May 24, 2007

Media Release

Air NZ’s KiwiSaver commitment may have ‘fishhooks’

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union welcomes Air New Zealand’s move to bring its KiwiSaver contributions forward but is cautious about the impact of the move on bargaining with the national carrier.

Many of the Air New Zealand collective employment agreements already have union-negotiated provisions for contributions to a worker superannuation scheme that exceeded four percent.

EPMU National Secretary Andrew Little says he is concerned the company will try to cut costs by trading off wage increases against KiwiSaver payments.

“In many cases our members are already getting the employers contributions they and their predecessors have fought for. We’ll be looking very closely at this to make sure Air New Zealand isn’t offering our members something less than they’re already entitled to in exchange for low pay rises.

“Air New Zealand hasn’t consulted with us over this and we’ve only found out with the rest of the New Zealand public so we haven’t had the chance to crunch the numbers and see if there are any fishhooks for our members yet.

“What we can say is that if this pans out then it is good to see a major New Zealand corporate committing to contributing to its workers’ long-term wellbeing but we’ll still be negotiating our collectives based on what our members believe is a fair deal.”

In February the EPMU announced it would take employer contributions to KiwiSaver into account in the 2007/2008 wage round.

ENDS

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