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

BusinessJune 20, 2022

A hospo industry vibe check

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

Covid-19 on the loose, staffing shortages, newly-opened borders, supply-chain issues – there’s plenty for our hospitality industry to contend with. Charlotte Muru-Lanning talks to owner operators and workers from eateries across the country about what life is like at the moment.

“It’s a lot busier at the moment, compared to the last two years,” says Christchurch front-of-house restaurant manager and advocate for Raise the Bar Hospo Union Ellsie. But, staff, she says, are “really burnt out”.

On the upside, since the start of the pandemic, Ellsie says she’s observed a “nice culture shift” in terms of how workers are treated by guests. “Customers are more patient with shortages and wait times,” she says, and they don’t expect their “coffee in just two minutes”.

And while she’s “somewhat grateful” for no longer having to police mask mandates for customers, “it has meant people have become lax”. Serving maskless customers at the till who have just hopped off a plane from overseas can be anxiety-inducing. “In my head I’m like, you could have at least given it 24 hours,” she says.

There’s been a noticeable “culture shift” around how customers treat staff says restaurant worker Ellsie. (Photo: Getty Images)

As well as her main restaurant job, Ellsie works as a temp at two other hospitality businesses and can sense by how in demand she is that “staffing levels are down”. 

She explains that understaffing has long been a problem in restaurants, cafes and bars, but with compounding factors like people leaving the industry because of the risk of Covid-19, or staff taking time off due to being sick with the flu or Covid, “we just don’t have the staffing to cope”.

Echoing that, Alex Davies, who owns Christchurch restaurant Gatherings, says there’s a “constant readjustment of staff” as workers and their households catch Covid-19.

The government’s Covid-19 leave support scheme, where employers receive a subsidy to pass on to staff who have to isolate, is helpful, he says, especially in an industry where working from home is for the most part impossible. Gatherings’ chef was off work for two weeks in isolation, and “instead of using up all his sick days, he was able to use the subsidy”, Davies says. “It eases the pressure on staff.”

Chef Alex Davies of Christchurch’s Gatherings Restaurant (Image: Naomi Haussmann)

At the moment, as with staff rosters, bookings are ever-changing as customers test positive for the virus and cancel. Despite the challenges, Davies’ restaurant “is buzzing with people just happy to be out” and the team is doing what they can to adapt. “It’s just the world we live in now, isn’t it? The world is weird.”

Paul Lee opened his first Auckland restaurant, Ockhee, with his wife Lisa a week before the first nationwide lockdown in 2020. Last week the pair opened their second spot, a cafe selling Korean street sandwiches in Auckland’s city centre called Swings.

“Because I went through so much, it really toughened me up and I’m not really scared to spend 20K on a fitting, because I know that I can make it work,” Lee says. His latest opening is an expression that he’s hopeful about the future, not just for the industry, but about the pandemic-afflicted Auckland CBD. “I kinda enjoy the challenge – it’s not so much fun if it’s too easy,” he says.

The biggest challenges for their eateries at the moment are threefold: cancelled bookings, and a lack of both supplies and specialty workers. “For a restaurant like Ockhee, where it’s really authentic Korean food, it’s just Koreans who can actually really make it,” Lee explains. “There’s no one to replace us.” Their chefs have been working long hours, six days a week, for the last few years. “Their bodies are run down,” he says. 

Paul Lee at his Ponsonby Road restaurant Ockhee (Photo: Tim D)

Auckland kitchen hand Shastry works casual contracts at four different hospitality businesses. Because he’s on minimum wage, he usually works all seven days of the week. Most of his wages go toward paying for rent and bills for his “shoe-box-sized apartment”.

At the moment, staffing is so low that “I work alone on a shift where you’d normally have two or three kitchen hands,” he says. Enticing workers into hospitality is difficult across the board, but he reckons that’s exacerbated in his line of work because “no one wants to be a dishwasher” – a job that’s both heavy and dirty. 

In March this year, Shastry caught Covid-19. His employer applied for the wage subsidy, but it took more than two weeks to find its way to his bank account, meaning he went 10 days without any pay. Because he lives paycheque to paycheque, he had to borrow money from friends to get by. Now, he’s nervous about taking a test if he has symptoms. “I can’t afford to do that again,” he says.


