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Experts say more effective masks are vital in protecting each other from Omicron. (Image: Tina Tiller)
Experts say more effective masks are vital in protecting each other from Omicron. (Image: Tina Tiller)

PoliticsJanuary 18, 2022

As the threat of omicron looms, we need to upgrade our mask game

Experts say more effective masks are vital in protecting each other from Omicron. (Image: Tina Tiller)
Experts say more effective masks are vital in protecting each other from Omicron. (Image: Tina Tiller)

Higher-quality masks could be one of our most important lines of defence against omicron – particularly as officials have said further lockdowns are unlikely. So why hasn’t the government updated advice around which masks offer the best protection or ensured we have access to them?

At this point in the pandemic, there’s consensus that Covid-19 is an airborne virus. That means, for the most part, it spreads from an infected person’s breath – in some cases travelling metres – through aerosols and liquid microdroplets. Because of this, masks are one of the most significant tools to protect ourselves and each other from catching the virus.

As much of the world is overwhelmed with cases of the newer omicron variant, and increasing numbers of cases are detected at our border, the threat of an outbreak here looms ever nearer. The spread of omicron has been so rapid because of its extreme transmissibility. 

“We’re dealing with the most transmissible variant we’ve seen yet,” says Joel Rindelaub, a research fellow at the University of Auckland. Omicron, he says “is almost like the pinnacle of transmissibility as far as aerosol transmission is concerned”. 

So with that in mind, “it’s very important to have the best protection available”, he says. While any face covering is better than nothing, experience overseas has made it very clear: some masks are much better than others. 

Despite this, the New Zealand government hasn’t updated advice around which types of masks offer the most effective protection, nor has it ensured we have access to them.

That’s something epidemiologist Michael Baker says needs to change – and quickly. 

“At the moment, I think our settings are very crude and I think most people are quite confused about when to wear masks and so on,” he says.

There needs to be practical advice for the public around which masks are most effective and a “dedicated effort going into working out what is the best evidence-informed approach we can have”, Baker says.

Chloe Ann-King, founder of hospitality union Raise the Bar, agrees that there needs to be clearer and updated guidance, especially for people in high-risk workplaces like hospitality. “There could be a lot more specific guidance around masks,” she says. Especially, she adds, “when we know what’s happened to workers in our industry overseas as a result of omicron”.

At the beginning of the pandemic cloth masks were considered more than adequate. That thinking has changed. Photo: Getty Images

We’ve mandated face coverings in Aotearoa in certain business settings and on different forms of transport. But our official guidance offers very little advice when it comes to the varying effectiveness of different kinds of masks. The laws and advice dictate the use of “face coverings”, rather than “face masks”. On the official Covid-19 website, the government only distinguishes between “single-use face coverings” and “fabric reusable face coverings”. There’s no mention of the more effective N95, P2 or FFP2 types of masks.

Respirator masks must meet minimum standards, and these certifications vary depending which country you’re in. FFP2 is the UK version, Korea’s is KF94, in China it’s KN95, the US standard is N95, and in Australia and New Zealand it’s P2. Both Rindelaub and Baker agree that N95 and P2 masks offer the best protection, and they’re available at some hardware stores and pharmacies.

There are two main reasons why respirator masks are so effective. The first is that they’re made from a special material consisting of a web of tiny fibres charged with electrostatic energy that attracts and intercepts foreign particles. These types of mask are also designed to achieve a very close facial fit. When fitted properly, they should form a secure seal around the nose and mouth – a characteristic that differentiates them from the vast majority of fabric and surgical masks.

Despite their reputation for being single-use, respirator masks can in fact be reused after hanging them up in the sun for a period. The inventor of the N95 mask, Peter Tsai, has recommended buying seven of the masks and rotating them daily, so that virus particles have time to become inactivated over the week.

Baker says the “fabric mask is a bit of a leftover from when there was a real supply shortage and people were worried about there being enough masks for healthcare workers”. Now, he says, “we’ve got over that supply problem”.

N95 mask and P2 masks. (Images: 3M)

Baker believes the government needs to ensure there’s a good supply of high-quality masks at a suitable standard, as well as set clear guidelines and rules that support using masks in the right places at the right times. That might mean using cloth masks in lower-risk outdoor settings and respirator styles when grocery shopping or in the workplace. 

But these higher-quality masks also tend to come with a higher price tag, so “equity is of huge concern”, says Baker. He reckons there needs to be serious consideration around accessibility by the government. That’s echoed by Ann-King who says the cost could be a “huge barrier” for “workers in low-waged industries”.

