Woolworths New Zealand will close its Auckland customer care centre and move the work to Sydney, ending about 130 jobs in New Zealand. The supermarket chain confirmed the decision on 29 September after consulting affected staff, saying it would fold the team into the Woolworths Group customer support network across the Tasman.
The company first put the plan to workers on 1 September. At that stage it said the aim was to use the group’s scale, systems and expertise to serve New Zealand customers while running a simpler business here, 1News reported. Staff had until 15 September to give feedback. The proposal was expected to save the company $4.1 million by the 2029 financial year, according to Supermarket News.
Mark Wolfenden, the company’s director of digital and ecommerce, said the business had listened but would go ahead. “This has been a difficult decision, and we recognise the significant impact it has on our customer care team members who have served our Kiwi customers with dedication for many years,” he said.
“We have taken on feedback received during the consultation process, and adjusted our approach accordingly, however we will progress with the core elements of the proposal,” Wolfenden said, according to RNZ.
He said staff would get help finding other work inside the company. “We are working one-on-one with each team member to explore genuine redeployment opportunities across our supermarket network, supply chain, and broader business, including ring-fencing vacant roles.” Woolworths has also hired career transition firms, is offering counselling to affected staff and their families, and will pay redundancy. It described the move as part of a wider push to simplify its operations and remove duplicated overheads, 1News reported.
The Workers First union, which represents the staff, was scathing. Deputy secretary Rudd Hughes pointed to the company’s latest profit. “Woolworths has just banked $163 million in earnings from Kiwi shoppers, and its response is to put 130 New Zealanders out of work to save pocket change,” he said. “It’s short-sighted, it’s greedy, and it’s a company turning its back on a country it has extracted mega-profits from.”
Hughes told RNZ many of the workers had taken the jobs because they could be done from home. Some had since moved out of Auckland to cheaper parts of the country, where finding a replacement job will be harder. “There are quite a few single parents who are doing this kind of work and being able to do it from home means they can give proper care for their children,” he said.
The timing adds to the sting. Hughes said many of the workers had their jobs extended until 30 November. “What that means is that these people will be going out on to the job market, becoming unemployed right around Christmas time.” He said he did not have high hopes for redeployment.
The numbers behind the decision come from the Woolworths Group annual result released on the ASX on 26 August. The New Zealand supermarket business earned $163 million before interest and tax in the year to 28 June, up 8.8 per cent from $150 million. Sales rose 2.5 per cent to $8.49 billion.
Those headline figures hide a weaker second half. Earnings in the six months to June fell 7.7 per cent to $63 million, and the profit margin on sales slipped to 1.5 per cent. The group blamed a customer “flight to value”, a highly competitive market and disruption from changes to how its stores are run. Sales through its physical stores were flat at $6.36 billion, while online sales grew 10.8 per cent to $1.37 billion. For every $100 New Zealand shoppers spent at Woolworths over the year, the company kept about $1.90 as operating profit.
Seen against that result, the saving is modest. The $4.1 million the company expects from the move by 2029 is about 2.5 per cent of one year’s New Zealand operating profit. The Australian parent is in far stronger shape. Group earnings before interest, tax and one-off items rose 12.7 per cent to A$3.1 billion, and shareholders were paid a final dividend 15.6 per cent higher than last year.
The growth in online shopping is part of why the union argues the local team matters. Online orders tend to raise questions about substitutions, missing items, delivery windows and refunds, the kind of problems a customer care team deals with. Hughes said the Auckland team was one of the best customer service centres in the country, and the union has argued the knowledge its staff built up would not be possible to replicate offshore.
Woolworths is not the only big Australian-owned company shifting New Zealand work across the Tasman this month. Last week ANZ proposed cutting more than 100 New Zealand IT jobs, with software testing work that could move offshore. Much of the country’s banking, insurance and grocery trade is controlled from Australia, a pattern we looked at in why Australians own so many New Zealand banks, supermarkets and insurers.
The decision also lands in the middle of an election campaign in which the supermarket duopoly is a major issue. National and Labour have both put forward ways to rein in the big grocers, and ACT leader David Seymour has attacked promises to break them up. Woolworths and Foodstuffs together sell most of the country’s groceries, which gives the union a ready audience when it argues that a company earning so much from New Zealand households should keep more of its work here.
For the 130 workers the practical question is what happens next. The union says it will now focus on holding Woolworths to its redundancy obligations and pushing for real redeployment. Woolworths says it is contacting local employers who are hiring customer support staff. Whether many of those jobs exist for people working from home in small towns, weeks before Christmas, is the part neither side has yet answered.
Have you dealt with Woolworths customer care, or had your own job moved to Australia? Should big Australian-owned companies be expected to keep work in New Zealand? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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