Roger Award Winners Announced

Taejin Fisheries wins

 Rio Tinto & King Salmon equal runners up

Government & United Fisheries share the accomplice award

The nominators of Taejin Fisheries also nominated United Fisheries Ltd and the NZ Government for the Accomplice Award.

The winners were announced at an event in Wellington on May 1st.

Roger Award 2012 Winner 

Taejin Fisheries won because, in the words of the judges: “The formula is simple: You’ve got a resource, turn to the Third World for cheap, unorganised ‘slave labour’ in order to process that resource. In this case you lease your fishing quota to foreign charter vessels owned by a South Korean company about whom information is non-existent, which employs Indonesian crew on their two trawlers, Melilla 201 and Mellila 203”. The judges cite a seminal report into the NZ fishing industry which itemises foreign companies using “fraudulent documentation, exploitation, intimidation, coercion, blacklisting, inhumane working conditions, brutal beatings, sexual assault and even murder”.

2012 Accomplice Award
.

Indonesian crewmen protest at United Fisheries'
Christchurch head office in support of 89 crew
members who they say are owed a year's wages.

United Fisheries Ltd and the Government shared the Accomplice Award. “The Christchurch firm United Fisheries happily continued to charter vessels from Taejin Fisheries with no apparent serious effort to ensure decent living conditions, pay, and working hours, for the crews on the boats. The Government continued to issue work permits for new crew to be employed offshore without regard to press reports of ill-treatment… There is no solid financial information available about Taejin Fisheries, which is not registered in New Zealand. United Fisheries is a closely held family-owned New Zealand company. New Zealand’s financial reporting regime allows such companies to keep their financial affairs private … United Fisheries’ role in the appalling treatment of foreign fishing crews damages New Zealand’s international reputation in the fishing industry, and undermines the clean and green image New Zealand likes to project in foreign markets… The fact that United Fisheries is a family-owned company is not a valid reason for exempting it or other economically significant companies from filing on the public record audited financial reports”.

 Roger Award 2012 Runner Up

Rio Tinto, the equal runner-up, is the majority owner of the Bluff aluminium smelter. It has been a regular finalist. It was the defending champion, having won the 2011 Roger Award and was runner up in both 2009 and 08. The Judges’ Report succinctly summarised its 50 year history in NZ as: “Once the deal was done, it had us by the balls and has continued to squeeze ever since… In 2012, it cried wolf because of the drop in world aluminium prices and tried to insist on rewriting its’ contract with Meridian (which already had some slack in terms of world aluminium prices), sacked some workers and once again threatened to close” (behaviour which it has ramped up in 2013).

King Salmon is the other equal runner-up. “Marine farms are problematic in an area like the Sounds, as they are an industrial activity, generating noise, odour, traffic, lighting, damaging habitat, affecting water quality, and they constitute a privatising of public water space”. Locals objected to its major expansion plans, which were prohibited by the Marlborough District Council; the Government sent the case to the newly created Environmental Protection Agency as a matter of “national significance”, and it gave the go ahead for half the requested new salmon farms. “This move to sabotage local democratic processes is a particularly insidious one”.

Read the full Judges’ Report

Finalists were

• the Australian-owned banks (ANZ/ASB/BNZ/Westpac) collectively)
• BAT (British American Tobacco) 
• IAG (Insurance Australia Group)
• King Salmon
• Newmont Waihi Gold
• Rio Tinto
• Taejin Fisheries Co. Ltd 
• Vodafone 

Judging Criteria 

The Judges 

Checkout some of the background on the slave ships 

September- October (2011) issue of
Professional Skipper magazine covered
 the practices of Foriegn Charter Vessels
fishing in NZ territorial waters.
Click Here

Not in New Zealand´s waters, surely?
Labour and human rights abuses
aboard foreign fishing vessels
(University of Auckland 2011)
Click Here 

                          

Let The “Too Big To Fail” Smelter Fail

Too big to fail: Rio Tinto’s Bluff smelter was decades ahead of the fashion

“Too big to fail” was the mantra of the robber banks and other transnational financial sharks during the Global Financial Crisis, which remains ongoing. This left the victims to pay for the costs of the crime, while the corporate criminals walked away scotfree and kept their loot. The people of Cyprus are the latest to experience firsthand just how this works.

