Sixty Four Shades Of Grey

Bright Sunlit Morning - Or Grey Rainy Day? In the final days of the US presidential election some Trump supporters waited in line for 11 hours to see their champion. Eleven hours! Forgive me for being harsh, but honestly, I can’t see too many Kiwis being willing to wait in line for 11 minutes to see Andrew Little.

 

IS OUR LABOUR PARTY capable of learning anything from the US Democratic Party’s stunning electoral defeat? Andrew Little’s recent string of lacklustre media performances offer few reasons for optimism.

 

Donald Trump won the White House because he made politics exciting. Newshub’s Paddy Gower was in the US for the final days of the presidential campaign and interviewed Trump supporters who’d been waiting in line for 11 hours to see their champion. Eleven hours! Forgive me for being harsh, but honestly, I can’t see too many Kiwis being willing to wait in line for 11 minutes to see Andrew Little.

 

And that unwillingness is not entirely attributable to the Labour Leader’s complete charisma by-pass. Possessing the wit and movie-star good-looks of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, certainly wouldn’t impede Little’s political career, but it is not enough, on its own, to guarantee Labour’s electoral success.

 

Bernie Sanders is hardly what you’d call a matinee idol (more like the voter’s cranky old uncle) but that didn’t prevent him from electrifying huge crowds of young Americans. What lured all those millennials away from their I-Pads had nothing to do with what Sanders looked like. What made them “Feel the Bern” were the things Sanders said.

 

And even Justin Trudeau could not have become Canada’s PM solely on the strength of his illustrious parentage and pleasing countenance. Indeed, his Conservative Party opponents regarded his sense of political entitlement and youthful good looks as powerful negatives to be exploited.

 

Canadians, they argued, had no need of a pretty, upper-class dilettante with nothing more to offer them than a famous name. And if that had been all Trudeau offered Canada, then the centre-left New Democrats would have won last year’s election. What finally sealed the deal for the Canadian electorate was Trudeau’s strategic flair and the boldness of his party’s policies. These, combined with the Trudeau family’s indisputable lustre, were what gave Justin and his Liberals their historic victory.

 

No, Little’s lack of glamour is not Labour’s problem. What’s crippling his leadership – and his party’s chances of winning next year’s election – is that neither he, nor his colleagues, seem capable of inspiring the slightest enthusiasm or excitement in the electorate.

 

Labour either can’t, or won’t, commit to the sort of hard-and-fast policies its supporters want to hear. Like Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, Little and Labour are deaf to the cries of those who find themselves on the food-supply side of the dog-eat-dog struggle which now passes for life in the neoliberal West.

 

What Labour’s electoral base is presented with, instead, is wonkism. For nearly two years Grant Robertson and his Future of Work Commission have being toiling away. Their final report was released earlier this month at Labour’s centennial conference. Presented for our perusal were no fewer than 64 recommendations – none of them meriting, even slightly, the description of bold or exciting.

 

There wasn’t a single policy recommendation to match Trump’s in-your-face promise to build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican migrants. Nothing that came anywhere close to Sander’s promise to abolish student loans. Labour’s policy proposition in 2017 isn’t 50 – but 64 – shades of grey.

 

The worst thing is, Little and his advisors flatly refuse to see this as a problem. They have only the coldest disdain for the sort of wild-eyed populism which has swept across the United Kingdom and the United States in 2016, and which, in 2017, threatens to wreak equal havoc among the political classes of Italy and France. It’s simply not the way the shell-shocked party pulled together by Helen Clark, Michael Cullen and Steve Maharey cares to do business. When asked whether he would have voted for Jeremy Corbyn, the present, British-born, President of the NZ Labour Party responded curtly: “No.”

 

In morbid conformity with the limp “Third-Way-ism” which still engrosses them, Little and his people – like Hillary and hers – have placed all their eggs in one technological basket. The mysterious algorithms of their data-manipulating, voter-identifying wonks will do what thousands of committed followers – apparently – cannot. They will locate all the shy, centrist voters Labour needs to win. That these same mysterious algorithms singularly failed to deliver the White House to Hillary has not shaken their confidence in electoral mechanisation.

 

To paraphrase Talleyrand’s celebrated dismissal of the Bourbon dynasty: Labour has forgotten everything – and learned nothing.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 November 2016.