We’re fortunate enough to learn from overseas experience with omicron. Governments in various countries have begun advising the public to opt for varieties of masks like N95, FFP and P2. Germany has mandated filtered masks on public transport. In the US, the White House has announced it will be distributing “high quality” masks to people across the country. In some US states, free respirator masks are being dispensed from libraries and community centres after the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) advice was updated last week to tell people to wear medical grade masks like N95 rather than fabric. 

Asked about the current government advice on masks, a Ministry of Health spokesperson said the ministry “continually reviews the latest science, international and national evidence and advice on Covid-19 transmission and PPE in light of the omicron variant.

“Omicron was first detected in late November and we are still learning about the variant, including its impact on our current PPE guidance. It is important to note that in New Zealand’s context of low Covid-19 prevalence, we don’t always immediately adopt strategies or technologies used in other countries. ” The spokesperson added that P2 and N95 masks are used by “frontline staff who are exposed to potential or confirmed Coid-19 cases at the border and in healthcare settings”. As well, border and MIQ facility staff “must wear P2/N95 particulate respirators when in areas where they could or will be in contact with a returnee”.

“It’s great that there’s a very high uptake of mask use in this country,” says Rindelaub. But, he says, “what we’re seeing from overseas is that these cloth masks just probably won’t be enough in the face of omicron.

“We need to upgrade our mask use, as this variant has upgraded its transmissibility.”

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A protest against the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 (Image: John Nicholson, Evening Post via the National Library)
A protest against the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 (Image: John Nicholson, Evening Post via the National Library)

PoliticsJanuary 12, 2022

When New Zealand’s employment laws changed forever

A protest against the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 (Image: John Nicholson, Evening Post via the National Library)
A protest against the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 (Image: John Nicholson, Evening Post via the National Library)

May 15, 1991 marked the dawn of a new system of employment that utterly transformed the world of work. The Employment Contracts Act dramatically deregulated the labour market, struck a huge blow against the union movement, and reshaped the economy. Alex Braae looks back.

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Originally published on May 15, 2021.


When Faith Harrison began working at the supermarket, she didn’t do weekends. Nobody did, because the store was closed. 

That was 44 years ago, when Countdown was Foodtown. She took a job in the butchery department at the Onehunga store and has been there ever since, rising to a position of managing her team in that time. 

At first, she loved the freedom her working life allowed, and felt almost rich on the money coming in. “I was heavily involved in sports, so it was a good place to be at the time, because we only did Monday to Friday,” she said. Working late on Friday night meant extra pay, thanks to the penal rates. 

Today she works Tuesday through Saturday, every week, nine hours a day. “No weekend shopping, oh I miss those days, it should still be the same. You know, family time’s gone out the door.” Raising five kids, her earnings have sometimes left her barely able to get by. Harrison makes it clear that Progressive, owner of the Countdown chain, has always been good to her, as far as employers go. 

But her life story gives a snapshot of how much a single piece of legislation changed the nature of work in New Zealand. It’s a story about modernisation, and what gets gained and lost in the process. It’s a story of fighting over the fundamental relationship between employees and employers. And it’s a story about how unity among working people can be the difference between them winning and losing those battles. 

Faith Harrison with her collection of the various contracts she’s had over 44 years at the supermarket (Photo: Alex Braae)

Sweeping away the system

By a quirk of history, the Employment Contracts Act was originally meant to be passed through parliament on the first of May, 1991. May Day is internationally celebrated as a day to mark working class struggles.

As it happened, the National government passed the ECA later in the month, exactly 30 years ago today. The ECA massively deregulated the labour market, and can be seen as part of a continuum of reforms started by the previous Labour government, often described as Rogernomics, after the free-market finance minister of the time, Roger Douglas. 

The ECA swept away the system of “national awards” that had previously governed employment. Under the awards, whole industries would have the same baseline pay and conditions, which were hammered out every year by union and employer representatives. Before 1991, unionism had been effectively compulsory.

Harrison had been involved with awards arbitration. She used to go down to Christchurch for meetings that took place over three days, with a mediator sitting between the two sides. At the end of it, she’d take the offer back to members to vote on, and they would have the choice of either taking it, or taking industrial action. 

The 1991 changes meant that every employee would either be on an individual contract, or on a single-employer collective agreement. “At least with the award, we kept our penal rates, our laundry allowance, and you had long service [bonuses]”, said Harrison. “If you were going to another job, at least you knew what your rate was. Whereas now, you have to negotiate that rate.” 

