How Fletcher Building CEO Ross Taylor reacted to an unexpected event at Wednesday's fire press conference.
Fletcher Building has disputed First Union over claims over how its approximately 10,000 New Zealand staff are being treated during the month-long lockdown.
The union called for immediate Government intervention, saying one of the country's major employers and a big Government wage subsidy benefactor had misled workers.
Jared Abbott, unionsecretary for transport, logistics and manufacturing, said some staff had been misled over their eligibility for urgent financial assistance.
He also said Fletcher had "used and abused a national crisis to reduce the employment conditions of its workers, and was redistributing funds from the company into a welfare pool of its own to apply on a discretionary basis to its lower-paid workers while simultaneously refusing to top up their salaries beyond an arbitrary cap of their own invention".
The company was running a welfare fund to help its lower-paid workers yet claimed it could not pay 80 per cent of their salaries. Fletcher was being allowed to set the standard for employment relations "and we should all be very worried by that", Abbott said.
But a Fletcher spokesman said the union had misrepresented the situation with "significant inaccuracies which we refute".
Fletcher Building chief executive Ross Taylor. Photo / Greg Bowker
Fletcher employees were not being misled into losing rights as the union claimed and although "we engaged in a compressed consultation process, our employees were fully informed of the details of the bridging pay programme that they were agreeing to".
Fletcher had continued to engage with the few employees who had not joined the scheme, he said.
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"We laid out a 12-week programme in line with the Government wage subsidy to provide our people certainty to allow them to plan ahead. As we work through the lockdown period and restart process, as we are able to bring our people safely back to work, they will return to their normal hours and pay even if it is with the 12-week period," the Fletcher spokesman said.
