The Rockstar economy isn’t playing anything MWU members can dance to. Even though the Commodity Price Index for March 2014 showed improving commodity prices for beef and lamb driving up NZ’s terms of trade to a forty-year high with the price of sheep meat hitting a 22 month high, meat worker staff are being cut to the bone.
All they have on offer from Silver Fern Farms for their Collective Employment Agreement is a 0% wage rise in the first year and a 2% wage rise in the second year.
This despite Silver Fern Farms Board of Directors getting a 7.8% pay rise in 2013. And the year before that they got a 15% pay rise! That’s a 22.8% pay increase over two years!
The Silver Fern Farms Chairman of the Board of Directors received an 8.2% pay rise in in 2013, and in 2012 he received a 15% increase. That’s a 23.2% pay increase over two years
The Silver Fern Farms Chief Executive got a 4.3% increase in remuneration in 2013 and a 12.5% pay increase over three years.
In 2008 there were 86 SFF employees earning above $100,000pa, now there are 128.
Over the last year, the workers doing all the actual work Silver Fern Farms relies upon to pay those huge fees received only a 2% pay rise.
Is this the Government’s much lauded economic recovery? Where the very wealthiest receive 22% pay rises while the workers doing the work get a 2% pittance?
If the inequality poisoning our society is to be healed, then offering those workers at the coalface of our primary economy a 0% pay rise while the bosses are creaming it is no means to do that.
This is an example of how the recovery is a mirage for working people.
You’re so right! The injustices of this government knows no bounds, as for their recent “raising” of the minimum wage by .50c was more of an insult than a pay rise. It’s a pity silver farm workers don’t come under the state services commission, then the’d get a pay rise every year wether they wanted one or not.
This situation has nothing to do with ‘this government.’ Silver Fern Farms is a co-operative and as such is answerable to its shareholders, the farmer suppliers.
The whole meat industry is presently struggling with the problem of over supply, estimated to be around 40%, a situation brought about by changes in land use related to the dairy industry. There do have to be ongoing adjustments in the labour cost and supply to adapt to the new situation.
The members of the board are mainly elected democratically through a postal ballot process by farmer shareholders, and as such, are the people charged with making the decisions that need to be made to ensure the medium and long term future of the industry.
The only legitimate point that I believe this article exposes is that of remuneration of board members. It has to be everybody’s dream, getting paid not for what you actually produce yourself, but paid for your position….. “I am a board member and board members in Australia get paid X dollars, so I deserve X dollars too. Oh look, that board over there just awarded themselves a pay rise, that means we qualify for a pay rise. Childish and unfair on the productive.
Mike,
As an ex-employee of SFF I sure “Lionel” is more informed than I am, however, I’m pretty sure you’ll find that their operation is far from being a workers’ co-operative. In a true workers’ co-operative “Lionel” would not have had his rights eroded by government policies you try to claim are not the fault of this government.
I didn’t say it was a workers co-operative, I said it was a co-operative answerable to its farmer shareholders.
In this case, if SFF was indeed a true workers co-operative, workers rights for your friend Lionel would be the last thing on his mind as he grappled with the fact that due to downsizing of the sheep and beef meat industry, the company that he presently works for and has a vested interest in as a shareholder is currently facing an over capacity of around 40% and unless they downscale to meet the current demand, do something to increase their throughput from a breeding ewe pool of 28 million ewes (down from 52 million in 1982) or drastically cut their operating costs, they face not only losing their job, but also the company and the assets they own as a co-operative.
The meat industry is presently facing a crisis of fight or flight proportions. Luckily they have chosen to fight and time will tell if the tough decisions they are making now are the right ones for the survival of the company and indeed the industry.