Negotiations for collective agreements after 1991 could be a lot more intense. Harrison recalls one round of negotiations in which the union simply refused to leave the table, or agree to what was being offered – in the end everyone had to keep thrashing it out until four in the morning. 

The policy development for the Employment Contracts Act took place when National was in opposition. Jim Bolger, under whose prime ministership the legislation was enacted, told The Spinoff he didn’t consider himself anti-union by any stretch, but the law change was necessary because of the impact strikes had on the country, a view formed by his experience as the labour minister under Rob Muldoon. 

Then prime minister Jim Bolger speaking to a Chamber of Commerce audience in 1997 (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

“I spent virtually all my time as minister of labour resolving and arbitrating strikes in my office. This was disaster territory that I inherited and worked my way through. Yes, we did other things, but it dominated everything,” said Bolger. Many of the strikes seemed to him like “unbelievable nonsense”, he said.

“The Employment Contracts Act was designed to introduce a different structure to work relations. And it dramatically changed the landscape in terms of stoppages and strikes.” Bolger added that “what we mustn’t do is romanticise the past. It was a terrible system.” 

The ECA was always intended to be an “employers charter”, said Otago University associate professor Brian Roper, a staunch opponent of the changes at the time who has made a name for himself researching how business lobbies government ever since. 

“It was really the largest defeat suffered by the union movement in Aotearoa since the maritime strike of 1890, and it fundamentally reshaped the legislative framework for employment relations.” 

Roper said the ECA reforms took place in part because unions had already been weakened, and high unemployment had diminished their bargaining power. He argues that when unions are particularly strong, businesses lobby for centralised systems to determine wages, to deter union militancy and strike action. But when unions are weak, employers can offer poorer wages and conditions, so decentralisation suits them better. 

There was heavy lobbying from the Business Roundtable and Employers Federation for the ECA. Much of it is detailed in journalist Rebecca Macfie’s new book about the life of union leader Helen Kelly. A letter written at the time by Roundtable executive director Roger Kerr included a claim that the draft law was having a “big effect in policy circles. We should see the returns for this and other past efforts in the next couple of weeks. My expectation is that much of our framework will emerge, but with some blemishes.” 

When the Employment Contracts Act passed, Maxine Gay was working for a union that doesn’t exist any more. She was an organiser for the Clerical Workers Union, as well as being a regional secretary for the Council of Trade Unions in Manawatu. Ultimately, the CWU became “one of the casualties of the act”, said Gay. “It de-unionised 20,000 primarily female workers.”

Gay tells the story of a clothing worker in Hāwera, who had a baby in 1990 and left the workforce, earning “something like $13 an hour – she was a sample machinist, so was paid reasonably well.” 

“She came back to work in the same factory 16 years later, on less money than she had left on when she had a baby.” The minimum wage, which in 2006 was $10.25 an hour, had become the new floor for what workers could expect, said Gay. 

Full circle with fair pay agreements 

Industrial relations laws went most of the way round a full circle last week, with the announcement that fair pay agreements would be introduced. These will set minimum standards for industries, bearing some resemblance to the old national award system. 

In another of those twists of history, Jim Bolger accepted an offer from the Labour-led government to chair the working group on FPAs. He said the goal of that report was to “support workers and firms to drive productivity growth and share the benefits”. He doesn’t agree, however, with the view that FPAs will undo the work of his government on the ECA.  

Jim Bolger and then minister Iain Lees-Galloway at a Fair Pay Agreement press conference (Photo: Radio NZ)

“What we wanted to do in that report is in fact to stop us having some employers totally undercut others who are trying to be fair and decent. Some employers went to what’s called the living wage quite early on – it’s hard to argue against the concept of the living wage.” He added though, that some people will “always try to screw the worker”.

FPAs will also entrench unions as the key bargaining parties on the side of workers, a role that has been steadily eroded over the decades. “This is what working people in unions have been campaigning for; a more balanced employment relationship between working people and employers,” said CTU president Richard Wagstaff in welcoming the plans. 

Over the last three decades, the changes in the ECA, combined with a range of social and economic forces, saw the power of unions steadily fade and inequality grow, with workers often missing out on the fruits of productivity. “Real wages have been rising appreciably more slowly than productivity measured as added value per hour worked,” said CTU economist Bill Rosenberg, in a piece of research published in 2010. 

After Labour got back into government under Helen Clark in 1999, the Employment Contracts Act was repealed and replaced with the Employment Relations Act. But some of the key provisions were kept. 

One of these was around the concept of “free-riding” – in which non-union members are able to take advantage of the gains negotiated by the union. Immediately following the passing of the ECA, union density collapsed. In 1991 there were more than 500,000 union members in New Zealand. The next year it was just over 400,000. Despite the population of the country growing rapidly, that number has stayed pretty much static ever since. 

