With James Ritchie, of NZDWU

 

We must not waste this historical opportunity to organize globally

 

The New Zealand Dairy Workers Union (NZDWU) participated very actively in the Conference through its large delegation. Sirel interviewed James Ritchie, NZDWU National Secretary, to learn more about this union, which is one of the most solid trade unions in the dairy sector worldwide

 

-Could you describe NZDWU?

-Our union is an industry union, so that means that we only have members in the dairy industry. Our members work in the factories, in the dairy factories; they transport the milk by milk tankers from the farms to the factories. We also have members who work in distribution, warehousing, in laboratories, and also in the manufacture of consumer goods in New Zealand.

 

We have 7,000 members and our structure is that each region elects representatives onto our national executive, or our board. We have a president and a vice president that are elected by the whole membership. And I am appointed by that Executive Committee and the whole Congress of all of our workplace representatives, site delegates, that takes place once a year.

 

We also have a very strong Women’s Committee within our union, an Indigenous Peoples Committee in the union, and a Welfare Committee.

 

- When was the Union formed?

- The union was created in the 1920s, late 1920s or early 1930s, and it began as several regional unions. It was very important in the 1970s and the 1980s, the work that was done to make our union truly a national union. We’ve been much more effective since we became a national union then when we had different regional structures.

 

- There have been some political changes in New Zealand and this has affected unions. Can you describe these changes and tell us how this has actually affected unions?

-I need to go a little bit back in history. Before the 1980s New Zealand had a very high density of unionization, it was more like the Nordic countries than many other places in the world.

 

And then in the 1980s a government was elected that went through a process of deregulation and privatization. And I’m very sad to have to have to say that this was a Labor government that did this. The one thing they did not do was deregulate the labor market.

 

But in 1990 a Conservative government was elected, and in 1991 it introduced legislation that completely deregulated the labor market. So there were very strong antiunion laws in New Zealand from 1991 through to 2000, when this Conservative government was in power.

 

And it was a very, very difficult time for unions. So that union density went from over 50 percent of the workforce down to less than 20 percent of the workforce.

 

As of 2000 there was a very good Labor government in power, with much better legislation. And slowly we have been growing back our influence and our strength. But unfortunately last year a Conservative government was elected again.

 

They have introduced one law to make it so that employers can dismiss workers in small workplaces in the first 90 days of employment. They have plans to attack the holidays, people’s holiday rights. They also have plans to reduce workers’ ability to get justice if they are unjustifiably dismissed. They are talking about restricting access of unions to worksites, and collective bargaining is much more difficult under the conservative government because the employers are buoyant about their new strength with their friends in government. So the whole climate and environment in which unions work is much harder over the last two years.

 

-In particular, what is the situation of NZDWU?

-Our Union remains a very effective and strong union. We have gone through a very difficult dispute with an employer who has begun operating in New Zealand and is a very antiunion employer. And they have just established in the dairy industry. They are local interests: a company called Talleys that has run under the name of “Open Country Dairy.” And this Talleys company operates throughout the food sector in New Zealand.

 

They are in fishing, sea food, frozen vegetables, meat, and now dairy. They use all the known tactics to try and stop the organization of their workforce. We recruited many workers in one plant and we tried to bargain a collective agreement.

 

We ended up on strike, then we were locked out. We were fighting legally, we were fighting on the pickets. And we settled that after 37 days. It was a very tough dispute and we got a collective agreement. But many workers did not want to go back and work for this employer. So we’re still very weak on this job.

 

One of the challenges is to work with other unions to organize in this very, very tough employer. This employer also is working with a Singaporean investment company, an investment company from Singapore that is called Olam International. There is a lot of money that is going into this company.

 

Our big challenge is to fight these antiunion companies and try and organize them. Otherwise our major dairy company, Fonterra, will start to erode, or try to erode, terms and conditions. Because they have good terms and conditions. But this other company does not. They have very low terms and conditions, and so it puts pressure on Fonterra. So this is a very difficult situation for us.

