By PETER CALDER
It wasn't meant to happen like this. As the television crews, forewarned by a press release from the Service and Food Workers' Union, gathered on the footpath, a small band of workers in white overalls and hygienic shower caps stood outside the small Mangere Bridge factory with placards and megaphones.
The sight of workers publicly protesting in support of their contract claims is unfamiliar enough these days but what made this protest even odder was the workplace.
The Mahunga Drive headquarters of Hubbard Foods Ltd are nothing flash. The reception area for management is decorated with two garishly cheery paintings (done by a staff member's wife) which depict the factory in a cornucopia of nature's bounty.
But they are dwarfed by a shelf stacked with the company's products. Breakfast cereals all, they rejoice in cute, childish names such as Berry Berry Nice or Bugs 'n' Mud.
At Hubbard Foods, says governing director R.J. "Dick" Hubbard, workers are not factory fodder but members of one big happy family. Senior management and the lowliest floor sweeper are on first-name terms and the boss says he is as interested in the "quality" of the profit as the quantity of it.
Money spent making the staff happy is seen as money well spent.
Mr Hubbard spent $150,000 taking all 120 of them to Samoa for a holiday to celebrate 10 years of operations and now, 12 years after opening, he and his staff are producing breakfasts for half a million people a day on both sides of the Tasman.
But this week, the workers' friend was embroiled in a battle with the workers, or at least with their union representatives.
At issue were union claims for a meal allowance, an extra week's annual leave and a change to overtime payments which would, says Mr Hubbard, add between 30 and 40 per cent to the company's overtime bill.
Perched on the edge of a couch in his modest office - his desk is not an endless expanse of mahogany but a small and uncluttered chain-store veneer type - the cereal maker, his narrow face and prominent ears lending him a remarkable resemblance to a young Ron Brierley, looks mournful about the industrial stoush that has attracted national media coverage.
To some extent he thinks he is being punished for his own reputation.
"I can understand that. On the one hand I say that I am passionate about social responsibility in business and on the other hand I'm portrayed as being tangled up in a messy argument over overtime rates.
"But the fact remains that of course the values and the culture of the company are very important to me."
Mr Hubbard says he feels deeply hurt by the union action, which he regards as an attack on his personal integrity.
"This is more than a tiff about overtime," he says.
"The union has put me on a pedestal because we are seen as a socially responsible company and they are implying that as a socially responsible company we will give them what they want all the time.
"But it would be socially irresponsible to run the company at a loss and put all those jobs in jeopardy and also the livelihoods of all those who depend on the company."
Social responsibility has always been the Hubbard catchphrase.
Mr Hubbard set up his company just when the disciples of Rogernomics were in the ascendancy and the new right had their hands on the tiller of New Zealand's great economic miracle.
His principle: a company needs to look beyond profit as the reason for its existence.
He speaks of it as putting emphasis on the quality of the profit. "How you derive it, whether you get involved in things that are questionable ethically or morally, is as important as how much of it you derive."
Everyone is on first-name terms - Mr Hubbard says, perhaps tellingly, that he would "probably growl if somebody called me Mr Hubbard."
"I don't wear a tie because one of the comments that was made in one of the staff meetings was that people feel a bit funny talking to me when I'm wandering around in a tie, so now I only wear a tie when the bank manager or customers come."
Likewise there are no corporate car parks. It's first come first served, the boss says, and if he gets in late he parks his Mitsubishi with 170,000km on the clock "down the back with all the containers."
His good intentions are evident but it's hard to escape the impression that there is something of the benevolent despot about this corporal of industry.
That nasty word "paternalism" surfaced during a television interview when the dispute erupted on Monday.
It was first raised by the interviewer but enthusiastically picked up by the union rep and applied to a plan "which has become somewhat tangled up in this affair" - to distribute 10 per cent of pretax profit to staff according to length of service only.
"Someone who has swept the factory floor for 10 years," Mr Hubbard explains with evident pride, "will get 10 times as much as an accountant who has only been there for one year."
He rejects, more in sorrow than in anger, the suggestion that he is paternalistic.
"It's a slightly derogatory term and I feel a bit hurt by it," he says. "I would certainly call myself benevolent. Paternalistic means you make the decisions on behalf of everyone, that you are the father figure who looks down and decides for everyone.
"But the fact is that whenever I'm in here, which is a fair whack of the time, I make a point of wandering around, listening to staff, picking up vibes, comments and trying to get in tune."
How well tuned he is may be a matter of debate. One worker I speak to says the staff respect Mr Hubbard as a good employer but are reluctant to speak up if something is bothering them.
At least part of that barrier is cultural, the worker says.
Pacific Islanders make up more than 95 per cent of the staff and chiding the boss does not come naturally.
"Most of them won't say anything in front of Dick and because they don't say anything, he thinks they're happy," the worker says.
"If he finds out something is wrong he's likely to say, 'Why didn't they just come and see me?' but it's not that easy."
Yet Mr Hubbard does not accept that decisions made on behalf of staff - that they would be better off with a trip to Samoa than with a $2-an-hour wage hike, for example - are paternalistic.
"I don't believe in running the company like a total democracy.
"That's an unworkable and unrealistic concept.
"I believe in stakeholder theory, which holds that management has to factor in the wishes of all the stakeholders - staff, customers, suppliers, whoever has got an interest in the company's success.
"But because we stand for social responsibility we have a special duty: if anything happened to Hubbard Foods the critics of social responsibility would say, 'See, that's what happens when you try that sort of nonsense'."
<i>Calder at large</i> - 'Father Hubbard' feels a victim of his own success
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