The Unions Are Finished: Neoliberalism's Most Important Lie.

Alive And Kicking: In spite of having to function in one of the most hostile legal environments in the OECD, New Zealand's trade unions continue to represent more than 360,000 Kiwi workers. Were its legal shackles to be struck off by a "true Left Wing government", that number would increase dramatically.

 

ORGANISED LABOUR lost its influence for two reasons, both of which are global in nature and unstoppable:

Firstly, automation vastly improved industrial efficiency and reduced the need for manual labour. This process continues unabated and will impact generations to come.

Secondly, when China opened up its economy it added 50% to the global workforce, undermining labour rates across the western world.

So if you're hoping for a change in local politics to halt the demise of union power, you’re deluding yourself. Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

The above comment came in anonymously (don’t they always!) but I thought it worth quoting at length. Only rarely are the precepts of neoliberalism advanced so succinctly, so eloquently, or, with such superficial plausibility.

 

That the comment homes-in on the condition of organised labour is no accident. Stripped of all its fine ideological plumage, Neoliberalism has always been about smashing unions.

 

No other institution has done as much to advance the interests of ordinary people than the trade union. Without the power of organised labour, the historic shifts in political and economic power which characterised the 1930s and 40s could not have happened.

 

It was the union movement which, by redirecting business profits from the shareholders’ dividends to the employees’ wage-packets, lifted the living-standards of the working-class across the post-war world. Wherever unions became a force to be reckoned with, the power and prestige of the ruling-class (or the “1 Percent”, as we prefer to call them these days) dwindled. The recovery of that lost power and prestige could not begin until the unions were first tamed – and then destroyed.

 

A Clear Correlation: This graph, from the NZ Council of Trade Unions, illustrates in the most dramatic fashion the inverse relationship between union strength and the economic power of the top 1 percent of income earners.

 

Look back over the history of neoliberalism – especially at the years in which its key elements were being set in place – and you will encounter a series of epic industrial struggles. All of these were deliberately fomented by neoliberal politicians, and all of them had but one objective: the disarming of the new regime’s most dangerous enemies. The crushing of PATCO by the newly-elected Reagan Administration. The defeat of the National Union of Miners by Margaret Thatcher. These set-piece confrontations were intended to – and did – overawe and demoralise the forces of organised labour.

 

With the unions safely shackled by draconian anti-union legislation, the neoliberals were free to proceed to the next stage of their programme: the destruction of the unions’ greatest achievement – the Welfare State. Everything that followed; from the privatisation of public assets; to the introduction of student loans; to the sell-off of social housing. The whole sad saga of the 1 Percent’s triumphant resurrection of the injustices and inequalities of a Gilded Age the Left believed to be long dead and buried, was predicated on the destruction of the trade unions.

 

And so, of course, the neoliberals’ over-riding mission, following the restoration of plutocratic power, was to convince succeeding generations that trade unionism’s demise was not the work of a ruling class whose authority it had challenged, but simply the result of  forces that were “global in nature and unstoppable”.

 

Our anonymous commentator singles out automation and the opening of China to capitalist investment as the two principal reasons for organised labour’s loss of influence. But, a moment’s historical reflection reveals both of these arguments to be false.

 

The entire Industrial Revolution was about little else but automation – the replacement of human energy and dexterity by machines. Far from reducing the total number of jobs, the wealth generated by mechanisation not only led very rapidly to the creation of more jobs but also new jobs – indeed, to whole new industries. This vast expansion in the demand for labour was what drove millions to emigrate from the impoverished agrarian societies of Southern and Eastern Europe to the Americas and Australasia. It was out of these new immigrant communities that the mass industrial unionism of the 20th Century emerged to challenge the overweening power of capital.

 

Far from being branded the gravediggers of organised labour, the latest wave of automation and the proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry should be seen the harbingers of the next great surge of progressivism across the planet.

 

Of course, such an outcome is, quite literally, inconceivable to our anonymous commentator. In his eyes, any attempt to restore a modicum of justice and decency to the workplace, or pay working people a living wage, can only end in disaster:

 

Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

In progressive ears, however, those words sound very differently:

 

Only when we vote in a true Left Wing government, and the golden days of union power return, will the power of the 1 Percent be broken and ordinary working people recover the confidence to snap neoliberalism’s unjust and unequal society like a twig. In short order we will become again the Utopia of the South Pacific – and the envy of the World.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Thursday, 19 March 2015.