Promise Or Threat? How Is Labour’s Future Of Work Exercise Likely To Be Received?

Tireless Workers: Innovation, automation, relocation, globalisation – the driving forces of change are undeniably real, and their impact on the working lives of working people are visible everywhere. The better jobs and the more fulfilling lives that the fourth industrial revolution is supposed to usher in are much harder to see.

 

LABOUR’S ‘FUTURE OF WORK’ EXERCISE  has received considerable praise from political commentators and economists. The party has been commended for looking over the usual three-year time horizon of the professional New Zealand politician. The journalistic consensus appears to be that even if the Future of Work (FoW) exercise doesn’t glean Labour a swag of much needed extra votes – it should.

 

Unfortunately, that’s not how politics works. Worthy and future-focused though it may be, FoW is unlikely to exert a positive influence over the voting behaviour of working-class New Zealanders. There have been far too many reports about what ordinary working people must do to make themselves employable in the labour markets of the future. Far too many experts have pronounced upon the revolutionary impact of technological innovation and how it will force workers to adapt – or be left behind. Working people have been hearing this sort of talk since the Rogernomics “revolution” in the mid-1980s, and all it has left them is behind.

 

Innovation, automation, relocation, globalisation – the driving forces of change are undeniably real, and their impact on the working lives of working people are visible everywhere. The better jobs and the more fulfilling lives that the fourth industrial revolution is supposed to usher in are much harder to see.

 

When “inevitable” change arrived in small regional centres like Patea, Hastings and Timaru it left far more empty factories and unemployed workers in its wake than it did new, better-paid and more exciting forms of employment. The new jobs did arrive, eventually, but they generally paid lower wages than the old ones and offered workers much less security.

 

Some effort was made to prepare workers for the brave new world of adaptation and transformation that was rushing at them. The Fourth Labour Government established what were known as Regional Employment and Access Councils (REACs). These were comprised of representatives from the employers, the trade unions and the “community” (whatever that was!) and were empowered to fund employment and training programmes for those without work.

 

These programmes were a great success. Not because they imparted new and marketable skills to the luckless unemployed and redundant workers funnelled into them by the Department of Labour, but because they created hundreds of state-subsidised jobs for the middle-class professionals who set up the programmes and ran them. (These social entrepreneurs even got to keep the state-funded tools, office equipment and furniture when their contracts with the REACs expired!)

 

It was a pattern repeated endlessly during the years that followed. As globalisation hollowed out the manufacturing and processing sectors, driving thousands of jobless workers into the new, low-paying service sector, thousands of well-educated middle classes professionals found themselves designing, resourcing and managing the radical re-organisation of New Zealanders’ working lives that the new neoliberal order demanded.

 

Which is why, when the conversation turns to the jobs and workplaces of the future, what you hear depends on where you are positioned in the labour market. If you’re a young, highly-educated middle-class professional; or a person skilled in the design and application of new technologies; then the future beckons you forward with a smile. But if you’re a truck driver, or a store-person, then the prospect of driverless vehicles, or robot-operated warehouses, fills you with dread. Young workers have grown up watching their parents being forced to accept lower and lower positions in the occupational hierarchy. Soon, they fear, it will be their turn.

 

For the working-class voters Labour so desperately needs to return to its electoral fold, the “promises” of its FoW exercise are much more likely to be read as threats.

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton excelled at extolling the virtues of innovation, automation, relocation and globalisation. Helen Clark was fond of invoking the received economic wisdom that a rising tide lifts all boats. The response of their working-class followers in the years since has been to recite the childhood chant: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

 

If you want to know what that means in electoral terms, just ask Donald Trump – or Winston Peters.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 20 November 2016.

Giving Workers What They Want: Honouring The Legacy Of Helen Kelly.

Helen Kelly - A Twenty-First Century Union Leader: The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

WHAT BETTER TIME could there be to talk about Kiwi workers’ rights than in the days following Helen Kelly’s death? Who has contributed more to this discussion than the NZ Council of Trade Unions’ (CTU) first female President? And what other contemporary New Zealand trade unionist’s passing could have left such large and stylish shoes to fill?

