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

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

 

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

 

But, they were also highly revealing.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Nothing of the sort appeared.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

A Thought For Labour Day

Apologies for the Spelling! But this cartoon from the US Christian Science Monitor neatly encapsulates my thinking on Labour Day 2012.

FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS now we have been conducting a social experiment on the consequences for New Zealand workers of voluntary unionism and enterprise-based employment contracts. The results are in - and they are crystal clear.

The steady growth in workers incomes that characterised the 40 years following WWII came to a definitive end with the Employment Contracts Act in 1991. The widening gulf between NZ and Australian wage-rates dates from then, as does the explosive growth in social inequality.

To a social-democrat it should be axiomatic that this experiment be brought to an end. The true measure of neoliberal ideological hegemony, however, may be discerned in the inability of not only the NZLP but the CTU itself to recognise the necessity of rebuilding a mass labour movement.

Everything the unions have tried to overcome the structural obstacles placed before the trade union movement by the neoliberal authors of NZ's labour relations legislation has failed. Union density in the private sector now stands at less than 10 percent. And still union officials and Labour MPs will roll their eyes in scorn the moment a return to universal union membership or a national award system is suggested.

Nothing I know of could better illustrate neoliberalism's almost total victory over the Left than hearing union leaders argue against the interests of their own members in the language of their oppressors.

Something to think about on Labour Day.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

MoBIE: Socialist Instrument Or Steven Joyce's Great White Whale?

Nemesis: Steven Joyce will be hoping that his "super-ministry" - MoBIE - does not prove to be his undoing, as the Great White Whale, Moby Dick, did for the obsessional Captain Ahab in Melville's famous novel.

IT’S HUGE, it’s “business facing” and, in the right hands, it could give Treasury a run for its money. What is it? The official designation is the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, but it’s called MoBIE (as in “Moby Dick”) for short. Will this new “super-ministry” become the critical driver of John Key’s Government’s economic plans; or will it turn out to be the Great White Whale that drags its creator, Steven Joyce, to the bottom? Interestingly, not everyone hoping for the latter is located on the Opposition side of the aisle.

There’s no doubt that the amalgamation of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Department of Labour, the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Department of Building and Housing is a high-risk gambit. Not only because the critical responsibilities of the former stand-alone ministries and departments are at real risk of being blurred, downgraded or even elided in the new structure, but also because Mr Joyce’s bureaucratic behemoth may simply prove to be too large, too complicated and too cumbersome to achieve its minister’s ambitious goals.

Officially, MoBIE’s purpose is to create a more efficient and effective Ministry focused on lifting overall productivity and supporting the growth of competitive businesses in order to create more jobs, paying higher wages, and boosting our standard of living. It is hoped that by grouping formerly discrete bureaucratic functions into a single structure businesses and companies will find it easier to access innovative ideas, markets, capital, skilled workers, resources, and the supporting public infrastructure.

“The Government has a comprehensive business growth agenda to assist business, and a single focused business-facing government ministry will further boost our momentum”, said Mr Joyce, in a statement announcing the creation of the new super-ministry on 15 March 2012.

The crucial question posed by MoBIE’s creation is: “What will fuel this new bureaucratic machine?” If the present government’s past behaviour is any guide, it will be fuelled by foreign capital.

What Mr Joyce appears to be offering overseas investors is a ministry to normalise and co-ordinate the sort of ad-hoc deal we saw struck between Mr Key’s Government and Warner Bros. over The Hobbit. In that deal New Zealand’s labour law was made fit for Warner Bros.’ purpose; the innovative prowess of Sir Peter Jackson and Weta Workshops buttressed, and New Zealand’s film industry jobs protected. MoBIE’s mission would appear to be to make that sort of one-off accommodation to the needs of both domestic and foreign capital routine.

If that is correct, then it’s easy to see why the NZ Council of Trade Unions has expressed its profound unease about MoBIE. CTU Secretary, Peter Conway, is concerned that: “plans to have a sole ‘business facing’ purpose for the Department responsible for safety at work, holidays, parental leave, minimum wages, and for wider workers’ employment conditions and rights poses great risks for the interests of the over two million New Zealanders who are in the workforce.” Unsurprisingly he drew the Government’s attention to the serious shortcomings exposed within the stand-alone Labour Department by the Pike River Disaster inquiry:

“Tragedies such as Pike River have shown that the Government is already struggling to provide adequate resourcing to the health and safety inspectorate, and to adequately carry out their health and safety functions.” How likely is it that the new “business-facing” MoBIE will turn around and become a “worker-facing” organisation?