In this country, Rio Tinto’s Bluff smelter was decades ahead of the fashion. Every time that Rio Tinto feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. It does so in the knowledge that it has always been deemed “too big to fail” by the succession of Governments, both National and Labour, that it has effortlessly outmanoeuvred for more than 40 years. This time it is trying it on as a tactic to try to pressure Meridian over its power price contract, on which the ink is barely dry and which only took effect in January.

Stop crying wolf, stop using your New Zealand workers
 as disposable pawns in your cynical game,
stop holding Southland and the country to ransom

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) calls Rio Tinto’s bluff (pun intended). Stop crying wolf, stop using your New Zealand workers as disposable pawns in your cynical game, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you. The smelter is the country’s single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for more than 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available for any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country.

How ironic that Rio Tinto has rejected the Government’s offer of a short term subsidy. It wants a long term one, preferably indefinitely. Presumably, this is in addition to the massive taxpayer subsidy it has been receiving continuously for more than 40 years, in the form of the Manapouri power station built with public money for its exclusive use (and let’s never forget that men died building that); and the  cheapest and most secret power price rate in the country bar none. Not good enough apparently, it still wants more.
Rio Tinto won the 2011 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand (and was runner up in both 2009 and 08). It was nominated for lobbying two Governments “over several years to secure excessive allocations of free emissions units under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme”.

The Roger Award judges agreed, concluding: “It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer is subsidising a transnational corporate rort of the emissions trading scheme… The significance of this stance cannot be underestimated; a major transnational player within New Zealand materially benefits from its non-compliance with a strategy to reduce global climate change and its ecological effects”.

“It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer
is subsidising a transnational corporate rort of the
emissions trading scheme

The Judges’ Report concludes that the company has a 50 year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning successive New Zealand governments into paying massive subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly greenwashed face to the media and the public. Its milking of the Emissions Trading Scheme is entirely in character”.

The extremely detailed Financial Analysis reveals that the smelter’s claimed benefits to NZ, namely annual export earnings of “around $1 billion” are, in fact, overstated by four fifths.

The full, damning, 2011 Roger Award Judges’ Report can be read at here

Rio Tinto is, once again, a finalist in the 2012 Roger Award, the winner of which will be announced in Wellington on May 1 ()

In short, it is a liability to New Zealand, not an asset.

What about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? Indisputably, the smelter closing would have a negative impact on Invercargill and Southland. But let’s keep a sense of proportion – in disaster terms it doesn’t compete with Christchurch having lost 185 lives, 50,000 jobs, and sustained $30 billion worth of damage in a matter of seconds on February 22, 2011. If Christchurch can get back in the saddle after that, Invercargill should be able to handle the smelter closure and its attendant job losses. As a plus, the city will be able to shake off its unhealthily dependent situation as a company town with its local government at the beck and call of this transnational bludger.

The tobacco industry used to employ a lot of people here, but that was deemed to be no longer in the public interest. Lacing lollywater with booze and selling it to kids supports a lot of jobs too but there’s plenty of public demand to get rid of that particular industry as well. The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. History is full of examples of horrible industries that kept people in jobs (such as the slave trade) but which were banned and/or abolished for the greater good.

This smelter constitutes a crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for its entire existence.

In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.

It would be a great bonus to have 15% of the country’s electricity suddenly available and no longer committed to one smelter. There would no excuse for the moneygrabbing power companies not to cut their prices (we’ve been falsely promised lower power prices since the “electricity reforms” of the 1990s). And, we’re told, it would drive down Meridian’s attractiveness to would be buyers as part of the Government’s assets sale process. How ironic that the selfishness and ruthlessness of one transnational corporation could bugger up the plans to flog off more of our public assets to transnational corporations.

