The Dog That Doesn’t Bark.

Why You Lookin At Me? So, here we are. All out of charismatic and battle-hardened working-class guard-dogs. I’d wager that 99 New Zealanders out of 100 could not name of the Council of Trade Union’s current president.

“IS THERE ANY OTHER POINT to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Asks Gregory, the Scotland Yard detective. “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, replies Sherlock Holmes. “But, the dog did nothing in the night-time”, says Gregory. “That was the curious incident”, says Holmes.

Those lines, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Silver Blaze, are among the most frequently quoted words of the celebrated consulting detective of 221B Baker Street.

As the Labour Government’s popularity continues to evaporate (26 percent in the latest Roy Morgan poll!) I cannot help pondering, like Holmes, why the labour movement’s guard dog, the Council of Trade Unions, has done so little to dispel the night-time that has settled upon Labour’s hopes.

On the face of it, the CTU should be making the case for a just and more equitable New Zealand. It should have been “organised labour” that led the charge for a dramatic overhaul of this country’s taxation system. When it became clear that the private sector could not be relied upon to build the state houses so desperately needed to pare-back a waiting-list of 24,000 desperate Kiwis, it should have been the CTU demanding the creation of a state-owned construction company to make good the market failure.

But, when I talk about leading the charge and issuing demands, I have in mind a CTU led by somebody cast from the same mould as Helen Kelly. Think back to the campaign Helen waged for the health and safety of forestry workers. Think of her steadfast defence of the film industry workforce against Sir Peter Jackson’s and Warner Bros’ wrath. Remember how she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the maritime workers against the hard-nosed bosses of the Ports of Auckland. While Helen lived, so too did the CTU. In the glow of her lonely activism, other union “leaders” had to at least pretend to be in it for the working-class.

Now, as someone schooled in the heroic traditions of the American Socialist Party and the ideological bomb-throwers of the Industrial Workers of the World – “the Wobblies” – I can quote Eugene Victor Debs with the best of them: “I would not lead you into socialism even if I could”, he told his members. “Anyone who can lead you into socialism can lead you out again.” Even so, since 1984, the New Zealand working-class has had to endure more than its fair share of bad luck.

How different things might have been had Rob Campbell not been prevented, by a combination of illness and treachery, from being elected the CTU’s first president, and, after that, president of the Labour Party. Just think, New Zealand might have been blessed (cursed?) with its very own Bob Hawke and, as happened in Australia, the neoliberal revolution may well have been attenuated to a reform programme the working-class could learn to live with.

And then, thirty years later, Helen Kelly was elected president of the CTU. Once again, there was talk of a trade union leader wearing the double-crown of the labour movement. People dared to hope that a genuine leftist, the first since Big Norm Kirk, might exhort the Labour Party into, once again, making space on the political stage for the working people of New Zealand. Until, tragically, cancer cut her story short, and the traditional (as opposed to the woke) left could only contemplate the counterfactuals – the triumphs that might have been – through their tears.

So, here we are. All out of charismatic and battle-hardened working-class leaders. I’d wager that 99 New Zealanders out of 100 could not name of the CTU’s current president. Even fewer could cite the content of the turgid and timorous media statements it occasionally releases on matters economic, social and political. In the face of inflationary pressures unseen since the 1990s, buckling beneath the crushing weight of their household bills, working people have a right to expect their peak trade union organisation to be barking like a furious guard-dog in the night-time – not slumbering on a silk cushion like a pampered pup.

“The curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But not that curious, not really. Not when you consider that the modern trade union movement does not exist to guard, let alone lead, New Zealand’s workers. It exists to manage them.

To do nothing.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 August 2023.

Missing From The Anti-Covid Action.

The Invisible Man: Where has the NZ Council of Trade Unions been during the Covid-19 Pandemic? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff (above) become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? 

WHERE HAVE THE UNIONS BEEN during the Covid-19 Pandemic? That the question can even be posed suggests that something is very wrong with the New Zealand labour movement. After all, the answer should be all around us.

At its high-point, under the late, and sorely missed, Helen Kelly, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) liked to present itself as the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. With upwards of 300,000 affiliated members, that claim was no idle boast. As Kelly proved, the CTU has always possessed the potential to do an enormous amount of good.

So, where has it been? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff, become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? Where was the tireless advocacy for essential workers: the people who stood at the check-out counters, drove the trucks and operated the warehouses? When supermarket workers came under attack from the stupid and the selfish, why were they defended with more passion by their bosses, than by the CTU?

