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Fast food workers meet to “End zero hours in 2015!”
By Mike Treen / February 13, 2015 / 5 Comments
Rating: 4.3/5 (6 votes cast)
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This Saturday, February 14, over 100 fast food workers from across New Zealand will be gathering in Auckland to discuss their upcoming battle to end zero hour contracts in the fast food industry. The conference is also open to anyone who wants to actively support the workers campaign.
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This Saturday, February 14, over 100 fast food workers from across New Zealand will be gathering in Auckland to discuss their upcoming battle to end zero hour contracts in the fast food industry. The conference is also open to anyone who wants to actively support the workers campaign.
This issue has emerged as the number one problem for workers in the industry over recent years. Almost no hourly paid staff have guaranteed hours. Attempts through previous collective agreements to regulate the allocation of hours in a fair and transparent manner have been unsuccessful. Unite has collective agreements with McDonald’s, Restaurant Brands (KFC, Car’s Jr, Pizza Hut and Starbucks); Burger King and Wendy’s. Whilst real improvements have been made it has proved difficult to get the companies to abandon their attachment to “flexibility” around rostered hours. The best we have achieved is to have clauses that specify the need to advertise hours to existing staff before new staff are hired but that has proved difficult to enforce.
The companies have a turnover of staff of about 66% a year and we have tried to argue that this could be reduced with regular guaranteed hours but the companies seem unmoved by that argument. They seem to prefer the control that zero hour contracts give over their staff. These type of contracts also exist in the security industry, hotels and many call centres where Unite represents workers as well.
SkyCity casino has a variation of this contract but with all part time staff having only an 8 hour minimum. This gives the bosses there a similar ability to maintain control over their staff and have them competing for favours for more hours. They have resisted very strongly against guaranteeing workers and particular shifts even if they are on the busiest nights of the week. Over the last few years they have restructured huge department like Gaming Machines to turn them from being 75% full-time to being a 75% part time department. They have refused to hire a full-time table game dealer for years in order to achieve the same result. Again we have pointed out that there is a higher turnover of part time staff and they lose many to Australia where they can get full-time work – often with the same employer! You might think that the training costs would be high as a consequence but they force workers to do a training course run by the company without pay before they are employed. WINZ assists them in this scam as well. That is another hidden government subsidy.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2015/02/13/fast-food-workers-meet-to-end-zero-hours-in-2015/#.dpuf