Accusations of lies in supermarket pay dispute

The industrial dispute involving an Australasian supermarket giant is getting ugly, with allegations of dirty tactics and outright lies.

About 500 workers at Progressive Enterprises' distribution centres supplying Foodtown, Countdown and Woolworths supermarkets have been on strike since Friday over a pay and holiday dispute.

National Distribution Union's national secretary Laila Harre said the company was stocking supermarket shelves from elsewhere.

"We have received information the company has contracted [an] outside company to handle distribution, which is, in our view, blatantly illegal."

The union was urgently seeking legal advice, she said. The company denied the claim.

Progressive had not made any attempt to contact either the union or mediators, Ms Harre said. Its full-page newspaper adverts, which ran in yesterday's New Zealand Herald and regional papers, "were full of lies", Ms Harre said.

She said the enthusiasm of the 500 workers, now in day four of what was to be a 48-hour strike, had not waned.

Progressive Enterprises' managing director, Marty Hamnett, said the company had not contracted out grocery supply.

"It is absolute nonsense," he said. "What we are doing is circumventing our warehouses and delivering directly to stores."

He also slammed Ms Harre's allegations that the company was running a "PR strategy", saying the union had been running a campaign "for weeks and weeks".

"Ours is not a media campaign, it's a communications programme to ensure the facts are getting out into the market place, rather than just fiction," he said.

- NZPA