Generation Games

Divide and Conquer: Who benefits from setting Generations X & Y and the Baby-Boomers at each other's throats?

WHEN DID IT BEGIN – this war between the Baby-Boomers and Generations X & Y? When did it become something more than the normal bickering between those who wish they still were, and those who (infuriatingly) still are – young? And how did I become so sensitised to these anti-Baby-Boomer attitudes that I’m now posting on the subject?

The proximate cause – as the forensic scientists would say – was a story by Tim Watkin on the Pundit blogsite. According to Tim, the Baby-Boomers were "locusts" –poised like a pestilence to devour what little remains of New Zealand’s patrimony:

"The baby-boomers start retiring now", wailed Tim, "which means the first locusts are already landing on our crops, and behind them comes the swarm ready to devour our welfare budget. Yet our politicians are sitting there like the monkeys with their hands over their eyes, ears and mouth."

For the first time in a long time I experienced that awful feeling of being condemned not for anything I had done, but because of my membership in a particular group. Like every other New Zealander born between the years 1946 and 1966, I did not choose my birth date – and yet, there I was, squarely in Tim’s gunsights.

I cannot say my mood was improved upon reading, a little further down, that: "[The Baby-Boomers] have given themselves generous and repeated tax cuts, meaning fewer services and assets for the generation coming behind. I used the locust metaphor because the baby-boomers (not all, of course, and in a broad, generational sense) have simply gorged themselves without thinking about what they leave behind."

Tim’s rather mealy-mouthed qualification notwithstanding, this accusation really flicked my angry switch. So this was how the younger generations saw us? As selfish insects who "gorged themselves" without the slightest thought for future generations?

I recalled the Baby-Boomers who had raised the banner of ecological sustainability; the Baby-Boomers who had fought tooth-and-nail against the onslaught of Rogernomics; men and women with no other thoughts in their minds except to preserve the planet and keep safe the ideals of fairness and social justice for future generations.

I thought about the vast cultural and political transformations wrought by young middle-class students of the 1960s and 70s: in civil rights, women’s rights, Maori rights, gay rights. I remembered the struggles waged against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, sporting contacts with South Africa, and for a woman’s right to choose. Two decades of unceasing agitation against the cultural and political institutions of the rigid post-war consensus: militant anti-communism; fast-frozen gender- and race-relations; a stultifying cultural conservatism – all made palatable by an ever-rising standard of living and expanding material wealth.

And, finally, I thought of the tens of thousands of young New Zealand workers who’d unleashed the most protracted period of strike action in New Zealand history. Because, yes, it was the working-class Baby-Boomers who made the 1970s and 80s rock-n-roll with militant union power: working on the chain at the freezing works, driving trucks, building dams, manning the production-lines in the big import-substitution factories of Auckland, Porirua and the Hutt Valley.

Not that I imagine young Tim ever gave much thought to where all those fifteen-year-olds ruthlessly drafted-out of secondary education by the School Certificate examination eventually ended up.

Just as it never occurred to Tim that the tax-cuts he so casually attributes to the greed of the Baby-Boomers couldn’t possibly have been their doing. It was, after all, Rob Muldoon who began cutting income taxes back in the early 1980s. Roger Douglas and Bill Birch (neither of whom are Baby-Boomers) kept on cutting – but not for the sake of young New Zealanders in their 20s and 30s.

The reduction in the top rate of income tax was for the benefit of those in the top income brackets, and in the normal course of events such people tend to be older rather than younger. The men and women (they were mostly men) entering their prime earning years in the 1980s and 90s weren’t Baby-Boomers, they were of Roger Douglas’s and Bill Birch’s generation – New Zealanders born in the 1930s and 40s – not the 1950s and 60s.

A moment’s more thought would have reminded Tim that the real "Baby-Boomer Government" led by Labour’s Helen Clark (b. 1950) – didn’t cut taxes, it raised them.

And it’s about here, of course, that we come to the ultimate cause of this nasty little war between the Baby-Boomers and Generations X & Y - historical amnesia.