The Labour Party’s opposition to MoBIE’s establishment is somewhat harder to fathom. In the hands of an unashamedly interventionist social-democrat (David Cunliffe take note!) MoBIE could become the dominant instrument of government policy, consigning Treasury to a distant second place. Fuelled by the capital reserves of the Cullen Fund and a state-run Kiwisaver, with powers to determine minimum wages and conditions, union rights, research funding, regional development and housing construction, MoBIE could swiftly take on the nation-building role of the 1930s Ministry of Works. Its capacity to create tens of thousands of jobs – principally by building new homes and upgrading New Zealand’s decaying infrastructure, would make MoBIE the most valuable tool in Labour’s workshop.

The precedent is there not only in our own Ministry of Works, but in the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Brought into existence by Presidential decree in 1953, HEW became the principal architect and builder of America’s post-war welfare state, especially President Johnson’s “Great Society”. What made it work was the powerful common objectives of its component divisions. Until its demise in 1979 (when Education was calved-off to form a separate department) HEW oversaw the continuation and elaboration of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal”.

Infused with HEW’s sense of historic mission and reformist zeal, MoBIE could become the driver of twenty-first century social-democracy in New Zealand. The reason, perhaps, why not all of Mr Joyce’s cabinet colleagues are celebrating its birth.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 July 2012.

Frightening The Government

Frightening Their Government: Students gather for a demonstration on 16 October, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. Since the Student-Worker uprising of May 1968, French politicians have evinced a healthy respect for demonstrations and strikes. There was a time when the New Zealand state was similarly unwilling to risk the wrath of its citizens.

THERE’S A LINE in Michael Moore’s Sicko documentary that every democratic citizen should commit to memory. The radical film-maker declares: “Governments should always be afraid of their people, but people should never be afraid of their government.”

Mr Moore was comparing France with the United States, and wondering how two countries, both with revolutionary traditions, could end up so far apart. Americans’ fear and hatred of “Big Government” is legendary. But the French will challenge government policy at the drop of a chapeau.

In the USA you strike and demonstrate at your own risk. French governments do not like to risk demonstrations and strikes. In 1968 – well within the memory of senior French politicians – demonstrations and strikes brought the Fifth Republic to the very brink of revolution. It took the active intercession of the French Communist Party, and a ten-percent pay rise, to separate the workers from their youthful student allies. 

Governments in New Zealand were also afraid of the people – once. And the people gave them good reason.

The National Party was elected for the first time in 1949 on a rock-solid promise to abolish what they called “compulsory unionism”. In 1951 they provoked a fight with the Waterside Workers Union. If they could make an example of New Zealand’s toughest and most progressive union, then abolishing compulsory unionism would be a piece of cake.

What they got was a very different sort of example. For 151 days the wharfies and their allies fought Sid Holland’s government toe-to-toe. The Government “won” – but only because the Machiavellian boss of the Federation of Labour agreed to keep its 300,000 members “neutral”.

It would be another forty years before the National Party was prepared to have another crack at organised labour. And the only reason Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Bill passed into law without serious amendment in 1991 was because the Council of Trade Unions, dominated by “moderate” state-sector union bosses, lacked the courage to give Mr Birch and his mates a bloody nose.

Well, we’ve had twenty years to appreciate the benefits of “moderation”. Perhaps we’ve all been much too polite for far too long.

Then again, civility and moderation are qualities highly prized by New Zealanders. Our country is one of the oldest, continuously-functioning democracies on Earth. As far as possible, we prefer to communicate with our political leaders through the Ballot Box. It’s only when they deliberately and stubbornly refuse to be advised by the democratic process that we get angry.

I guess that’s why Labour, the Greens, the CTU and Grey Power have opted to fight the partial privatisation of the state-owned energy companies by launching a Citizens Initiated Referendum. Between elections, it’s one of the few ways of using the Ballot Box to make your point. CIR’s are, of course, non-binding, but a Government refusal to be guided by its undoubted success, would be extremely provocative. Knowing a majority of the electorate was against their policy – but proceeding anyway – the National-led Government would be positively inviting the people to organise a more robust response.

