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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONBusinessJuly 22, 2022

What employers should learn from Zuru’s court win

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

The New Zealand toy giant winning its case against an anonymous workplace review site has implications for both companies, and important lessons about the employee/employer relationship in the online age, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell.

New Zealand toy manufacturer Zuru recently won a court case against Glassdoor, an online platform that allows employees to post anonymous reviews of companies and share salary information. A Californian judge ruled that Glassdoor must hand over the identities of those who posted the negative reviews about Zuru to the company.

Zuru has called many of the reviews “spam” and said they’re fake. In a statement, Glassdoor has said it’s dismayed by the ruling and that “contrary to Zuru’s contentions, the unflattering workplace experience reviews describing working at Zuru were authored by multiple former Zuru employees”.

It may spell the end of Glassdoor, as without the promise of anonymity and the possibility of defamation action dangling over your head, people are unlikely to want to use it.

Zuru co-founder Nick Mowbray (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images for NZTE)

There are two logical camps on this one. The first is that it’s a blow for the potential of online platforms like Glassdoor and social media to reverse the power imbalance between workers and employers. Whether we agree with the practice of savaging your employer online or not, an entire generation who were essentially born with phones in their hands are now in the workplace. Your social media policy, if you have one, is sometimes not worth the paper it’s written on and while they are often part of contractually binding codes of conduct, many I’ve seen are outdated and reference Digg or Google+, a network that was brutally euthanised by Google in 2019. They don’t account for the times we live in nor the people you want to attract as employees. 

The lines between our personal and professional selves are now forever blurred. People can earn a living posting content online. It’s not an occasional habit or even an entitlement, but an extension of people’s very souls. When you have hired employees who’ve known nothing but a world where an Amazon worker getting fired sparks a social media riot, the genie is not getting back in the bottle. 

The counter argument is that companies like Zuru have a right to defend their reputation and to fight against fake reviews. In the judge’s ruling it’s noted that there is no real way of determining whether the reviews are fake without releasing the details of the people who posted them. Fake reviews are no small problem online. I encounter them regularly on Google, where you can smell the sweat of small business owners trying to locate the records of someone who has posted an awful review, only to find that person has never frequented their establishment. It’s estimated that up to 10% of reviews on Google are fake. A small business in Melbourne is currently engaged in a court battle with Google over what it says are fake reviews. 

I’m not a legal expert but I do know something about the employer/employee dynamic on social media and review sites. Before coming to work at The Spinoff, I had a career working in social media, where I advised companies on employee social media policies, and employers on using social media professionally. 

Like a cockroach, large, established companies with a lot of money can often wear the slow creep of bad reviews and will survive the nuclear fallout of an online scandal. Employees often don’t. Former Washington Post journalist Felicia Sonmez was recently fired because of a “Twitter war” where she complained about colleagues and the company. Sonmez sued the paper for discrimination in 2021 (the suit was recently dismissed and she plans to appeal) and had been outspoken about issues related to inequity in the newsroom.

My approach was always to pitch any kind of social media policy to employees as protection for them and not the company. I still think it’s good advice, but I often felt personally conflicted about it. At what point does encouraging employees to behave well online equal silencing people about very real issues within the workplace? And at what point are you just an old person who believes in following the rules and entrenching the establishment view, while younger generations, often with good reason, are trying to blow it up? Conversely, I now also hold firmly entrenched beliefs that civilisation may be in fast decline for a range of reasons, with unfettered posting on social media or review sites that generally doesn’t result in change but inflicts damage on all involved one of them.

‘If you value The Spinoff and the perspectives we share, support our work by donating today.’
Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

In a post on LinkedIn yesterday referencing the court decision, Vodafone New Zealand’s chief people officer Jodie King wrote that she believes “that getting constant feedback from staff – good, bad or ugly – is a way companies can constantly evolve to better serve their employees and customers” and that “While nobody likes to read critical feedback, and we certainly wouldn’t condone defamation, trying to suppress or avoid anonymous feedback means we would miss out on the benefit of the rich diversity of opinions amongst people.” 

It’s a smart approach and probably the pragmatic middle ground HR professionals are discussing right now. It’s not a great move to make people fearful of being able to vent somewhere (defamation or fake reviews notwithstanding) because their experiences are inevitably going to leak out somewhere anyway. If it’s not Glassdoor, it might be TikTok where the bad boss hashtag has 106.8m views and workplace and corporate satire is a very popular genre of content. Humans also still talk to other humans IRL from time to time. The labour market is tight. If we’re all to coexist in a world where negative feedback is regrettably a click away, developing some resilience and tolerance for that and recognising where power lies in an employment relationship probably isn’t the worst idea. 

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St James Theatre owner Steve Bielby (Photos: Sonya Nagels)
St James Theatre owner Steve Bielby (Photos: Sonya Nagels)

BusinessJuly 21, 2022

‘They were there for days’: The St James’s owner has one last plan to fix the break-ins

St James Theatre owner Steve Bielby (Photos: Sonya Nagels)
St James Theatre owner Steve Bielby (Photos: Sonya Nagels)

Steve Bielby is attempting to launch one final plan to save the mothballed Auckland theatre repeatedly targeted by vandals and ‘professional’ thieves.

