Executive -Chefe Matt Crockett said the agency’s rapid expansion is not financially sustainable.
Photo: RNZ/ MARIKA KHABAZI
A member of the Kāininga team says that colleagues walk around the office crying after the announcement of a restructuring proposal that would cut hundreds of jobs.
Consultation on a second round of restructuring at the Social Housing Agency began on Thursday, with
A proposed loss of 673 functions – but with 195 of these functions currently vacancies, a total net of 478 people could be redundant by the end of June.
On March 31, Kāinga now employed 2819 people.
A current employee who RNZ agreed not to name, the team said in a series of meetings on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
“It was very, very horrible, and there are many really shocked and upset people,” they said. “It’s undervalued all the hard Mahi that our team does, and I think it’s the worst of it.”
Executive -Chief Matt Crockett said the agency was established for a rapidly expanding period, in charge of providing thousands of new social houses.
“This period of growth, however, was not financially sustainable,” he said in a statement. “Kāinga now has announced its redefinition and now needs to resize its workforce and renew the organization to align with this new direction.”
Crockett confirmed that the proposal affected the functions faced by the customer, including the places and call center, but he said this would not negatively affect support and services to tenants.
“We carefully analyze how many people we have in these roles now and how many people we will need as we continue to maintain our levels of service.”
Kāinga now could not provide RNZ a collapse of which teams the papers were either if they were the front line or the back office team.
But the public service association said 12 employees, or 10 % of the team that deals directly with tenants calls and the public in their three call centers, should go.
Everything, 66 net functions in call centers should be removed – a third of the workforce – and the team that worked across the country with the Ministry of Social Development to put people in social housing was also being “destroyed”.
Kāinga now could not confirm these numbers.
Rotulated heartless process
The team member said he understood that things had to change, but the process had been heartless.
Employees have not yet received a formal letter on changes in their individual roles, and affected employees received the restructuring documents at the same time as everyone else after a seven-minute presentation of the chief executive.
The opportunity to take advantage of voluntary redundancy was opened for the entire organization, they said.
“They are also talking about changes in report lines, changes in wages.
“People who work for Kāninga sometimes are passionate people, there are many long -term employees who do a lot of hard and hard work,” they said.
“There was no recognition of this work, and it was only for me the lack of care.”
Employees were appointed to the funds to help them during the process, they said – including a deck of excitement cards that people could cut and use to articulate their emotions.
“We have people walking through offices crying, people can’t come to work, it’s horrendous.”
The team now had until April 22 to give feedback.
PSA National Secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the courts would certainly affect the agency’s work abilities.
“Of course tenants will have fewer people available to support them when they need support,” she said.
“These proposals are a shocking attack on public housing in New Zealand,” she said. “They would result in the mass dismissal of experts who support our tenants in public housing. They must be resisted.”
“These are specialized workers who must be valued and kept and heard by their knowledge.”
Kāninga Ora told RNZ that he had nothing more to add to his publicly publicized statement.
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