Old Talley’s needs to learn new tricks

WorkSafe is picking a big fight.

After some staggering footage last week on TVNZ’s 1 News of filthy kit and safety concerns at the Talley’s Ashburton factory, the government’s health and safety watchdog jumped on the bandwagon with a late Friday announcement that it wants to look under the hood of the Nelson food empire’s operations.

Brandishing a handy factsheet with which to whack the company over the head, it pointed at two past prosecutions and one current action, 144 formal notifications and 43 other enforcements taken against the multi-billion-dollar Talley’s group of companies.

However, the government agency isn’t pushing too hard, stressing it’s not an investigation. One can only imagine it’s still feeling a little gun shy after its shoddy work taking a prosecution got thrown out in the district court and ended up needing the high, appeal and supreme courts to wade in. That case was over an accident where a worker at the Ashburton plant was left paraplegic, and took years to complete.

Talley’s may be putting its best foot forward in opening its doors to the WorkSafe programme and launching a separate independent investigation into the Ashburton plant, but it did threaten to injunct 1 News from running the story.

That wouldn’t surprise Talley’s sceptics of old.

The 80-year-old company has attracted the scorn of unions for its battles over the past decade, principally between its meat-processing Affco business and the Meat Workers and Related Trades Union, with heated strikes, lock-outs, name-calling and litigation a mainstay of their dispute.

Things got so bad in 2016, Affco demanded the union stop badmouthing members of the Talley family as a condition of getting back to the negotiating table, and little over a year later, Council of Trade Unions chief Richard Wagstaff singled out Talley’s as being “hell-bent on eradicating unions”.

Talley’s first got into Affco in 2001, buying a 10% stake before lifting that to almost 53% five years later, and taking it over in 2010.

Past form

The meat processor has a long history of employment disputes.

With 20-odd years of Employment Relations Authority determinations and Employment Court judgments accessible online, Talley’s and Affco pop up with a regularity that appears disconcerting, given the number of rulings against the food producer.

Thousands of dollars have been paid out in dozens of actions for unjustifiable dismissals, personal grievances, and bad faith bargaining on collective agreements.

Primary industries are fraught workplaces, full of danger, but you’re hard-pressed to find another employer that loses as often as the Talley’s group of companies has.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t processes in place.

The decisions clearly show the Talley’s group of companies have policies in place when it comes to employment relations and health and safety.

What comes across in the employment disputes is a type of rapid decision-making that then tries to backfill the process, something you tend to come across more regularly in small businesses that don’t have the resources to cross all the t's and dot all the i's.

You’d think that would make it hard for the likes of Talley’s to keep their staff, but the group still seems to keep its people, many of whom stick around for decades.

That might be down to the nature of the work – Talley’s spans coal mining in its joint venture with Bathurst Resources, dairy processing through Open Country Dairy, meat processing in Affco, frozen veges and a fishing fleet – and the fact it offers employment in areas where jobs can be scarce.

But if it was truly awful, no amount of whitewashing would hide that from the thousands of people they employ, many of whom keep going back to seasonal jobs.

Closed doors

Talley’s comes across as a hard-nosed and very private business, working behind the scenes in industry groups and keeping the family’s good works in the Tasman region largely under wraps.

However, it appears to be softening some of those edges.

Michael Talley – with whom the unions had a particular axe to grind – quietly stepped down from as a director a couple of years ago, leaving brother Peter and their sons Milan and Andrew to round out the board.

The three Talleys also sit on the board of Affco with long-time chair Sam Lewis and general manager Rowan Ogg, while Lewis and Andrew Talley are on the Open Country board with chair Laurie Margrain.

A more unexpected change was the appointment of long-time lieutenant Tony Hazlett as chief executive of Talley’s last year, which has traditionally relied on the family to run the group as managing directors.

That’s also seen a softer face on the Talley’s website, with the company jumping on the sustainability bandwagon.

Talley’s also tweaked its decades-old constitution in 2018 to cater to the appointment of an independent director, perhaps a nod to the future if not to the present.

These are welcome steps from a company that isn’t well-received in Wellington, and may simply be a recognition that the primary sector customers, workforce and wider stakeholders demand more than just affordable products, stable wages, and reliable returns.

That’s not a conclusion I was expecting to come to, but if Talley’s is adopting a new playbook that can only be a plus for corporate New Zealand.