They cut the power. They disabled the security system. They took irreplaceable artefacts, including a 94-year-old bronze statue. They stripped thousands of dollars worth of copper from the building. “They even fitted their own padlock to the gate,” says Steve Bielby, the owner of Auckland’s historic but mothballed St James Theatre, who believes a recent robbery was the work of professionals. “They were there for a few days and had trade skills to be able to do what they did.”

Over the past six months, Bielby’s seen graffiti and vandalism escalate at his mothballed inner-city venue, a much-loved theatre that has hosted the likes of Kanye West, Coldplay and Her Majesty the Queen since it opened in 1928. The venue hasn’t been used since 2016, and it needs millions of dollars of restoration work – a plan that has been tied intricately to a proposed neighbouring apartment tower providing toilets, offices, disabled access and other amenities. It was all set to go in 2017, with most of the apartments sold, when a bank pulled funding.

st james
Steve Bielby surveys the incomplete renovations at Auckland’s St James Theatre. (Photo: Sonya Nagels)

Right now, the St James is a dead zone in the city centre of Tāmaki Makaurau. The Queen Street-facing wall, the one covered in scaffolding, is smothered by an impressive array of street art. The gates are locked but if you know how, it’s easy to get yourself over that and into the compound where the apartments are slated to go. “Once things are tagged they seem to become a magnet for other taggers,” says Bielby. Lately, the building’s become a magnet for other things too.

Bielby knows of four separate break-ins, but the one that occurred most recently was the worst. “The latest break-in is far more sophisticated,” he tells The Spinoff via email. Of the destruction, he says it will cost “tens of thousands of dollars of damage at a minimum” to repair. He calls the bronze cherub statue that sat on its own plinth on the mezzanine floor “irreplaceable”. “I’m sure it’s only a couple of hundred dollars of bronze but would be thousands to replace even if we’re able to,” he says.

The longer the St James sits derelict, Bielby says, the harder and more expensive the restoration work becomes, and the more damage it receives from vandals. “Mothballing is death by a thousand cuts.” Foundational work and earthquake restrengthening needs to be done before the venue’s floorboards are restored, its 1928 origins are honoured, and the doors can open again.

So Bielby’s launching a new plan in an attempt to do just that. Today, he’s announcing an official uncoupling of the projects. The St James Theatre’s restoration timeline is no longer intricately entwined with the construction of the apartment complex. While it’s still expected that the two will share amenities, it’s hoped that separating the plans will lower the risk and make each a more attractive proposition for investors and funding applications. “The proposal … sees the disconnection of the projects and enables the opportunity for the theatre project to progress independently of the apartment project,” Bielby says in a press release issued today.

That’s not all. The apartment complex plans have changed. It’s now bigger, expanding from 300 to 400 apartments, and from 41 to 43 levels, including 400 bike parks, 200 car parks and retail space. It’s estimated to cost $400 million to build, and $1 million has been spent overhauling earlier plans to get them ready to be submitted for resource consent approval. They’re sitting with Auckland Council and a decision is due later this year. An artist’s rendition of the new development shows a sleek, shiny, curved tower dominating the skyline on that part of Queen Street.

St James
An artist’s rendition of the new apartment complex neighbouring the St James. (Photo: Supplied)

With $15m of funding already approved from Auckland Council, along with $1.5m from Heritage New Zealand, it means the restoration of the St James can begin whether or not the apartment complex is approved. Bielby says the theatre restoration would take two years, then three years for the apartment complex to be finished. “Getting past the stage where these buildings interact and are structurally interlinked is key to de-risking both projects,” he says. “The theatre is an issue for the apartments, and the apartments are an issue for the theatre.”

Bielby’s pivot has been praised by Noel Reardon, Auckland Council’s heritage manager, who calls it “great news,” a thought echoed by central city councillor Pippa Coom, who is “incredibly excited by the prospect of St James Theatre’s restoration moving past its current impasse”. Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick, who hosted a St James hui a year ago in an attempt to get the government to match Auckland Council’s restoration fund, has also weighed in with cautious optimism. “This theatre is the cheapest ‘new’ venue we’ll ever get,” she says. “Today’s news of progress on the apartment development puts this shortfall squarely back in the spotlight.”

St James
Graffiti smothers the Queen Street-facing wall of Auckland’s St James Theatre. (Photo: Chris Schulz)

Bielby’s optimistic too, but he’s been here before. A year ago, he told The Spinoff: “The theatre’s not on my journey. I’m kind of on the theatre’s journey. It’s in control.” His timeline hopes are for all the pieces for fall into place before the end of the year. Because of foundational issues, the theatre has to be restored first or it will be “indefinitely mothballed”. Done the other way around, he believes the St James “will sit there in a state where it is not compliant with modern building codes, and the upgrade costs are just too great and the work too risky to do.”

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Gabi Lardies
— Staff writer

So, if this plan fails, is that it? “I think we’re definitely approaching the point where we ask ourselves, ‘Are the decision-makers trying to indefinitely kick the can further down the road?'” Bielby says. “[If] there isn’t the interest from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage to save this place … we have to let it go. My feeling is this decision is coming sooner rather than later.”

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