The union puts out a black-and-white video, all beautifully shot and lit, featuring the families of Ports workers speaking over cloying, sentimental background music and he tells me the Ports of Auckland is producing propaganda?!
Dear me.
The three-minute clip, where wives and children talk about the dispute being about family, not about money, and how all they want is for things to stay the same, would belong right up there with the best in terms of emotive filming. The message throughout the video is that no guaranteed hours means no guaranteed income and yet anyone who listens to the news will know that the workers have been offered a guarantee of 160 hours a month.
Now, there may be conditions to that, but it does put paid to the union's simplistic message.
I sympathise with the workers - all along they were the ones who were going to get hurt. Not Gary Parsloe. Not the Ports management.
And maybe they're the ones who are right and all of us working all hours on contracts are wrong. Maybe we should have all taken the stand that the union is taking now when we were moved off staff and on to flexible contracts.
But we didn't and those flexible contracts seem to be the way most companies do business. The union's pleas for things to stay the same seemed somewhat redundant in the modern world - and now the workers are redundant too.