Why Isn't The Left As Angry As The Right?

If You Want To Get Even - Get Mad! The Government's response to the Labour-Green Opposition's energy plan may not have been very rational, but it certainly conveyed the message to it's followers that their opponents had crossed a line and "there will be blood". What is it that prevents the Left from deploying the same kind of political rage?

 

“ECONOMIC SABOTAGE!” “North Korean Economics!” “Half-Baked Soviet Union-Style Nationalisation!” The right-wing rhetorical explosions that greeted the Opposition’s new energy policy were as entertaining as they were ludicrous.

 

But, they were also highly revealing.

 

When the Right’s economic and social achievements are threatened, its response is both immediate and dramatic. No accusation – no matter how absurd – is ruled out as a response. Its enemies are left in absolutely no doubt that they have crossed a line and that, rhetorically, at least, “there will be blood”.

 

The Left’s response to attacks on its own achievements, by contrast, is rather bloodless.

 

Had Labour and the Greens felt as strongly about defending workers’ rights as National and ACT clearly feel about the sanctity of markets, their response to the Government’s proposed changes to New Zealand’s employment laws would have been very different.

 

The amendments announced by Labour Minister, Simon Bridges, last Friday, rip the guts out of the Clark-Anderton Government’s mild-mannered Employment Relations Act (2000). If passed, the brutal regime set up by the Fourth National Government’s Employment Contracts Act will be restored. New Zealand’s formal commitment to international conventions guaranteeing the right of workers to bargain collectively – already tenuous – will be further diminished.

 

All in all, a pretty reasonable days’ work for Mr Bridges, who has clearly set out to impress his senior Cabinet colleagues as the ‘go-to-guy’ for all those unpleasant and unpopular jobs that have to be done quickly, efficiently and without flinching.

 

National’s big-business backers are always on the lookout for someone prepared to present their ideological butcher’s-bill to the voters. If the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, and Mr Bridges’ earlier, draconian, response to deep sea drilling protests are any indication, they may have found their man.

 

Indeed, this latest legislative flurry from Mr Bridges signals the arrival of an unusually bold and ruthless political operator. As someone once said of that other ‘Young Turk’ in a hurry, Sir Robert Muldoon: “This little man, he will bigger get.”

 

So, you might think that political and legislative threats on such a scale would see the Left unlimbering its heaviest rhetorical guns. In the spirit of National’s splenetic response to the release of the Opposition’s energy plans, you could forgive Labour and the Greens for going all-out with headline-grabbers like:

 

“National’s Anti-Union Bill Channels General Pinochet!” “Fascist-Style Legislation Will Hurt Kiwi Workers!” “Far-Right Thinking Inspires National’s Attack On Union Movement!”

 

Nothing of the sort appeared.

 

The Council of Trade Unions’ President, Helen Kelly, and Labour’s Employment Relations spokesperson, Darien Fenton, both defaulted immediately to Cassandra mode. All manner of dire consequences for working people were predicted should Mr Bridges’ legislation be passed. But, neither woman was prepared to engage in the kind of no-holds-barred, red-in-tooth-and-claw ideological warfare immediately reverted to by their right-wing opponents. 

Far from declaring all-out war on Mr Bridges and his right-wing business supporters, Ms Kelly asked, instead, for employer assistance:

 

“I don’t expect the national business organisations to do anything but support this. I hope some major employers will speak out against it as some did the youth rates. It is time for a better approach to work in this country – today is a giant step backwards.”

 

Ms Fenton’s media release didn’t go that far but it was deafeningly silent on what Labour’s response to Mr Bridges’ assault would be – apart, of course, from voting against it in Parliament:

 

“Labour will oppose this legislation. The New Zealand labour market needs hands-on policies that help create decent work and fairness, not this return to failed policies of the past.”

 

But a return to the policies of the past is, arguably, exactly what Labour should do! The prime targets of the Employment Contracts Act were: universal union membership; the system of national “awards” (collective contracts covering whole occupational groups); and the right to strike.

 

At the very least, trade unionists might expect “their” political party to give back what National and its employer allies went to such extreme lengths to take away!

 

How to explain this left-wing passivity? Why is even the trade union movement’s peak organisation, the CTU, so loath to defend its members with the commitment and aggression now so evident on the right?

 

Its behaviour points clearly to the existence, at the very heart of the New Zealand Left, of deep-seated ideological doubt: a profound degree of uncertainty which is influencing not only the level of confidence which the CTU and the Labour Party have in themselves, but also the confidence they are willing to place in their members and voters. Unlike their right-wing opponents, they no longer appear to be very sure what is the right thing to do, or which is the right way to go.

 

While this lack of conviction on the Left persists, the passionate intensity of the Right will go on winning.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 30 April 2013.

National Attacks Unions ... Again. How Will Labour Respond?

Other Options: If Labour fails to meet National's latest challenge to the right of workers to trade union protection, then other, less timid, political forces will step into the political space they have chosen to vacate. The dialectic does not sleep.

“YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED in the dialectic,” quipped Leon Trotsky, “but the dialectic is interested in you.” As the National Party prepares to introduce yet another tranche of employer-friendly changes to New Zealand’s labour relations law, Labour will be required to respond. What will that response be? Will it continue to promote policies that have hardly changed in 25 years? Will it go on behaving as if the charges laid against the trade union movement of the 1970s and 80s were true? Or, will it serve notice on the Employers that: if they persist in attacking and undermining the trade union movement legislatively, then Labour and the other parties of the Left will be forced to retaliate in kind?