Associate professor Roper said the ECA “undermined union membership and bargaining power through the legislative entrenchment of free-riding.” That provision wasn’t repealed in the ERA. 

Faith Harrison holding individual and collective agreements from the early 2000s (Photo: Alex Braae)

Was weakening unions an intended outcome of the ECA? Bolger said he “strongly supported” an end to compulsory unionism. “The unions were substantially a political movement, and the requirement that you had to join a political movement to get a job doesn’t ring well in a free society.” 

In her capacity as a union delegate, Harrison said she still sees the impact of this routinely. There can be tensions between those on the collective, and those on individual agreements. 

“Some people will say we’re bullies, some will say nah, that’s just the way it is. Because it can cause a rift between staff.” This is particularly true when those on the collective get their pay rise several months before it filters through to those on individual agreements, even though that is basically the only difference between the two categories. 

The fight before and after the ECA 

Opposition to the Employment Contracts Act was fierce and widespread, but more muted than many would have liked. Many in the union movement had been shocked at the speed and scope of Rogernomics, and feared what would happen next. 

Massive protests took place in both big and small centres, with hundreds of thousands of people involved in demonstrations. Roper was in Temuka at the time, a town just to the north of Timaru. “When I heard that there had been a protest of 3-400 people in Temuka, I knew it was huge.” At the time, the town’s population was around 3000. 

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

Some believe that by going further and harder, the trade unions could have defeated the ECA, particularly if every union under the banner of the CTU participated in a general strike. “There were signs that the government was starting to panic,” said Roper. But some senior unionists decided that a general strike would alienate unions from public support, and so worked to prevent it. 

Bolger strongly disagrees that the government could have been swayed. To an extent, that was simply because of the crushing majority National enjoyed in parliament after the 1990 election. But even so, Bolger said he had no memory of feeling threatened by the possibility of a general strike. 

Faith Harrison with colleague and fellow First Union stalwart Terry Tuiletufuga (Photo: Alex Braae)

“There were some quite large protests, but they were totally predictable. And they didn’t – I don’t think they really played into our calculation of it,” said Bolger. “And to go back to what I said earlier, we had written most of this because we knew we had to make change and move quickly.” 

For Harrison, her fears began to be realised about two years after the ECA passed, particularly when she started understanding how differently collective agreements would be negotiated compared to the old awards system. “As time went on, it started chewing up all our penalties. We were losing this, and this. In some cases people were seeing the dollar signs, but not seeing further than that.”  

While the frequency of strikes has gone down dramatically since 1991, they still happen when unions are strong enough to believe they can win. Harrison was involved in one in 2006, when workers at Progressive distribution centres went on strike – and were then locked out by the company. 

The dispute centred around more than just pay rates, with distribution workers attempting to also get a nationwide collective agreement. Her department wasn’t involved, but Harrison and her union colleagues joined in solidarity. She said something like 20 buses went to the company’s head office to protest. “It affected all of us, regardless of which department you were in,” she said. “We didn’t move until the company met us.”

Empty shelves during the height of the 2006 Progressive Enterprises strike (Photo: Phil Walters/Getty Images)

At the height of the dispute, supermarket shelves started to run out of food. Given the importance of supermarkets to daily life, the dispute garnered significant national attention. Other unions gave financial support to locked out workers, and some threatened to take industrial action of their own in support. 

In the end, a compromise was reached. There was no nationwide collective, but pay rates were equalised across the country, and a pay rise of 4.5% was achieved. Progressive was able to claim victory, in the sense that they got back to business as usual. But the unions perhaps won the bigger victory, because they showed they still had muscles to flex. 

A new generation

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find your generation totally different to us,” said Harrison, to the Spinoff reporter born in the early 90s. “They don’t know any better. The young ones – we can go on and on about what it used to be like, but it just goes over their head.”

For better and worse, the workforce is now largely made up of individuals trying to navigate through as best they can. And for anyone who started working after 1991, that’s all they will ever have known. The social impacts of that, in how people relate to work, have been profound. 

Throughout it all, there’s one thing from the old awards that Harrison has been able to hang on to. She still gets the laundry allowance, having refused to sell it as part of new contracts being negotiated. Nothing of the sort is offered to those who come in on individual agreements now, but Harrison said she’s always been “too much of a tight-arse” to let it go. 

“Five dollars ain’t much,” she said of what she gets. “But it was better in my pocket than their pocket, as far as I was concerned.”

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer
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