The precedent is there in Greenpeace’s campaign against mining Schedule Four land. The spectacle of 50,000 New Zealanders marching up Auckland’s Queen Street was more than enough to throw Mr Key’s and his Government’s big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Greenpeace's 50,000 demonstrators threw National's big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Discretion will, once again prove to be the better part of National’s valour if Kiwis respond to the Labour/Green/CTU/Grey Power call for volunteers. If anything, the spectacle of ordinary citizens, muffled against the Autumn gales, standing on tens-of-thousands of street corners clutching clip-boards and ball-point pens, or knocking on the doors of tens-of-thousands of former National Party voters, is likely to prove even more terrifying than Robyn Malcolm, Lucy Lawless and their Greenpeace legions.

The task of gathering the 307,000 signatures required to force a referendum on asset sales is not a small one – but it can be done.

And, frankly, we need to do it. As citizens, we’ve been passive for far too long. As the veteran British Labour politician, Tony Benn, tells Michael Moore in Sicko: “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.” Much harder than a nation that’s beaten-down, demoralised and genuinely frightened of its own government.

Democracy is not a political system for fearful people: to function properly it requires regular displays of unreasonable and immoderate courage.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 February 2012.

The Auckland Ports Dispute: An Injury To All

Together We Stand: If the New Zealand Left fails to launch a counter-offensive against the, to date, highly successful campaign by the Right to break the Maritime Union and set the scene for the privatisation of the Ports of Auckland, then it will sustain a significant, perhaps historic, strategic defeat. There is much more at stake on the Auckland wharves than the wages and conditions of 300 waterside workers.

THE LOOMING CONFRONTATION on Auckland’s wharves will be a test for the whole of the New Zealand Left. If the clear pattern of escalation by the Ports of Auckland Ltd’s (POAL) Board of Directors is not answered by a broad counter-mobilisation from the Left, then not only POAL, but the entire New Zealand Right, will score a significant – perhaps historic – victory. As they were in 1913 and 1951, Auckland’s wharves have once again become the crucible of class conflict in New Zealand.

It is hardly a coincidence that this dispute flared within days of National’s election victory. Hard-liners in the Auckland business community know that if POAL can take down the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ), one of the very few New Zealand trade unions with sufficient strength to protect the living standards and working conditions of its members, then Prime Minister Key and his Labour Minister, Kate Wilkinson, will feel free to introduce a further round of swingeing workplace “reforms”.

And it is not simply at the level of central government that a management victory on the Auckland wharves would free the hands of the Right. If the highly popular, left-leaning Mayor of Auckland, Len Brown, can be manoeuvred into a position where he is seen to be acting against the interests of working people, then there is every possibility that his electoral base in the south of the city will desert him in next year’s local government elections. This would open the way for a right-wing council and mayor to take power on a programme of privatising the city’s assets – including POAL.

Clearly, there is a lot more at stake on the Auckland wharves than the wages and conditions of MUNZ’s members. The defeat of MUNZ in Auckland will open the way for a further and rapid erosion of trade union rights across the rest of New Zealand, as well as providing additional fuel for the Right’s campaign to privatise what remains of New Zealand’s public estate.

What, then, should the Left be doing?

There is already a measure of co-operation between MUNZ and the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU). Together these bodies have released a fact-sheet on the dispute which puts paid to most of POAL’s half-truths and misrepresentations of the union’s position. But much more than this needs to done. MUNZ should consider seriously “handing over” the dispute to the CTU in the way unions enmeshed in serious disputes in the 1960s and 70s “handed them over” to the National Executive of the old Federation of Labour.

By involving all of New Zealand’s trade unions in the dispute’s resolution, MUNZ would be saying to the POAL management: “This fight is now a national issue.” It would empower the CTU President, Helen Kelly, to speak out nationally on the issues at stake and, as workers’ awareness grew, the CTU’s affiliates could be advised to prepare for large-scale solidarity actions in support of MUNZ’s members.

Because New Zealand’s draconian employment laws outlaw sympathy and protest strikes the CTU’s response (at least initially) would have to be confined to organising demonstrations and raising funds to support striking workers’ families. What the CTU could also do, however, if POAL refuses to negotiate with MUNZ in good faith, is call upon young unemployed workers and students to take a leaf out of California’s “Occupy Oakland” play-book and prepare to occupy the wharves.

Makes more sense than sitting in a pup-tent in Auckland’s Aotea Square.