Which is not to imply that, down at the coalface, union organisers have not been fighting the good fight for their members. The “sergeants” and “corporals” of the movement have, indeed, been working tirelessly. Some of them have even managed to attract the attention of the news media. Unions like FIRST and Unite – affiliates of the CTU – have stood loyal right through this pandemic: speaking-up and fighting-back; making it very clear to anyone with ears to hear, exactly which side they are on.

But these are the “grunts”, the frontline fighters, the ones who, when the question arises: “Who ya gonna call?”, answer: “Us. You call us. You call your union.” There just aren’t enough hours in the day for these battlers to meet even half the need that’s out there. They certainly don’t have the time or the resources to plan and fund nationwide campaigns; issue media releases; and appear on programmes like AM, Breakfast, Newshub Nation and Q+A. That’s why they send money, collected from thousands of ordinary working people, to the CTU in Wellington.

This is where you might expect to find the “generals” and the “colonels” of the labour movement. The men and women who run the unions’ union. This is where you might expect to hear the national voice of organised labour in New Zealand – speaking up loud and proud for this country’s working-class.

So why haven’t we heard anything remotely like this coming from the CTU? All that money: taken from the pockets of ordinary working men and women so their voices can be heard and their interests defended; what has it been spent on?

This country has been subjected to a veritable blizzard of propaganda from those whose profits have been put at risk. The lobbying of the tourism and hospitality industries was so unrelenting they were gifted their precious Trans-Tasman Bubble – and workers ended up with the Delta variant.

Workers might have expected the CTU to lead the charge for “No Jab. No Job”. Because how else can employees be protected from the enormous risk posed by the stupid and the selfish? The great union motto has always been: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” Not, “The injury of all – by one.” What greater priority could the labour movement have than throwing its entire weight behind the drive for universal inoculation against Covid-19?

Well, according to the veteran political journalist, Richard Harman, the priority of the CTU has been ever-so-slightly different:

“Businesses are caught in a legal tangle if they try to enforce ‘no jab no job’ policies. Up until yesterday, business leaders were convinced the Government would not move on “no jab no job”, in part because it is opposed by the Combined Trade Unions.”

Yep, that’s what he said: “because it is opposed” by the CTU. Opposed!

Rather than defend the health of ordinary working people, the CTU has been slowing the vaccination roll-out by defending the “rights” of the stupid and the selfish. Permitting the injury of all – by anti-vaxxers.

How wonderful that, at last, Jacinda Ardern and her Labour colleagues have finally seen sense and set the “No Jab. No Job” ball rolling. But, how ironic, that they had to do it over the objections of the CTU.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 October 2021.

CTU Resolution Backs The Junior Doctors – Over Its President’s Strong Objections

Not Smiling Now: The carrying of a resolution in support of the Resident Doctor's Association over the strong objections of the CTU President, Richard Wagstaff (above) represents a rare assertion of the interests of private sector workers within the CTU – as well as an important breaking-of-ranks within the usually dominant “Big Four” public sector unions. Together, Wagstaff’s opponents have delivered a stunning blow to his presidential mana, greatly reducing his chances of being re-elected to a second term as leader of the CTU.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the upsurge in strike action across New Zealand since the Coalition Government assumed office. The National Party and its allies are insisting that this can only mean a return to the bad old days of the 1970s when, as National’s Workplace Relations spokesperson, Scott Simpson, told RNZ, unions would go on strike “at the drop of a hat”. What Simpson and his right-wing colleagues probably don’t know is how much worse things might have been had the Coalition Government not been able to rely on the moderating influence of the President of the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) Richard Wagstaff.

The CTU President, it is important to note, won his spurs as a senior official in the Public Service Association (PSA). Important, because the PSA has wielded a decisive influence over the CTU for more than 30 years. Crucially, that influence has been used to promote moderation, not radicalism. Both the PSA and the CTU have been consistent advocates of “partnership”, through “constructive engagement” with both the state and the private sector.

This is the jargon of the Wellington bureaucracy. The PSA is driven by the interests and priorities of the thousands of state-employed professionals and managers who make up its membership. These workers are deeply embedded in the governmental apparatus and their jobs very often entail monitoring, servicing and, in some cases, “sanctioning” the nation’s poorest and most marginalised citizens.

