Tairāwhiti forestry workers fear they will become collateral damage as the industry’s harvesting practices come under fierce public scrutiny. By Rebecca Macfie.
Paul’s* typical workday starts at midnight. He gets up, has a coffee, and is on the road at 1am for an hour-long drive to the site. By 2.15am, he’s ready to load up the first logging trucks of the day.
By the time he gets home at about 5pm, he’s too exhausted to do anything more than greet his wife and children, have a shower and eat his meal. He’s in bed asleep by 7pm, ready to get up at midnight to do it all again.
This is Paul’s life as a forestry worker in Tairāwhiti – five and sometimes six days a week. With three decades of experience in the sector, he’s paid about $35 an hour, excluding travel time to site.
When there’s work, the money isn’t bad. But when there’s no work – for instance, if the log price drops and logging crews are stood down – there’s no pay.
Worker insecurity is a core part of the forestry industry’s business model, as is clearfell logging and the abandonment of huge volumes of slash – harvest debris – on hillsides. It’s a business model that has enabled plantation owners to profit from the remote, steep, erosion-prone East Coast.
After Cyclone Gabrielle hit, Paul went without work and pay for a fortnight, apart from a $200 civil defence payment. With mouths to feed and $420 a week in rent to pay, anxiety in his household was acute, as always when work and wages are halted. “In previous times we’ve always got by, but the stress levels go through the roof,” he says.
In the last week of February, the contractor he’s employed by put him back to work clearing forest roads. But most of his workmates were not so fortunate: three weeks after the cyclone, they were still without wages.
The industry bodies – the Forest Owners Association, Eastland Wood Council and Forest Industry Contractors Association – don’t know how many of the region’s 1000 forestry workers are surviving at home without pay, how many have got back to work on logging sites and how many are working on repairs and clean-up.
In the meantime, the stress of the cyclone and loss of income has been made worse by abuse levelled at workers and their families by members of the public angry about the devastation caused by torrents of forestry slash to roads, bridges, beaches and private property.
“The [workers] on the ground are getting it the most,” says Paul. “They’re the ones everyone blames for leaving it [slash] behind. But at the end of the day, the ones on the ground are just doing what they’re told.”
Precarious position
For Gisborne-based Candice Gate, a forestry health and safety advocate and founder of Tāngata Humāria Charitable Trust, the precarious situation of workers such as Paul is all too familiar. “This industry has chewed them up and spat them out so many times.”
She says some haven’t had work since Christmas. With incomes turned off and on like a tap, it’s impossible for workers, families and forestry communities to thrive.
Workers are employed by logging contractors – many of them small-scale operators – who can’t pay them if they don’t have work from the forest owners. The region’s Pinus radiata crop is exported as raw logs, mostly ending up in China, where the predominant use is single-use construction formwork (eg, framing for concrete) and packaging.
Despite the low-value end uses, forest owners have been extracting strong returns. Nationwide, the industry’s pre-tax profit per worker was $361,000 in 2021, up from $167,700 in 2013, having peaked in 2018 at $553,400, according to analysis of the Annual Enterprise Survey by FIRST Union researcher Edward Miller. Foreign investors own 57 per cent of New Zealand’s commercial forests.
Bottom of the pile
Tairāwhiti is regarded as the hardest place in the country to be a forester, thanks to its difficult and erodable terrain, fragile roading network and distance to port.
Trevor Best, a former forester who worked in the region in the 1990s, has just completed a doctorate on worker wellbeing in the industry.
From his interviews with machine operators in three forestry regions, he found that although the hourly rates in Tairāwhiti are among the highest, the working conditions faced by operators there were the “most challenging by far”.
“Operators work long hours because, between the port company, forest owner and contractor, not enough operational resource is provided to meet daily production expectations within reasonable hours.”
Workers are at the bottom of a steep hierarchy – forest owners at the top, down through forest management companies and contractors – which leaves them powerless to influence conditions.
Infrastructure such as forestry roads and landing sites is expensive to build in the region, and Best says consequently they are often inadequate to cope with production expectations. That creates pressure on workers, who meet targets by putting in longer hours. The cost is borne by their families and their own health.
And although industry leaders such as Forest Owners Association president Grant Dodson argue much progress has been made in health and safety since a major inquiry in 2014, death still stalks the sector in Tairāwhiti. Tāngata Humāria’s Candice Gate counts the industry’s toll in the region at 14 over the past 12 years, including those killed by logging trucks and a child killed playing in slash on a Gisborne beach in late January. The most recent logging-worker death was 42-year-old Jason Rawiri last October.
Model under scrutiny
The industry’s operating model is now under scrutiny as never before. After ex-cyclone Hale in January triggered lahars of slash and silt, the community petitioned for an inquiry. Following the devastation of Gabrielle a month later, the government had no choice but to comply, and has set up a two-month inquiry to look into the issue in Tairāwhiti and Wairoa and recommend changes to land-use practices and regulations.
The call to end clearfell harvesting is loud and clear from local communities, environmentalists and even some in the industry. While foresters say – with backing from historical research – that much of the deep silt deposited across the countryside has originated from pastoral farming, Dodson concedes that plantation owners are “absolutely aghast” at what has happened and at “their impact on their communities”.
He says although pine forests stabilised the soil in the years after cyclones Bernie (1982) and Bola (1988), as those forests reached maturity the harvest model “got exposed as not sufficient for those highly erodable soils”.
But if the most profitable method of harvesting is banned, will owners just lock up their trees for carbon farming, or walk away from the scarred and damaged land that has already been cleared?
Best thinks either scenario is likely, in which case workers like Paul will be dumped. “There would be no need for them. And these guys have been some of the most-well-paid members of a community that has to work harder than most to provide employment.”
This is Gate’s fear. She wants workers around the table at the inquiry. And she says even if clearfelling is banned, that doesn’t fix the problem of thousands of tonnes of slash still lying on hillsides, ready to be mobilised in the next cyclone. There is plenty of work to be done to heal the land and rivers, she says, and forestry workers know this terrain better than anyone. Whatever the future direction of the industry, the skills and needs of people like Paul and his family must be at the heart of it, she says.
“They are experts at what they do; they are intelligent and innovative and they deserve a seat around that table to have an active input into what their future looks like in our region … They shouldn’t be bearing the costs of poor decision-making in the past. There is nobody that knows that land better, and that has the solutions, than the people on the ground.”
