Stopwork halts Kinleith

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Kinleith pulp and paper mill workers were due to shut down production early today for a stopwork meeting over job changes to make way for controversial redundancies.

A union committee has infuriated mill owner Carter Holt Harvey by calling an all-up meeting of its 280 or so remaining production workers rather than heeding a request to run two separate sessions to allow Kinleith's boilers to keep running.

The shutdown was due to start at midnight, for the giant mill's boilers to be taken out of production from 5am for a meeting set for 8.30am.

There was no word last night on when production might resume, or the likelihood of another strike such as one which began with a stopwork meeting before Christmas and shut down the mill for 48 hours.

CHH Kinleith chief executive Brice Landman said shutting the entire operation was likely to harm the mill's infrastructure as well as its lacklustre profitability.

But the union's senior production delegate, Whisky Hastie, said his committee was adamant a single meeting was needed to discuss major job changes the company was trying to impose.