Boning it up

DITA DE BONI talks to the woman who pushed, prodded and inspired 21 burly boners to get their National Certificates in meat processing.

Dot Waitoa will never forget the day she stood in an unemployment line in Hastings to be told the only job she would ever be able to do was pick apples. To this day, the memory of the insult makes tears sting behind her eyes.

After being made redundant with hundreds of others from the Tomoana freezing works, the words were a huge blow. She had 12 years' experience in the industry, but nothing on paper to show for it. How could she possibly raise three children, alone, on a casual fruit-picker's wage?

Worse, Waitoa and her children had just returned from a holiday in Auckland, draining their savings. There was to be no redundancy payout.

"You shouldn't have gone and spent all your money," the woman behind the counter at the unemployment office chided. "You have to wait 10 weeks for your benefit."

"I was really really upset at what she said to me, and absolutely determined never to be in that situation again," Waitoa remembers.

She meant it. She now works as a cutting supervisor and training assessor at Foodtech in Takapau, an arm of New Zealand's largest meat-processing company, Richmond, and thanks largely to her efforts, some of the toughest nuts in the factory have been the first in the country to gain National Certificates in Meat Processing.

Waitoa is modest about her achievements, unconvinced that the story of how she got herself and her colleagues certified is anything remarkable. But that is not the view of the managers at Richmond, who have been pushed by the head of their boning chain to look at further training on the factory floor, including basic literacy studies.

They had been in the process of improving the skills of their workforce anyhow, but concede that without Waitoa, it might have been much more difficult.

"She's definitely a leader, someone the others just naturally look up to," says training and development manager Michelle Hoskin.

Waitoa has certainly earned her stripes. Now in her late 40s, she came from a family of six sisters and three brothers and was expected, like the rest of her siblings, to leave school at 15 and go to work. That meant getting a job at the region's freezing works, first joining her relatives in the chillers at the historic Tomoana plant, then moving, chilled herself, to the boning area.

Boning is traditionally a man's job. It is the most physically demanding part of the chain, where bones are literally cut from carcass after carcass. Around 1000 carcasses can go through a plant each day, and in the case of beef, can weigh as much as 250kg each.

Waitoa says while the work was tough, she liked it, even though as the first female to do the job she encountered some "defensiveness" from the men.

When Tomoana was shut Waitoa - who had quickly mastered each job she'd been moved to - and her colleagues walked away with nothing.

Workers were told hours before being made redundant that they would have no job to come to the next day.

This was when Waitoa was told to go fruit picking and, indeed, she did work in the orchards for a while. But she also squeezed in extramural study for a Bachelor of Social Work from Massey University alongside picking, packing groceries, the community work that was part of her degree course, looking after an elderly lady at night, and raising her three children.

When she finally completed her degree, Waitoa was so broke she could not afford the trip to Palmerston North to collect it.

She describes holding the piece of paper "I just so badly wanted" for the first time as one of the most wonderful moments of her life. It was a purely personal pleasure, however, as her children found out only this year that their mother earned a degree while bringing them up.

After working in social work, specialising in teenage counselling, Waitoa decided she wanted a job that was less emotionally draining and more physical. Again, the meat-processing works beckoned.

She began at Richmond's Foodtech plant in 1999, gained her her Quality Assurance Diploma on the job in 2000 and was welcomed as a training assessor for the company.

"When it was explained what an assessor would do, the whole thing just clicked with me," she says. "It was exactly the type of thing I had been looking for. I could see the advantages of giving meat-processing workers recognition for their skills in a way that was on-site. On-the-job assessment would be rewarding for them, instead of forcing them to go into a classroom and sit exams, which many of them would not want to do."

Waitoa says she decided on her "guinea pigs" by choosing 12 boners, the burly guys on the shift who everyone watched. "I knew if I could convince them to have a go, everyone else would follow."

She followed them around, reading out questions from the Certificate in Meat Processing assessment booklet and getting them to answer. Although generally reluctant at first, once they realised that they actually knew the answers, many became converts.

One man, who confessed he could not read or write, was coached by Waitoa and with the help of his family - including a daughter at university - also took part. In all, 21 Foodtech boners gained their National Certificate and 60 more plant workers are training for the qualification. The company will hold a graduation ceremony this year.

Michele Hoskin says the effect of Waitoa's efforts to take her colleagues through certification have not been formally measured, but "anecdotally, the supervisors report product quality has improved". The company is now focused on researching its workforce's needs and investing in courses to help them.

Richmond, which at some of its 14 mostly rural sites is the main employer in town, estimates that around 30 per cent of its workforce cannot read and write to a suitable standard and is keen to start literacy classes. The move is not just beneficence on the part of the company. It has taken note of findings in other companies with similar workforces - such as Gisborne's Heinz Wattie's, Mt Wellington's Coca-Cola Amatil and Kawerau's Tasman Pulp and Paper - which show that increasing workers' skills can decrease absenteeism, accidents and errors in packaging and other factory functions.

"We had surveyed our workforce and were told that our training and development processes were not good enough, and also that we needed to reward and recognise our people better," says Hoskin.

The system of assessment Richmond now works on does not pass or fail people, but encourages them to formalise what they already know before moving on to other areas. Hoskin believes many of the workers are talented, but are daunted by failing traditional written examinations.

Waitoa agrees. "These people have often just been marked as failures within the school system, but they perhaps just have a different way of learning things. Some people learn things by doing them, not by reading and writing about them.

"The sense of achievement they have has paid off for them, not just in getting the qualification, but also in the fact they walk with their heads up, they look proud, they take their jobs and their skills seriously.

"It's so important that when people leave or change jobs, they can show a piece of paper and say, 'This is what I know and these are my skills,"' she continues.

"I want to be sure no one ever has to feel the way I did all those years ago."

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