Farm Forestry New Zealand

The role of the Forest Industry Contractors Association

Prue Younger, New Zealand Tree Grower February 2020.

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 Recently I was given the opportunity to make a presentation to the NZFFA Executive and the experience was enlightening, on both sides. I believe we have put farm foresters to one side until now. Until recently, our way to get information to the NZFFA had been via the NZ Forest Owners Association. We have under-estimated the size of your membership, your influence and knowledge.

We therefore thought it was about time that the Forest Industry Contractors Association put itself in front of you. I started in the role of CEO in April 2018 and I have just begun feeling as if I understand my job and the role of the Forest Industry Contractors Association in the greater forestry industry. Some of you may already know that we represent contractors in New Zealand from the top of the North Island to Invercargill in the deep south.

Contractors under our watch include silviculture, logging, harvesting and civil roading businesses. We believe there are about 400 such contractors around the country and we have just over half of them as members.
However, those as members represent about 75 per cent of the total annual log harvest so we consider that most of the larger contractors are members.

Most of our members have between one and ten crews, so extrapolating from this to employees, the Forest Industry Contractors Association is concerned with the welfare of approximately 3,000 employees.  We have regular communication, workshops and regional catch-ups with our members and have found it beneficial to open up our membership to associated sectors and businesses which are linked with forestry and bring them into the fold of our communications.

Where are the other contractors who are not members? That is a good question and one we are pondering. It makes it difficult to involve them around industry matters which includes raising the bar for the forest industry in respect of good environmental practices, health and safety. To maintain a professional image for the forestry industry it would be much better if we could take everyone with us.

The Forest Industry Contractors Association works across six broad areas including −

• Core and the governance
• Competency which covers education, training and careers
• Capability which goes hand in hand with health and safety
• Communication and how we get our message out, nationally and globally
• Care and social responsibility
• Collaboration with stakeholders and aligning messages, funding and results.

Contractor certification

Hot on our list of actions is a programme called Safetree Contractor Certification. To give you some background, Safetree Contractor Certification was officially launched in April 2017. The Forest Industry Safety Council is the organisation which initiated the scheme as part of the independent health and safety review the industry embarked on in 2014. The review panel’s vision was for a safe, sustainable and professional forestry sector, in partnership with government, industry and workers.

This can be achieved if the forestry industry learns to improve the management of the health and safety challenges which come from its varied environment.
The challenges include the industry’s ability to understand the health and safety responsibilities of all those in the supply chain. This is especially important for small-scale forest growers including members of the NZFFA. Some of the basic points are outlined below −

• Ensure contractual arrangements recognise and support health and safety especially when you are planning to harvest your trees. Make sure you know that your harvesting contractor has robust health and safety policies.
• Manage the process in a way that enables the forest block to be managed safely and take equal responsibility for making sure anyone you have operating to clear your trees is safe, the machinery is well maintained, and that workers have the right gear.
• Ensure the safety implications of the choice and design of a forest block are managed. This involves a conversation with your harvester to make sure they understand the hazards and who does what in this process.
• Plan and organise work so it can be carried out safely.
• Ensure workers and their crew bosses have the skills to work safely. You should ask how credible they are, how well you know them and if they have trained staff who know what they are doing. When walking away from the work zone you should feel good and confident about this contractor.  
• Ensure that workers’ employment terms and conditions support safe workplaces. You can ask to see any documentation you wish to so that you know the calibre of this contractor is what they say they are.

This is not a full and comprehensive list. What would be easier is for you to ask one question – do your contractors have Safetree Contractor Certification?  If the answer is yes then you can shake hands on the deal and know that you have just engaged a professional. It provides a benchmark that their health and safety systems and business operation are designed and audited to meet a common standard.
For you, the forest owner, using certified contractors provides an assurance that the companies you hire are competent to do the job. For workers, the scheme will lead to improved health, safety and employment conditions. It will also show potential employees that the contractor is an employer who will be operating to a high standard of credibility and transparency.

Supporting the scheme

The Forest Industry Contractors Association want to make you are aware of the drive to assure the public that this industry has been aspiring to be professional for quite some time and we feel strongly about accepting the challenge to go from bushman to professional forester. It is a national scheme, supported by forest owners as well as contractors and we can continue improvement more quickly if we learn from each other. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said ‘Learn from the mistakes of others … You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’ He was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1930s.

Today there are 174 certified contractors with 88 waiting for audits and another 82 have expressed their interest in taking up certification. As mentioned earlier, there are only 400 forestry contractors, so most of the industry is taking up the challenge and becoming professionals.

Everyone involved is working hard to promote the certification programme, particularly with government agencies. This will be advantageous to those who are certified and align to any new legislation which will recognise it and it has been included in the recently developed Forestry Workforce Action Plan.

The relationship we hope to strengthen with NZFFA is one that, with our combined interest in trees, we will provide education and management. We want to ensure we can use the contact you have with smaller woodlot contractors to get important messages out and perhaps they can be encouraged to become members of the Forest Industry Contractors Association as well.

Encourage the NZFFA to support this scheme by using only certified contractors on your woodlots. That would be a move to exemplify this commitment we have to a safer and more attractive industry.

Prue Younger is the Chief Executive Officer of the Forest Industry Contractors Association.