Work of this kind tends to encourage a high degree of identification with the administrative and political authorities on whose behalf public servants are required to act. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the PSA (with 70,000 members, New Zealand’s largest union) has, since the CTU’s inception in 1987, exerted a powerful restraining influence over the whole trade union movement.

Its influence has only grown stronger as the percentage of the private sector workforce belonging to a trade union has declined to the point where, today, fewer than 10 percent of private sector workers are unionised. Accordingly, for close to thirty years, trade unionism in New Zealand has largely been defined by the state sector unions: the PSA, the Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) the NZ Educational Institute (NZEI) and the NZ Nurses Organisation. Well-supplied with both members and money, these state unions have been willing to take a stand in defence of their own workers. Tragically, however, they have consistently declined to campaign for the rebuilding of trade unionism in the private sector.

The election of Helen Kelly to the presidency of the CTU changed its tone dramatically. She was much more willing to take a stand on behalf of workers in the private sector – winning significant moral victories against the logging industry and the Ports of Auckland. Her stand against Peter Jackson, while unsuccessful, was inspirational in its steadfast refusal to bend the knee to either Hollywood or the Beehive. The loss of Kelly, to lung cancer, robbed the CTU of its most inspirational leader ever. The New Zealand working class lost a true friend and champion.

Wagstaff, Kelly’s successor, has taken a very different leadership path. Not at all a street-fighting man, he prefers to work behind the scenes, taking full advantage of the capital city’s myriad power networks to neutralise enemies and cultivate friends. What Wagstaff lacks in charisma and rhetorical inspiration, he more than makes up for by his intimate knowledge of exactly which people are attached to what strings – and when they should be pulled.

The most recent example of Wagstaff’s leadership style was his handling of the prolonged and bitter dispute between the country’s District Health Boards (DHBs) and the Resident Doctors’ Association (RDA). One school of thought has it that Wagstaff, well aware of both the DHB’s and the Coalition Government’s desire to be rid of the Resident Doctors’ highly successful advocate, Deborah Powell, encouraged his old union, the PSA, to facilitate the formation of a rival union, which the DHBs could use to undermine the bargaining power of the RDA. Certainly, the almost total silence of the CTU on the increasingly vulnerable position of the RDA, vis-à-vis the DHBs, did little to encourage alternative explanations for Wagstaff’s unwillingness to become involved in the dispute. His explanation? The RDA were not affiliated to the CTU. What happened to the junior doctors and their troublesome advocate was not, according to its President, the CTU’s business.

Other affiliates, most particularly the two unions most closely associated with the RDA: the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) and the NZNO; begged to differ. Urged on by private sector unions anxious for the CTU to express its solidarity with the junior doctors, the ASMS and the NZNO took a resolution to the National Affiliate Council (NAC) of the CTU held in Wellington on Thursday, 28 February.

It read:

That the CTU expresses concern in the strongest possible terms to the district health boards for the collective bargaining strategy adopted in their MECA negotiations with the Resident Doctors’ Association which includes (a) the undermining of a union that is in bargaining with the potential effect of ‘union busting’ and (b) taking advantage of the vulnerability of resident doctors due to their dependence on changing DHB employment for their training.  Further, the CTU urges the Government to urgently require DHBs to discontinue this strategy forthwith and to communicate this resolution to the DHBs and Government.

The resolution was carried 9 votes to 4, with 2 abstentions.

Sources close to the NAC have stressed the importance of this vote. They have noted Wagstaff’s implacable opposition to its passage and the vehemence with which he argued against its adoption. They have also pointed out that while the PSA and its usual allies, the PPTA and the NZEI, stood with Wagstaff, at least two of his normally reliable allies, the E Tu union, servicing workers in the manufacturing and service industries, along with the Dairy Workers, chose to abstain.

Wagstaff is reported to have pressured the nurses into withdrawing their support for the junior doctors, but the latter, strongly supported by the “senior doctors” of the ASMS, held firm. Joining them in the vote were the First Union, covering transport, warehousing and retail workers, Unite, covering casino workers, security guards and fast-food workers, and the unions covering the maritime and railway industries.

The carrying of the resolution thus represented a rare assertion of the interests of private sector workers within the CTU – as well as an important breaking-of-ranks within the usually dominant “Big Four” public sector unions. Together, Wagstaff’s opponents have delivered a stunning blow to his presidential mana, greatly reducing his chances of being re-elected to a second term as leader of the CTU.