 

However, we remain very positive. We remain very well organized. And throughout this year and until next year, when we begin our collective bargaining for our largest Fonterra agreement, we’re going to focus on a theme, which is protecting our collective agreements and fighting casualization and contracting out and the use of labor agencies, labor-hire agency firms for staff.

 

We have very good protections in our Collective Agreements on the use of temporary staff, casual staff, and contractors. So we see the next period as defending those protections and trying to improve them.

 

-Why are you affiliated to the IUF?

-Our affiliation to the IUF is very important to us, because we work in a country in which the dairy industry is the major export earner for New Zealand. It is a vital industry in New Zealand. And our largest company,  Fonterra, is a transnational corporation now.

 

It is operating in many parts of the world. It is operating in Latin America through Chile and a company called Soprole, which Fonterra owns. But also it is in partnership with Nestlé, through Dairy Partners of America (DPA), in many parts of Latin America.

 

Our Union believes that we must work very hard through the IUF. First of all to assist workers who are employed by Fonterra around the world, as an act of solidarity. Secondly to assist workers around the world and work with them in cooperation and solidarity with all dairy workers, and also with the wider family under the IUF.

 

We see this as an important union work for solidarity. It is also important work to defend our own terms and conditions in New Zealand. Because no country alone can protect good wages and conditions. They must work with unions elsewhere around the world so that we all try to raise standards and protect standards.

 

So our affiliation with the IUF is vital for our work in New Zealand.

 

-This is your second time in Latin America, right?

-Yes, we were very privileged to be hosted once before by ATILRA (Argentine Association of Dairy Industry Workers) in 2005. That union showed us great friendship, warmth and solidarity. And during that visit, with the assistance of the Rel-UITA (the IUF Latin American Regional Office), we had some discussions about how unions could cooperate.

 

Soon after that visit we had a delegation from ATILRA come to New Zealand, led by its general secretary, Héctor Ponce. In that visit we signed a cooperation agreement between ATILRA and our Union, which pledges that we will share information, we will cooperate, we will find new means of effective solidarity and we will contribute to research and development of the dairy industry, not just in Argentina and in New Zealand, but throughout Latin America, and we will use our influence in the Asia and Pacific region to continue to organize and support workers in dairy throughout that region as well.

 

-What is your opinion on the IUF Conference and its outcome?

-The Conference exceeded my expectations. I thought it was an extremely well-run conference, with contributions from delegates from a large number of countries. So, I’m very pleased with the conference.

 

There was a good background paper from Enildo Iglesias, from Rel-UITA. there were great contributions from the IUF, from its global secretary Ron Oswald and from the IUF Latin American Secretariat. And there was also great leadership shown by ATILRA in this conference.

 

So I was very pleased. There was a lot of information, and a lot of challenges become apparent.

 

What is very important now is what happens next. And I think that, following this Conference, we have an opportunity to cooperate and organize globally in the dairy sector, a better opportunity than we have ever had before. I think that if we don’t take up this opportunity, then we are throwing away, we are wasting a historical opportunity that may not come up again for several decades.

 

So we must now find the means by which we take this conference forward, to understand more about the dairy sector, understand who the major players are, who the major companies are, where they are operating, where there is good union strength, where organization is weak; and try and work with each other to strengthen that organization, to build better understanding about the issues of workers’ rights, about the issues of the environment, about the issues of dairy companies and operations needing to support rural communities, about the importance of a good agriculture to support communities and the role of these dairy companies.

 

The message we have to spread is that all of the wealth generated by dairy production needs to be equally or fairly shared throughout the whole community.

 

There are also issues of food safety and health and safety as well.

 

These are the important aspects that have come out of this conference that need much further work if we are to protect workers' and their families' and their communities' rights throughout the globe who rely on the dairy industry for their livelihoods.