Key to the dispute are the company’s demands to scrap the current seniority provisions governing job assignments and promotion. Management is also seeking to replace the specialized fire-fighting unit by assigning other workers to these duties on top of doing their own jobs--a move that would seriously compromise safety standards.

"In our mill we have promotion lines--equal opportunities for everyone, whether Pacific Islander, Maori, pakeha [white] or woman, to work their way up," Hastie told the rally. "They want the boss to have the sole right to appoint people.... Innocent people, people who speak up won’t get the opportunity. Because I speak out, I’m one of the first to be demoted under their system."

The previous day, a bus load of Kinleith workers had traveled to Auckland to picket the company’s annual general meeting. The mill owner, Carter Holt Harvey, is the second largest company listed on the New Zealand stock exchange. On April 16, it reported a trebling in its first-quarter profit for this year. Carter Holt Harvey is half owned by the giant U.S.-based company International Paper.

Striking unionists have been busy visiting workplaces around the country and in Australia, as well as contacting sister unions in the United States, to win support. They have especially found a response from fellow timber workers and members of the EPMU, some of whom are giving regular financial contributions or visiting the protest camp.

Auckland-based Local 13 of the Maritime Union has donated several thousand dollars to the strike fund. Wharfies (longshoremen) organized by this union at the port of Auckland are collecting NZ $20 per person to add to this (NZ$1.00 = US$0.56). A delegation of wharfies from the port of Tauranga visited the protest camp and organized a truckload of potatoes to be delivered there.

With the camp located on the main highway, just south of Tokoroa, truck drivers, other motorists and vacationers have been dropping in. One strike supporter at the camp described a driver that pulled up recently with two huge Easter eggs for the strikers’ children.

While a few women work at the mill, the work force is overwhelmingly male. Opal, who is married to one of the strikers, and a regular at the camp, explained how many strikers’ wives have become involved--attending the weekly strike meetings, and helping staff the campsite. A few days earlier, she explained, a group of women had set up their own picket at the entry gate to the mill for a while. She is now on her "third time round" she said, referring to two previous long strikes at the facility, in 1992 and 1980.

The company, which has been using the strike period to perform routine mill maintenance, is now foreshadowing laying off these 170 maintenance staff employed by a private contractor, and threatening to mothball the plant--a message they are also spelling out in the weekly personal letters they are sending to strikers’ homes. They are trying to "get at the wives, to get at the husbands," Opal said.

The strikers have prepared their own leaflet explaining what their struggle is about and suggesting ways people can help. They have distributed it to letter boxes throughout Tokoroa. The unionists have held social events, including a family "fun day" and karaoke night at the camp site. One picketer, describing the response from townspeople, said that a busload of teenagers eating take-out food on their way home from a local disco saved their French fries to give to the "men at the strike."

Donations or messages of support can be sent to the Kinleith Welfare Office, Currie Street, Tokoroa. For more information visit the strike website, www.kinleithworkers.com

Felicity Coggan is a sewing machine operator and a member of the National Distribution Union.  
 
 
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