Auckland wharfies find friends on city's boards

The bitter battle on Auckland's waterfront is creating a major rift in the new supercity council as councillors and local board members war over ways to resolve the dispute.

The council-owned Ports of Auckland plans to make 320 union workers redundant and replace them with outside contractors. This follows weeks of strike action by the Maritime Union wharfies over their collective contract.

Members of 10 local boards representing large chunks of the city have united to call on the port to stop the contracting out of workers and get back to good-faith bargaining with the union.

These 28 board members concede their views do not necessarily represent the views of their whole board.

Councillor Christine Fletcher, aligned to the right-leaning Citizens and Ratepayers Now, says she does not condone those who try to micro-manage how the port is operated.

"It's very disappointing there has been no resolution, and the majority of councillors want to it to be operating as efficiently as possible, but this can't happen if councillors or local board members constantly interfere," she said.

The value of the port had "dramatically reduced" since the council took full ownership of the port, she said.

"The dispute is the responsibility of the board of the port, and if we don't like it we can fire them and have a new board appointed – but the majority of councillors support the board."

Left-leaning councillor Mike Lee said it was "a bit rich" of Fletcher to criticise local politicians for meddling in the dispute.

"The only councillor who has been interfering is Christine Fletcher, who tried to get the council to support the port company in whatever measure it wanted to take in the dispute."

It was appropriate for the mayor and council to keep out of the port dispute, but to blow the whistle when the interests of the people of Auckland were at stake, he said.

"The parties are starting to diverge alarmingly. At some stage the mayor has got to bang some heads together and get them to come up with an agreement."

The union should agree to be more flexible, but Lee was opposed to the attempt by port management to bust the union and contract out workers.

"The two parties need to sit down in the room and treat each other with mutual respect and remember the port belongs to the people of Auckland, which I think they are both forgetting at the moment."

The council found out about the port's plans to contract out workers only after the union strikes had begun, he said, and never formally approved the outsourcing plans.

Port spokeswoman Catherine Etheredge said its preference all along had been to get a collective agreement and its final offer remained on the table.

Management's decision to explore a contracting-out proposal, which was signalled after the loss of the Maersk contract and confirmed after the loss of Fonterra's business, was endorsed by the port's board, she said.

It is understood that the mayor's office believes there has been some progress in the dispute, but it declined to comment.

The port yesterday confirmed it had offered a stop-work meeting to the union, and was waiting for a response from them.

However, Simon Allen, chairman of council investment arm Auckland Council Investments, said it supported Ports of Auckland chief executive Tony Gibson's moves to contract out work. The company had a duty to operate efficiently.

- © Fairfax NZ News