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(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

BusinessFebruary 7, 2022

The deep unfairness of New Zealand public holidays

(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

If you work weekdays you’re probably enjoying a day off today – and if you are working, you’re likely getting time and a half. But a surprisingly large section of our workforce doesn’t get either. Charlotte Muru-Lanning explains.

Public holidays are important. They help nourish mental health, they improve worker productivity and, especially in the case of Waitangi Day, they mark significant events. And who doesn’t love an extra day off?

Most of us are used to 11 public holidays a year, which means a paid day off, or time and a half for those who have to work. This year there’s a new official public holiday, Matariki, bringing the total number of annual public holidays to 12.

But here’s something you may not know: A bunch of full-time workers in New Zealand completely miss out on up to seven public holidays each year. 

That’s because of an anomaly in the Holidays Act. If you work Monday to Friday you’re guaranteed all public holidays, because even if the holiday falls on the weekend – when you usually wouldn’t work – your public holiday is ‘Mondayised’; it gets shifted to Monday. These workers are the lucky ones.

You’re a little less lucky if you don’t work weekdays. If you don’t work Mondays, for example, you’re likely to miss out on more than five public holiday entitlements this year. This is particularly an issue in industries like retail and hospitality, where it’s not unusual to work Tuesday to Saturday. In the restaurant industry, it’s common for restaurants to be shut on Mondays, so none of the staff work.

But why do these people miss out on holidays? Unite Union national secretary John Crocker says it’s due to both legislative and societal changes. “If you look back in New Zealand’s labour history, we were predominantly a Monday to Friday workforce,” he says. Before the 1980s, it was rare to find a shop open on the weekends; in fact it was illegal for most retailers to trade on Saturday or Sunday. It was only when the National government passed the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Act in 1980 that Saturday trading was allowed – despite campaigns against it from the Shop Employees union. In 1989, trading on Sundays was made legal too. But even then, when people did work on the weekend, “penal rates were built in” Crocker says, so they were compensated for missing out on public holidays. These penal rates were removed under the Employment Contracts Act of 1991.

Back in the 80s, Crocker says, “those missing out were a minority”. But now there’s a growing workforce who work outside of the traditional working week. Statistics New Zealand’s 2018 survey of working life found that two thirds of employed people had worked at a non-standard time (any hours worked outside of 7am to 7pm, Monday to Friday) at least once in the past four weeks. The most commonly worked non-standard time was during the day on Saturday. Considering this, the fact that public holidays are still based on a Monday to Friday working week starts to seem archaic.

In the restaurant industry, it’s common for restaurants to stay shut on Mondays. (Photo: Getty Images)

Crocker was on the Holidays Act Taskforce that reviewed that Holidays Act in 2019. He says one of the reasons the law doesn’t account for non-traditional work weeks is that those who create legislation tend to be weekday workers themselves, and so are less likely to recognise anomalies in weekend workers are treated. The public holiday issue also reflects the lack of political representation for people who work non-standard hours. 

Crocker says Unite Union is planning to lobby for a change to the legislation to ensure all employees benefit from a minimum number of public holidays, or get days in lieu based on the number of days per week they work.

Change is imperative, he reckons. “New Zealand society has changed and we are more of a 24/7, seven days a week workforce now,” he says. “The legislation should reflect that”.

The current discrepancy is also an equity issue, he notes, with young, female, and Māori and Pacific workers more likely to be shortchanged by the current rules around public holidays. 

He adds that while some industries have been able to negotiate better public holiday arrangements by unionising, a change of legislation is important to protect the most vulnerable workers who can’t unionise.

David Williamson, senior hospitality and tourism lecturer at AUT, agrees that change is “absolutely needed”, arguing that hospitality and tourism is too often overlooked when employment legislation is written. He worries that even with a change of legislation, a lack of enforcement could mean employers will fail to comply with the new law. 

In the years following reports of widespread non-compliance with the Holidays Act, many larger employers resolved the issue through worker remediation – but there are still huge parts of the workforce that haven’t, Crocker notes, and that’s a bad sign for any future changes to the act.

To Williamson, improving holiday entitlements would be an easy win for the hospitality industry, which is suffering from intense worker shortages and high employee turnover. Giving hospo workers the same number of holidays as Monday-to-Friday workers would encourage more people into the industry, he says.

Under the current system, too many in the workforce are missing out on holidays the rest of us take for granted. As the introduction of the Matariki holiday this year shows, the government has the power to give us a break from grind – to make our working lives a little better. And surely we’d all enjoy our long weekends even more if they were fairer.