Wagstaff’s defeat is also a defeat for the Minister of Health, David Clark, as well as Labour’s ministers in the Coalition Government. The National Party may decry the upsurge in industrial action of the past 12 months, but if they’d realised how assertive the trade unions might become if the CTU is led by someone less steeped in the machinations of Wellington, they might have held their tongues. If Wagstaff and the PSA continue to be outvoted, both the Government and the Opposition should get ready for “trouble at mill”.

As Al Jolson puts in The Jazz Singer, the world’s first ‘talking picture’:

“You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 February 2019.

“Nothing Without A Demand” The Need For A New Union Movement.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

FOR 27 YEARS wage workers in New Zealand have been forced to endure “labour market flexibility”. In the guise of, first, the Employment Contracts Act (1991) and then, the Employment Relations Act (2000) a workplace regime specifically designed to advantage employers has steadily whittled away workers’ collective economic security.

Their legal power to act as a class, by striking in solidarity with other workers engaged in industrial action, has been nullified by the legislative strategies of both the National and Labour parties. The consequent engorgement of employer power has fundamentally redrawn the contours of class relations in New Zealand. Until they are redrawn again – this time in the workers’ favour – New Zealand society will continue its long, slow slide into narcissism and cruelty.

So entrenched has the employers’ advantage in the workplace become that the Labour-NZF coalition government’s promised restoration of the core content of the Employment Relations Act: those rights steadily whittled away during nine years of National Party rule under John Key and Bill English; is being represented by the employers as an example of how “ideology rather than solid public policy [is] driving decisions”.

The bare-faced affrontery of this assertion is stunning. As if the Employment Contracts Act wasn’t the product of the most clear and uncompromising ideological calculation. The Act was widely regarded as a legislative marvel, celebrated by right-wingers around the world as the most effective means of taming the unions (short of deploying tanks and guns) which the promoters of “free markets” had yet devised.

Its successor, the Employment Relations Act was, if anything, even more ideological. Its Labour Party sponsors took care to give just enough – but no more – to the battered trade union bureaucracies. The changes contained in the Act permitted what remained of the New Zealand trade union movement to survive – but not thrive. What it most emphatically did not do was encourage the mass re-unionisation of the workforce, with all that implied about bringing ordinary working people back onto the country’s political stage.

Not that the surviving union bureaucracies would have been at all keen to see such a decisive shift in power relations. Prior to the Employment Contracts Act, the “electorates” of the major trade unions ran into the tens-of-thousands. To become a union secretary (the equivalent of a CEO) one had first to be elected by the rank-and-file membership. This could involve anything up to 35,000 union electors being eligible to cast a postal ballot. Today, union leaders are elected by a few dozen hand-picked conference delegates.

The annual conferences of the old Federation of Labour (1936-1989) which attracted hundreds of politicised working-class delegates have been replaced by the profoundly undemocratic Council of Trade Unions’ biennial get togethers. Gatherings that seldom attract more than fifty souls – most of them paid union officials.

It’s facts like these that make the National Party’s claim that the Labour-NZF Government’s reforms will “return us to 1970s-style adversarial union activity” so utterly nonsensical. The “Fair Pay Agreements” which, of all the proposed changes, come closest to resurrecting the bargaining structures of the 1970s, cannot be secured by industry-wide strike action. The employers have the Prime Minister’s word on that.

What’s more, the National Party’s Workplace Relations and Safety spokesperson, Scott Simpson, has stated bluntly that: “The Employment Relations Amendment Bill will go down as one of this Government’s biggest economic mistakes and a future National-led Government will repeal the provisions”.

The rights of working people will thus be traded back and forth like chips on the political poker table. Neither National nor Labour are really interested in hearing how workers themselves would prefer the modern workplace to be organised, or in learning about ways that the twenty-first century economy, with all its technological miracles, might be so regulated as to ensure that the benefits of robotics and artificial intelligence accrue to the benefit of the whole population – and not just to the shareholders of the transnational corporations who own the patents.

What will it take for that to happen? Well, it will take a lot more than simply voting for the Labour Party, the Greens or NZ First. [Who are already showing signs of backing away from Labour’s proposed reforms.]

The first step towards the construction of a new union movement is a commitment to learn from the past. Grasping the key historical fact that the trade unions were not the creation of the Labour Party; the Labour Party was the creation of the trade unions. That only a broad-based and independent workers’ movement can generate the necessary industrial and political heft to ensure that the interests of working people are not simply shunted aside by the bosses and their enablers.

