Employers On The Warpath.

Excellent! So blow you employer windbags: crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! Spew forth cataracts of media releases, unleash your Facebook hurricanoes. Spout your nonsense about the Seventies until the voters are drenched with lies and the public square awash with fake news.

WELL, THAT DIDN’T take very long, did it? Nine months into this government’s first term and employer organisations up and down the country are on the warpath. There are full-page adverts and billboards for all the old folks who still respond to the printed word and a digital campaign for everybody else. The message? Simple. The proposed reforms to the Employment Relations Act must be “fixed”. Not “fixed” as in repaired, you understand, but “fixed” as in “the fix is in” and “the fight is fixed”. Basically, the bosses’ reps are telling the Labour-NZF-Green government that their members are happy with the way things are in the workplace and that no changes are necessary. Got that? No changes!

Wait a minute! Are these the same employer groups who, just a few weeks ago, were announcing their determination to be “part of the solution”? Yep, they sure are. But, a lot can happen in a few weeks. For example, you can be bombarded with hundreds of angry e-mails (from the businesses large and small that fund these groups) saying: “What the fuck do you idiots think you’re doing!”

Seems that New Zealand’s employers are not about to let union officials onto their premises at any time of the day or night simply because they’ve received an anguished call for help from one of their members. And why should it only be the small employers with fewer than twenty staff who get to have all the fun of waiting until Day 89 to fire their naïve 90-day probationers? No. New Zealand’s employers have made it very clear that they’re not paying their subs to have a bunch of pinko politicians order them to go on negotiating with their employees in good faith until a settlement is reached. No way. If Simon Bridges could be persuaded let them walk away from the negotiating table whenever they decide there’s nothing more to say, then so can Iain Lees-Galloway.

He’s a weak link that Iain Lees-Galloway. Ever since he backed away from his party’s solemn promise to repeal the hated “Hobbit Law”, it’s been clear that the guy isn’t what you’d call a tower of union-backing strength. Word is that the MBIE bureaucrats had him house-trained in a matter of days. Hugh Watt he’s not. Nor Stan Rodger neither. [Ministers of Labour in the Kirk and Lange Labour Governments respectively – Ed.]

But, if Iain Lees-Galloway is a weak link, then the NZ First caucus is a frayed rope. The various employer groups saw what just one full-page ad from the Sensible Sentencing Trust could do to the populists’ reluctant agreement to repeal the Three Strikes legislation. How long is their willingness to sing “Solidarity Forever” with the unions likely to last once they’ve driven past a few 10-metre-long billboards encouraging them to “fix” the employment relations legislation?

The answer – as always when the question is NZ First – depends on Winston Peters. A decision to throw in the towel of workplace relations reform would be a decision to leave a legacy of gutlessness and surrender. Certainly, it would make a nonsense of his determination to give capitalism a human face. It would also render incomprehensible his post-Cabinet press conference remarks about workers seeing his coalition government as a friend willing to listen. Winston won’t turn his back on all that just yet. He’s not about to let the unions carve the single word “Scab” on his political tombstone.

The other reason why Winston is more likely than not to urge resistance to the employers’ campaign is because he, unlike so many of the youngsters writing National’s attack-lines, remembers very clearly what happened in the 1970s.

Rather than the grey Polish shipyard so beloved of neoliberal revisionist historians like Michael Bassett, Peters remembers a New Zealand in which a dirt-poor Maori family from Northland could send their talented son to Auckland University without going into debt. He will recall, too, an era when working people did not live in fear of the boss. Yes there were strikes, and they could be damned inconvenient. But, seeing what happened to New Zealand after 1984 and 1991, Peters – along with his old comrade Jim Bolger – has come to understand that it was precisely because working people had trade unions to defend them that they also had jobs that paid them a living wage, houses they could afford, and children who could, and did, expect their lives to be better than their parents’.

So blow you employer windbags: crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! Spew forth cataracts of media releases, unleash your Facebook hurricanoes. Spout your nonsense about the Seventies until the voters are drenched with lies and the public square awash with fake news.

Spit and rage all you want. This government is determined to put a human face upon New Zealand capitalism – regardless of its well-funded protests.

Not for the bosses’ sake – but for ours.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 29 June 2018.

Forget the 1970s, Labour’s Fair Pay Agreements will take New Zealand back to the 1890s!

Poacher Turned Gamekeeper? Will Jim Bolger, the one-time master-poacher of worker’s rights, be able to transform himself, over the course of the coming months, into the incorruptible game-keeper of their interests?

“FAIR PAY AGREEMENTS” (FPA) are the final proof that Labour is evolving backwards into the Liberal Party. Predictably, National’s ignorance of its own country’s history has rendered it incapable of placing this latest example of Labour milksoppery into its proper context. Scott Simpson can witter-on all he likes about Jim Bolger (of whom more later) taking New Zealand back to the 1970s. A much more accurate historical invocation would be the 1890s. Or, if we’re being precise, 1894. That was the year the Liberal Government of Richard John Seddon passed the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act (ICAA) – the true inspiration for Iain Lees-Galloway’s FPAs.

The ICCA empowered the state to bring employers and workers together for the purpose of establishing minimum rates-of-pay and working conditions across whole industries and occupations. If these could not be arrived at by negotiation, then binding arbitration was available from a special Arbitration Court. Crucially, unions and employer associations who submitted their disputes to the Court were forbidden from engaging in strikes or lockouts. These “awards” of the Arbitration Court spelled out the minimum standards workers could expect and prevented the employers’ competitors from initiating a ‘race to the bottom’ on wages and conditions.