 

Few would dispute that Kelly was by far the best leader that the CTU has so far produced. The way she was able to combine rock-solid principle with PR smarts made her the labour movement’s most effective twenty-first century union boss. Though she couldn’t quite match the Unite union’s Matt McCarten at street-level campaigning, Kelly’s keen intellect and her winning ways with the news media allowed her to keep the ideals of trade unionism alive in an era notoriously hostile to the claims of collectivism.

Had she not succumbed to lung cancer, it is likely that well before the end of this decade she would have made the transition from the trade union movement to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Once in Parliament, her rise to the top would have been inexorable. In relatively short order New Zealand would have had its second Labour Prime Minister called Helen.

 

All of which makes it one the great counterfactual questions of our history: “How different would New Zealand have been if Helen Kelly had not died of cancer at the tragically young age of fifty-two?” It is only when we attempt to answer that question that the true magnitude of the nation’s loss is brought home to us.

 

Labour has made great play of its current Future of Work exercise, but it has been much less enthusiastic about discussing the future of workplace relations. Indeed, Grant Robertson seems much more comfortable discussing how vital it is that workers are made ready for the challenges of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. We hear a great deal about the importance of continuous upskilling and labour flexibility, but nothing like as much about ensuring employees have a genuine say in how much they are paid and under what conditions they work.

 

For a party calling itself “Labour”, this is a critical deficiency. The power relationships of the workplace have a huge impact on people’s well-being. How much we earn and how we work continue to dominate our existence in much the same way that they have done since the first industrial revolution. More so in the first quarter of the twenty-first century than in the second half of the twentieth, because the effective destruction of mass trade union membership in the 1980s and 90s swung the balance-of-power decisively in the employers’ favour.

 

Anyone raising these issues, however, will be told that they are living in the past, and that the world has changed too much for any social-democratic party to contemplate a return to the industrial relations regime of the 1970s. And it’s true, times have changed: although not enough, apparently, to destroy the master/servant relationship, or eliminate the commercial necessity of legally limited liability; but certainly enough to make joining a union a career-threatening move for 90 percent of private sector employees.

 

The most important challenge facing today’s Labour Party is how to render workplace power relationships more equal without mobilising the entire neoliberal establishment against it. Simply legislating for the restoration of compulsory unionism and industry-wide contracts is not the answer, because a change of government would instantly bring about their legal demise.

 

The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

Such an exercise would need to be established and protected by legislation. The body responsible – let’s call it WorkRight NZ – would aim to, and be empowered to, approach as many working people as possible in their workplaces and have them fill in a comprehensive questionnaire intended to identify both the good and bad aspects of working life in twenty-first century New Zealand. The survey would also ask workers how their rights, as citizens and employees, might best be protected and exercised within the workplace.

 

The WorkRight NZ legislation would also establish a second investigative unit, dedicated to drawing upon the knowledge and experience of existing trade union and employer organisations; the experiences of employers, unions and working people in other countries; and the research and insights of New Zealand and overseas academic employment relations specialists. The goal of this investigative unit would be to establish local and international best practice in relation to collective bargaining.

 

The results of the consultative exercise would then be collated, analysed and written up in the form of a comprehensive report by WorkRight NZ. Contained within the report would be a draft bill, incorporating the participants principal recommendations, for presentation to Parliament.

 

Interestingly, a similar exercise in mass inquiry was undertaken by the First Labour Government. The Social Survey Bureau was set up in 1937 to discover the actual conditions prevailing in New Zealand’s farms, factories, shops, offices and homes. Its first major inquiry – into the living conditions of dairy farmers – produced such shocking findings, however, that the responsible cabinet minister, Peter Fraser, tried to suppress the research report and, when that failed, shut the Bureau down.

 

Asking the right questions has always been the essence of political radicalism. It’s what made Helen Kelly such an effective trade union leader. If the CTU and the Labour Party are looking for a way to honour her legacy, then finding out what workers want from their employers and their workplaces – and giving it to them – would be a great place to start.

 

This essay was jointly posted by The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Sunday, 16 October 2016.

Red Shift: Labour Reorients Itself Toward Small Business.

"Meet The New Boss - Same As The Old Boss" The key question of Grant Robertson's "Future of Work" inquiry has been: What must Labour do to guarantee employers a steady supply of productive workers as New Zealand and the rest of the world enters the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”? Rather than making his FoW project about empowerment, Robertson chose instead to make it about facilitation.