Such movements have happened before in New Zealand history. Massive waves of unionisation, often followed by militant industrial struggle, during which the employing class was given good reason to fear the power of organised labour. In place of strife, the employers were moved to search for some way of living in peace with the trade unions: an arrangement that was capable of benefitting both parties to the employment relationship. Absent that fear; absent that independent organisation; neither of the major political parties will feel under the slightest obligation to address the interests of working-class New Zealanders. National will look after its own, and Labour will look after itself.

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) the freed African-American slave and tireless toiler in the anti-slavery cause, wrote movingly of the unavoidable nature of struggle:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 September 2018.

Can The Nurses Win On Their Own?

The First Of Many? If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.

NEW ZEALAND’S NURSES are about to discover whether their store of public good-will is big enough to see them through a strike. New Zealanders with experience of this country’s public health system almost always speak very highly of its staff. Nurses in particular draw the public’s praise and respect. In our overburdened and understaffed hospitals they display the weary-but-unflinching professionalism of workers required to operate in an environment of more-or-less permanent crisis.

No one knows better that this country’s frontline health professionals how potentially dangerous this situation can become. New Zealand needs more nurses – lots more nurses. But to keep the staff it already has – let alone attract new recruits – nurses insist they must be paid more. Lots more.

But, how much more? That is the question. In an economy where roughly half the paid workforce have not had a pay-rise for close to two years, will the NZ Nurses’ Organisation’s demand for an immediate, across the board, 11 percent increase strike the average Kiwi as “about right” or “too much”. With an experienced registered nurse’s salary set to rise from $66,755 to $77,386 by December next year under the present offer, will the two-thirds of workers who earn considerably less than that sum (in 2016 the median NZ income was just $48,800) regard the union’s proposed strike action as reasonable – or unreasonable?

The offer on the table also guarantees that an additional 500 nurses will be recruited to the national health-sector workforce. This is clever. The single most important contributing factor to the crisis in the nation’s hospital wards is chronic understaffing. More than anything else it is the personal toll extracted by the excessive workloads caused by understaffing that is fuelling nurses’ anger and impatience with the District Health Boards’ management. It would be interesting to know whether the 9 percent offer on the table would be deemed enough if nurses could be convinced that their workloads were about to be reduced very rapidly to more bearable levels.

The DHB negotiators have also been clever in advancing the figure of half-a-billion dollars as the all-up cost of the settlement on the table. Many New Zealanders will see this as an extraordinarily generous sum – especially when the money on offer has been drawn from their taxes. In rejecting the offer, the Nurses’ union runs the risk of being dismissed as either unrealistic or greedy – or both.

The best way to avoid this perception taking hold would be for the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) to present the Nurses’ claim as the first of many. After nearly a decade of both public- and private-sector wage restraint, the unions should argue, the time has come for working people to make up the lost ground. The CTU should also emphasise the fact that Nurses are not the only workers in New Zealand who have been expected to work harder and longer for no appreciable improvement in their overall living standards. Nurses are, however, the first occupational group to vote in favour of doing something about it.

If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.

If the nurses are left to fight this battle on their own, however, then, sadly, there is a better than even chance that the politics of envy and resentment will prevail over the politics of solidarity.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 June 2018.

Unionists Learn Which Words Not To Use: Ika Salon Hosts “From Strike To Like”

Don't Mention The Surrender! Richard Wagstaff, CTU President. The betrayal of 1991 is not something the CTU ever talks about. Like the Fourth Labour Government’s betrayal of its core beliefs in the late-1980s, the CTU’s not unrelated betrayal of New Zealand’s trade unionists over the Employment Contracts Act remains both unacknowledged and unexamined. That being the case, all the organising conferences in the world will not avail a trade union leadership that has internalised the logic – and the language – of defeat.

 

WHEN A TRADE UNION organising conference advises participants to avoid using such words and phrases as: “Workers”, “Inequality”, “Collective Bargaining”, “Strikes”, “Lockouts”, and even, God help us, “The Union”; it’s a reasonably safe bet that trade unionism is in trouble.

 

When New Zealand’s trade union “density” – i.e. “the proportion of paid workers who are union members” – falls from 50 percent to 18 percent in the space of just 25 years, “trouble” seems a pathetically inadequate description.

 

And, when only 9 percent of private sector workers belong to a trade union, the only appropriate word to describe the condition in which New Zealand unionism finds itself is “crisis”.

