This was made public by Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) organiser Ross Heslop, who said in a statement yesterday the announcement to staff last week ''came as a shock to the workers'', following what was ''a very productive year in 2014'', Scott having returned a healthy profit.
''We've asked the company to hold off redundancies until they know if they'll be successful in several contracts they're bidding on, but they've refused,'' Mr Heslop said.
The Christchurch operation, which manufactures appliance lines, had more than 90 staff before the redundancies, while in Dunedin, where Scott manufactures robotics for the meat industry, and other equipment for the mining and agriculture sectors, there are 66 staff.
Scott's Dunedin-based chief executive Chris Hopkins said the company had been in talks with the EPMU ''for several months now''.
''This [redundancies] is in response to a forecast downturn in production. Staff have been well aware of the low workload,'' Mr Hopkins said.
The 13 redundancies were mainly engineering workshop-related, and a small number in design, he said.
Mr Heslop claimed Scott had indicated it wanted ''to move away from the [full-time] employee model and begin relying more on temp workers to fill orders''.
Mr Hopkins rejected the claim, saying although the company supported employing students for work experience and it did contract out some work, there was ''no intention'' to employ casual or temporary staff.
Mr Hopkins said the Dunedin operations were unaffected by the redundancies.
He said as appliance orders for Christchurch had built up during the past 18 to 24 months, staff numbers had risen, and the redundancies meant that division would still be operating at ''similar levels'' to two years ago.
On the question of appliance manufacturing orders globally, Mr Hopkins said the world market remained ''in turmoil''.
As the company had six manufacturing plants in New Zealand, two in Australia and one each in China and the US, supplying ''numerous customers'', it was inevitable there would be times of ''rebalancing of local resources'', he said.
Mr Heslop said EPMU members at Scott were entitled to redundancy compensation, under the terms of their collective agreement.