Also see

• Tracing the history of Tiwai Pt 

Roger Award venue announced

The Roger Award Ceremony for the worst worst transnational corporation operating in Aotearoa - New Zealand in 2012 will be held:

6.00 pm

.

May 1st 2013

.

Level 6, PSA House

.

11 Aurora Terrace

.

Wellington Central

map

Don’t forget to take part in the inaugural 'Peoples Choice' Award VOTE HERE 

Announcing the 2012 Roger "People’s Choice Award "

Who is the Worst 

Transnational Corporation

 Operating in Aotearoa - New Zealand?

.

For the first time, the organisers of the Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand are inviting the public to have their say by voting online for the People’s Choice winner.

This is an online poll only; the field is restricted to the eight finalists from the 2102 Roger Award listed at the People’s Choice Website, along with brief information about why each of them was selected; the People’s Choice winner will be announced at the same May Day event in Wellington at which the Roger Award judges announce their winner. 

The judges’ choice is the actual winner of the Roger Award and, as always, will be accompanied by a detailed Judges’ Report and Financial Analysis. There will be no equivalent reports about the People’s Choice winner.

VOTE NOW!

Lest We Forget

Warner Brothers Won 2010 Roger Award For “Hobbit” Affair

Amidst all the hype and hysteria of today’s world premiere of “The Hobbit”, let’s refresh our memories about its ugly beginnings a couple of years ago.

Warner Brothers won the 2010 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand despite being a first time nominee (in racing terms, it was “the bolter” of the field). The Judges’ Statement said: ''The ‘Hobbit’ affair was an extraordinary example of transnational capital interfering in local politics, and overtly influencing the actions of the NZ Government (which richly deserves its Accomplice Award). It was an overt display of bullying that humiliated every New Zealander, and deliberately set out to do that… such interference in New Zealand politics sets a precedent for all future negotiations between the New Zealand government and transnational corporations”. It won because of its interference in NZ politics and governance and treatment of employees and contractors.

John Key and his Government won the Accomplice Award for their ignoble role in the whole Warner Brothers/”Hobbit” affair. “It has apparently given rise to a whole new men’s fashion garment in Hollywood – Warners of Wellington trousers. They have an arrow printed on the seat, and the words ‘kiss here’”. The judges announced a special Quisling Award for Sir Peter Jackson (to be awarded to the individual New Zealander who does the most to facilitate foreign control of New Zealand), once again for his role in the Warner Brothers/”Hobbit” affair. “Sir Peter Jackson – you are fully worthy of joining that other blackened knight, that other exemplar in selling out your country to foreign corporations, the one for whom this award is named – Sir Roger Douglas”. So, a triple sweep for the movie industry – the Roger, the Accomplice and the Quisling. Says it all really, doesn’t it.

The full 2010 Roger Award Judges’ Report can be  downloaded here

And, to quote from Foreign Control Watchdog 125, December 2010:

The sorry spectacle of the Prime Minister falling over himself to appease Warner Brothers to ensure that the giant American transnational corporation would condescend to continue to film “The Hobbit” in New Zealand was a perfect illustration of the global modus operandi of such corporations, aided and abetted by their local collaborators, and facilitated by craven and wilfully naïve politicians. How appropriate that a film about an imaginary feudal society should be made possible by such a textbook example of modern day corporate feudalism in action, complete with forelock tugging grovelling from the powers that be, mass hysteria from the media, and some Oscar-worthy prima donna behaviour by the knights of the shire, Sir Peter Jackson and Sir Richard Taylor. The American studio bosses must have been falling over themselves with laughter when they realised that all they had to do to get their own way was to threaten to take their bat and ball and go elsewhere (a standard threat from transnational corporations, sometimes enacted, but much more often used as a bargaining ploy to extract concessions. It has been a standard tactic for decades from the transnational owners of the Bluff aluminium smelter, to cite the most high profile example). 

