-
Sign for Yarrow's Bakery - Source: ONE News -
Related
Yarrows Bakery in south Taranaki says lay-offs announced on Thursday were delayed for as long as possible.
The company is laying 10% of staff at its Manaia factory leaving 28 people without a job.
Yarrows chief executive Colin Pettigrew told the Taranaki Daily News that the company had been carrying excess staff for the last six months and had held out as long as possible.
The company, which has been operating in New Zealand for the past 86 years, supplies bread for fast food giant Subway, and that part of the operation will now take place in Sydney.
Pettigrew says the jobs cuts were announced as part of restructuring to take place at factories in Sydney, Perth and Rotorua.
The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) says news hit the workers hard.
There were emotional scenes at the factory after the news was broken, with staff having suffered months of uncertainty due to production of frozen dough products being down.
"It's pretty grim," says EPMU lead organiser Wayne Ruscoe.
"It's never a nice thing jobs going, there's simply no nice way to do this. There'll be $1 million a year in wages sucked out of the local economy."
The affected workers will get a paid month's leave and there will be redundancy pay for those who had been with the company for more than a year.
Pettigrew says staff had been offered positions at the Australian factories where relocation facilities would be made available, but so far no one has taken up the offer.
