The Oamaru site’s workforce received the news on Wednesday after it emerged last week the company was retrenching.
About 180 workers will stay and the 100 redundancies initially proposed have been pulled back by nearly two dozen, NZ Meatworkers Union national secretary Darryl Carran said.
Some of the job losses are Pasifika people who had been working at Oamaru Meats on site-specific work visas, but the union believed the job losses were across "an even split" with longer term employees at the site.
Mr Carran said affected employees had been individually texted and called to individual meetings yesterday.
They were being let go on a month’s pay.
Mr Carran said Work and Income and Immigration NZ were on site yesterday to support and work through transfer possibilities to other South Island meat processing sites.
"For those affected people, both migrants and otherwise, some of it is going to be subject to Immigration NZ altering visas for people to work elsewhere."
Mr Carran believed there could be between 30 and 40 positions available with Alliance at Oamaru and "possible opportunities" with Blue Sky Meats in Southland.
Oamaru Meats is majority owned by NZ Binxi (Oamaru) Foods, a subsidiary of Chinese-owned Heilongjiang Binxi Group Co Ltd.
The company did not respond to an approach by the ODT for comment.
Pasifika workers make up a large chunk of the plant’s employees.
In June last year, the plant lauded the fact it had no worker shortage, thanks to the 88 Pasifika workers who had all come to New Zealand on Pacific Islands visa schemes. At that time, Oamaru Meats had close to 300 staff, including the Pasifika workers who were under the 2022-23 Pacific Quotas Programme, which oversees the Samoan Quota and Pacific Access Category visa schemes.
Mr Carran said those affected would have been contacted and then had one-on-one engagement with the company over the last two days, Mr Carran said.
He believed the positions selected for the chop would have an "evenhanded impact on both migrant workers and locals".
"There’s about 25 less [job losses] than would have been impacted had we not objected."
Mr Carren said the initial job cut proposal would have gutted the plant’s capacity to quickly gear up for an upswing in processing demand.
But as it was, the operation could not reach "certain targets and production, that were never going to be achievable".
Mr Curran said under a new negotiated approach, the plant would operate with two different production goals to allow enough labour capacity to achieve peak and off-peak targets.
The union believed that was "achievable".
"Hopefully they can do their budgets around that."
Negotiating job transfers for some affected migrant workers where one or both partners were in a relationship was possible.
"We’ll keep an eye on it. At some stage, I’m sure we’ll be talking to Immigration NZ as well."
Hopefully the negotiations to come would mean those affected "end up on the dole".
Alliance Group processing general manager Wayne Shaw said their thoughts were with those affected by the BX Foods decision.
"While it is currently a quieter period due to seasonal livestock volumes, we encourage anyone interested in working at the co-operative to get in touch with our Smithfield [Timaru] and Pukeuri [Oamaru] plants ahead of the season ramping up in several weeks."
