Section 2: Case Study: Food Fight

Stanley Donaldson has been running a large farm near Gingin on Perth's urban fringe for over 30 years. There he grows a variety of fruit and vegetables for the Perth market which is sold under the well regarded brand of TrueVeg. Their main buyer is CBA, an independent chain of supermarkets that competes with Coles and Woolworths. In 2016 competition heated up among retail buyers as Aldi became established and started taking market share. This led to a general feeling among growers that the changing circumstances in the retail sector may help improve prices for smaller growers like TrueVeg. With a location close to Perth, Stanley felt he was well positioned to undercut some of the competitors from the eastern states.

Unfortunately for Stanley other things were changing rapidly. Huge growing cooperatives had emerged and some of these large eastern states growers were resorting to ethically questionable tactics to compete. By 2018 huge scandals had been exposed by ABC journalists in which large growers had been exploiting temporary visa holders.Stories about pay rates as low as $2.50 an hour were aired, yet no one was sent to jail. In most cases government agencies simply let offending organisations off with a warning and "education."

Stanley was angry about these rivals undercutting his prices as he worked long hours and sometimes wondered if he could sustain his efforts as he got older. So, he decided change to his approach to workforce recruitment and management. He was recently approached by a business which did a lot of the workforce management for his larger competitors. He was offered an attractive package where he paid them to recruit, pay and manage workers that were mainly backpackers and other foreign temporary visa holders. The lower labour costs were too attractive to ignore and he felt it would help address the cost advantages the larger competitors enjoyed while reducing the demands of building and managing his own workforce. So, while he kept his long-time workers when needed, he would use labour hire firms to address the bulk of his needs and draw up some production bonuses to motivate managers to increase productivity.

Problems became evident when his long-standing Head of Operations Ronald resigned over these decisions. Ronald objected to letting "newcomers" control too much and he was concerned they would have problems with quality among other things. His resignation meant he had to promote an Operations Manager Neil to the role of Head of Operations.Neil was never one of the popular managers and Stanley was soon dealing with complaints about Neil's abrupt manner and lack of concern for worker conditions. Two long standing employees including another Operations Manager left and when Stanley interviewed them some clear themes were evident.

Neil was not well liked as he was not respectful to workers and treated them poorly. The poor training and experience of new workers meant the experienced long standing workers had to do a lot more work to help train them up. Neil was not prepared to pay experienced workers for the time spent training or reduce their production targets which they needed to meet to be paid as this had not been budgeted for and adversely impacted his production targets. Then as the new foreign workers took on more work as their skills improved, the existing workers began to feel they were being robbed of hours by the cheaper foreign workers.

By early March 2020, it was clear the world would change drastically. The government would need to shut down sectors of the economy to prevent the spread of COVID19 and Stanley knew what it meant for his business and the new approach for farm operations. Foreign workers became harder to find and in time those they could find were not always the best workers. Losing the older experienced local hands costed them dearly as they struggled to harvest crops and they found themselves trying to train a new smaller workforce with less experienced employees which were not particularly motivated given the work situation and recent events.

Worker conflict sometimes boiled over and the work environment became tense and stressful. The remaining original workers didn't like the new workers for taking their hours and as the new workers got better at their job, they became resentful of the better pay the local workers received. At times the quality was an issue as concerns began to surface that some workers were deliberately damaging product as a form of protest. Neil continued to dismiss the complaints all while he assigned more and more work to the already overworked new foreign workers. Many workers suspected Neil was getting a bonus for cutting labour costs and indeed, he did admit to some of them that the new foreign workers were paid less. This made the better foreign workers particularly angry, and for this some were dismissed for "troublemaking" by Neil.

By early November 2021 as Donaldson was planning to harvest the Tomato crop, he received a call from an ABC journalist. The journalist was requesting his comment on accusations of slave labour in the agricultural sector and the poor treatment these workers. Neil's attitude was mentioned by the reporter as a "significant issue" by some of those they had spoken to. He was told by the reporter that some of his foreign workers were being paid virtually nothing by the labour hire firm he used after they deducted accommodation and food expenses from worker pay. The foreign workers were now planning legal action against both him and the labour hire firm he used. He was deeply upset and surprised by these revelations.

1. Define and apply two motivation theories (5 marks each) in order to discuss two causes of poor motivation in production workers (Total 10 marks).

(600 word maximum for both parts combined)

ANSWER:

1. List in clear terms the internal primary problems evident in the case (maximum of three). Note: You will lose half of all marks if there are more than three (4 marks).

18 words maximum (6 word limit for each)

ANSWER:

1. Identify, define and apply two types of perception or decision-making errors (2 marks each) to discuss how they may be playing a role in any of the problems evident in the case (4 marks total).

(200 word maximum)

ANSWER: