The vote on the muster agreement that was taken nationally last week returned a result of 99.1% in favour of accepting. This is an over whelming vote forward and lets hope that CIE can see how this came about with CANZ.

The one sour point for me is that the scabs that have left the union during this industrial action are also going to get this allowance. Lets hope their morals will tell them that they are not part of the collective group and as such don’t deserve this allowance which was gained because of union power.

There was of course a second resolution passed last week and the results of that are very encouraging. The new strike notices are with the lawyer and will hopefully be presented this Thursday when we are in Wellington.

But as is the form of CIE, they have no money but can afford to muck you around in court with fancy lawyers etc just to delay the inevitable. So we believe that this will be the course of action they take.

It was nice to see the panic comments made by CIE to try and talk down the action of our 170 out of 300ish members across the country. They prefer to say it was 150 people out of 5300 staff. Was it not the GM who gave us this 300ish figure just last Sunday?

The other pleasing comments were that if we could identify where you are under paid they would pay up. Well there is no one to compare you with in New Zealand as we are the only ones who run prisons so I guess we should compare with the Aussies. I believe that the Tory’s are claiming that on average kiwis are 30% below the Aussies. I am sure you would all be happy to accept a 30% pay increase.

This probably won’t happen as CIE will say a NZ comparator. OK then the only other group that are trades people and are teaching NZQA unit standards are Polytechnic tutors. They earn from $50,000 to $70,000. Funny the increase that we want would put us at the bottom end of that.

Again this probably won’t happen. So I guess the best comparator would be someone who does exactly what you do. Maybe we should compare with the Instructors on I/A’s. They do exactly what you do and 8 of them are on about 8% more than you.

Thanks

Sent on behalf of the CANZ national Exec