Less than two weeks before Christmas and that good old Christmas redundancy feeling is upon us. You have to wonder whether the timing’s deliberate, or just insensitive, but the Christmas redundancies are mounting up :
- Taxrefunds in Oamaru are planning to make 67 staff redundant at its call centre.
- Twenty-eight jobs at Yarrows bakery in the Taranaki will be gone by Christmas.
- Longveld Engineering is laying off up to 17 workers, depite being named both Waikato Business of the Year and Manufacturing Business of the Year.
- The final 80 workers will be out of a job at Lane Walker Rudkin by Christmas.
- Up to 50 union members and other call centre staff at Colmar Brunton will be made redundant with no redundancy compensation.
- Staff at Waikato Rugby Union headquarters have taken 10-15 per cent pay cuts to avoid Christmas redundancies.
These are the ones in the media this week, but there’s more we don’t hear about. 53% of employers in a recent EMA survey reported they used redundancy as a cost cutting measure in the past year.
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Then there’s the redundancies my friend told me about at the weekend, where three of his workmates were told they had no job after Christmas and by the way, there would be no redundancy pay either.
But don’t give up. My Redundancy Protection Bill campaign is still alive and kicking. I’ve postponed the bill until March to allow for more campaigning time. More unions and groups are joining in, and the petition and postcards will be out at public events over the summer.
PS: This is my Christmas card to you all.
