Listen
While many big businesses are still posting big profits, workers and consumers are being squeezed by the economic downturn - and industrial unrest is on the rise. One business journalist tells Mediawatch reporting now needs to apply the same scrutiny it brings to politics to our businesses and their leaders.
Bay of Plenty Times reporting developments in the Kawerau mill lockout. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
"You're destroying families. That's what I'm saying to Essity,” Kawerau paper mill worker Bill told RNZ’s Midday Report this week.
He described the personal toll of the lockout enforced by his employer Essity, now in its second month.
“At first I could see their point of view but jeez, I'm starting to hurt," said Bill, who supports two grandkids with complex medical needs.
He told RNZ he had already had to go his bank to work out how to continue their care.
Bill asked how Essity could do this to its workers, given the extra hours they'd put into keeping the factory running during the Covid-19 crisis.
"When Covid was hitting, people were dying, the whole mill came together. We all did overtime and so forth because we knew we had to supply the public with the paper. We all got through it, and all we wanted was a bit of thanks and respect from the company and what do we get? Nothing," he said.
Before the lockout began on 9 August, Essity offered a wage increase of 14.7 percent over three years, comprising a 3 percent increase every year plus an additional cash payment this year.
Lockouts are relatively rare in Aotearoa. The last one was in 2016, when Talley's locked out meat workers in Wairoa.
This week, The Panel’s panelist Alexia Russell said Essity’s move reminded her of the days when industrial disputes made the headlines far more often.
"Those were the days when we actually had an industrial affairs reporter who was working full-time on things like lockouts. I remember a couple of years ago . . . some of our reporters didn't even know what a lockout was. Are we going backwards?" she asked.
In days gone by, more than half of workers in New Zealand were unionised. Today only about one in five belong to a trade union.
But unions are once again on the rise in many countries overseas, with high-profile campaigns for worker rights in the US and the UK making headlines - and also making an impact on social media.
The impression that companies are doing better than ever while workers are getting poorer in real terms could also put workers at odds with employers again here.
Last week TVNZ’s 1News listed huge profits recorded by our power gentailers.
"Excessive profits that are hurting customers are being condemned as some of our biggest companies are making big bucks despite fears of a recession," said presenter Simon Dallow.
Dallow went on to point out that the profits of Meridian, Genesis and Mercury Energy went up by a total of $1.3 billion over the last year. Genesis alone made $221 million more, up 600 percent on the previous year.
Banks have recorded big profits too, while Fletcher Building’s earnings - up 42 percent to $432 million raised eyebrows given the recent GIB board crisis and its refusal to pay back the $68 million it took in wage subsidies.
Another business that’s been raking it in over the last few years is Purex manufacturer Essity.
It posted a $1.5 billion profit globally in 2021, partly on the back of all that Covid-era toilet paper panic-buying that had Bill and his colleagues working overtime.
This wave of sunny profit announcements has coincided with interest rate hikes which hit workers hardest, prompting warnings from commentators and business about a possible "wage price spiral".
All this is starting to chafe with pro-worker representatives and commentators.
In a column for Stuff, Morgan Godfery argued workers shouldn’t be asked to bear the brunt of inflation while corporations post massive windfall gains.
In the Herald, columnist Shane Te Pou asked why rising corporate profits don’t attract the same lingo about a destructive ‘spiral’.
On RNZ’s Afternoons First Union researcher Edward Miller argued corporate profits are a bigger driver of inflation than wages. He said they spiked 39 percent - or $20b - in the year to March 2022, while wages rose by just $11b to $12b in the same period.
Few commentators though have been as withering about big business as Rebecca Stevenson of interest.co.nz.
When National leader Christopher Luxon told a UK audience last month that he thought New Zealand businesses had gone “soft” during Covid-19, she responded with a searing opinion piece agreeing with his premise on interest.co.nz.
It took aim at what she called “a rat king of regulatory capture”, which keeps business profits high at the expense of just about everyone else, particularly workers and consumers.
"We’re being milked for everything we have or ever could aspire to have, so those at the top of this grotesque structure of wealth-hoarding, asset capture and feral network of lobbyists and associations can keep getting richer," she wrote.
Stevenson is not your usual polemicist political commentator. She previously worked as a business editor for Stuff, BusinessDesk and The Spinoff.
She said more business reporters could take a more sceptical, or even adversarial stance toward our biggest corporations.
"I think we see a lot of coverage at the moment with people saying they can't get workers, but what are they offering them? How much is the pay? What is their background as employers? Are they good employers? So I think we do need to be much more critical of these stories."
That might mean editors making conscious efforts to include the perspective of workers or everyday consumers alongside the businesses’ interests, she says.
"You often see the same faces, the same association heads, the same people. Let's not talk to those people so much anymore. Maybe you want to take a statement from them. That's fine. But do we always have to lead with the same people? I don't think so," she said.
Stevenson was in favour of a return to the days Russell described on The Panel, where reporters are assigned to cover industrial relations.
She also encouraged more people to write genuinely critical commentary on business and the regulatory environment governing its conduct - though she understood why that might not happen.
"Writing opinion is quite frightening. In New Zealand we have fairly stringent defamation laws. And as a reporter you can be held personally liable. These things keep me up at night, and I imagine it's probably similar for other reporters," she said.
"But it gives us an opportunity to really look at some issues in a really hard way. I'm not happy with the how things are at the moment and I want there to be more fairness than I see at the moment," she told Mediawatch.