Case Studies - CONSULTATION, PARTICIPATION AND CO-OPERATION BETWEEN WINSTONE PULP INTERNATIONAL, THE NDU AND THE EPMU

The Collective Agreement

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The current state of the relationship and the commitments that the parties have made to each other are described and updated in successive employment agreements.

The workforce is split into two major areas: production workers who are members of the NDU and maintenance workers who are members of the EPMU. While they share a considerable number of core employment conditions, they also have distinctive shift rosters and requirements for overtime.

The agreement provides important structures that facilitate the relationship and also detail the unique conditions of employment that describe the design and operation of work, and frame the parties’ relationship. The following is a summary of some of its key elements.

Site Consultative/Participative Committee

Arguably, one of the most important provisions in this agreement is the vehicle which encourages the parties to have ongoing dialogue on a broad range of issues, with formal rules of engagement that facilitate detailed agreements and commitments to emerge. This vehicle is the Site Consultative/Participative Committee which has existed in one form or another since at least 1992.

The Consultative Committee meets every month and provides a regular opportunity for the parties to discuss proposed changes before they need to be addressed in collective agreements.

“The Consultative Committee is really good; you can get all the information and take it out to the workforce. If the guys are informed they work as a team.”
EPMU member

Significant changes to conditions of employment have been discussed and developed at these committee meetings. One of the mechanisms that has assisted these changes, which is discussed below, is that the employees have a sense of security regarding their employment status. This provides a guarantee that, during the term of agreement, there will be no reduction in the number of employees engaged under the terms of the collective agreement.

Other key structures, systems, and agreements within the Collective Agreement relate to sick leave entitlement and usage, the recruitment and promotion of staff, the design and operation of shift rosters, remuneration systems (including salarisation and skill-based pay), the functioning of self-managed teams and the development of key performance indicators, and finally, but not least, arrangements for training. All of these provisions help support meaningful and constructive engagement between the parties.

Sick leave

The parties have had a longstanding agreement for an entitlement to paid sick leave, based on the concept of managing its use around what is reasonable. Over time, the four pages of guidelines that existed in the policy and procedure manual in 1992 have been reduced to a simple explanation that a joint union/management committee will be responsible for approving or declining payments for sick leave use. The following entitlement applies:

“The conditions for having unlimited sick leave is that it wouldn’t cost the company an arm and a leg. Because people don’t abuse it, they can see that there are added benefits there for them when it is needed. Some guys have been on paid leave of up to 12 months.

Opportunities for the abuse of sick leave have reduced because of the lower number of shifts now that people only work 140 days a year on the roster. If you are sick your mate has to turn up to work on overtime that your mate has already been paid for. So if you swing the lead, your mates give you a hard time because they are disadvantaged.

The company looked at it from the perspective that they are not going to necessarily save money. However, there is less management time required to administer it and a much better culture has developed.”

NDU delegate

The operation of the sick leave clause has to be considered in the context of the overall workplace culture that now exists and the operation of the rosters. This has meant that, despite there being a requirement of a joint union/management committee to manage the sick leave, in reality, the committee has long since ceased to meet.

Recruitment and promotion

The commitment of the parties to working together is aptly demonstrated in the process by which new staff are recruited to WPI and existing staff are promoted. As far back as 1992, the then Mill Manager agreed to what, at that stage, must have been a radical approach to recruitment and promotion, particularly against the backdrop of the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act.

Over the years, the framework has evolved but the essential principle of employee involvement has been maintained. Committee members are properly trained in their role and, in the case of the NDU, its two representatives have been involved for the last 10 years.

Shift rosters

There are a number of shift rosters in place for different occupational groups/work areas. The current rosters are designed to be self-contained, inclusive of annual leave, training days, and most overtime. A primary motivation was rosters that had the dual benefits of supporting the development of a healthier, more productive workforce.

The Pulp Mill shift roster – Salaried shift employees

The plant has a high level of automation. To this end, shift design in production areas is geared towards supporting a key driver of keeping the plant running. Restrictive work classifications have been largely removed.

The site operates five shift crews and 12-hour shifts. In addition to providing for production days, annual leave, and statutory leave days, the roster has 15 (8-hour) training days per year, scheduled on rostered days off. The roster works in tandem with salarisation which includes 100 hours’ overtime paid for and available to be worked in addition to rostered hours.
Employees are free, by mutual agreement, to swap production shifts in order to take specific days off.

Gary Godfrey, NDU delegate, believes that only the union could have designed and implemented the current shift roster and that, specifically, the impetus for change came from the leadership of Jim Jones, Wood Sector Division Secretary of the NDU and in turn from Alex Christensen, the Kariori Mill Operations Manager in 1999.

“Alex said to the union that you can come up with the shift roster that you like; provided it increases productivity and keeps people happy we will agree to it. The company provided leadership by resourcing the changes allowing the union to do the work. The change had to be delivered by their own mates/the union.”
NDU delegate

When the new shifter roster was implemented, it required an increase in the number of shifts from four to five but with no increase in staff. An outcome of this arrangement is that the workforce has the responsibility to maintain coverage when a crew member is absent.

“You need to organise your own swaps to get longer breaks. The shift roster only works because the employees themselves have a free hand in organising these shift swaps. During one year there were 900 shift swaps and only one hiccup. The guys themselves want to make it work.”
NDU delegate

The NDU are effusive in their praise of this roster and promote it on their website as a model for the wood sector on what can be achieved when working together with employers for mutual gain.