Having the generations who were its primary victims at each others’ throats is exactly what the neoliberal architects of Rogernomics require. Those responsible for the changes which transformed New Zealand society from one of the most equal (in terms of income share) to one of the most unequal in the OECD have no interest whatsoever in New Zealanders accurately recalling "whodunnit".

And, of course, Generations X & Y either weren’t old enough to appreciate what was going on between 1984-93 – or had yet to be born. All they know about what happened in the 1980s and 90s is what other people tell them. And that’s the trick, you see. To make them believe that the reason they have to pay student fees; the reason they can’t afford a house; the reason they have to keep putting off getting married and starting a family: it’s all down to those greedy bloody Baby-Boomers!

And we Boomers: affronted and hurt by the false accusations of Generations X and Y; and not a little confused ourselves about how everything turned so comprehensively to shit over the past quarter-century; we get all angry and defensive.

"Who do these little bastards think they are?" we say. "We haven’t noticed them marching down the street for peace, justice and equality – like we did. We haven’t seen them taking part in strike action. Shut up in their rooms: with their PCs and iPods and cell-phones; downloading, texting, face-booking and tweeting their lives away; who the fuck are they to point their fingers at us!"

Divide et Impera. Divide and Conquer. It almost never fails.

While the victims of the neoliberal counter-revolution scratch and tear at each other for a share of the social-services cake which, with every passing budget, emerges from the oven just a little bit smaller than the year before, the men and women who bake it refill their glasses and offer up a votive prayer to Pluto – the God of Death and Money – that those whose lives they've so comprehensively constrained never grasp the simple and unchanging truth. That greed is ageless.

Johnny & Billy - Zombie Slayers?

Night of the Living Dead: This 1968 horror classic features creatures that refuse to die. Is the National Government battling a neo-liberal establishment which similarly refuses to accept its own mortality?

IS THIS GOVERNMENT really the free-market horror film its left-wing critics make it out to be? Or, are John Key’s and Bill English’s most daunting political challengers now coming at them from the Right?

Not if you subscribe to the Left’s political narrative.

According to Labour and its left-wing allies, John Key is a hard-line free-marketeer who had to be "sold" to the New Zealand electorate (principally by the Australian political consultancy, Crosby-Textor) as a benign centrist. Had Key not adopted this persona, the Left insists, he would never have been elected. Which means National’s election-winning formula: Labour-lite + tax-cuts; cannot be abandoned before 2011 without putting its re-election at risk. Consequently, Key must wait until he wins a second term before unleashing his "secret" agenda: radical welfare reform + wholesale deregulation and privatisation.

But what if we are actually watching a very different movie? What if, far from being a sort of antipodean werewolf, impatiently waiting for the next electoral full moon so he can tear to shreds what remains of the egalitarian New Zealand dream, Key really is a moderate? What if the horror-movie we’re watching isn’t The Howling, but a political version of Night of the Living Dead, in which Key and his Finance Minister desperately battle the reanimated corpses of economic and social policies everyone believed dead and buried in the 1990s?

Now, that would be a real horror-show.

So, has the Budget really got the zombies pounding on the Beehive door? Well, National’s far-Right allies were certainly vocally unimpressed by Bill English’s "Road to Recovery". Act Leader, Rodney Hide, (as befits his ministerial status) has remained silent, but the keeper of the party’s ideological flame, Sir Roger Douglas, has unleashed volley after volley of verbal scorn upon English’s economic programme.

"This is the budget of deficits", thundered the former Finance Minister on Budget Day. "A deficit of spending, a deficit of the current account, a deficit of courage, but most importantly, a deficit of imagination."

But what would a budget which passed Sir Roger’s imagination test look like? What do the unreconstructed disciples of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek actually want from John Key and Bill English? And could Key’s government possibly deliver it?

Fortunately, former Act MP, and proprietor of the NZ Centre for Political Research website, Muriel Newman, also wanted answers to these questions, and asked the Executive Director of the NZ Business Roundtable, Roger Kerr, to supply them.