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Like Shastry, Ellsie also has concerns about the prospect of repeatedly catching Covid-19 and having to take time off while sick. “I’m in contact with probably a few thousand people each week and that’s direct contact, it’s much higher risk than many other jobs,” she says. Ellsie ended up in hospital with her first bout of Covid-19 in late March, has had to isolate as a household contact, and tested positive again last week. The ongoing uncertainty about when she’ll next have to take time off work and whether she’ll get financial support has meant she’s started a “rainy day” savings account.

Much of that uncertainty is because hospitality workers are often casual workers or with changing rosters and fluctuating hours, making it difficult to figure out what financial entitlements are available. “Legislation was never designed for people who work in such a particular situation,” Ellsie says.

She’d like some assurance that the isolation subsidy will stick around, arguing that losing it would mean a hard choice between isolating with no pay, or coming into work and risking infecting co-workers. “I don’t know where it’s going, but I know I’m nervous about it.”

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BusinessJune 20, 2022

Why everyone’s so mad with BusinessNZ over fair pay agreements

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The business lobby group has been roundly criticised for playing fast and loose with the truth about the new Fair Pay Agreement law – and over the results of its attempt to have a UN agency intervene. Jacob Flanagan explains the story so far.

After BusinessNZ met with an indifferent response to its complaint to the International Labour Organisation over Fair Pay Agreements earlier this month, workplace relations and safety minister Michael Wood called the lobby group’s actions part of an “active misinformation campaign” against the new law. The strength of his language reflects frustration within government and labour organisations over BusinessNZ’s claims, which many FPA supporters say have been, at best, misleading and hyperbolic; at worst, outright false.

So are the critics right? Is BusinessNZ? Here’s how we got here, and what’s coming next.

Fair pay agreements: remind me what those are? 

A bill currently wending its way through parliament is set to introduce a new system of Fair Pay Agreements, or FPAs, to New Zealand. These are legally binding documents, agreed to by employees and employers, setting out minimum pay and conditions across a sector – for example, all nurses might be under one FPA. Similar minimum employment standards are commonplace in Australia and Europe.

The bargaining process can begin if at least 10% of a workforce or 1,000 employees agree to begin an FPA, or if it’s in the “public interest” to do so, such as in low pay industries.

Next, the proposed FPA needs support from a majority of employee and employer voters – employers receive one vote per covered employee. If the vote fails, parties go back to bargaining, before voting again.

If a second vote also fails, or if the parties can’t agree, the Employment Relations Authority decides the terms of the FPA.

The process for establishing an FPA.

FPAs were first recommended in 2018 by the Fair Pay Agreements Working Group, chaired by former National Party prime minister Jim Bolger. The group’s report found that “wages in New Zealand have grown, but much more slowly for workers on lower incomes than those on high wages; and they have grown more slowly than labour productivity”. The report argued FPAs could boost low pay, while ensuring “good employers are not disadvantaged by paying reasonable, industry-standard wages”.

Businesses, rather than workers, have enjoyed much of New Zealand’s productivity gains since the 1970s. (Source: FPA working group)

Right. But what’s international law got to do with it?

The International Labour Organisation (ILO), the United Nations agency in charge of employment rights, meets every year with governments, employers and workers to promote fair work conditions. Because New Zealand has agreed to many of the ILO’s conventions promoting things like banning child labour, our legislation is obliged to comply with them.

One of the many pieces of legislation from around the world examined at this year’s meeting was the government’s FPA bill.


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And BusinessNZ said we were on the ILO’s naughty list?

Last month, BusinessNZ released a statement claiming that “The International Labour Organisation has included New Zealand on the list of the 40 worst cases of breaches of international labour treaties”.

“The fact New Zealand was included on a list bookended by Afghanistan and Venezuela and just ahead of Nigeria showed just how flawed the proposed FPA Legislation was.

“The fact we’re on a naughty forty list […] is seriously damaging for our international positioning as a leading human rights protagonist,” complained Kirk Hope, BusinessNZ chief executive (and, apparently, human rights advocate).

What? New Zealand is one of the worst 40 countries for labour laws? Our worker rights are nearly as bad as Nigeria, where child slavery is common? This sounds terrible!

Or would do if it were true. As has been widely reported, BusinessNZ misleadingly edited the title of the ILO’s report.

