E T\u016b union regional organiser Norm Mouritsen said of the 350 roles potentially on the chopping block, 50 were at the King St facility where Wattie\u2019s started its empire.<\/p>\n
A Heinz Wattie\u2019s spokesperson said if the proposal goes ahead, it is confident of redeploying impacted people from King St with its sites in Hawke\u2019s Bay.<\/p>\n
Mouritsen said 500 people were employed at King St in peak season, but currently it had 350 fulltime workers.<\/p>\n
Just after 11am on Wednesday, Mouritsen claimed he was in a meeting when he got a call from an Australian number.<\/p>\n
He said he would usually ignore calls during a meeting, but as the national advocate for Wattie\u2019s, the Australian calling code intrigued him, so he answered.<\/p>\n
On the other end was the Heinz Wattie\u2019s general manager for human resources who said the company needed to meet with him at midday.<\/p>\n
Mouritsen said he would not show up to any meeting \u201cat any time\u201d without knowing what it\u2019s about.<\/p>\n
The manager said they \u201ccouldn\u2019t divulge anything\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mouritsen said since he was in the middle of a meeting, and wasn\u2019t being told why he had to attend the meeting in less than an hour, he could not be expected to drop everything and turn up.<\/p>\n
He said the manager told him the company was meeting with union members at 1pm on Wednesday and they wanted to give him a \u201cheads up\u201d before they called other union organisers around the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not acceptable at all,\u201d Mouritsen said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe usual practice of all employers is that we get miles of notice and then if it\u2019s in terms of a restructure, proposed restructure or whatever it is, they give us the embargoed information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mouritsen said if the company really cared about its workers and wanted to support them \u201cyou would have expected that we would have had the opportunity to go there, sit with them and support them, to be there with them\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t good. Shocking really.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Heinz Wattie\u2019s spokesperson said the company consulted with the unions at the earliest possible time, \u201cin view of the complexity of the proposed plans\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will be engaging constructively with unions as part of consultation process,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke\u2019s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"E T\u016b union regional organiser Norm Mouritsen said of the 350 roles potentially on the chopping block, 50…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1443,175430,33283,138,17163,124,19724,5194,1976,174624,11551,232,4507,7494,5268,111,139,11552,69,1118,48717,2171,17159,312,131,1361,165,4483,23359,4478],"class_list":["post-327066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-about","tag-baybased","tag-blasts","tag-business","tag-closure","tag-could","tag-given","tag-hastings","tag-hawkes","tag-heinz","tag-hours","tag-jobs","tag-late","tag-less","tag-lose","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-notice","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-organiser","tag-plans","tag-proposal","tag-says","tag-than","tag-that","tag-their","tag-union","tag-watties","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}