Wine industry
The story on the grape contractor (Friday August 26) highlights what is not a one-off situation but has been an on-going situation in the wine industry for many years now.
Certain people who have exploited employees, whether it be through illegal workers and Immigration Act penalties, have been a woeful deterrent; through defrauding the IRD (PAYE and GST) and then escaping accountability by liquidation and running away offshore; and under paying the pair of hands that actually does the hard work.
The industry’s use of contractors labour separates the meeting of legal requirements and responsibility for workers from the vineyard or winery owner.
Some contractors I have come across have been left in desperate parlous financial situations through non-payment or by contacts that are simply uneconomic.
Others contractors have come from cultures where the rule of law is either not seen as a necessary commercial value or is non-existent. Robbing the IRD, workers, and local people who provide trade and professional services, by dishonestly gaming and cheating the system is a norm.
None of this is good for the reputation of the so called ‘‘Marlborough’’ brand: that brand is put at risk by wine the industry’s ‘‘Nelsonian blindness’’ to problems that it does know about. To do nothing is to condone what is going on.
The industry and owners, as one blogger rightly pointed out, include a cross section of the community who are engaged in other occupations.
For example, lawyers, accountants, current and former bankers, valuers, engineers and one can add Marlborough Lines (and the Power Trust) all have commercial interests in the wider economy.
While Sustainable Wine Growing New Zealand and ‘‘Clean and Green’’ are important brand markers, it is the case that both are stablemates with ethical business investment and ethical business practices, and markets respond to these as well. If Marlborough, which has a low average per head income, is seen as a sweat shop and a place of sharp practice, the adverse stereotype and stigma will prejudicially affect and taint all who work or do business here. The industry house needs to be got into order ASAP. medal. Fractions of seconds often separate the medal winners and the losers.
It takes such commitment to even enter these events; time, energy, personal lives, and even injuries to overcome.
Then they compete and do their best.
They all deserve our praise, athletes to be proud of one and all. doubt that the melting point of ice has changed, and that ice has started melting at a lower temperature than it once did.
What else could explain the rapid shrinking of the ice fields of the Tibetan Plateau, where temperatures have only increased at a rate of 0.4 degrees Celsius per decade since the 1960s, or the recent 13.4 per cent reduction per decade in summer Arctic ice cover, when air temperatures there are only 3C higher than they were in 1900?
Investigating this change in the melting point of ice would be a fertile field of research that MBIE would surely fund.