Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

never cleaned fish before, that was a challenge. But Im very impressed with the ability of thelocal ladies to learn this.“Complaints? We’ve had from time to time, employing 1200 to 13000 people every day, we’veterminated many people, people who have been found to have betelnut on their possession,there’s a rule no betelenut in the factory and no chewing betelnut in the factory. People continueto bring it in, and they get terminated when they get caught. People get disciplined. We’ve hadpeople complain about their pay. How much they earn. First thing: how many days did youwork? First thing, and they talk to other outsiders and they say, ‘What-- you only earn thatmuch money?’ But what the person is not telling them is that they didn’t show up for work twodays in a fortnight. And like I said with the absenteeism, people don’t understand, or it’s taken along time to understand that they’re paid by the hour. We have a base rate, we have a startingrate, we have a rate after the probationary period, and then we have rates for other levels of--forteam leaders, the supervisors, the forklift drivers, the maintainence people, so we have a payscale, and everybody that shows up ten doys out of the ten day period they get an additionalattendance bonus in their pay packet.”N: “How long is probationary period?”IB: “The standard 3 months. Then it goes to regular rate, and then we pay a shift differential, fordifferent hours, so the night shift is paid more…anybody that’s on the night shift gets apremium per hour in addition to that. What we also do is give our employees the opportunity totransfers, at the end of every month they have the opportunity to change shifts if they sodesire…so the second shift people can come to the first, and so forth.“Safety? That’s a good question. The majority of our workers are female and weve designed ourshifts and the length of our shifts around the daylight hours. We start the day shift---see localtransport here---we do not want to be in the transport business, we do not want to take thebusiness away from the local operators. The local operators don’t want to operate outside of 6oclock at night and 6 oclock in the morning. For security reasons. We wouldn’t want to be anydifferent from them, we have the same security problems. We designed our shifts around thosehours and what we do is we have a standard 8 hour shift, on the day shift, and the night shiftstarts at 6 oclock at night., which means they can get in while transport is operating and the dayshift can get home, and we do an extra two hours. Of overtime, they get paid overtime, for thattime, which brings them closer to that day shift, 6 AM, so they can get home. That extends thenight shift on and puts them at a time when they can pick up the transportation.”N: “You provide a meal?”IB: “We provide with no charge to the employees if they so desire to eat it, its not compulsory,a meal, we offer a meal, I get a lot of criticism because I think a lot of people think it’s thesustaining meal for the day, but it’s a meal that’s offered by the factory for employees if theychoose to.”N: “Some bring their own lunch?”IB: “They’re quite welcome to do that. We’ve gone backwards and forwards on the meal, welisten to a lot of complaints on the meal, and weve had complaints from time to time and we’vetried tin fish and we tried sago.“We’re starting to have some employee meetings on a monthly basis, where we don’t selectthem, but employees meet with management and HR and hopefully well start to get some of91