Chief executive Matt Crockett said the agency's rapid expansion was not financially sustainable. Photo: RNZ/ Marika Khabazi
A staff member at Kāinga Ora says colleagues have been walking around the office crying following the announcement of a restructure proposal which 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 roles - but with 195 of those roles currently vacant, a net total of 478 people could be made redundant by the end of June.
As of March 31, Kāinga Ora employed 2819 people.
A current employee, who RNZ has agreed not to name, said staff found out in a series of meetings on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
"It was really, really awful, and there's a lot of really shocked, upset people," they said. "It's devalued all the hard mahi that our staff do, and I think that's the worst of it."
Chief executive Matt Crockett said the agency was established during a period of rapid expansion, tasked with delivering thousands of new social houses.
"That period of growth, however, was not financially sustainable," he said in a statement. "Kāinga Ora has since announced its reset and now needs to resize its workforce and renew the organisation to align to this new direction."
Crockett confirmed the proposal impacted customer facing roles, including housing placement and call centre teams, but he said it would not negatively impact support and services for tenants.
"We have carefully looked at how many people we have in these roles now, and how many people we'll need while continuing to maintain our service levels."
Kāinga Ora could not provide RNZ with a breakdown of what teams the roles were in, or whether they were front line or back office staff.
But the Public Service Association said 12 staff, or 10 percent of the team which deals directly with calls from tenants and the public at its three call centres, were set to go.
All up, 66 net roles at call centres were to be axed - a third of the workforce - and the team which worked across the country with the Ministry of Social Development to place people in social housing was also being "gutted".
Kāinga Ora could not confirm those numbers.
Process labelled heartless
The staff member said they understood things had to change, but the process had been heartless.
Staff still had not received a formal letter about changes to their individual roles, and affected staff received the restructure documents at the same time as everybody else, following a seven-minute presentation from the chief executive.
The opportunity to take voluntary redundancy had been opened up to the entire organisation, they said.
"They're also talking about changes in reporting lines, changes in salaries.
"The people that work for Kāinga Ora are passionate people, there's a lot of long-term staff, that do a lot of really hard, hard work," they said.
"There's been no acknowledgement of that work, and it was just, for me, the lack of care."
Staff had been pointed to resources to help them through the process, they said - including a deck of emotion cards, which people could cut out and use to articulate their emotions.
"We've got people walking around offices crying, people are unable to come to work, it's horrendous."
Staff now had until April 22 to give feedback.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the cuts would certainly impact the agency's work capabilities.
"It is clear that tenants will have less 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 specialist workers who should be valued and retained and listened to for their expertise."
Kāinga Ora told RNZ it had nothing further to add to its publicly released statement.
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