One of New Zealand’s largest port logistics operators has been ordered to reinstate a terminal tractor operator at Gisborne’s Eastland Port after the Employment Relations Authority found it could not justify dismissing two workers who refused to work a shift with a colleague they considered unsafe.
The authority’s interim determination, reported by RNZ on 10 May, concerned Paul McMillan and Dion Robin, two terminal tractor operators employed by Qube Ports NZ Limited to move logs and freight around the Eastland Port apron. Both were dismissed on 27 February after refusing to work alongside a co-worker on 8 January 2026. McMillan was on a permanent contract and has now been reinstated. Robin was a casual employee and could not be reinstated under his contract, but the authority found his treatment by Qube was also unjustified.
The case is striking because the workers had raised safety concerns about the same colleague repeatedly across more than a year before the January refusal. McMillan first reported an incident in 2024 in which a loader operator drove into him while he was attached to his trailer. He followed that up with an email to the port manager in February 2025 setting out his concerns. Robin filed two incident reports of his own in October and December 2025, including one in which logs were allegedly loaded onto his trailer while it was still attached to his rig, a sequencing error that ports treat as a serious near-miss because of the load weights involved.
When all three terminal tractor operators on shift declined to work with the same colleague on 8 January, Qube treated the refusal as serious misconduct on the grounds that the workers had refused a reasonable and lawful instruction and had coordinated that refusal between themselves. The company told the authority that closed-circuit television footage contradicted the workers’ descriptions of at least one of the underlying incidents and characterised the dispute as one of interpersonal communication rather than workplace safety.
Authority member Sarah Blick was not persuaded. In her interim determination she found that Qube had not produced a clear record of how it had investigated the safety reports, how it had resolved them, or how it had communicated any resolution back to the workers who had raised them. She wrote that the authority could not with confidence say at that stage that the safety issues had been adequately considered, resolved and communicated to the applicants by Qube. On that basis the company’s serious misconduct finding could not stand, and McMillan was ordered back to his role pending the substantive hearing.
The decision lands at an awkward time for the port logistics sector. The NZ Herald’s coverage notes that Qube handles a heavy daily traffic load at Eastland Port, with hundreds of trucks moving through the gates each day and multiple vessels being loaded across a working week. That throughput depends on tractor operators being willing to mesh their movements with loader operators, stevedores, ship’s crews and forestry contractors, in a yard where a momentary lapse can put a person under a swinging log or a reversing wheel.
New Zealand’s port safety record has been under intense scrutiny since the Maritime Union and WorkSafe began publishing more granular incident data following a string of fatal injuries on the country’s wharves over the past decade. The Health and Safety at Work Act gives any worker an explicit right to cease, or refuse to carry out, work that they reasonably believe would expose them or anyone else to a serious risk arising from an immediate or imminent hazard. That right has rarely been tested in the ports context with named workers and a named employer, and the Blick determination is likely to be cited the next time it is.
For employers the practical takeaway is narrower than the headline. The authority did not rule on whether the colleague in question was in fact dangerous, and it has not yet awarded compensation. What it found is that an employer carrying serious misconduct dismissals over the line on the strength of a refusal to work needs to be able to show its own paper trail on the safety complaints that triggered the refusal. If it cannot show that complaints were investigated, resolved and the resolution communicated back, the dismissal is exposed. CCTV that contradicts a worker’s account of one incident does not, by itself, dispose of a year of running concerns.
Qube is part of the Australian-listed Qube Holdings group, which acquired the New Zealand ports services business from Mainfreight subsidiary Owens in the past decade and now operates at most of the country’s commercial ports under stevedoring and terminal contracts. The Eastland Port operation is one of its larger New Zealand sites and a key piece of infrastructure for the East Coast forestry sector, which has been under separate pressure since storm damage on the region’s roading network in 2023.
A substantive hearing on remedies including lost wages and compensation for hurt and humiliation is expected. Robin, as a casual, will have a different argument to run on losses than McMillan, who is now back in his permanent role with continuity of service preserved. Until that substantive determination is published, the interim finding stands as a reminder that the right to refuse unsafe work in New Zealand is enforceable, but only when the worker exercising it has documented their concerns and the employer has failed to show it took them seriously.
What do you make of this case and the wider question of when workers can refuse a shift on safety grounds? Have you raised a workplace safety concern that went nowhere until you escalated it? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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