NO MORE CAKE!

The National Distribution Union's (NDU) hopeless response to the mass redundancies at Lane Walker Rudkin appears to have come to a grinding halt.

Instead of flexing its industrial muscle, the NDU thought that organising a few cake stalls would be more preferable.

According to NDU national secretary Laila Harre, who must take a lot of the blame for this debacle, the cake stalls 'would help the workers help each other.' Perhaps she thought they could swap recipes.

A Facebook site was set up to coordinate the cake stalls but there's been no action the site for over two weeks. No news has been posted since May 24.

It appears that the NDU have decided that the sacked workers don't need any more help 'to help each other'.

These workers have received none of the redundancy and holiday money owed them.

Of course the NDU also completely failed to defend the jobs of the approximately 90 clothing workers who were sacked when Pacific Brands closed its New Zealand operations in March this year.

At the time NDU president Robert Reid made it clear that the NDU would cooperate with the closure.

No union campaign was waged to defend the threatened jobs and the NDU's only demand was that redundancy entitlements be put in trust.

Yes, workers pay their union dues and end up being abandoned by their union 'representatives' when the going gets tough. Not much of a deal, is it?

The NDU officialdom are, unfortunately, part of a wider problem. The CTU and its affiliates, despite the rocketing unemployment figures, have offered no resistance to the growing number of redundancies.

And it's only the socialist left who are speaking out about the dismal performance of the union hierarchy.

There has been a distinct lack of criticism from the politically bankrupt Labour Party and its declining number of followers.

No surprises there.