Waitara meat messiah tells Labour to 'back off'

By Nick Smith

Friday 27th February 2004

Meat company Anzco Foods, fresh from announcing it is bringing prosperity to tiny Taranaki town Waitara, yesterday told the government to scrap its controversial employment legislation.

Anzco chairman Graeme Harrison said his company would reopen the Waitara works, closed in 1998, providing 70 jobs and up to $100 million in exports.

The company's expansion into a small, undereducated, unemployment-plagued town where more than a third of the population is Maori is an example of what a flexible labour market can achieve.

Yet the government's labour policy and amendments to the Employment Relations Act would stop investment of the kind planned for Waitara.

"It's no good for the country," Harrison said of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill.

He stressed he was not bagging the government, just the policy, and he wants new Labour Minister Paul Swain to hear Anzco's reasons for rejecting the bill.

"There's too much at stake [to indulge in political sniping]," he said.

On the back of successive surprise poll results, the government has flip-flopped on treaty and education policy, a change that Harrison said "shows we have a government who is prepared to listen.

"To be listened to is all we seek," Harrison said.

In the wider meat industry, an employment exemplar of what is wrong with the bill, there is widespread anger at the lack of consultation.

Meat exports are worth more than $5 billion.

In peak season the industry employs 20,000 people from Moerewa to Invercargill in a variety of companies, be they co-operative, privately held or public, both listed and unlisted.

The industry is opposed to widening good-faith bargaining provisions, stiffening law about dismissals, disclosure requirements, mandatory collective agreements and multi-party collective agreements.

Despite saying "we oppose the bill in its entirety," Harrison is particularly aggrieved by the demand for multi-site agreements. "We want onsite agreements, we're opposed to multi-site agreements," he said.

"We have no problems with unions onsite, our own people.

"But we find it unacceptable to run a business with someone else who is not involved in the workforce. I don't want to talk to socialists who aren't onsite."

The primary problem with the bill "is it pretends labour markets are different from other markets," Harrison said.

But the "one approach fits all" will result in closing down regional plants and concentrating business in single large operations, he said. "It doesn't take account of regional differences. One rule for all is c***."

His analysis carries particular weight since under Harrison's management, Anzco has, apart from one processing plant in Dunedin, operated exclusively in the provinces, from Blenheim to Bulls and the West Coast to Manawatu.

"They want to increase prosperity, put us back in the top half of the OECD ... well, carry on down this path and we will have no chance of getting there.

"The bottom line is real wealth still lies with the primary sectors."

Harrison points to the turnaround at Anzco's Riverland Eltham works, also in Taranaki, site of the longest running meatworks strike in the 1990s. "Before it was run by the unions, now it operates year-round."

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