 

RICHARD HARMAN writes approvingly about Labour’s turn to the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector. His Politik Blog entry of 29/8/16 covers Labour’s second “Future of Work” conference, held in Wellington last Friday (26/8/16) which he sums up with the sentence: “Labour is beginning to sound like a more entrepreneurial small-business friendly party as it digests the results of its study into the future of work.”

 

The “Future of Work” (FoW) project has been Grant Robertson’s baby ever since Andrew Little pipped him at the post for the Labour leadership in 2014. As an idea, FoW promised much. Initiated with radical intent it could easily have grown into a broad investigation into what twenty-first century workers expect of their employers, their workplaces, and paid employment in general. Such an investigation could have identified both the good and bad of contemporary employment practice and provided a compelling snapshot of what working life is like, 25 years after the Employment Contracts Act, and what it could look like in the future.

 

But that is not the direction in which Robertson opted to steer the FoW project. Rather than focus on the work people do, the conditions under which they’re required to do it, and how much they’re getting paid for it: the details of working life in which the Labour Party has, for the best part of its 100 year history, been most interested; Robertson and his team opted to take the technocratic route.

 

Instead of asking: What are New Zealand workers experiencing now? And: What tools do New Zealand workers need to ensure that their future work experiences are better, not worse, than todays? The key question of Robertson’s FoW inquiry has been: What must Labour do to guarantee employers a steady supply of productive workers as New Zealand and the rest of the world enters the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”? Rather than making the FoW project about empowerment, Robertson chose instead to make it about facilitation.

 

Which is where Labour’s turn to the SME sector enters the picture. As Harman notes in his Politik article: “Though the fine print has still to be delivered, the general thrust of where the party is going marks a substantial break with its big-industry oriented past.” Or, to put it another way, the Labour Party which Robertson is shaping, rather than being a vehicle for the needs and aspirations of factory workers, construction workers, shop employees, office workers, hospitality staff, transport operators and general labourers, will instead become the party of highly-skilled STEM workers, creatives and professionals.

 

This represents a major shift in Labour’s class allegiance: one which can only lead to a radical re-ordering of the party’s priorities. SMEs are no less grasping than large enterprises when it comes to divvying up the fruits of their employees’ collective effort. Indeed, they are often much worse. About this aspect of small-scale capitalism, Robertson and his team have little to say.

 

They are considerably more voluble, however, on the subject of self-employment. As Harman puts it: “Perhaps the most radical impact of the study has been a recognition by Labour that particularly young people have a “tremendous desire” to be their own boss.” We are not told whether these young people’s aspiration to become their own boss is matched by an equally strong determination to become somebody else’s.

 

The power relationship between employers and employees is still the principal driver of capitalist social relations. It also supplies the underlying logic of capitalist politics. Labour’s core mission, as a political party, has been to reshape New Zealand society in ways which ensure that the power relationship between bosses and workers is as equitable as possible. Crucial to that mission has been the trade union. What Harman failed to notice (or perhaps he did notice, but considered it unimportant) is that in Robertson’s 3,431-word opening address to the second FoW conference there is not a single reference to the institutions out of which the Labour Party was born.

 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, at least as far as Grant Robertson is concerned, trade unions have nothing to contribute to the future of work – or workers – in twenty-first century New Zealand.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 29 August 2016.

The Future Of Workers.

Unions? - Please Explain: Grant Robertson subtitled his address to Labour's second "Future of Work" conference “Building Wealth from the Ground Up”. Any common sense reading of that title would predict a fulsome measure of worker participation in the exercise, which, to be effective, would have to involve the organisations dedicated to defining and articulating workers’ interests – the trade unions. Astonishingly, the term "trade union" did not appear anywhere in Robertson's 3,431-word speech.

 

WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE of the fact that Grant Robertson’s speech to Labour’s second “Future of Work” conference contains no reference to trade unions? Or that, in the entire 3,431-word text of the speech the word “union” appears only once? In a list of the groups involved in the “Commission External Reference Group” of Robertson’s Future of Work project. In addition to business people, academics and community representatives, Robertson admits to “union leaders” also being consulted.

 

That admission raises some pretty thorny problems of its own. If “union leaders” have indeed been involved in this flagship Labour Party exercise, then what do they make of Robertson’s very clear implication that their organisations, Labour’s founding fathers, will have no role to play in the future of work in New Zealand?

