Dialogue: Waterfront has found the limit of mediation

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Chris Liddell, chief executive of Carter Holt Harvey, is a cheerful, attentive, easy man to meet. You sense why the Prime Minister was anxious to rope him into mediation over the picketing of South Island ports.

Mediation is a good idea when two sides want to be in a relationship and have a disagreement. When one side no longer wants the relationship and the other cannot accept that, there is not a lot of middle ground to be found.

That is what happened. At Nelson, the stevedore employing members of the Waterside Workers Union had been loading ships for Carter Holt Harvey from 1989 until last year, when the company got a better offer.

If that is not permissible under the Employment Relations Act, it is for courts to say so. Mediation in these circumstances is for appearances

Helen Clark calculated, no doubt, that whatever the rights and wrongs of the watersiders' action, Carter Holt Harvey could do without the publicity, which was certainly running against it.

Every time a ship called at Bluff, Port Chalmers, Timaru or Nelson we read that logs were being loaded by North Islanders flown in to undercut the wages of local workers, depriving them of full-time jobs, taking cash out of the local economy. We got it wrong.

Walter Grills, a mediator for the Department of Labour, is fondly recalled by the journalists' union for a job he did some years ago.

Called into the Nelson waterfront dispute, he came to interesting conclusions.

Carter's new contractor, Mainland Stevedoring, was not trying to displace local labour. It was training up a fully South Island workforce.

Mainland was not undercutting other stevedores. In fact, it charged more for loading a ship and paid higher rates.

The savings for Carter Holt Harvey came at the other end, where the logs were more readily unloaded and delivered thanks to Mainland's method of stowing them.

When Mr Grills had run down all the red herrings and cut through the rhetoric and sentiment, he found the union had just three differences with Mainland.

The union wants full-time employees guaranteed 40 hours a week. Mainland guaranteed only 72 hours a month. They had found a way around that before their dealings broke down on the other two issues:

Mainland workers get two tea breaks in a 12-hour shift. South Island stevedores allow three.

And South Island crews have a man at the hatch of a ship to watch the man in the hold and signal to the man in the crane that it is safe to drop another bundle. Mainland gives the man in the hold a radio. Occupational Safety and Health inspectors have no complaint.

Ostensibly, that is what it was about - all the picketing, abuse and lamentation, the police, the mini-van of Mainland workers daily running the gauntlet onto the wharves. All for the want of a hatch-man and a tea break.

But it is really about the rights of business versus the power now restored to unions, and the consequences for the country.

Mr Grills, unfortunately, is a mediator, not an adjudicator. His findings of fact came in a draft report given to both sides a few weeks ago. His final report, given to the Government and released this week, has a different purpose. It is concerned less with rights and wrongs than with proposing a solution.

When one side is going about its business lawfully and the other challenges its right to do so, mediation is worse than useless. It can do an injustice. If a mugger demands your money and he is offered mediation, he is going to be awarded some of it.

Mr Grills, in his final report, has decided that Carter Holt Harvey ought to have invited tenders for the contract when it took it away from the watersiders' company last year and gave it to Mainland.

He acknowledges there was no legal obligation to run a tender, and he does not suggest that the union's preferred stevedore would have matched Mainland's service back then.

But now, he reports, "Nelson watersiders say that Stevedoring Services (Nelson) Ltd can better any proposal from Mainland. They are prepared to compete with Mainland Ltd in a trial on a ship to ship basis. They would expect Carter Holt Harvey would carry out an evaluation ... "

Carter Holt is supposed to tell the union exactly what Mainland is doing and let the union undercut Mainland's charges (and pay). It is bizarre.

It is the perverse sort of competition now common in the public service as it strives to emulate the corporate world.

After "11 hard years," Mr Grills concludes, "watersiders want to know what happened to the competitive spirit of port reforms.

"In the spirit of competition the union has made its concessions; in the spirit of competition and good faith the union says its company should be allowed to compete with Mainland." Spare us.

Open tenders, trials and evaluations may now be routine to the public sector; they are not the way competition ordinarily works. Companies win business by building associations and constantly demonstrating the quality of their service. It is intensive, sustained work, not a staged performance.

Mr Liddell's company pulled out of mediation when it saw the way it was going. He should never have been drawn into it. This was always a case for a judge.