In his guest commentary to the NZCPR Weekly newsletter, Kerr is careful not to be too specific in his recommendations, but the overall direction of his proposed programme of "reform" is reasonably clear.

He applauds what he claims is Bill English’s emphasis on "structural adjustment" – meaning a "shift of resources from the domestic economy to internationally competing industries". This "basic change in economic direction", says Kerr, is one of the (all-too-few?) "positive features" of the Budget.

What that ominous term "structural adjustment" means in plain English, is that Kerr very badly wants this Government to slash public spending on the goods and services New Zealanders consume, and redirect the state’s resources towards private businesses producing goods and services that foreigners consume.

In reality, there’s very little in this Budget that redirects resources in the way Kerr suggests. Indeed, English has been criticised by many commentators for maintaining the level of state spending in health, education and social welfare at the expense of the export sector. He did, after all, cut back on state support for research and development and skills training – both of which are crucial to lifting productivity.

To be blunt, I think Kerr is confusing what English has actually done, with what the Business Roundtable would like him to do. It’s a frequent mistake among left-wing ideologues, especially those dealing with conservative social-democratic governments – so it’s comforting to discover that right-wing ideologues suffer from the same wishful thinking.

The key passage in Kerr’s commentary, however, is this one:

"If we are to [catch up with Australian income levels by 2025] the government (and the community at large) have to recognise the need for policy settings much more like those of more successful countries. We can’t continue avoiding ‘third rail’ issues such as the superannuation eligibility age, privatisation of commercial businesses, a freer labour market and welfare reform."

In unpacking that heavily loaded sentence, we catch a glimpse of the sort of New Zealand the Business Roundtable is hoping to create.

It will be a New Zealand without unions. What else can "freer" mean when, already, barely seven percent of the private sector workforce is unionised? To further "free" the labour market, the public sector unions covering teachers, nurses and civil servants would have to be targeted. But, eliminating these powerful democratic institutions will not be achieved without massive political upheaval.

The same, of course, might be said about imposing "welfare reform" – a code-word for radically restricting citizens’ access to transfer payments, usually by limiting the period of eligibility to 3 months, or less.

Limiting elderly New Zealanders’ access to superannuation, by lifting the age of entitlement to 67, or more, and privatising what remains of the publicly-owned airways, railways and electricity generators rounds out Kerr’s vision of the future. Clearly, the Business Roundtable’s "ideal" New Zealand is going be a much less generous – and a much more politically contentious – country in which to live.

Or will it? Given that Kerr holds up both Hong Kong and Singapore as models of "small, high income countries" (‘with authoritarian governments’, he should have, but unaccountably failed, to add) political dissent may not be all that welcome in the Business Roundtable’s brave new world.

Writing about the current global economic crisis in The London Review of Books, recently, the veteran British labour historian, Ross McKibbin observed:

"The present crisis has established beyond doubt that neoliberalism, even the British form, and democracy are incompatible. To try to make them compatible, governments have adopted ever more risky policies, which brought down the last Conservative government and will probably bring down Brown’s."

"Risky" is a most inadequate word to describe the prescription which Kerr is offering Key and English. Filling it would be political suicide.

Perhaps, the Left should reconsider its rather gruesome characterisation of National’s leaders. Compared to the undead ideological creatures pounding on their door, who do Key and English more resemble: villains – or heroes?

This commentary was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 11 June 2009.

The New Worker

Welcome to my air-conditioned, computer keyboard nightmare!

A SPECTRE is haunting the factories, shops and offices of the 21st Century. It is the spectre of the "New Worker". That, at least, is what "Xchequer", writing at his new blogsite, ‘NZ Home Office’, would have us believe.

Is he right? Has a new generation of workers, raised entirely under the economic, industrial and cultural sway of Neo-Liberal Capitalism, been irreversibly inoculated against the ideological viruses of the 19th and 20th Centuries? Is the rising generation of "New Workers" therefore "immune" to all kinds of left-wing industrial and political organising?