Quisling Award winner

So John Key made himself personally available when the Hollywood moguls flew into Wellington and proceeded to give them even more tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars (isn’t it interesting how politicians and the media never wax indignant about these subsidies to Big Business or demand that something be done about these beneficiaries of such massive corporate welfare, surely the biggest bludgers in the country?). And just for good measure Key got the labour laws changed so that anyone working in the film industry is now classified as a self-employed contractor, not an employee, which makes things a lot easier for the film industry employer, who now has no responsibility for things such as tax, annual leave, sick leave, ACC levies, etc, etc. All of that becomes the responsibility of the worker. The hysteria and political overkill was in reaction to one Supreme Court case where a film industry worker had been ruled to be an employee, not a contractor. In fact, so sweeping was the scope of the political gutlessness that even kneejerk backers of National and the bosses felt uneasy enough to express doubts about it in editorials and columns.

Divide And Rule

There was something extremely ugly about the anti-union and anti-worker hysteria which was very rapidly whipped up, including heaping personal abuse and threats on Helen Kelly, the head of the Council of Trade Unions (always disparagingly referred to by the media as “union boss”) and high profile Actors’ Equity spokespeople such as TV star Robyn Malcolm. Particular venom was reserved for the Australian representative of the union which was invited by Actors’ Equity to help them with their industrial campaign for better conditions and security of employment – how ironic that foreign-owned media crusading on behalf of a gigantic American film company should attack an Australian union and its staff for practising international workers’ solidarity. It’s easy to see how fascism can get going –“your problems are all the fault of those immigrants/gypsies/Jews/Australian unions”. Sir Peter Jackson, especially, revealed a very unattractive side of his carefully cultivated avuncular personality (watching him on TV reminded me of his old mate Gollum, fixated about “my precious”). Whenever high achievers such as Jackson are criticised, the standard response from their media apologists is that “this is the tall poppy syndrome”. Bullshit. In this case Jackson’s behaviour was reprehensible and he showed clearly whose side he is on in the faceoff between “his” workers and the studio boss.

Divide and conquer has always been a standard, and well proven, tactic of colonisers and this nasty little exercise in corporate colonisation proved no exception. So there were “we want to work” rallies by film workers stampeded into being frightened about their jobs. All par for the course – local collaborators and their stooges have played a vital, if ignoble, role throughout history. They were in the slave trade; Aotearoa would not have been colonised by the British if not for the help of “loyal Maori”. Once again, how appropriate that a film about an imaginary feudal society should feature the loyal serfs being mobilised to fight the rebellious ones and being misled by their knightly lords and masters (with the help of the Government and media) into seeing those nasty Australian-backed “union bosses” as being their enemy, rather than the huge American film company which demanded that their pay, conditions, job security and union protections be reduced or eradicated before withdrawing its threat to find cheaper and more servile labour elsewhere. Obviously Warner Brothers is now satisfied that the NZ film industry can offer suitably cheap and docile workers. The whole ”Hobbit” fiasco shows very clearly that this is a Government that will go to any lengths to grovel to the transnationals and trample on NZ workers and unions in the process (not to mention blithely giving those transnationals tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars as unabashed corporate welfare).

Text CAFCA Media Release

Cartoon Ian Dalziel

Blistering CNN report calls Kiwis 'desperate' over Hobbit

Out of the Shadows

The Trans-Pacific Partnership

.
&.

What they won't tell us and why we should be worried about it

Monday 26th November

.

5.30 pm

 

Knox Presbyterian Church Lounge

28 Bealey Avenue

.

Christchurch
map

Two of the world's foremost critical voices on international free trade and investment agreements — Lori Wallach and Jane Kelsey — will deliver presentations and take questions on the Trans- Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a treaty being negotiated between the United States, New Zealand, and 9 other countries on the Asia-Pacific rim.

The TPPA is one the biggest political issues facing New Zealand, but one of the least publicized and least understood.