The CTU and the Occupy Movement should not, however, be expected to fight POAL alone. Mayor Brown, rather than allow himself to be alienated from his South Auckland base, should announce immediately his intention of organising a series of rallies throughout Auckland’s working-class suburbs where he will declare his support for trade union rights, pledge to keep the Ports of Auckland in public hands and ask for Aucklanders’ support in dismissing the POAL Board of Directors should a settlement of the dispute not be effected quickly.

Nor should the Leader of the Opposition, David Shearer, be allowed to repeat the error of his predecessor, Walter Nash, by attempting to keep the Labour Party neutral in this dispute. Here, before him, lies his “Orewa moment”: a chance to demonstrate to Labour’s electoral base that the Left is far from vanquished.

That “an injury to one” remains “an injury to all”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 December 2012.

The Auckland Ports Dispute: Pace Setters

Overcapitalised: In the anarchic context of free market capitalism, businesses like the Ports of Auckland Ltd attempt to steal a march on their competitors by investing in plant and machienery they can, ultimately, only afford by downgrading the pay and conditions of their workforce. A real union will prevent them - but only at the cost of sparking a major confrontation.

THE MACHINERY of a modern port dwarfs the men who work it. Vast sums of capital are bound up in each gantry crane and reach stacker, requiring their human operators to move the waiting cargo with speed and efficiency. These are solid, reliable men: worth every cent of their generous wage package.

The 300 waterside workers employed by the Ports of Auckland Ltd (POAL) know exactly what they are worth, and with a tradition of unionisation extending back well over a century they know how to defend the wages and conditions the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) and its predecessors have won. They also know the dangers inherent in deunionisation; the risk that is posed to every worker when the work rhythms and safety measures enforced by the union’s collective contract are undermined by “self-employed” contractors.

It is in defence of their self-determined pace and rhythm of work and its critical importance to the health and safety of workers on and off the job that the members of MUNZ employed by POAL have struck. The bitter experience of other workers across New Zealand has taught them that the moment the union’s central role in determining the working conditions of its members is surrendered, then it ceases to be a union. It may still collect dues and celebrate May Day, but by facilitating the full restoration of managerial prerogatives on the “shop floor” it has become the employer’s creature – not the workers’.

The unimpeded exercise of managerial prerogative is what lies at the heart of all great industrial disputes. “Flexibility” is the watchword – meaning the ability of the employer to call workers in and send them home, as required, without incurring penalty rates of pay. “Flexibility” empowers the employer to hire and fire at will; to raise or lower employees’ wages according to the dictates of the market and without reference to the actual living expenses of individual workers and their families. “Flexibility” imposes on every worker an inescapable obligation to “give”, while conferring upon every employer an unchallengeable right to “take”.

That’s why every union that takes root in a business enterprise and wins the recognition of its owners is, in its own small way, a revolution. At stake is the fate of that business’s profits: the proportion allotted to the shareholders, and the proportion returned to the workforce in the form of higher wages and/or improved conditions. It’s class war at its most basic, its most dynamic, level. The unavoidable by-product of, to quote Leonard Cohen’s magnificent song Democracy: “the homicidal bitchin’/ that goes down in every kitchen/ to determine who will serve and who will eat.”

And when all of those tiny revolutions are joined together the result can very easily add up to a big revolution. Data gathered by the UK’s Office of National Statistics reveals in the starkest terms how Britain’s Top 1 Percent’s share of total income declined as trade union membership rose. When expressed graphically, one almost becomes the mirror-image of the other. In 1978, when the wealthiest Britons’ share of total income reached its nadir, the number of Britons belonging to a trade union attained its peak. Significantly, Mrs Thatcher’s neo-liberal counter-revolution set about reversing the process less than a year later. Five years on, New Zealand’s data undoubtedly reveals a very similar story.

The whirlwind of abuse unleashed against MUNZ’s Port of Auckland members reveals how acutely sensitive the employing class still is to even the slightest stirrings of union power. The employers understand perfectly what is at stake and are furious at MUNZ for flexing its muscles so publicly.

Winning concessions in private is one thing, but by making the benefits of solidarity so obvious, and demonstrating the limits of managerial prerogative – at least on Auckland’s publicly-owned waterfront – MUNZ has crossed a line. A victory for the union at this point in the dispute could only be interpreted as a victory for all unionised workers.

And that’s how revolutions begin.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 January 2012.