 

Robertson subtitled his speech “Building Wealth from the Ground Up”. Any common sense reading of that title would predict a fulsome measure of worker participation in the exercise, which, to be effective, would have to involve the organisations dedicated to defining and articulating workers’ interests – the trade unions.

 

But, if that is what Robertson and the union leaders advising him intend, then the absence of the slightest reference to organised labour helping to build New Zealand’s future wealth becomes even more puzzling. Either, New Zealand’s leading unionists all anticipate being made redundant in the near future; or, they do indeed see themselves playing a leading economic role, but have agreed, along with the party, to say nothing about it until Labour’s safely re-elected.

 

If it’s the latter, then the electorate will have every right to feel duped. Major changes – and a programme entitled “Building Wealth from the Ground Up” surely qualifies as such – should be signalled well in advance of a general election. Without prior notification, along with the discussion and debate such announcements inevitably provoke, political parties cannot claim a legitimate mandate for change. Lacking an electoral mandate, major policy reforms instantly become vulnerable to repeal by the Opposition. Refusing to share your plans with the voters isn’t just bad form, it’s bad politics.

 

So, why has Robertson been so careful to avoid referencing his party’s core constituency: the 300,000 New Zealanders who still belong to a trade union? The speech itself contains a number of hints.

 

The first of these is the warm welcome extended to David Coats, one of the Conference’s keynote speakers. Coats comes with an impressive CV, and is well-placed, as one of the UK’s leading commentators on trade union affairs, to assist Robertson in speaking out forthrightly on what organised labour must do to remain relevant to twenty-first century workers. Coats’ preference for a union movement that is focused on helping its members to “‘get on’, rather than ‘get even’” dovetails neatly with Robertson’s own ideas about employee aspiration. Sadly, any discussion of such matters appears to have remained strictly in-house.

 

Another pointer towards why Robertson kept the trade unions out of his speech was his reference to Jeremy Corbyn. In spite of the fact that Corbyn now stands at the heart of an intense political struggle to determine the future of the British Labour Party, and hence the future of work in the United Kingdom, Robertson mentioned his name only in relation to what was happening 18 months ago: “Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour backbencher was preparing to defy his party whip for the 489th time”.

 

The remark is vintage Robertson. In dismissing Corbyn as a disloyal back-bench pest, the MP for Wellington Central reveals how little he thinks of the British Labour leader’s left-wing ideas, and how much he values strictly-enforced political discipline. One can only speculate as to what all those “union leaders” allegedly involved in Robertson’s “Future of Work” project made of the remark.

 

After all, Corbyn recently announced his determination to re-arm the British Labour Movement by repealing the multitude of anti-union laws which, between them, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair either added to, or kept on, the UK statute books. With less than 10 percent of New Zealand’s private sector workforce involved in a trade union, our own “union leaders” must be hoping for something similar should Andrew Little win the 2017 election.

 

That’s unlikely. Especially when Robertson’s speech describes only one personal encounter with a living, breathing worker:

 

“At a public meeting in Albany earlier in the year after my presentation a man who had sat attentively at the front came forward and asked, with tears in his eyes, if I could do anything to help him get a job.”

 

It is difficult to imagine a more poignant depiction of the powerlessness of so many unemployed and precariously employed New Zealanders. If Robertson can’t make the case for empowering these workers and their unions now, relying upon him to do so after the election seems foolhardy in the extreme.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 30 August 2016.

The Universal Basic Income: A “Barking Mad” Idea Whose Time Has Come.

The Fourth Industrial Revolutionary: The Universal Basic Income is an inevitability. Not only because ordinary people all over the world are daily growing more determined to end inequality through a fairer distribution of wealth, but also because the more-than-human intelligence of the super-machines destined to manufacture our future will recognise what capitalists have always struggled to acknowledge: that people are at their most human when they work at their own pace and for their own purposes.

 

“THE FUTURE OF WORK” was the name Labour gave to its recent conference. All very forward-looking, I’m sure, but a much more appropriate title would have been “The Future of Capitalism”. Because, at this present point in the long march of human civilisation, work and capitalism remain inextricably intertwined. One cannot consider the future of one, without examining the future of the other.

