Tolley put on the spot by unionised scum

Between 200 and 300 teachers from Invercargill and surrounds will boycott workshops aimed at preparing teachers for the introduction of National Standards

And?

Tolley - your ball. Your time to shine.

I would hope that each one of those that refuse have their severance notices delivered before close of play this week.

Unionised scum trying it on.

Unproductive want general wage order

Granny Herald has been asking the unwashed about lifting the minimum wage from $12.50 for zero increase in productivity. Not suprisingly the respondents are in favour of more taxpayer-funded largesse.

these people are on the bottom of the food chain and should be supported to get an increment

The Maori Party, Green Party and Labour all support the $15 level

As expected, the usual suspects are there with their hands out awaiting a hefty increase. More than ever ready to steal from actual taxpayers. The bludgers continue to expand.

Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly said the CTU had made a submission to the Government calling for $15, which she believed was affordable

No wonder unions support $15, where else would they get a 20% general wage order.

I support nil increase and total removal of any minimum wage. Someone has to do the menial jobs for piss-poor rates. That is what drives workers to upskill themselves or increase their productivity.

Ending Christmas freebies affects thousands

drivers did without gift hampers

had received messages from drivers accusing the company of being "a bit Scrooge-like" and trying to claw back some of the pay rise they won last month after a six-month dispute

The unionised miffed at not getting a freebie Xmas hamper on top of their excessive pay rises from their fiscally stretched employer this year.

Thousands of Aucklanders missed out on free Christmas Day bus rides

passengers waiting at bus stops with no money

And would be Christmas Day free riders also have got their noses out of joint when they had to cough up for the bus services they used.

She denied there had been any lack of notice, saying posters had been put up in buses advising passengers of Christmas timetables and that normal fares would apply

Tough. User pays. About time the true costs of public transport were sheeted home. I often wonder how viable public transport would be with the full cost of dedicated bus lanes etc attached to a ticket.

The headline is correct. Such moves do affect thousands. I applaud the bus companies for taking the stand on the end of the free ride. Particularly the end of the unionised free ride. And no doubt thousands of affected ratepayers will applaud in a similar vein.

I await some union driven stiff putting a complaint into your local council about the unfairness of it all.

More turkeys looking for an early Christmas

More unionist turkeys looking for an early Christmas. Following in the footsteps of BA.

What with the NZ teachers getting a strop on, all that is needed is for the maritime unions to stop the Cook Strait ferries over Christmas (or maybe Easter). The sublime joys of having Labour in opposition, being actively throttled by a National government.

Christmas comes early at BA

Dear British Airways cabin crew,

Obviously festive spirit is in short supply amongst you lot at the moment. Yesterday it was announced that Unite union members have voted for a 12-day strike over Christmas and the New Year, throwing the holiday plans of nearly 1 million British Airways passengers into chaos. It appears that common sense among airline workers is in as short supply as goodwill towards bankers.

12,500 of you will walkout between 22nd December and 2nd January, effectively grounding Heathrow airport’s largest carrier and sparking a scramble for tickets on rival airlines. The disagreement centres around reductions to staff numbers and budgets, which BA recently announced in response to posting a record loss of £401 million in the 12 months to March 2009 and they are already on course to lose £600 million in the current year. Your beloved employer expected to carry about 65,000 passengers a day over the festive period. The last serious industrial dispute that you instigated was in early 2007 and forced BA to refund passengers or switch them to services with other airlines if space was available at an estimated cost of £80 million. Your strike announcement came just a few hours after BA released details of a near-doubling of its pension deficit to £3.7 billion, up from £1.9 billion – making it one of the largest pension deficits in the private sector (although not so high that it would derail the group’s planned merger with the Spanish carrier Iberia, apparently).

So we come to the question of who is to blame. Personally, I think BA are being pretty cheeky by denying that the pension funds announcement was timed to coincide with the Unite meeting, but they are right to emphasise the need to return to profitability as soon as possible to start repairing the damage. BA already puts £330 million a year into their pension pot and is clearly in no position to increase this. However, despite their questionable sense of timing, BA are nowhere near as culpable as you. What I find astonishing, as with the Royal Mail workers who went on several strikes in recent months, is that you seem totally unable to comprehend how self-defeating your strike action will be. BA is already teetering on the brink of financial meltdown, and analysts believe that your 12-day walkout with add £300 million onto their debt. Surely you don’t have to be a gifted mathematician to realise that adding even more debt to a crippled company will jeopardise your own jobs? Royal Mail workers gave Royal Mail’s rivals a huge boost by walking out as their competitors were handed huge amounts of new business, thereby condemning Royal Mail to slip further and further down businesses’ preferred mail providers, and now here you are giving BA’s rivals an early Christmas bonus by handing them extra business in return for absolutely nothing while BA slips rapidly towards oblivion.