Keep going!
Critical co-founders Adam Ransfield and Rui Peng. (Photo: Supplied)
Critical co-founders Adam Ransfield and Rui Peng. (Photo: Supplied)

BusinessFebruary 6, 2022

Through a tornado and a pandemic, this South Auckland recycling startup keeps growing

Critical co-founders Adam Ransfield and Rui Peng. (Photo: Supplied)
Critical co-founders Adam Ransfield and Rui Peng. (Photo: Supplied)

A business that was brought to its knees by a tornado is back on its feet, promising to transform the plastic recycling industry – as long as it can find the right investors. 

When I last visited Rui Peng at his Papatoetoe factory in June 2021, large puddles pooled on the floor and a cool wind whipped through the large, shredded opening in the roof

Peng’s office had a number of high-powered fans working to dry carpet, and the man himself seemed somewhat shellshocked, following the devastation left by a tornado that had wreaked carnage through the suburb days earlier. 

Seven months later, Peng and his business partner Adam Ransfield at the upcycling technology firm Critical are in a much more optimistic frame of mind, having just been named one of 15 businesses to be part of a lucrative Australasian accelerator programme called Startmate.

Along with comprehensive mentoring and the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a range of high-end investors and venture capitalists, the pair received $120,000 in seed funding to get themselves investment-ready. 

Critical’s chief technology officer Hanna Eastvold, chief executive and co-founder Rui Peng and engineering intern Tom Bradfield. (Photo: Justin Latif)

Peng says it’s hard to believe that they were chosen for the programme less than a month after getting through a lockdown and completing repairs on their tornado-ravaged facility.

And if their time in the programme is successful, Ransfield and Peng say their business could transform the way plastic waste is processed in this country. 

“Our goal is, within the next three to six months, to have a production capability of being able to process 165 tonnes of any type of plastic waste and by the end of the year that could be up to 300 tonnes,” Peng says, a plan that will require at least $1.5 million to execute. 

Critical’s unique recycling technology allows it to process any used plastic product, even if it’s been contaminated, and upcycle that waste into beautifully-designed furniture, from large interior wall panelling to building materials that can be used in retail or hospitality fit-outs. 

Critical is already contracted to take some waste from Auckland Council’s recycling centres as well as from the soft plastics collection bins outside Countdown supermarkets. But as the company increases its capacity, Ransfield says not only will it stop single-use plastic wrappings and bottles going into landfill but it will process more of the commercial waste which makes up 83% of plastic rubbish. 

“In Aotearoa there are 24 different types of plastic waste and the current infrastructure is only able to take about three of those types, whereas we’re able to process all 24 types,” he says.

“With the right commercial partners, we’ll be capturing all types of waste streams that are not recyclable in the current infrastructure to create our products and deliver that at a scalable, national level.”

The next step is convincing a group of investors to come on board. Peng says the 12-week Startmate programme, which ends in April, will be crucial to this aim. 

“We’re aiming to raise $1.5 million by the end of it, but the accelerator programme significantly increases our chance of doing this as they can help us by tapping into their network of more than 1000 alumni businesses, as well as a range of other corporate partners.”

Critical’s factory roof was ripped off and machinery was damaged by a tornado in June, 2021. (Photo: Justin Latif)

As they sit on the cusp of becoming a significant player in the recycling market, Ransfield admits he thought “it was over” when the tornado hit. But Peng, whose parents came to New Zealand looking for a better life after living in relative poverty in China, says seeing how his parents struggled for many years to establish themselves here, has been a source of inspiration to go through his own challenges. 

“When the storm hit, I think we had invested close to $250,000 which we had raised over the years from grants and government funding,” he says. “So it was pretty emotionally devastating. But having seen what my parents and family went through as new immigrants, I just had this attitude that I’m not going to take no for an answer and I’m just going to keep going.”

And keep going they have. 

The pair are fathers to three young children each, along with holding down busy daytime jobs, and they both agree their success wouldn’t be possible without the support of family. 

“You just toss everything up in the air, and catch whatever comes down first. And it’s about having very understanding spouses,” Ransfield says. 

“In some ways the long lockdown made things easier, because we weren’t having to rush around, and if my wife needed some help with the kids, I was only 10 seconds away.”

So next time you’re dropping off your soft plastics to a bin at your local Countdown, remember there’s a couple of guys trying to work out a way to keep that out of our bulging landfills.

“Our core values aren’t just being about profit,” says Ransfield. “Instead we have split that into being focused on helping people, the planet as well as ensuring a profit. So our focus is to get the type of investor who wants to make an impact and have that alignment there for us.”

Here’s hoping they can do it. 

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