Sealord, a New Zealand company that the Herald describes as “a global seafood enterprise” announced yesterday restructuring plans aimed at “improving its financial performance amid the recession” and positioning the company for “further international growth”. The company is switching to a day shift-only operation at the company’s Nelson seafood processing plant which could potentially result in the loss of about 180 jobs. Sealord has also indicated that it may close their processing plant unless staff agreed to a $70-a-week cut in wages across the board.

A union delegate at the site told The Nelson Mail that staff left the factory in a state of shock on Monday after hearing that its future was in jeopardy. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people went home and had sleepless nights wondering where the money for bills and food is going to come from.” A representative of the Service and Food Workers Union also noted that Sealord employers a number of Burmese refugees and other immigrants, and he was worried about how they would find new jobs.

Neville Donaldson, assistant national secretary of the union, told the Herald that “Given the commitment from the Job Summit, we are expecting immediate support from the Government to save these jobs.” However workers at Sealord my the first to experience first hand what a farce the governments job summit was, as one blogger has noted:

The jobs summit was full of people who had cut jobs over the last 12 months, and empty of people who had lost them...The proposals are about making life better for businesses. Which when it comes down to it was the entire point of this summit: trying to maintain the fiction that the interests of workers and the interests of businesses are one and the same thing.