I honestly don’t know what the idiots at Unite told you but it is quite clear that you have been brainwashed into thinking that this is the 1970s and you, the workers, are in a position of power – which you’re not. Your strike action is about as idiotic as all the turkeys in this country chipping in to hire a fleet of coaches to bus them down to Parliament square for a protest march demanding that Christmas comes early this year. The only winners here are BA rival operators – you lose, BA lose, families lose, businesses lose, Britain loses. Hearty congratulations for your ridiculous efforts and, in case you were wondering, I don’t wish you a merry Christmas.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

Flogged in full via Letters from a Tory.

One linked comment I saw - "BA is British Leyland with wings."

The unionised in Godzone would do well to take note whilst having a Happy Christmas and planning their next moves.

Won't someone think of the children?

The usual suspects appeal to base instincts to get the message across about a school closure and integrating the kids into other schools.

their prime concern was the future of the children at the school.

... The PSA has 27 members working at Waimokoia

Nice to see another 27 unionised about to enter the real workforce.

Really makes Friday the 13th great.

Message getting through to the damned

An ultimatum given to management at the Auckland War Memorial Museum has passed without an offer - but unions have put off a threatened strike

At last, a union that realises Uncle Helen will not be running this country anytime soon in the second decade of the the 21st centrury.

Delicate negotiations

It's at a bit of a delicate stage

What's there to be delicate about thieving from taxpayers?

Either the unionised want to work in a recession or they don't.

Really, nothing delicate, a simple decision is required on their part.

Private transport beats unions

Travellers had coped by switching to trains, buses provided by other companies, car pooled or brought their own cars

Once again private transport wins on reliability.

Every day the strike of the unionised continues, the message on the inherent fallibility of public transport is reinforced as commuters and parents make alternative arrangements, taking the message directly to the unionists that their style of advocacy and militancy will not be tolerated.

the alternative services offered a better ride on more comfortable buses, with music and a friendly atmosphere

Every customer lost will be extremely hard to win back, further reducing the mythical effectiveness of public transport.

Give it up unions, nobody is listening to your demands in these recessionary times.

Should have happened years ago, long may it continue!

Voluntary Student Membership First Reading

Big News has a post about voluntary student membership, trying to argue it is not about membership.  Apparently the bill is about to get its first reading.

Being absolutely anti anything union, it is a subject dear to my heart.

Commenter Heine says it all.

'This debate is entirely about membership. It's discrimination to say that you can't get a degree unless you join the union.'

For those of us who have never darkened the doorstep of the varsity, or more recently a technical institute, the debate is entirely about forced union membership.

To take up and complete a tertiary course externally via correspondence I am compelled to join a student union delivering 'services' I will never use.  That I can actually complete the said course without setting foot on the campus or even holding a student ID confirms the issue for for me.  I will never get to listen to campus radio or read the student rag.

Big News argues that you are not compelled to join any union.  His line is 'if you do not want to join a union, do not study'.

Not studying because you have to join the union is a value worth pursuing to stop unions being funded directly through forced membership or alternatively via backdoor methods from the government for 'student services'.  It is indeed an ethic I have used, apart from where work has compelled me to do so, to actually not study because I would have to fund a union.

I do hope this bill passes, removing the forced membership and funding of unions from the taxpayers purse.  Also I look forward to being able to do courses of study without having to fund a union to which I do not wish to belong. 

And, incidentally, a corresponding drop in course fees.

Union thuggery in the Waikato

Rocks were apparently thrown at vehicles passing the workers' picket line outside the factory yesterday

Reports of vehicles getting windows smashed and gross pollution of local waterways.

a disgruntled employee was behind the sludge-dumping

When dealing with the lowest common denominator one expects nothing less, union thuggery knows no bounds, always resulting in violence.

Union Busters: A work in progress on the lines

Today Telecom announced the arrangement would be brought forward three weeks and Visionstream would take over Chorus work in North Shore and Waitakere ahead of schedule.

Telecom said owner-operators were lined up and eager to start installing and repairing customer phone and broadband services.

Nice to see independent contractors are out there keen to actually work for a living, not attending work for a handout on a picket.

Telecom was continuing to needlessly put the network at risk when there was an alternative model that would suit both union members and Telecom

Bollocks! Union woolly speak for we want more of the status quo and the cake. Nice work Telecom. Go Hard!

