Mitre 10 chair still in employment wrangle

mitre 10 mastertonMartin Dippie, chairman of hardware chain Mitre 10 is still embroiled in an employment dispute with Dunedin workers after over three and a half years of negotiations.

Workers at Jacks Hardware and Timber, trading as Mitre 10 Mega Dunedin and Mitre 10 Mosgiel, are still waiting to settle their first collective agreement after Dippie’s refusal to adopt a recommendation of the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) on the inclusion of a trial period provision in the agreement and how a wage clause should be included.

Bargaining between First Union and Jacks Hardware and Timber was initiated in 2013. In 2014 the company made an attempt to unilaterally end collective agreement negotiations with the union, but the Employment Court ruled this was unlawful and ordered both parties to attend facilitation in the ERA.

They made some headway at meetings in October and November last year facilitated by Employment Relations Authority member Peter van Keulen, but couldn’t agree on the wording of a trial period provision, the wage clause, and term of the collective agreement.

In a written recommendation last week, van Keulen backed wording on a trial period to show Jacks Hardware was ‘likely to’ use a 90-day trial period rather than ‘may’, saying that “implied that First accepts that a trial period provision is likely to be appropriate in most cases”.

Van Keulen also recommended a two-tier wage clause, recognising the difference between minimum starting rates for youth workers over the single-tier sought by Jacks and the three-tier preferred by the union. He turned down a request by First to make a recommendation on rates, saying he didn’t have enough information and there hadn’t been enough bargaining for his intervention to be necessary. Similarly, he said it was too early to recommend the term of the collective, saying 12 months was too short and three years was too long.

“We’ve managed to agree on a number of issues in the ERA, but the company is still refusing to write in a ‘tiered’ pay scale in the collective agreement, even though the ERA facilitator recommended a two-tier scale,” said Paul Watson, First Union Southern Region Secretary.

“We’re no longer prepared to waste time with a company and employer who has no desire to genuinely conclude a collective agreement with staff who are union members. We’ll be pursuing an alternative legal remedy.”

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