“While cover requirements become minimal, this is operated on a co-operative basis. The site has a skill-based pay remuneration structure. This is a relatively new initiative in workplace design and the success of this roster system has meant that productivity is up and workers are taking responsibility for their own cover. The roster provides workers with an extra 40 hours off work per year and creates larger blocks of leisure time and more weekends off.

This workplace design means everyone benefits, the company gets a skilled workforce, and the skills remuneration system rewards workers for their achievements, enables them to gain qualifications and personal satisfaction. It's an opportunity for workers to move forward.”

Jim Jones – Wood Sector Division Secretary NDU

Maintenance day employees – working hours pattern

Ten maintenance employees work on shifts, two per shift, in support of the production employees’ shift roster. Approximately another 30 maintenance employees are day workers, working on a fixed four-day working week from Monday to Thursday.

These hours of work attract an annualised salary. The rationale behind this pattern of hours of work was to allow for an improved work/life balance and to provide time for dedicated training. Most importantly, it was to reduce the actual number of overtime hours worked by removing the incentive to work overtime through incorporating overtime pay into salaries.

Maintenance staff are very supportive of these changes, particularly as it has given them improved quality time away from work.

“The four-day working week and salarisation was a huge change. Originally only 50% supported it; now no one would want to change it.”
EPMU delegate

“The new shift system is a win-win; there are more days off but more days available for training.”
EPMU member

Managers acknowledge that some of the benefits of the new rosters were a noticeable improvement in their staff’s attitude and that they were not as tired as they were previously.

Salarisation and skill-based pay

The principles of the salary scheme include the concept that employment is for the job and, therefore, compensation is not for the hours of attendance.

Common to both salaried shift workers and maintenance day employees is that their salarisation includes a level of pre-paid overtime.

Both rosters have in place systems to manage overtime allocation. Broadly speaking, it remains the responsibility of the workers themselves to organise this within the guidelines that additional hours or overtime shall be managed so as to ensure as equitable sharing as possible across work groups/teams and departments.

The Salaried Shift Employees Pulp Mill Shift Roster has the following arrangements:

“The old system encouraged overtime. People worked so much overtime they took sickies or days off to recover knowing that they would be ahead of the game.”
NDU delegate

The Salaried Maintenance Day Employees have the following arrangements.

“I am happy to have people focus on eliminating the overtime.”
Paul Saunders – Pulp Mill Manager

The overall impact of incorporating overtime into salaries has been a substantial reduction of the number of hours of overtime worked on-site.

Skill-based pay for Pulp Mill salaried shift employees

In 2003, there was a transition to skill-based pay for production. This included a removal of allowances, service pay and bonus payments.

The skill-based pay qualifications for production workers are comprised of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) credits and WPI Credits. The NZQA credit is a nationally recognised Pulp and Paper Qualification. The WPI credit is a site-specific qualification.

The remuneration value for each skill level is determined by a mixture of: skills and qualifications, non-skill related payments reflecting the different types of roster worked on-site, overtime component and the type of transport allowance paid.

Skill-based pay for maintenance employees is still under development.

Self-managed teams and key performance indicators

Maintenance day employees have undertaken to work in groups with the aim of being self-managed. The principles behind these arrangements are to create improvements in efficiency and performance:

This includes being responsible collectively and individually to provide cover for breakdown work outside the hours of 8am to 4pm, Monday to Friday inclusive, and both Saturday and Sunday on an on-call roster. In addition, the parties have agreed to develop mutually agreed Key Performance Indicators and targets with every effort made to achieve the targets by both management and employees sharing a common goal.

The self-managed teams are charged with the responsibility of meeting these key performance indicators. This is intended to be achieved through a process of consultation with the team leaders and team members who meet on a regular weekly basis to plan their work, discuss any problems and mutually agree on when the work is carried out, whether in normal working hours or overtime hours.
The company has undertaken to support the teams to be self-managed through training, up-skilling and guidance.

Training

WPI and the unions have shown an absolute commitment to the importance of training. The company recognised a number of years ago that up-skilling their staff was critical to their future. In 1996, the company decided that they needed their production staff to have new qualifications. They had to design qualifications for pulp and paper workers that were both site-specific and NZQA linked.

Ten years on, the evidence of this commitment is the investment in a training wing, training staff and up to 15 days’ dedicated training time for each employee. The driver behind training can be summed up in this statement:

“We need more input for the same.”
WPI Management

In the case of maintenance day employees, the intention is that training days are not to be utilised as maintenance days. Employees on training are the last resort in terms of covering work requirements.

Management advised that they have recently undertaken a survey of the training needs of all maintenance staff with a view to developing and implementing individualised training plans.

Staffing levels

The Collective also includes a redundancy agreement which details a commitment to maintaining staffing levels.

This agreement was reached during the implementation of many of the above changes and continues to be a restriction on the employer. It does not rule out agreed reductions but does prevent unilateral change.

“The question the parties have to consider before redundancy is that change creates a resource opportunity; is there any way we can use staff whose roles are changing to increase productivity and to benefit the business? If there is no logical way, then there may be no option other than the loss of jobs. ”
Jim Jones – Wood Sector Division Secretary NDU

To this point, there have been no problems with this aspect of the agreement.

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