‘I don’t think there’s a future here’: Workers pick up the pieces after plant closures
Wednesday, 1 October 2025
A worker at the Tokoroa plywood plant due to close next month says employees are being forced to look outside of town to find their next job.
“A lot of the young ones, especially, are looking to Australia,” Amira Turner told RNZ on Thursday morning. “The more established ones, the more older ones, like for myself, I’m willing to commute for a job. There’s not a lot around Tokoroa.”
Carter Holt Harvey announced this week it was moving ahead with plans to close its plywood manufacturing plant in the Waikato town. The company reportedly told workers on Tuesday afternoon that the plant would be shut down in November.
A union delegate told RNZ that 119 jobs would be lost in the process, with only a handful of workers kept to process imported timber.
The proposal to close the Carter Holt Harvey plant, announced earlier this month, followed news earlier this year that the Kinleith pulp and paper mill in Tokoroa was closing its paper-making operation, with about 150 jobs lost.
Turner told RNZ that confirmation of the plant’s closure hadn’t come as a shock after the initial proposal.
She’d worked at the plant for 23 years and said some people were angry, while others were appreciative of the job they’d held for so long and the relationships made.
Some staff members were able to stay, but she said that was a “drop in the bucket” compared to the 119 that went.
She said she didn’t have a plan, but as it was shutting down in November, which was getting close to Christmas, she planned to spent time with family and look for a job in the new year.
“A lot of the young ones, especially, are looking to Australia. The more established ones, the more older ones, like for myself, I’m willing to commute for a job. There’s not a lot around Tokoroa.”
She said she might need to commute to other parts of the region, to Taupō, Rotorua, or Matamata, Waharoa, Cambridge.
Employee Gilbert Sydney told RNZ he was lucky to find work at the Carter Holt Harvey plant following the closure of the Kinleith mill, but found out four weeks later he was being made redundant again.
“Double-banger, it’s a double-banger but I’ve always felt as you just gotta move on with life, you can’t be in the dumps for too long, especially when you’ve got family,” he said.
“What am I gonna do now? How am I gonna afford, because I’ve just got a mortgage, how am I gonna pay for all of this?”
Sydney wanted to stay in Tokoroa, but worried whether his family would have a future there.
“I think if these two places like fully shut, nah… I don’t think there’s a future here for them,” he said.
E tū delegate Andrew Dobbs, who’d worked at the plant for 24 years said earlier that staff were devastated by the news of the Carter Holt Harvey plant’s impending closure.
“It’s just really sad. We knew things were tough, but I didn’t expect them to stop manufacturing altogether. You’d say people are feeling sad and depressed – it’s not quite a closure, but there will be so few people left there, making nothing, just reprocessing imports to send to market.
“Basically, imported product is just too cheap for us to compete with, that’s the guts of it. Personally I don’t want to move out of town, but that might be the only choice we’ve got.
“You already know that the pulp and paper mill has cut jobs, they’ve either moved out or are looking for jobs. Now there’s going to be a whole lot more people looking for jobs locally, but there aren’t that many jobs at present, not for that many people.”