 

The reaction to Labour’s conference from the two political parties most dedicated to capitalism’s defence – National and Act – would suggest that the free market’s future is not very bright. Strangely, capitalism’s least effective defenders appear to be the capitalists themselves!

 

Take the Prime Minister’s reaction to the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). “Barking mad!” was John Key’s response to an idea that is already being trialled in a number of overseas jurisdictions. (Including the “barking mad” nation of Finland, whose GDP per capita ranking, at 22, was five places ahead of New Zealand’s in 2014. Source: World Bank.) Is it really asking too much to expect our Prime Minister (and the leader-writers of our largest newspaper) to keep abreast of international thinking on income distribution?

 

Apparently so.

 

Our Prime Minister would also, presumably, hurl the “barking mad” epithet at the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab. Earlier this year, at Davos, Professor Schwab told the gathered One Percenters that “we are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another”. This “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, said Professor Schwab, is “fundamentally different” from the previous three industrial revolutions:

 

“It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”

 

Now, ordinary New Zealanders, whose future employment prospects will likely be put at risk by technological, economic and social change on this scale, are probably assuming that the Government, no less than the Opposition, is doing its best to ready the country for the onset of this Fourth Industrial Revolution. That the Prime Minister is already asking himself how a population becoming increasingly incidental to the processes of production, can possibly continue participating in the processes of consumption? And whether the creation of purchasing power, currently the near monopoly of the international financial system, might not, more sensibly, be restored to the democratic nation state? Because, surely, securing the future of Capitalism – and hence the future of work – is their Prime Minister’s Number One priority?

 

Apparently not.

 

Then again, according to business journalist Fran O’Sullivan, the Prime Minister is seized with his own vision of New Zealand’s future. Apparently, we are to become the Switzerland of the South Seas: a bolt-hole for free-floating capital and capitalists; a secure refuge for those with the resources to escape a world teetering on the brink of irreversible chaos. Quite where New Zealanders fit into this world of hunkered-down plutocrats is left rather vague. Perhaps those of us not employed to satisfy their every whim, will be deployed to keep out less disreputable refugees.

 

Who did the Prime Minister say was “barking mad”?

 

Casting a backward glance over modern history, it is relatively easy to see that what has saved capitalism from its own internal contradictions is not the impetuous avarice of the capitalists, but the determination of ordinary people to share in the bounty which capitalism’s long-term love affair with technological innovation inevitably generates. Generally, this has taken the form of extracting a greater share of the surplus than the capitalists, unprompted, would have felt obliged to give them. Without this forced redistribution of wealth, the capitalist system would not have progressed much beyond William Blake’s “dark, satanic mills”.

 

If Professor Schwab is correct about the unprecedented character of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, then the UBI is an inevitability. Not only because ordinary people all over the world are daily growing more determined to end inequality through a fairer distribution of wealth, but also because the more-than-human intelligence of the super-machines destined to manufacture our future will recognise what the factory-owners and bankers have always struggled to acknowledge: that people are at their most human when they work at their own pace and for their own purposes.

 

Anything else is barking mad.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 April 2016.

Third Term Temptations.

First, Fill Your War-Chest: With its radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy package, Labour should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.

 

THE THIRD TERM in Opposition is always the most dangerous. It’s the time when sticking to one’s principles is hardest, and when the blandishments of “professionals” promising easy victories are at their most persuasive. The prospect of another three years in opposition: of feeling powerless and useless; looms ahead of Opposition MPs like a prison sentence. They’ll do anything to escape. To win.

 

In 2016 Labour is in its third term of opposition, and it’s easy to imagine how desperately its caucus is looking for a way out. The party is heading into its hundredth year without a charismatic leader, shorn of just about all of the policies it campaigned on in the 2011 and 2014 elections; and as close to broke as any major party should ever be. What Labour needs is reinvigoration – reinvention even. Otherwise it risks being rejected by the electorate as too old and too irrelevant to make a difference. Yesterday’s party, filled with yesterday’s politicians.

 

Labour’s been here before – most recently in 1998. That, too, was the middle year of a National-led government’s third term, but it’s there that the similarities end. The government of Jenny Shipley was a government of rebels and turncoats and it was deeply unpopular. It was also a government made up of politicians elected under a radically new and different electoral system – MMP.