There is one thing for sure about any shiny-arsed bureaucrat on any board in any industry, they will never pick up tools and do the job themselves. They think they are way above that and wouldn’t know how to do our job anyway. They think they are clever in that they only need to ‘meet the market’ and pay the staff just enough to keep them interested and to them any more is just a waste. A company faced with overcapacity like this is obviously over staffed at the ‘coal face’ so a strike will probably only lead to either an all out restructure leading to staff layoffs to better match capacity or cause the failure of the company. I would guess that SFF are probably at the stage where they are not offering enough to attract the good staff and therefore have a roomful of ‘monkeys’ getting paid peanuts, resulting in poor company performance, a high workplace accident rate, high staff turnover and probably high workplace drug use and absenteeism.
Unfortunately the best course of action for workers may be to simply leave and exacerbate the problems for SFF outlined above, wait for them to realise they can’t retain the good staff they need by treating them this way, and reapply and only accept the job on your terms. Very difficult to do on a collective agreement and in a tight job market. But at the end of the day you can be rest assured that SFF will suffer more as a company through poor staff retention than the employees will, it just may not be obvious from where we stand.
What you’ve highlighted here is part of the mechanism that drives The Great New Zealand Institutionalized Lie .
The perpetrators of the ‘ Lie ‘ can’t afford to give [ farm ] workers a fair wage because it’d eventually lead to an uncomfortable ( read disastrous ) unraveling for the select few who profit from our [ farmer / farm worker ] ignorance and blind compliance .
In all seriousness Bomber . If you start looking into our agrarian infrastructure you will soon be horrified at what you will start to unearth . Pardon the pun .
There is a nefarious reason for down-playing the importance of our agricultural infrastructure , including its workers .
Imagine you owned a gold mine and employed miners to do the digging . You told the gold miners that what they did was barely worth a mention since the price of gold was so low but you will keep paying them a small stipend , just to keep them from starving . What you don’t tell them ( And actively keep from them ) is that gold is GOLD man and you could pay them 100 times their current salary .
Silver Fern Farms ( Aww Bless . ) is just another dodgy producer board designed to skim off funds from dopy farmers ” In My personal view , fuck you ! ”
We Kiwis have a product better than gold . We grow food . And fucking shit tons of it . By farmers well used to being used by Blue Cocks parading around as Mr Flash the Queen Street Cockie pretending to be the Farmers Friend , all the while building vast private wealth on the stupidity of the very farmer and his employees that they parasitise .
And what happens to New Zealand in the meantime ?
We live on a borrowed economy that’s going down the gurgler and taking all of us with it . But they’re alright mate . She will be right … for them .
You will find the core reasons for our beautiful country becoming a Pacific Islands Cluster Fuck down on the farm .
Call me old fashioned if you must .
It’s a pretty safe bet that a respectable percentage of these workers qualify for WFF tax credits. Now THAT is Corporate Welfare. Why should SFF pay more when the taxpayer has to pick up the tab.
The 22% mob is laughing all the way to the bank.
That is a sweeping generalisation which would be incorrect for most. Many of the workers are tradesman (yes skilled, who have completed apprenticeships). They work exceptionally hard and many newbies don’t last because of the physicality of the work. What people like you have no conception of is the toll it takes to on the body to work at that job long term, and SFF don’t give a monkeys if your body is breaking down in pursuit of their profit. Training is practically non-existent, and in our situation we have never received any subsidy and most I know haven’t either – get your facts right!
I worked at one of the SSF plants for 21 years the meat industry is a shining example of the erosion of workers rights under the Employment Contracts Act I could write a very long piece on what I saw in my time there unlike the Dairy industry which has a collective industry wide contract the meatworkers have individual plant and even individual department contracts prior to the ECA it was the best paying factory job out but that ceased in the 90s thanks to the mongrel tories and sadly a union movement (Ken Douglas,Rob Campbell) who rolled over.Would’nt happen in Australia.
This John Key is very tricky, he is the pin-up boy who has been picked up by his relatives in New York and the BRT to continue the neo liberal privatisation/theft of State Assets, these were gold plated investments with solid income streams some which have existed for more than 100 years, sold off for a pittance to be the play things of the rich and famous.
The collapse of the BNZ is a classic example of an absolute Cluster Fuck in a Banana Republic yet the Directors came out smelling of roses???
