ON Thursday December 28, The Fiji Times published a different kind of article about the ongoing industrial drama at the Air Terminal Services headquarters — the story of Jiajiana Vatanitawake, a 22-year ATS veteran.
Jiajiana started work at ATS in 1995 as a washer. She worked her way up the job ladder, increasing her hourly pay along the way. But the hourly pay rates have not increased for 11 years.
Also in The Fiji Times that day was the story of Mereseini Tagidrau, who noted that employees had received no cost of living adjustments since 2006.
The forgotten lot
These are the people who seem to be forgotten in the media coverage of this confrontation. After the employers and the unionists have issued their press releases and had their photo opportunities for the day, people like Jiajiana and Mereseini must return to thinking about the same everyday issues that affect all of us.
They must get food on to the table three times a day, organise their children for the holidays and the coming school year, and meet the many daily challenges, small and large, that families present.
Both Jiajiana and Mereseini say that they can only make ends meet by working overtime — sometimes an extra 30 hours per week.
When we think of exploited employees, we think of greedy businessowners — the sort that government ministers publicly attack for not paying their taxes. But this employer is a company that is 51 per cent Government-owned, which has not given its employees an increase in pay for 11 years.
What is interesting about ATS is that it is also 49 per cent-owned by a trust owned by its employees. When ATS was launched, more than 37 years ago, it was presented as a model company that others could copy.
The employees would own shares. They would benefit from their own hard work and sacrifice in the form of the dividends. Yet no dividends have been paid for years.
Government domination
ATS’s Articles of Association provide that the employee trust (which after all has 49 per cent of the shares) should have three out of seven board members.
It seems that, although the board chair is supposed to be chosen by both sides, in 2015, the Government appointed its own chairman, Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
Then early this year, I am told, two of the three employee board members were removed from the ATS board, meaning there is only one left.
This means that the remaining employee representative will always be isolated and alone, consistently outvoted and without moral or even rhetorical support.
Yet this company is supposed to be a model of partnership between the government and employees.
ATSET vs ATS
The next step in this saga appears to be the employees learning that the Government and ATS management were discussing the sale of their 49 per cent stake in the company to Fijian Holdings Ltd, a large investment company all but controlled by the Government.
At that point, it seems the employees decided it was clearly time for a meeting to work out what to do. They did not give the required one week’s notice for time off for a meeting of the employee trust. That meant that 70 staff members left their jobs for three hours to go to the meeting.
ATS responded by suspending the 70. ATS maintains that these employees were suspended, not locked out. Even so, suspension for a three-hour absence from work seems harsh. Things then escalated when 200 more ATS employees walked off the job in support of the suspended employees.
Nearly two weeks on, while ATS management and the unions maintain their war of words through the news media, nothing more has happened.
The Employment Minister has declared the workers’ action an “illegal strike”, but the workers are unmoved. His bureaucrats have “facilitated” some kind of mediation, but that has clearly been a failure. The logical thing for the minister to do following his declaration was to also declare that workers return to work and declare the lockout illegal. But he hasn’t.
ATS management, meanwhile, has delivered the letters to employees’ homes demanding that they admit they were wrong and return to work to face disciplinary action.
ATS management is now boasting that it is getting a big response to the job vacancies it has advertised.
Questions
So while ATS management reads its rule books and writes its letters and makes its media statements, I wonder if it has stopped to reflect on how things have come to this.
* Why does a company which is supposed to be a model of employer/worker co-operation not have proper workers’ representation on its board as the company rules require?
* Why are the Government and Fijian Holdings Ltd talking about buying the workers’ 49 per cent shareholding without the workers themselves knowing about it?
* And how can a company owned 49 percent by workers hold down workers’ pay for 11 years, but not even produce enough profits to pay the workers’ trust a dividend that the workers can share out every year?
Most people are loyal to their employers. They would think very carefully about whether they would risk their jobs by confronting them. So, what has happened that so many employees feel they must take that risk?
Why have things become so toxic in this workplace that the employees believe industrial confrontation is their best solution?
We can all argue the legalities about employees leaving their workplaces, whether it was right to suspend them or whether there is a lockout and whether it is fair that the employees have now been sacked.
That will occupy the government officials and the tribunals for many weeks and perhaps enrich a few lawyers.
But the board and management of ATS have a much bigger set of questions to ask themselves.
The first of these is — how did it come to this?
* Lt-Col Pio Tikoduadua is a former government minister and president of the National Federation Party. Views expressed are his own and not of this newspaper.