 

The Bolger-led National Government’s opponents had split their votes between three parties: Labour, NZ First and the Alliance; and most of them expected a government composed of all three. Winston Peters confounded those expectations by throwing in his lot with Bolger – a decision which inflicted near-fatal damage on his party. NZ First’s generosity notwithstanding, however, by December of 1997 Shipley had rolled Bolger and split Peter’s parliamentary ranks in two.

 

The Shipley Government never took. Lacking democratic legitimacy it was widely regarded as a political “dead man walking” towards the 1999 electoral gallows. It’s only hope of survival was the bitter enmity between Labour and the left-wing Alliance, led by Jim Anderton. If these two parties were to contest the 1999 election as rivals, and the Left presented to the voters as hopelessly divided, then there was a chance – a very slim chance – that National could come through the middle.

 

Would Labour risk it? Could Helen Clark beat Anderton’s Alliance into a poor third and win power in its own right? There were those in Labour’s caucus who believed it could, but following the Alliance’s surprisingly strong showing in the Taranaki-King Country by-election of May 1998 (Labour polled 17.53 percent to the Alliance’s 15.46 percent) Helen Clark opted to accept the olive branch offered by Anderton and publically announced Labour’s readiness to form a loose coalition government with the Alliance following the 1999 general election.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

In 2016, is the Labour leader, Andrew Little, also faced with Clark’s 1998 predicament? Is he, too, confronted with the prospect of a National Party Government only too willing to repeat its propaganda victory of 2014, when the Labour/Green/NZ First/Mana opposition (not-to-mention Kim Dotcom) were successfully portrayed as a ship of fools, with everyone rowing in opposite directions? And, if so, does he really have any other option except to follow Clark’s 1998 example and announce Labour’s readiness to form a coalition government with the Greens in 2017?

 

That is certainly the option progressive New Zealanders are hoping Labour will take. Their not unreasonable assumption being that a coalition with the Greens will anchor Labour firmly on the Centre-Left, and decisively weaken the right-wing faction of Labour’s caucus. There are, however, a number of problems with this analysis.

 

First and foremost is the undeniable fact of the Prime Minister’s – and his government’s – still astonishing levels of popularity. John Key is no Jenny Shipley, and his government certainly isn’t cobbled together from rebels and turncoats. Far from being a “dead man walking”, Key’s government shows every sign of robust political health and is more than ready to make a successful bid for a fourth term. It’s a level of confidence that’s likely to keep National’s election war-chest full-to-overflowing (and Labour’s empty). It also serves as a warning to the all-important news media that, as things now stand, changing sides would not be a good idea.

 

In this gloomy context, the recent statements from Grant Robertson make bright and sunshiny sense. With his eyes not on 1998, but 1983, Robertson is readying the Labour Party for another bid to win the backing of big business. Like Roger Douglas before him, he is inviting his party to become, once again, New Zealand’s great political facilitator. Last time it was the Free Market Revolution of 1984-93 that Labour facilitated. This time it will be what the one-percenter luminaries gathering for the World Economic Forum at Davos are calling “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

 

It’s an extraordinarily clever move on Robertson’s part. The NZ Herald’s “Mood of the Boardroom” revealed that, while appreciated as a canny election-winner, Key is not regarded as the political and economic innovator New Zealand so desperately needs. With his radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy package, Robertson should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.

 

Nor will he be alone. The Greens’ James Shaw is perfectly placed to act as Robertson’s seconder in the nation’s boardrooms. With his assurances that the Greens, too, are committed to developing a whole new political and economic paradigm – one equal to the enormous challenges of the 21^st Century – the business community’s fears about the Greens can be sufficiently allayed to make the announcement, at Labour’s hundredth annual conference, of a Red-Green Alliance something big business can welcome – rather than condemn.

 

Will it be enough to defeat the Third Term Blues? Possibly. But it will certainly be enough to render Labour electorally competitive in ways the New Zealand electorate has not seen for 18 – maybe even 33 – years.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 18 January 2016.

"Flexicurity" - The Future Of Work?

The Fictional Realm: Borgen's prime-ministerial heroine Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is consoled by her Machiavellian spin-doctor Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) in the award-winning drama series from Danish public television. Until very recently one of the world's most progressive states (its current immigration reforms are insupportable!) Denmark is able to run active labour market policies such as "flexicurity" only because the Danish working-class still enjoys effective representation in the country's political system. Would it were so in New Zealand!