South Canterbury Finance does not look a hell of a lot better.
Where are our Business Leaders who are growing NZ Businesses and strengthening the States Balance Sheet, all we appear to have is a bunch of Asset Strippers hell bent on driving this country into foreign ownership.
I don’t work for the mongrels at SSF but I have plenty of horror stories from people working at our local factory.
It seems their favourite ploy is to lay off everyone during the off season and then only hire back the most skilled workers, at a reduced rate of pay, when slaughter picks up.
That’s how it happens all right. In the 1970s I knew a man who worked for the local CFM (Canterbury Frozen Meat) plant in the department that dealt with the skins. My father was very envious of his situation. CFM used to employ him for only 7 months of the year, yet pay him the equivalent of the full years pay in his hourly rate. He would then bank that money, the equivalent of a full years pay, and then go and work on farms for 5 months. He had acquaintances who liked the idea of 5 months off who would decide not to work, go on the dole (which they qualified for) and renovate the house, restore a vintage car, travel overseas or work for cash. “Who needs to win golden kiwi when you could be a freezing worker” as Dad used to say.
CFM did that because they valued the skills of a good knife hand, but those days are now gone. CFM realised at the time that they couldn’t afford to pay people for a full year who were only on the job for 7 months so announced that they were going to put a stop to it. The union reps, through negotiation, changed the employee status from full time to “contractor” which is a much higher hourly rate than full time, which had the effect of keeping their yearly pay the same. Problem was they were now able to be told which days to turn up to work and which days not to. Then followed the announcement of NZ being left out in the cold with the formation of the EU, followed by the Lange/Douglas years, then the dairy boom. Sure, the Employment Contracts Act and then the Employment Relations Act may not have had the power that the unions hoped it would to keep everyone’s remuneration at the same relative level, but by then you can be rest assured the freezing companies were in more financial trouble than any of the workers could imagine. Farmers went from being paid $15 for a mutton ewe at the works to being sent an account for $1.15 to “process” a mutton ewe. Farmers demonstrated by digging a big hole on a farm in Mid Canterbury and cutting the throats and burying more than 7000 ewes that day. Then next month, the freezing workers protested over the short killing season…….the rest is history.
The industry has been through some tough times readjusting to the new reality, and I’m sure that once a few more tough decisions have been made made that will better match capacity to demand, the meat industry will once again be in good heart.
Many thanks Mike for taking the time to give us some history of the meat industry, I found your observations very interesting.
You are right Yogi
It’s worse – you say:
“This despite Silver Fern Farms Board of Directors getting a 7.8% pay rise in 2013. And the year before that they got a 15% pay rise! That’s a 22.8% pay increase over two years!”
but the second year is 7.8% of 115% of the 2011 pay, total actually 23.97%!
and:
“The Silver Fern Farms Chairman of the Board of Directors received an 8.2% pay rise in in 2013, and in 2012 he received a 15% increase. That’s a 23.2% pay increase over two years”
the second year is 8.2% of 115% of the 2011 pay, total actually24.4%!
I don’t know if you can blame the government for workers’ woes in the meat industry – the companies themselves can take a bit of the blame. SFF is the biggest boy in the industry so is more noticeable but this habit of the top guys paying themselves is in every industry. A real worry for me is that I heard from a former Lean Meats employee that they weren’t allowed 5 minute breaks during work (although these are a legal right). Another concern is AFFCO (owned by Talleys I believe) playing hard ball with their workers – with accusations of discrimination against union members (which is illegal), threatening behaviour, and attempts to destroy all job security. While it is not my place to examine the veracity of such claims, it appears the NZMWU should be as their members may be victims of illegal treatment. It doesn’t matter how powerful these companies think they are or how good their lawyers are – the law is clear and they are perhaps pushing their luck. A good start would be for Lean Meats to be investigated to see if they grant proper breaks for their workers (easily done if you ask the workers). If not they could be in the gun for fines and back pay for workers working over their breaks.
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