Bus drivers seeking stop to work for mass meeting

The NZ Bus Depot in Halsey Street, Auckland. Photo / Richard Robinson

Unions intend balloting Auckland bus drivers about taking strike action unless their employer allows a city-wide stopwork meeting three days before Christmas.

They intend distributing postal ballot papers tomorrow, failing a guarantee from NZ Bus that the company will support an all-up paid stopwork meeting on Tuesday, December 22, without recriminations against their members.

The Auckland Tramways Union and First Union, representing about 1000 drivers and service staff employed across the Super City by the company, earlier gave it notice of a two-hour meeting to discuss negotiations for a new collective employment agreement.

Although the meeting at Mt Eden War Memorial Hall is scheduled for the off-peak hours of 11am to 1pm, drivers will also need time get back to their depots for evening commuter bus runs.

But the company has indicated it would prefer depot-by-depot meetings to minimise disruption to passengers, and last week said a refusal by drivers to work as rostered "could be treated as misconduct".

That has upset the unions, which told the company in a letter on Friday they will run a secret ballot calling for industrial action unless their request for the stopwork meeting is granted.

A ballot running from tomorrow until Thursday would determine whether drivers would take industrial action for about three hours on December 22, covering the time they would need to be off work to attend the meeting anyway.

"The failure of NZ Bus to facilitate our members attending an all-up paid stopwork meeting on this date, and the threat to discipline our members if they attend, has meant that we have had to resort to this action," First Union organiser Rudd Hughes said in the letter to the company.

Mr Hughes told the Herald today that the threat of a strike ballot was simply to give the unions and their members another option to hold their meeting, short of an agreement by the company to support it.

"We're not wanting to shut the company down or shut the buses down," he said.

He said the unions were prepared to work with the company to ensure enough drivers were left on duty to run a "skeleton" bus service at what would be a quiet time of day.

But Mr Hughes indicated that a ballot to take industrial action could rule out that option.

"It may actually shut down all the buses in Auckland -- certainly NZ Bus -- if we don't get some kind of sense out of the company."

Company regional operations manager Darek Koper reaffirmed an acknowledgement he made on Friday to the newspaper that the unions had a legal right to hold an Auckland-wide meeting, but said they were also obliged under their notice to NZ Bus to ensure enough drivers were left to maintain operations.

He acknowledged today that the unions could gain a mandate for a strike but said: "I don't think we are at that point yet.

"We will be working on options tomorrow," he said.

That would include meeting the unions once the company was able to determine how many drivers it needed to stay at work.

As well as being apart on wages, with the unions seeking a 2.95 per cent increase against a company offer of 0.75 per cent, the parties are at loggerheads over major roster changes NZ Bus made in July requiring most drivers to work rotating shifts.

One company employee warned the Herald in an email message this morning that "the mood of the drivers at present may well bring a large percentage of Auckland to a standstill".