In defence of his thesis, Xchequer provides a vivid description of his 14-year-old niece – a member of what is now being called "Gen-Y Neo" – whose cellphone "appears to be hardwired to her fingers". Xchequer’s young relative is said to live in a world where "the Ipod is king, consumerism is rampant and communication is on a scale never seen before."

"We are", he says, "moving to a more knowledge-based economy that means more and more people are moving from the factory floor or the waterfront to the air-conditioned office and the computer keyboard."

Xchequer’s argument: that there is now "little room for the old stereotype of the militant socialist – or even the vociferous one" is, as any student of modern politics knows, very far from being original. Indeed, it has been asserted many times in the half-century which has elapsed since the end of World War II. The most famous example being the American sociologist’s, Daniel Bell’s, singularly ill-timed book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties – which was published in 1960, just in time for one of the most tumultuous and politically engaged decades of the 20th Century.

It is one of the abiding dreams of the middle-class "progressive" – epitomised by such figures as H.G. Wells and James Burnham – that technology will rescue society from the class struggle, and that, ultimately, a new class of wise and ideologically disinterested scientists and technocrats will obviate the need for the grubby business of politics altogether.

Xchequer is, however, on much firmer ground when he argues that dramatic changes in the composition of the NZ workforce have had a profound impact on trade union organisation.

Unionisation was a relatively straight-forward proposition for the hundreds of unskilled and semi-skilled workers concentrated in the freezing works and import substitution manufacturing plants that characterised the industrial landscape of New Zealand from the 1930s to the early 1980s. For a generation whose experience of military regimentation, and the intense emotions associated with wartime solidarity and sacrifice had been formative, the mass-membership, intensely masculine, top-down unionisation of the 50s and 60s seemed perfectly natural. And while Xchequer’s "say-with-my-fists-what-my-mouth-can’t" is an entirely ahistorical slur on the highly articulate and intellectually rigorous NZ Watersider Workers Union, it is, nevertheless, true to say that a generation of men who had lived through the organised violence of total war, would likely find the prospect of organising resistance against the forces of the State a lot less intimidating than the unionists of today.

The generation which moved into the NZ workforce from the mid-1960s to the mid-80s – the "Baby-Boom Generation" – turned out to be much less comfortable with the organisational style of the trade unions their fathers and grandfathers had built. Thanks to the full-employment economy mandated by Keynesian economics, and Peter Fraser’s education reforms of the 30s and 40s, it was a much less regimented and increasingly adventurous working-class that began to fill the nation’s freezing works and factories. A generation which, as Otago political scientist, Brian Roper’s, research attests, in the 20-year period between 1966 and 1986, racked-up the greatest number of man-hours lost to strikes in New Zealand history. More self-actualising than their father’s generation, these men (and it was mainly men) chafed under what they saw as the timid, Cold War-influenced leadership of the trade union movement. Had the political trajectory of this new breed of working-class trade union activist not been interrupted, the shape of the 1980s and 90s might have been very different.

But, it was interrupted – decisively – by the Neo-Liberal Counter-Revolution of the mid-1980s. The "reforming" of the trade unions was led, significantly, by a former president of the PSA, the Labour Minister, Stan Rodger, who was ably assisted by a bevy of middle-class university graduates in the Department of Labour. Under the guise of "professionalisation", New Zealand’s unions were significantly enlarged and restructured along the lines of the new managerialism – whose hard-nosed apostles were at that time transforming working environments across the nation. The culmination of Rodger’s programme came when the Federation of Labour (FOL) – based on a fiercely independent and democratic network of trades councils – was merged with the Combined State-Sector Unions to form the dangerously oligarchic Council of Trade Unions (CTU).