 

“Crisis” is not, however, a word which the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) likes to use. Certainly its President, Richard Wagstaff, did not use it in his address to the Ika Seafood Bar & Grill “Salon” on Thursday night (18/8/16). Called “From Strike To Like” (an exceptionally appropriate title as it turned out) this latest dinner-and-discussion featured, in addition to Wagstaff, two Australian speakers: Mark Chenery from “Common Cause” and Madeline Holme from the service sector union, “United Voice”. Taking their cue from Wagstaff, their addresses were also resolutely upbeat.

 

The CTU was formed in October 1987 (on the same day the NZ sharemarket crashed). It brought together the hitherto separate peak organisations of the private and public sector unions, the Federation of Labour (FOL) and the Combined State Unions (CSU). Tellingly, the union leaders responsible for drawing-up the constitution of the new body decided to get rid of nearly all the democratic traditions built up over more than a century of trade unionism in New Zealand. The regional “worker parliaments” – known as the Trades Councils – were abolished, as was the tradition of holding large, delegate-based, annual conferences. Decision-making in the new organisation was instead placed in the hands of the leaders of the largest trade unions – about twenty individuals. They, and they alone, would decide the fate of the nearly half-a-million unionists affiliated to the CTU.

 

That it has taken the CTU nearly 30 years to hold its first organising conference (the reason why Wagstaff and the Australians were in Auckland this week) might strike some as a little strange. The passage of the draconian Employment Contracts Act in 1991 and the precipitate decline in union density that followed, must have suggested to at least some union leaders that a coming together of union organisers from across the country, to discuss what is, and isn’t, working at the shop-floor level, might be a useful exercise.

 

The sad truth of the matter, however, is that after 1991 many unions were only able to survive by gobbling-up the members of other unions. If they’d been corporations, the process would have been described as a ‘mergers and acquisitions frenzy’. In the grey bureaucratese of Kiwi unionism, however, the process was simply called ‘amalgamation’. It did not encourage co-operation.

 

That a coming together of organisers has finally happened bears testimony to just how parlous the position of New Zealand’s trade unions has become. Perhaps this is why keynote speakers to the organising conference – including Chenery and Holme – were received with such enthusiasm. The Aussie union movement has proved to be considerably more robust than its New Zealand counterpart and has happily embraced many of the techniques of political communication and persuasion coming out of the United States.

 

Coming up with suitable – i.e. less confronting – alternatives to the staunch phraseology of the picket-line is what inspired the list of “words to not use” with which this essay began. The research of American progressive Anat Shenker-Osorio, in particular, has been drawn on heavily by the Australian unions in an effort to “re-frame” the struggles in which their members are engaged. Holmes’ description of her own union’s fight to retain penal rates (oops, “weekend rates”) was particularly interesting in this regard.

 

The great risk here is that these purely tactical innovations will be mistaken for strategic imperatives. In its essence, trade unionism is an exercise in coercing a greater share of the surplus generated by a commercial enterprise than the owners of that enterprise, un-coerced, would feel inclined to distribute to their employees. There are ‘gentle’ ways to apply the coercive strength of a workforce, and there are not-so-gentle ways, but applied it must be if workers are to receive anything like their fair share of the wealth they create.

 

And it is here that we come to the matter which lies at the heart of the CTU’s weakness. In 1990, when the new National Government of Jim Bolger introduced the Employment Contracts Bill, the intention of the legislation was simple and clear: to legally eliminate the ability of workers to successfully coerce their employers.

 

Scores of thousands of New Zealand unionists marched and rallied against the Bill. At mass meetings across the country, resolution after resolution to stage a General Strike was carried overwhelmingly. At the summit of the CTU, however, the will to resist the bill by direct action was nowhere near as strong. Making full use of their power under the CTU’s undemocratic constitution, the union bosses voted 250,122 to 190,910 not to mount a nationwide stoppage.

 

At its first and most crucial test the CTU had failed its membership. It wasn’t just the National Party, or the employers, who were responsible for the collapse of unionism in New Zealand. The union leadership of 1991 must, itself, shoulder a very large share of the blame.

 

Not that any of this toxic historical legacy formed the slightest part of Wagstaff’s speech to the Ika audience. The betrayal of 1991 is not something the CTU ever talks about. Like the Fourth Labour Government’s betrayal of its core beliefs in the late-1980s, the CTU’s not unrelated betrayal of New Zealand’s trade unionists remains both unacknowledged and unexamined. That being the case, all the organising conferences in the world will not avail a trade union leadership that has internalised the logic – and the language – of defeat.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 20 August 2016.