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CANBERRA - Prime Minister John Howard will consider intervening in an industrial dispute in which a dying man has been denied a redundancy payout after decades of service.
Mr Howard today branded the behaviour of Sydney manufacturer Tristar Steering and Suspension appalling, after the Marrickville company's terminally ill accounts manager, John Bevan, was denied redundancy.
Mr Bevan, who is suffering bowel and liver cancer and has only days to live, believes the company is waiting for him to die so that it can avoid the payout.
He has worked for the company for 43 years.
Other long serving workers at Tristar, which is winding down its operations, are believed to have also missed out on redundancy entitlements, with the company terminating an enterprise agreement.
That means they did not receive the agreement's provision of four weeks' pay for every year of service, instead defaulting to a federal government scheme which provides for a payout of 12 weeks' pay.
Mr Howard said he would discuss the matter with new Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey this morning.
"We will endeavour to persuade the company to alter its position," he told Macquarie Radio.
"The company is behaving in an appalling fashion."
But Mr Howard said Tristar had not broken the law.
It had not given Mr Bevan his full payout because it had legally denied him voluntary redundancy.
"What has broken down here is the moral sensitivity of the company," Mr Howard said.
"On the information that I have the company has taken legal advice and has been told that because it's not a voluntary redundancy it's not obliged to make the payment."
Mr Howard said the government could not force the company to do the right thing without enacting an unworkable change to the law.
"I am not defending for a moment what the company has done," he said.
"I'm trying to point out that in this particular case it has applied the letter of the law, I think insensitively and unfairly and wrongly.
"It's a very big step to have a situation where you've got to give a discretion to a minister or a prime minister or an industrial relations commissioner to make moral judgments about the behaviour of individual companies.
"I don't think that's something that would be workable."
Tristar's managing director had refused to discuss the matter with the government, Mr Howard said.
- AAP