The influx of tens-of-thousands of middle-class state-sector workers (most of them female) which the creation of the CTU made possible, decisively diluted and demobilised the militant (mostly male) unions which had driven the FOL's "wage-push" of the 1970s and early-80s. This feminisation of the union movement was, of course, no more than a reflection of the feminisation of the wider workforce. Thanks to the "stagflation" of the 1970s, the wages of a "working man" were no longer sufficient to support a nuclear family, and tens-of-thousands of women were required to take up part-time or full-time employment. Statistically much less likely than men to participate in a trade union, let-alone engage in industrial action, women, by entering the paid workforce in such large numbers, constituted a huge boon to an employing class under pressure.

The demobilising effect of growing female participation in the paid workforce was intensified by the aggressively anti-male character of neo-liberal economic restructuring. Overwhelmingly, it was in the male-dominated sectors of the economy that "Rogernomics" wreaked the most havoc: the railways, the forest service, the freezing industry, the car-assembly plants and across the whole import-substitution sector, scores-of-thousands of male, blue-collar workers were laid-off. Where alternative employment opportunities existed at all for these adult job-seekers, it was mostly concentrated in the service sector, where unionisation was weak and their prime competitors were young people and women.

Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act placed the seal upon the destruction of the male-dominated, blue-collar, private-sector trade unions. Though ready and willing to fight Birch, what remained of the militant union movement was over-ruled by an unbeatable combination of middle-class, public-sector, highly-paid, trade union officials wielding the "card votes" of hundreds-of-thousands of unconsulted members.

It was a debacle from which trade unionism in New Zealand has never recovered. Throughout the 1990s less than 10 percent of the private-sector workforce retained their membership of a trade union. Huge numbers of white working-class, Maori and Pasifika males, stripped of the dignity of paid employment, and the pride that comes with the ability to provide for one’s family, sank into a morass of alcohol, drugs, petty-crime and criminal gangs. Their abandoned offspring, raised in deep poverty by their similarly abandoned mothers, have ensured that the tragedies of the 1980s and 90s are now intergenerational.

Its ingrained antipathy, and the key role it played in undermining working-class autonomy notwithstanding, the middle-class, itself, did not escape unscathed from the Neo-Liberal Counter-Revolution. The introduction of user-pays tertiary education enmeshed the Baby-Boomers’ children in a nexus of debt and enforced adolescence that reduced them to the status of glorified indentured servants for up to half of their adult working lives. New Zealand’s once internationally highly-regarded universities were, of course, corrupted in the process. What little academic rigor remains after a decade-long trend toward qualification inflation, is now being slowly eaten away by the need to keep the professors’ paying customers satisfied.

And so we return to the "New Worker": that unfortunate creation of the Baby Boom Generation - and principal victim of its failure to successfully confront and beat back the Neo-Liberal Counter-Revolution.

For those who fail to make it through the turnstiles of our tertiary education institutions, the fast-food kitchens, shop-counters, and call-centres of the service sector lie in wait. While for those who do manage to secure a tertiary qualification (and its related debt-burden) there are the "air-conditioned offices" (a.k.a "feeding stalls") and "computer keyboards" of the vast public and private sector bureaucracies that Xchequer so enthusiastically extols.

Ninety-percent of them will remain non-union-members all their working lives: miserably unaware that they are putting in longer hours for less money (in real terms) than their parents earned at the same age; and that the many support services and institutions which made sure their mums and dads were decently housed, and properly protected from the vicissitudes of ill-health and economic dislocation, have either been, or are in the process of being, stripped away from them.

Beguiled by the technological glitter of Ipods, text-messaging, Bebo and Twitter, and reassured by their bosses that they are History’s most "connected" generation, they've been persuaded that – somehow – all of these gadgets add up to a better life. But they do not know what they do not know: that they have been cheated, ripped-off, short-changed and dumbed-down to the point where they no longer have a secure purchase on what constitutes ethical conduct, and the very integrity of their innermost selves is being digitally eroded. Knowing nothing of the past, they cannot even begin to guess what is rising up ahead of them as their future. A vast tsunami of economic devastation, followed by a sequence of global climate changes that will leave them, and their bewildered children, reeling.

Only socialism can save them. Unfortunately, 99 percent of them don't even know what the word means.