Here’s a tip. If you expect the current leaders of the Labour Party to do anything more than mutter: “Tut, tut! Nasty National Party! Why are you being so mean to the poor little unions?” Well, you’re dreaming.

It’s the party’s labour relations spokesperson, Darien Fenton, that I feel sorry for. Her instincts, as a former trade union secretary, are generally pretty reliable. I strongly suspect that, if her caucus colleagues would only let her, she’d come out strongly in favour of a full-scale counter-attack against National’s legislatively-driven union-busting. But, of course, her caucus colleagues won’t do that because, like the former SUP leader whose advice on industrial law Labour has followed consistently since 1987: “they would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side”.

To the middle-class professionals at the summit of the Labour Party the very idea of re-empowering working people in the workplace, and restoring a semblance of balance to the employment relationship, is anathema. Why? Because it would very quickly lead to a massive recovery of working-class confidence – and that is not something the current crop of Labour politicians are either personally or ideologically equipped to deal with.

The litmus test of a Labour politician's commitment to genuine labour relations reform is whether or not they support universal union membership. It was the introduction of universal membership by the First Labour Government in 1936 that instantly evened-up the balance of social forces in depression-ravaged New Zealand, and its re-introduction in 2014 would have exactly the same effect. For most Labour MPs, however, universal membership (or, as they insist on calling it, “compulsory unionism”) has become what the Americans call a “third-rail” issue: touch it and die.

“Far better,” they parrot, “to have members by conviction than compulsion.” The fact that we have had “members by conviction” for the past 20 years, during which private-sector union density in New Zealand has fallen from just under 50 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 10 percent currently, makes not the slightest impression on their thinking. It’s as though “voluntary unionism”, far from being a busted flush, is still a viable experiment in progress – and they’re just waiting to see how it turns out. Not even the Council of Trade Unions’ graph showing the inverse correlation between union density and the share of national income controlled by the “One Percent” has dented their absolute certainty that a restoration of universal membership is neither feasible nor desirable.

And yet, raising the age of eligibility for National Superannuation was once declared to be a “third-rail” issue, but that didn’t prevent Labour going into the last election with a policy of lifting the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. The same used to be said about the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax, but, once again, Labour (alongside the Greens) campaigned in 2011 for its introduction. Strange, isn’t it, that policies applauded by the Centre and the Right are deemed worthy of risking the electorate’s wrath, but those associated with the Left are not?

A genuine Labour Party would have little difficulty in both formulating and promoting a campaign for universal membership. Recent and current disputes have driven home to the public the considerable legal powers available to employers and the corresponding vulnerability of employees in the post-union workplace. Is the Labour Party of 2012 really so much less capable than the nineteenth century Liberal Party that it cannot draft a comprehensive set of progressive labour reforms? Is there no one in its ranks equal in eloquence to the Rev. Rutherford Waddell, whose famous sermon, “The Sin of Cheapness”, led to the setting up of the Sweating Commission and recruited even middle-class reformers to the unions’ cause?

Labour does not even seem to possess anyone with the political smarts to approach National quietly and say: “Listen you guys, if you’re stupid enough to introduce this latest round of anti-union legislation, we’ll be forced to announce a comprehensive reform package of our own – which, we assure you, your friends the employers will not like. Why don’t we both agree to simply let sleeping dogs lie?” It wouldn’t be a very courageous, or ethical, way of operating, but it would probably work. [The same strategy would, of course, succeed in relation to the Government’s plans for “partial” privatisation. A constantly re-stated pledge to take the assets back into 100 percent public ownership would seriously dampen investor enthusiasm. And yet, Mr Shearer insists on telling potential investors: “Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.” Such a helpful fellow.]

It is one the great ironies of recent political history that the Right has learned the lessons of effective left-wing propaganda more thoroughly than the Left itself. Groups like the Business Roundtable and the Maxim Institute have always understood the enormous power of ideas, and how an argument well-researched, well-presented, and then powerfully and consistently advocated, will almost always shift public opinion in the desired direction. Copious evidence of exploitation, poverty-level wage-rates and oppressive employer conduct is available to any Labour MP willing to sit down for an hour with any union organiser. And any employment lawyer will succinctly list for them the insurmountable legal barriers to effective union protection. The only thing preventing Labour from campaigning for the comprehensive restoration of fairness in the workplace is its own, selfish, disinclination to meaningfully empower the party’s electoral base.

Labour’s disinclination to lead effective action to assist working people will not, however, prevent such action being proposed and, ultimately, taken. National and its employer mates have need of these proposed reforms precisely because, in the current economic climate, the profitability of their firms cannot be preserved except at the expense of their employees. But workers barely earning enough to cover basic living expenses now, cannot afford to accept a future in which they are paid, in real terms, even less. Like the response of the Greeks and the French to the policies of austerity, low-paid New Zealanders’ response to falling living standards will be to turn to the political parties of the Left for support. If Labour wants to know what a future based on surrendering to the power of the bosses looks like, it need only consider the fate of PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party. In 2009 it won 44 percent of the popular vote. In 2012, after allowing itself to become the IMF’s, the ECB’s and the EU’s bailiff, it won just 13 percent.

As Trotsky knew only too well: the dialectic is never uninterested in human affairs, and it never sleeps.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.