Mislaid Narratives

Black Riders, Dark Heroes: Roger Kerr, mouthpiece for the Neoliberal Nazgul of the Business Roundtable, deserves our admiration for his unceasing promotion of the capitalist narrative. Oh that the Left had such a fearsome ideological warrior.

WHAT CAN I SAY about Roger Kerr? Advised that the CEO of the Business Roundtable is the subject of The Nation’s investigative endeavours this Saturday (16 April) I’ve been wracking my brains (as one of The Nation’s panellists) for something intelligent to say, about the man.

Most Leftists wouldn’t bother. After Sir Roger Douglas, Roger Kerr is probably the most readily identifiable representative of the entire Rogernomics era. And his Business Roundtable, comprised of the CEOs of New Zealand’s leading businesses, plays the role of Tolkien’s Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings: the most potent instrument of an ancient evil men believed they had overcome but which has risen anew to plague this Middle Earth.

But even if Roger Kerr is regarded as a villain by the Left, he is – like most literary villains – a character who fascinates every bit as much as he repels.

When interviewed on television, and even more so in the flesh, his eyes are alive with what can only be described as merriment. On the occasions I have met him I could not help feeling that he had already anticipated every objection I could possibly muster to his line of argument and was quietly amused at their lack of force. Like a thoroughly prepped witness, he has a cogent and alarmingly persuasive response to any and every question his left-wing prosecutors might throw at him.

And it’s this imperviousness to cross-examination that sums up the real damage Roger Kerr and the Business Roundtable have done to political discourse in New Zealand. By treating the determination of national policy as a zero-sum game: a life-and-death struggle in which any neoliberal objective not won must be considered lost; Kerr and his big business backers have rendered open and intelligent debate impossible. Developing the military metaphor a little further, 21st Century political discourse resembles two armies firing bullets of a different calibre at each other. The enemy’s ammunition cannot be used in your weapons – and your own ammunition cannot be used in theirs.

The contrast between the neoliberal approach to managing the economy and society and the approach that prevailed from the end of World War II until the end of the 1970s could hardly be starker. The so-called “mixed economy” of the post-war era blended a great deal more than simply publicly- and privately-owned enterprises. By recognising that the workers’ and the bosses’ ideological narratives both contributed important insights to the processes of production, Keynesian economics encouraged a pluralism that drew all of the important “players” into the game.

For the thirty years between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, the primary objective had not been to “win the game”, but to come up with solutions that were acceptable to as many of the players as possible. It was an approach which required a willingness to give as well as to take: which more or less mandated a search for consensus; and which gave great heed to empirical expertise.

The neoliberal paradigm, which Roger Kerr so effectively embodies, rejects the quest for consensus utterly and harnesses empiricism for purely instrumental ends. The utility of an argument lies not in how close it comes to reflecting the truth, but in how effective it is at undermining the arguments of those who threaten neoliberalism's objectives. For neoliberals, facts are like clubs – useful things for beating your opponents to death.

Nowhere is neoliberalism’s essential hostility to empiricism more overtly on display that in the so-called “debate” over climate change. Because accepting the empirical data of anthropogenic global warming would require neoliberalism to surrender a great many of its most cherished ideological assumptions about the ineluctable beneficence of capitalism, it has enlisted scores of compliant scientists to manufacture arguments sufficiently club-like to secure, if not outright victory, then at least a planet-endangering stalemate.

What should I say, then, about Roger Kerr? I guess I’d have to say that I admire him – but only in the way I admire the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS. When viewed as a ferociously well-organised, well-equipped and highly-motivated fighting force, Roger Kerr and the Business Roundtable – like the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS – evoke feelings of awe and fear. But asked to judge whether they constitute a contribution to, or a subtraction from, the sum total of human happiness, I'd have to say that the only good thing they have ever done is to expose the howling ideological void where a strong and competitive left-wing opposition should be.

A few days ago, in her magisterial summation of The Hobbit Dispute, Helen Kelly wrote persuasively about the extraordinary success of the neoliberal establishment in implanting a narrative highly beneficial to the interests of the employing class in the minds of the New Zealand population:

“Basically the story runs like this – and I am simplifying it. Work is a benefit, business is the benefactor and workers are merely the beneficiaries. Workers should be grateful for a job; a job is a privilege; employers should be lauded for the contribution they make to growing economic wealth.”

Kelly’s problem, as President of the CTU, and the problem facing the entire Left, is that they have yet to adjust to the fact that the employing class has walked away from the consensus-based politics of the Keynesian Era.