The ILO did not publish a list of the 40 “worst case breaches”. Instead, they published the much more boringly-named “Preliminary list of cases as submitted by the social partners Committee on the Application of Standards” – in other words, the list of nations the ILO were going to meet with.

New Zealand was only on that list because BusinessNZ campaigned for them to be on it, and only “just ahead of Nigeria” because the list was ordered alphabetically.

Council of Trade Unions (CTU) president Richard Wagstaff explained that “being on the shortlist does not in any way indicate the ILO does not support the creation of FPAs in New Zealand”.

Workplace relations minister Michael Wood agreed, accusing BusinessNZ of an “active misinformation campaign” against the fair pay agreement system.

The title of the list BusinessNZ claimed the ILO had published (top), and the actual title of the list (bottom)

So when NZ went to the ILO, what did the ILO say?

OK, we’re about to get into the sometimes dull world of international labour law, so stick with me here.

BusinessNZ had convinced the ILO to examine New Zealand’s FPA bill at their meeting. The ILO looked at the bill, and published this:

What the ILO said to New Zealand: basically ‘Keep talking to employers and workers, and keep us in the loop.’

It was a very short statement, essentially just reminding the government to continue working with employers and workers, and to keep the ILO informed of progress.

For context, if we were to compare the ILO’s response to Aotearoa with, say, Nigeria (as BusinessNZ misleadingly did); the Nigerian government was advised to “without delay” review whether men and women were paid equally, ensure everyone is receiving at least minimum wage, and stop the policy of deliberately delaying wages.

One of these two countries was heavily criticised for its archaic and inhumane laws, while the other was told to continue as they were – which one do you think BusinessNZ kicked up a fuss about?

What did workers, businesses and the government think of the ILO response?

The Council of Trade Unions was pleased by such a concise decision, with president Richard Wagstaff arguing that BusinessNZ’s complaint was “more political than credible” and noting that several international worker associations, as well as the Australian and Belgian governments, spoke in favour of FPAs.

As you may have guessed, that’s not how BusinessNZ saw it.

They argued that the ILO ruling has been “misinterpreted” by the government and unions. Instead, BusinessNZ say, the FPA bill breaches ILO Convention 98, which New Zealand has agreed to.

Article 4 of the convention says collective bargaining must be voluntary, and according to BusinessNZ, “the Fair Pay Agreements system is not compliant with this Article because it requires/compels the parties to bargain once bargaining is initiated by a union”.

BusinessNZ argued that because the bill is still being debated by parliament, the ILO was reluctant to make conclusive statements, but that when it does become law the UN agency could rule it breaches Convention 98.

Minister Michael Wood was happy with the ruling, saying that “the ILO’s Committee on the Application of Standards has not found that FPAs are inconsistent with international conventions”. He again railed against “active misinformation campaigns” and called for BusinessNZ to cooperate with the government on the bill.

Labour’s Marja Lubeck, who chairs the education and workforce select committee currently reviewing the bill, was also critical of BusinessNZ’s interpretation of the ILO ruling.

Why are businesses so opposed to FPAs?

BusinessNZ have refused to cooperate with the government on FPAs and are running a public campaign against the legislation, stating that the FPAs “aren’t needed, they remove the flexibility and autonomy of modern workplaces and won’t improve pay and conditions for hardworking Kiwis.”

In fact, workers will be free to negotiate flexibility and autonomy, as the FPAs will simply place a “floor” on pay and conditions, which workers can freely go above and beyond.

Last year Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive Brett O’Riley revealed his fears that FPAs “will result in higher wages, and the solution for businesses will be to cut down their workforce”.

Unions, unsurprisingly, see this predicted rise in wages due to FPAs as a positive. “Mr O’Riley is right about one thing – FPAs will lead to higher wages for New Zealanders. That’s because we are one of the only developed countries without some sort of minimum awards,” argued the CTU’s Wagstaff in March.

Since the 1970s, employers have enjoyed significantly increased output from their employees, but workers haven’t seen the same benefit. Labour productivity more than doubled from 1978 to 2016, while real wages have risen considerably more slowly.

The FPA bill is currently at the select committee stage and is expected to become law by the end of the year, with the first agreements being negotiated in 2023.


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