The Redundancies: 12 Months of Warnings
In 2023, New Zealand's property market crashed 30 to 35 percent. The construction sector was hit hard — companies across the country were folding. I was running Longevity Construction, a business I had built from scratch that had completed over 200 projects across Auckland.
I held daily status meetings with all my staff. Every employee, including Diederik van Heerden and Robert Williams, attended these meetings for 12 consecutive months. In every meeting, I updated them on the deteriorating financial position. I told them redundancy was a real possibility. They knew.
In March 2024, with the renovation side of the business closed due to market conditions, I made them redundant. This was not sudden. This was not a surprise. This was after a year of documented daily briefings where every staff member was told this was coming.
The ERA Determination
When van Heerden and Williams took personal grievance claims to the Employment Relations Authority, I submitted 20,000 pages of meeting minutes as evidence. These minutes documented every daily briefing, every warning about the company's financial position, every discussion about potential redundancies.
The ERA refused to admit them — saying there was "too much evidence."
They accepted the employees' claim that they "never knew" about looming redundancies. Against 12 months of daily meetings. Against 20,000 pages of minutes.
One of those employees allegedly stole $5,000 worth of tools from the company. This was raised. The ERA did not consider it.
The Authority awarded van Heerden $206,000 and Williams $68,000 — a total of $274,000.
The Employment Court Challenge
Longevity challenged the ERA determinations in the Employment Court. The Court declined to strike out the challenge — meaning it had sufficient merit to proceed — but imposed a conditional stay: pay the awarded sums into court within 28 days.
By this point, the Beachcroft Apartments dispute had destroyed the company's cash position. $1.1M in unpaid invoices. A client who had trespassed our entire workforce. The Warren Apartments and Beachcroft receiverships had eliminated any remaining ability to fund the challenge.
The Employment Court challenge was discontinued due to lack of funds, not lack of merit.
What NZ Employers Should Know
The ERA does not function like a court. The rules of evidence are relaxed. The Authority has broad discretion to admit or reject material. You can document every conversation, hold every meeting, generate thousands of pages of records — and it may not matter if the Authority decides there is "too much" to review.
I did what every employment lawyer advises: document everything. I did it for 12 months. It wasn't enough. Not because the evidence was weak — but because the volume itself became the reason to ignore it.