It involves eleven Asian and P
acific-rim countries — including the United States — and it being negotiated in secret with no possibility of public oversight. If it goes ahead, we risk major damage to our economy, our environment, our health, and the ability to shape our own future.

Download the flyer                     Email for more information



Rio Tinto, Tell The Truth

The World Price For Aluminium Is Already Included In Your New Power Contract With Meridian

Stop crying wolf shut the smelter and bugger off

Every time that Rio Tinto, the gargantuan mining and processing transnational which owns 80% of the Bluff smelter, feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. Last time it did so (in 2008) was because of the Labour Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. This time it is trying it on as a tactic to try to pressure Meridian over its power price contract, which has already been negotiated and is due to take effect in January. It has succeeded in whipping up a storm of uncertainty among its workers, the union representing some of them, the Southland public and their local body politicians.

Rio Tinto has relentlessly peddled the line that its new power price from Meridian – which hasn’t even taken effect yet – must come down, because of the falling world price for aluminium. But what it hasn’t said is that: “The agreed base price is subject to escalation with reference to a multi-year average market price for electricity in New Zealand, the world price for aluminium (as determined by an independent benchmark), and a component as proxy for price inflation”. The quote – with our emphasis added – is from Meridian’s latest financial reports. In plain English, the world price of aluminium is already factored into its new power contract with Meridian.

Once again, Rio Tinto is just trying it on, with every expectation that Meridian will fold. And why wouldn’t Rio Tinto expect that? For the past nearly 50 years it has twisted every New Zealand government and State-owned electricity supplier around its little finger. The Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) calls upon Meridian to break the mould and surprise us all by sticking to its guns.

And we call Rio Tinto’s bluff (pun intended). Stop crying wolf, stop using your New Zealand workers as disposable pawns in your cynical game, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you.

Don’t take our word for that. Transpower’s Chief Executive, Patrick Strange, told the media this month that if the smelter closes, the surplus power would go to the rest of the grid, meaning lower prices for consumers. CAFCA says bring on the lower prices for long suffering consumers who have been waiting since the 1990s for any tangible benefits from the “electricity reforms”. All we’ve seen is ever increasing power prices.

The smelter closes = lower prices for consumers

The smelter is the country’s single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for more than 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available for any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country. Those who extol the bracing discipline of market forces for everybody else are strangely coy when it comes to this corporate recidivist.

Rio Tinto won the 2011 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand. It was nominated for lobbying two Governments “over several years to secure excessive allocations of free emissions units under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme”.

The Roger Award judges agreed, concluding: “It appears therefore, that the New Zealand taxpayer is subsidising a transnational corporate rort of the emissions trading scheme… The significance of this stance cannot be underestimated; a major transnational player within New Zealand materially benefits from its non-compliance with a strategy to reduce global climate change and its ecological effects”.

The Judges’ Report concludes that the company has a 50 year history of “suborning, blackmailing and conning successive New Zealand governments into paying massive subsidies on the smelter’s electricity; dodging tax, and running a brilliantly effective PR machine to present a friendly, socially responsible and thoroughly greenwashed face to the media and the public. Its milking of the Emissions Trading Scheme is entirely in character”.

The extremely detailed Financial Analysis reveals that the smelter’s claimed benefits to NZ, namely annual export earnings of “around $1 billion” are, in fact, overstated by four fifths.

The full, damning, 2011 Roger Award Judges’ Report can be read here 

In short, it is a liability to New Zealand, not an asset.

Equally undeniably, it has been good for Southland, in terms of jobs, etc. So what about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? The tobacco industry used to employ a lot of people here, but that was deemed to be no longer in the public interest. Lacing lollywater with booze and selling it to kids supports a lot of jobs too but there’s plenty of public demand to get rid of that particular industry as well. The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. History is full of examples of horrible industries that kept people in jobs (such as the slave trade) but which were banned and/or abolished for the greater good.

This smelter constitutes a crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for its entire existence.
In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.