Hillside Engineering workers will attend a stopwork meeting today to discuss several grievances about their KiwiRail employers.
Rail Manufacturing and Transport Union delegates at Hillside met yesterday to consider their options after KiwiRail hired "short-term" contractors for work duties less than four months after 44 employees were made redundant.
RMTU organiser John Kerr said Hillside delegates had "growing concerns" about the management of the South Dunedin engineering workshops.
"There is an issue about bringing in contractors when they made 44 people redundant," he said.
KiwiRail chief executive Jim Quinn has said the use of contractors for short-term specific duties, such as plumbing and glass-installation details, has always been commonplace at Hillside.
However, the RMTU claims Mr Quinn is being disingenuous about the practice of bringing in contractors, given a recent increase in demand for work at Hillside.
"There are about a dozen contractors doing the work of those people who were made redundant," Mr Kerr said.
The RMTU wanted to see a long-term plan for Hillside and its employees, instead of ongoing uncertainty. He claimed there were no fabrication work contracts for Hillside beyond next December.
"What happens after that?"
The stopwork meeting is expected to result in a list of operational requests for KiwiRail to consider as part of a sustainable move towards lean-manufacturing engineering practices, Mr Kerr said.
