Two of the country’s largest cardboard packaging companies have been shuttered by industrial action in recent days, and workers are preparing to strike again if their employers don’t sharpen their offers
It’s difficult to hear Jason Akai’s softly-spoken words above the constant blare of supportive toots from vehicles whizzing past on Roscommon Rd, Wiri, on a drizzly Auckland morning. Akai is here amid a thicket of union placards, picketing his employer alongside high vis-clad workers like him who want a 10 percent wage rise and a better deal on overtime.
“It’s pretty tight,” says Akai of his $27 an hour wage. The father of three young boys routinely works 50 hours a week, but there’s no overtime premium for him – under the company’s collective agreement, he gets time-and-a-half only if he works more than 50 hours a week.
“We barely make it through until the next week. You pay your bills and there’s nothing left.” He sees no prospect of saving enough to take his family on holiday, let alone accumulating a house deposit that would allow them to escape from renting.
Akai has worked for Charta Packaging, part of Australian-owned Visy Holdings (NZ), for eight years. He worked his way up from stacking product on the factory floor to operating machines that turn paper into the cardboard boxing crucial for the distribution of consumer goods.
“Workers don’t feel valued,” he says.
It’s not just the wages – he’s also frustrated by what he sees as a stifling of opportunity for worker advancement within the company.
Newsroom spoke to one picketing worker who has served 19 years with Visy and is on just $23 an hour. He works 60 hours a week and his wife, an airport catering worker, puts in 12 hour days.
"We want to be with the children, but we can’t,” he says. “Sometimes they have to be on their own, or a family member will come and stay with them. We pay the rent first, then power and petrol, and then food.”
Akai says the level of employee dissatisfaction has been made clear to the company in bargaining, but the workers were told their demands were unreasonable. “They’re saying inflation is going up for them as well,” says Akai. “They say they’re going to lose millions this year and we should think of that.”
The company is offering a two year agreement, with a 6 percent rise for higher-paid workers, and a lift in the lowest rates to $23.65 (the living wage) in the first year, and a 3 percent rise in the second year. The company says its offer works out at an average increase of 7.3 percent, equal to the current rate of CPI inflation. It refuses to bring the threshold for the overtime rate of time-and-a-half down to 40 hours, sticking with the status quo of 50 hours.
Workers considered that offer after their first day of strike action on August 24, and rejected it “unaminmously”, says E tū organiser Amy Hansen. The 100-odd workers took a second 24 hour strike yesterday.
Visy Holdings (NZ) is fully owned by Pratt Consolidated Holdings, which is in turn controlled by one of Australia’s richest men, Anthony Pratt, estimated by Forbes to be worth US$10 billion. He strongly promotes sustainability and recycling, and has referred to his multinational company as the ‘Tesla of packaging’.
The company has been criticised in the past for paying virtually no tax in Australia. The New Zealand operation last year generated revenue of $270.5 million – a level of turnover that has increased steadily over the years and is up 45 percent since 2015, according to Companies Office records. However it has only once recorded a profit in that time.
Akai knows he could walk away from the company and get another job in today’s tight labour market, but his choice for now is to stay put and “give it one more chance to make it better for workers”.
Manu Filimoekava has worked for Visy Board, Charta’s sister company, for 25 years. He works a 10 hour shift at the company’s Roscommon Rd plant on Mondays, 12 hours every day from Tuesday to Friday, eight hours on Saturdays, and sometimes eight hours on Sundays too. His wage rate is $35 an hour. The father of four says the weekend work isn’t compulsory, “but you have to, for the family to survive.”
He had never been on strike prior to the first walk-out on August 24. In the past, he has felt the company was thankful to its workers. Those who worked during weekends were provided with meals, which helped compensate for the long hours and missing out on family time.
But he says over the last year the weekend meals have stopped. Particularly after the hardships of the pandemic, when workers kept production going in their essential industry, the withdrawal of this support feels to him like an insult.
“That’s why people are feeling they are not being respected,” he told Newsroom. “That’s why for 25 years there was nothing happening [no strike action], until now.”
Visy NZ general manager Aaron Ashby told Newsroom yesterday in a written statement that the company was “very disappointed that its unionised employees elected to continue to pursue industrial action at their fibre box plants in Auckland today.
"The industrial action is being undertaken despite genuine attempts by the company to present realistic efforts to the members, and despite the fact that the parties are using the mediation service of MBIE in an attempt to reach a settlement on the collective agreement renewal.”
Ashby says Visy is hopeful of a settlement in the “near future”. But workers at yesterday’s picket indicated they are not holding their breath for that. They have already voted to strike again, most likely on Friday, at the same time as workers from competitor company, Opal Kiwi Packaging, who will also be on their third 24-hour stoppage.
Negotiations between Opal – which is owned by Nippon Paper Industries, of Japan – and the workforce have been dragging on since the start of this year. Partial strike action in the form of an overtime ban has been in place for weeks. Their first stoppage was for 24 hours last Friday. Yesterday they went on strike again, and bussed from their worksite to join the Visy workers at their picket on Roscommon Rd.
Opal is returning to mediation with its workers on Thursday, but E tū organiser Alvy Tata says if there’s no resolution there are likely to strikes again on Friday and Monday.
Like Visy, Opal management refused to be interviewed for this story, instead providing a brief written statement saying they are “working through the process” of negotiating a new collective, and that the company “remains committed to reaching a final agreement”.
Tata says for now things are at an impasse. The 90-odd Opal workers are on lower base pay rates than those at Visy, although they get time-and-a-half overtime rates after 40 hours. Opal’s latest offer of a two-year deal with a 4 percent increase in both years was roundly rejected prior yesterday’s strike. “Our members have come off a three year collective pay deal, and they need a decent pay rise,” says Tata. “We’re still far away [in bargaining] from where we need to be.”
One Opal worker, who asked not to be named, told Newsroom inflation was a key driver behind the strike action. “For a company to put up a bargaining offer of 4 percent is more of a pay cut than an increase in wages. I think it’s a struggle for most factory workers. We need to get ourselves more income.”
Workers at Opal have come to rely on huge hours to make an adequate income. Tata says some are doing 80 to 90 hours a week, with 67 hours the average.
“They’re working long hours because they haven’t got enough money, right,” said one Opal worker from the picket line. “Long hours should be about saving for something that you want to buy, and not so much just to meet your expenses … If you’re on not much more than the minimum wage and you’ve got rent of, say, $550, you’re hardly ever going to make it, so you’ve got no choice but to put in longer hours. And I’d say that’s where a lot of us are at, especially in Auckland where the cost of living is very expensive.”
