Factory closure pure greed, says Little
Labour Party leader Andrew Little has taken aim at United States food giant Mondelez International, saying a decision to close a profitable Cadbury factory was nothing more than ‘‘greed’’.
Little told media outside the Dunedin factory that while it would be nice if a case could be put to Mondelez, which owns Cadbury, to keep the factory open, the company seemed ‘‘pretty determined to close down the plant here’’.
‘‘Cadbury are doing this not because the plant isn’t profitable; they just want more profit out of it,’’ Little said. ‘‘They are doing it for greed.’’
The company had been planning on shutting down the plant for over a year, ‘‘so the fallback then has to make sure the workforce is looked after’’.
He urged the company to give its 350 workers redundancy, if they chose to leave before the factory’s closure early next year.
To help those seeking work the company should also provide training initiatives for jobseekers.
Little took issue with the company’s gagging order, saying ‘‘they should knock off their mega global corporate sort of autocratic tendencies’’.
‘‘People have to be allowed to say how they feel about it.’’
Little said he did not support boycotting Cadbury products as ‘‘it was the least helpful thing to happen’’. Instead, New Zealanders should urge the company to put pressure on the company ‘‘to do the right thing’’.
Meanwhile the company should ‘‘pull its head in’’ after giving the union only 10 days to respond, Little said.
‘‘That is pretty stupid stuff from a mega global corporate.’’
Taxpayers had paid about $2 million to keep the factory in Dunedin, and ‘‘it would be a pity if this Government, knowing it was going to happen, didn’t do anything about it’’.
He questioned comments made by Economic Development Minister Simon Bridges saying the city could absorb the 350 jobs.
Little said Bridges needed to say where those jobs would come from.
The planned closure follows that of Fisher & Paykel and Hillside Engineering, but did not signal the end of manufacturing in a city like Dunedin.
Nor did it mean Cadbury could exit the city without doing right by its workers, including redundancies and workforce training, Little said.