No networks were risked in making this union busting exercise...

Union busting

A strike by hundreds of telephone-line engineers will not sway Telecom's decision to change its network division Chorus to an owner-operator model

Great stuff.

400 less union members. As self employed contractors I guess the engineers will not be having a bar of union leeches affecting their productivity.

Anything that busts unions is good for the customer in my book. I feel sure the holdouts will soon see sense in these straitened times.

Keep the pressure on Telecom.

Doing the work of the Lord

Build and launch the package with the unions

In the above statement lies the crux of the left's absolute hatred of privatisation.

The left's divine ideological causes are promoted via their mass media organisations, the unions. Same reason unions get funded to teach 'elf 'n safety.

Union losers crying foul over forced unemployment

The Mitre10 orange barn in the Palmerston North has changed hands recently.

Upon the takeover a select few were given DCMs, effective immediately. They were escorted from the premises as security cleared their lockers. At the time a couple of weeks ago I thought great, must be the in house unionised getting their marching orders, although the story in the MW Standard at the time did not say anything about that.

At least eight staff who turned up for work on June 26 were called to the Palmerston North store's management office and told they were being made redundant.

The only explanation was that a condition of the sale of the store to the Kovaleski family was that some jobs would no longer be required.

Seems I was right about being the site unionised. They are now crying foul and stirring the pot trying to get their jobs reinstated. I say good on the previous owner for having the guts to fire the losers. Expect to see a picket line of the feral unwashed unemployed sometime soon when the expected mediation fails, or better still, does not occur.

"The Kovaleski family will be working in the store and will bring a level of business acumen and the spirit ... that is required in these challenging economic times."

Stuff that say the new owners. Their view is obviously that workers wasting their day on union matters is not on in these recessionary times. Rightly so, never in my book.

I congratulate PN Mitre 10 on their newly found level of business acumen and spirit. Pity a whole lot of other companies do not change hands to excise unionists.

Megaphone Diplomacy Traumatises Kids

The Len Richards Method continues to wreak havoc.

Bastard unions

Like civil unions, unions are an anachronism that should be outlawed.

Full of bastards, period.

WOBH has been examining bastards he has met in the course of employment over the years and notes his pathological hatred of all things union.

Like myself. My comment at his site below;

As an apprentice all those years ago I too witnessed the time serving mostly whinging Pom import union reps who knocked off at 5 to. 15 minutes to or more if they had to walk back from the other side of the factory. Also the vitriolic country-wide stoushes between unions and management when Kawerau / Kinlieth engineers wanted pneumatics that the sparkies said was their pitch due the electric interfaces. The sparkies won in our factory.

Dockyard maties in later employment had the black arts of unionism down pat. Nothing like the leverage of a frigate about to come out of refit to raise the bargaining power of those mongrels.

Those early days put me off union bastards for life with a venomous hatred of any union rep to this day. And worse still, my old man, God rest his soul, was an out and out card carrying wharfie. Don't get me started on those lazy pricks. Heard of 'rain money'? Look it up sometime. Used to be good fodder for a 'discussion' though.

Why is John Key sucking up to unions?

EPMU fisk

From the Department of Labour referring to employment law contained in the Employment Relations Act 2000.

Every employee ... must have a written employment agreement. It can be either an individual agreement or a collective agreement.

From the EPMU over prison workers doing real jobs in these recessionary times.

... but businesses would lay off workers if they did not have contracts.

So which employees without contracts are to be sacked?

Unions greedy demands reversed

Remember '5% in 05'? Where the unions decided the long term chances of another Liarbour government was nil and so they pushed for a general wage order for the unionised whilst they still had the ear of the government. Productivity hadn't risen 5%, now the companies are struggling.

The true cost of those greedy union demands is now coming home to roost as companies strip the 5% from staff in an effort to beat the recession.

A blast from the past

A name that I thought had long disappeared into the annals of union history. I actually thought he had been locked up for some union thuggery or the like, but not so it seems.

Pops up on TVNZ tonight, still leeching off the working stiff.

Has risen to the dizzy heights of Secretary of Northern Amalgamated Workers Union.

A short CV.

"Fridges, pie warmers and heaters which were common prior to the ECA are today a wondrous sight to behold".

Those words came from union secretary Ray Bianchi - who was heavily involved in the Marsden Point project which was nearly crippled by strike action.

Marsden Point.
BNZ Building Wellington.
Mangere Bridge at Onehunga on the motorway.

Union strikes crippled each of these sites and from what I remember the name was always prominent. On TV all the time, in your face unioism.

This unionist must have cost the country billions over his tenure.