 

IF ONLY New Zealand’s politics could be like those of Borgen – the Danish television series. Centred around the actions of a fictional Danish prime minister, Borgen’s politics are realistically riveting. More than this, however, they are rational. Denmark is portrayed as a nation with a conscience: the host of better angels to which, in extremis, Borgen’s heroine (yes, the prime minister is a woman) can successfully appeal. In the fictional realm, at least, the Danes remain the sort of people New Zealanders once believed themselves to be: decent, practical and courageous.

 

In population terms, Denmark and New Zealand are not that far apart: 5.6 million to 4.6 million. They are also similar in possessing large and efficient primary production sectors. Like New Zealand, Denmark’s political history has been strongly influenced by social democracy, with both countries boasting large and historically competitive Labour parties.

 

It is, therefore, unsurprising that left-wing intellectuals and Labour politicians from New Zealand have, from time to time, turned to Denmark for inspiration. In the late-1950s the left-wing political economist and public servant, William B. Sutch, urged Walter Nash’s Second Labour Government (1957-60) to follow the example of the small, highly-productive nations of northern and western Europe by radically increasing the range and complexity of New Zealand’s exports.

 

Excluding the political anomaly of the Rogernomics years (1984-1990), Sutch’s blueprint, albeit much updated and amended, has remained at the core of Labour’s economic thinking ever since.

 

Equally consistent has been the party’s predilection for adapting Scandinavian solutions to New Zealand’s social problems. Until the mass unemployment created by Roger Douglas’s free-market policies rendered the whole subject moot, the David Lange-led Labour Government borrowed heavily from the so-called “active labour market” regimes of the Scandinavian countries – especially Sweden and Denmark. Under the rubric of Grant Robertson’s “Future of Work Commission”, Labour is about to look northward again.

 

The Holy Grail? Grant Robertson's Future Of Work Commission looks set to make "flexicurity" an important part of Labour's 2017 manifesto.

 

Robertson’s buzzword-de-jour is “flexicurity”. As the name of this highly successful Danish policy suggests, the dual objective is to facilitate the maximum degree of labour market flexibility while providing the maximum level of employment security. Employers are offered considerable freedom to hire and fire, but, in return, employees are generously supported through periods of unemployment, and assisted with re-training and re-entering the labour market, by the state.

 

According to the official website of the Danish Government: “Danes are positive about globalisation and do not fear losing their jobs. Rather they seek opportunities for new and better jobs. This is partly ascribed to the flexicurity model which promotes adaptability of employees and enterprises.”

 

Small wonder that Labour’s Future of Work website links directly to this quintessentially Danish solution. In a New Zealand labour market increasingly composed of “independent” contractors, people holding down multiple jobs, part-timers, interns, and the plethora of similarly “precarious” employment relationships, the Danes’ flexicurity policies must have appeared to Grant Robertson in much the same way as the Holy Grail appeared to King Arthur.

 

Unfortunately, Robertson and his advisors failed to read the small print. New Zealand and Denmark have many similarities, but in 2016 they also feature a number of vital differences. In relation to flexicurity, the most important of these is the respective level of union density.

 

As the official Danish website puts it: “The development of the labour market owes much to the Danish collective bargaining model, which has ensured extensive worker protection while taking changing production and market conditions into account. The organisation rate for workers in Denmark is approx. 75%.”

 

The organisation rate for New Zealand workers in 2014 was approx. 19%.

 

It is typical of the contemporary New Zealand Labour Party that it has simply ignored the profound contextual differences between the workers of New Zealand and Denmark. With three-quarters of the workforce organised, the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions is a force in the land. With fewer than one in five New Zealand workers organised, the NZ Council of Trade Unions is in no position to prevent flexicurity turning into a government-backed scheme for employers to hire and fire at will. Presumably, the lone trade unionist on Robertson’s “External Reference Group” pointed this out. Presumably, Robertson wasn’t listening.

 

Borgen’s politics are rational because the balance of social forces in Denmark obliges its politicians to behave reasonably. Labour’s policies of 30 years ago predetermined the future of work in New Zealand: flexibility without security.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 January 2016.