The parallels with Labour’s proposed FPAs are obvious. What has yet to be established, however, is whether or not the advisory group headed by Bolger will incorporate a twenty-first century equivalent of the Arbitration Court into the new FPA machinery. Without such a mechanism, the negotiation of anything resembling a useful FPA will be next-to-impossible. Strikes and lockouts have already been ruled out of the process, so in the absence of a binding arbitration mechanism, negotiations between employers and unions could be prolonged indefinitely. Or, at the very least, until the National Party is re-elected and the legislation enabling FPAs repealed.

This will be the true test of whether Bolger’s ‘road to Damascus’ conversion: from hard-line anti-union promoter of the Employment Contract’s Act, to conscience-stricken repudiator of neoliberalism and all its works; is genuine. With National’s workplace relations spokesperson, Scott Simpson, on record as promising to repeal all FPA-related legislation, any hopes Labour may have entertained of Bolger inspiring an outbreak of constructive bi-partisanship have already been dashed.

The best the Left can hope for now is that the one-time master-poacher of worker’s rights will, over the course of the coming months, transform himself into the incorruptible game-keeper of their interests.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 6 June 2018.

A Labour Code Worthy Of Inspection.

Labour's Inspector-In-Chief: Since the Minister of Labour, Iain Lees-Galloway, has already ruled-out the only reform measure capable of reinvigorating the trade union movement: the restoration of compulsory membership; and in light of the fact that he is publicly pledged to expand the MBIE inspectorate; the idea of creating one big multifaceted “Labour Bureau” is not entirely fanciful.

AS A YOUNG trade unionist, back in the early 1980s, something always bothered me – the Department of Labour. Many of the issues confronting trade union organisers were straightforward breaches of the law relating to wages, conditions, holidays and, more importantly, the health and safety of the employees on site. This latter issue should not, strictly-speaking, have been the responsibility of the trade unions at all but of the Department of Labour’s safety inspectorate. Why were these Labour Inspectors so incredibly reluctant to intervene in workplace disputes?

The secretary of my union patiently explained to me just how delicate the balance was between the employers, the unions and the Department of Labour. Too much interference from the unions and/or the Labour Department’s inspectors in the employers’ “managerial prerogatives” would inevitably escalate into a political crisis from which, in the end, only the bosses would emerge victorious. Official intervention was, accordingly, reserved for only the most egregious breaches of the law. For the most part, the resolution of workplace difficulties was accomplished informally by paid union officials, or Departmental staff, having “a quiet word” with the delinquent employer. Only very rarely did matters end up in court.

To make doubly sure that enforcement did not get out of hand, the number of Labour Inspectors was kept ridiculously low. Even had the inspectorate been minded to act proactively against poor (or even dangerous) employment practices, there was simply too few of them to enforce the law effectively.

The unions, too, had received an unforgettable lesson in what was – and was not – acceptable industrial behaviour, from the National Party in 1951. Industrial militancy – especially when undertaken with overt political intent – would not be tolerated. If the unions wanted the legal mechanisms which made union membership compulsory to remain in place, then they would limit themselves to meeting the “bread and butter” needs of their members. Politically-inspired union militancy was off the agenda.

Bad though this state-of-affairs undoubtedly was, the arrival of “Rogernomics” made it much, much worse. Free market capitalism required “labour market flexibility”, “light-handed regulation” and the unfettered exercise of managerial prerogatives. With the passage of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991, the scope for interfering union officials and labour inspectors was dramatically reduced.

The consequences: whether manifested in the blatant criminal tragedy of the Pike River mine disaster; or, more insidiously, in the steady reduction in the share of the nation’s wealth afforded to working people (as opposed to shareholders) are all around us.

To date, most of the reform effort has been concentrated on heeding the lessons of Pike River. The law relating to occupational safety and health has been strengthened and that part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) responsible for the enforcement of workplace legislation has become much more assertive.

The most startling evidence of MBIE’s new proactive approach emerged only this week when, in a test case brought before it by the Ministry, the Employment Court ruled against the practice of not paying employees for business-related activities undertaken before and/or after their agreed hours of work.

The public reaction to this case, from and on behalf of what could easily end up being thousands of workers required to provide similar unpaid labour to their employers, raises an interesting question. What would happen if the functions of the entity we used to call the Department of Labour, and the much-diminished trade union movement, were combined in a single, legislatively-mandated and publicly-funded workplace law enforcement agency?

Since the Minister of Labour, Iain Lees-Galloway, has already ruled-out the only reform measure capable of reinvigorating the trade union movement: the restoration of compulsory membership; and in light of the fact that he is publicly pledged to expand the MBIE inspectorate; the idea of creating one big multifaceted “Labour Bureau” is not entirely fanciful.

In essence, it would require the enactment of a comprehensive code of employer/employee rights and responsibilities; the creation of an institution empowered to establish minimum rates of pay across all industries and occupations; and the recruitment of a veritable army of Labour Bureau Inspectors charged with the rigorous enforcement of both. As part of that enforcement, these inspectors could issue a cease-and-desist order to any business in violation of the code until such time as the breach is remedied.

These orders could be called “Strike Notices”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 May 2018.