week from its workers.

ABB, formerly Asea Brown Boveri, was given the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust's "First Steps award" at a gala dinner attended by Prime Minister Helen Clark at Auckland's Hyatt Hotel last Thursday.

The trust said ABB's Kinleith pulp mill division's "work-life initiatives include flexible shiftwork patterns, with two structured rosters - four 10-hour days and five 8-hour days".

"ABB Kinleith has demonstrated that working proactively to encourage work-life balance benefits the bottom line," said trust chief executive Philippa Reed.

But Electrical Workers Union secretary Lou Yukich said yesterday that the four-day week initiative actually came from the union, which had to take industrial action to stop the company axing it. He asked the trust to take the award off ABB.

"They have sought to have the four-day week withdrawn by way of variation [to the collective agreement] on several occasions," he said. "But the workers have said this is too important to them and they are not going to relinquish it."

Mr Yukich, an electrician at the Kinleith mill for 25 years until being sacked for attending a health and safety course in 2001, said mill owner Carter Holt Harvey, contracted out maintenance to ABB in 2003 as a way to slash 343 jobs.

ABB told the EEO Trust that 60 per cent of its 175 employees at Kinleith had previously worked for Carter Holt. But Mr Yukich said so many former Carter Holt workers had since left ABB that he would be surprised if more than 40 per cent of its staff were now ex-Carter Holt.

"ABB don't employ any apprentices. They employ a huge number of foreign immigrant labour. When they were introduced to the Kinleith mill, they employed a number of immigrants and paid them 30 to 40 per cent under rates," he said.

All staff were employed initially on individual contracts. The union took strike action to win a collective agreement about eight months later, which included higher pay for technicians and the option of the four-day week.

"We sought alternative rosters. We didn't predetermine them. We tried to negotiate an agreement for consultation to achieve whatever rostering arrangements were preferred by a particular work group," he said.

ABB Kinleith human resource manager Robyn White said last week that about 60 out of around 100 tradespeople were now working four 10-hour days, giving them a four-day weekend with their families every second weekend.

About 25 opted to stay on five eight-hour day shifts and 16 worked on rotating 24-hour shifts.

Mr Yukich said the company tried to make workers give up pay for statutory holidays falling on their days off when the four-day week provision came up for review.

The union had to concede that workers would work normal five-day weeks in weeks when statutory holidays occurred, in order to keep their pay for the holidays.

He said the union also won the four-day week option when ABB took over maintenance at Carter Holt's Kawerau pulp mill, but again had to take industrial action to keep the clause.

Ms White and ABB New Zealand manager Grant Gillard both declined to comment yesterday.

Dr Reed, who personally visited ABB Kinleith with the EEO Trust's judging panel, said the trust met union delegates on the site as well as managers.

"They did acknowledge that it was very difficult and painful circumstances in which the whole thing started. There was not a great atmosphere when they started. It was confrontational," she said. "The rostering system that has been praised was negotiated and hard-won through union action, and kind of conceded rather than given by ABB.

"I'm not trying to say that that was not the case at all. This [award] was about the whole process of change that has taken place since 2003 ... from having a really confrontational situation to what they had worked through."