The Left’s current narrative is all about "co-operation" with the employers; bargaining in “good faith”; strengthening “social partnerships” and “building consensus”. What they have forgotten is that the historic compromise thrashed out between Capital and Labour in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the global war against fascism featured not only the old laissez-faire description of the master-servant relationship (which Kelly so accurately summarises above) but the classic Marxist description of the capitalist as the last in a long line of overlords who've unjustly appropriated the ‘surplus value’ created by working people’s labour.

This working-class narrative is summed-up neatly in the 1916 lyrics of Ralph Chaplin’s union anthem Solidarity Forever:

They have hoarded untold millions
That they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn

It’s a narrative that seizes the moral high ground for the worker and casts the employer as thief and parasite. The capitalists are a criminal class which is only able to preserve its expropriated wealth because it controls the police, courts, schools, news media, legislature and, when push finally comes to shove, the armed forces.

According to this story, the liberation of the working-class can only be achieved when the contradictory forces shaping and reshaping capitalist society finally resolve into a general, revolutionary crisis: when, in Marx’s ominously clanking sentences:

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

This is the narrative Helen Kelly and the Left generally have mislaid. The narrative which, right up until the 1980s, continued to haunt the capitalist imagination. The German poet, Heinrich Heine, writing in the 1840s described their nightmare like this:

“Communism is the secret name of the dread antagonist setting proletarian rule with all its consequences against the present bourgeois regime. It will be a frightful duel. How will it end? No one knows but gods and goddesses acquainted with the future. We know only this much: Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy …”

Roger Kerr – and all he represents – have persuaded themselves that the “Dark Hero’s” moment in the "modern tragedy" has come and gone. The task of Helen Kelly – and all who march on the Left – is to convince Roger and his friends that what they have so far witnessed is only the First Act.

This essay is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Critical Failure

Put your money where your mouth is, Phil: The Labour Leader's failure to come out swinging on 20 October in defence of the labour movement in general, and NZ Actors Equity in particular, ceded the political advantage to Sir Peter Jackson, Warner Bros. and their National Party allies. To guarantee its long-term credibility, Labour must rediscover the courage to endure short-term unpopularity.

SIR PETER JACKSON surely deserves another academy award for his masterful direction of The Making of The Hobbit. Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens similarly merit an Oscar for their superb script. And, of course, Sir Richard Taylor and his team at Weta Workshops must be honoured for their amazing special effects. (The "protest march" down Lambton Quay and the "rally" in Civic Square were both superb examples of the PR illusionist’s art.

Less impressive, however, has been the labour movement’s critical response to Sir Peter Jackson’s production.

Coming straight off a remarkably successful Labour Party conference and into a week where the core values of the New Zealand labour movement were about to be given mass reaffirmation at CTU-organised "Fairness at Work" rallies across the country, Phil Goff should have been champing at the rhetorical bit.

Because, let’s face it, if the Leader of the Opposition can’t persuade the rest of New Zealand to join Labour and the CTU in reaffirming the values of fairness, solidarity and egalitarianism. Well then, he’s not going to be elected Prime Minister – is he?

Now, to be fair to Phil, I don’t think he could have anticipated everything that took place on the day of the CTU rallies.

For a start, his contacts in the CTU would almost certainly have let him know that the industrial relations problems afflicting The Hobbit had been all but resolved. And only the most cynical of union negotiators could have anticipated the DHB bosses’ self-defeating decision to publicly trash all chance of a settlement in their dispute with the medical radiographers and hospital lab technicians.

Even so, Sir Peter’s dire warnings about the imminent fate of The Hobbit on the morning of Wednesday, 20 October, followed up a couple of hours later by Fran Walsh’s and Phillipa Boyens’ utterances on Radio NZ’s Nine-to-Noon programme, should have alerted the Leader of the Opposition’s Office that something potentially very damaging was afoot.

Clearly, a whole new drama was being overlaid across the drama of thousands of trade unionists turning out to demand "Fairness at Work". If all of the sweat and effort that had gone into mobilising so many union members was not to be utterly wasted, both wings of the labour movement needed to reposition themselves – and quickly – to meet their opponents’ surprise attack.

This they did not do.

Though the agreement she thought she’d negotiated in good faith between NZ Actors Equity, Sir Peter, SPADA and the studio bosses was clearly being shredded before her eyes, the CTU President, Helen Kelly, nobly attempted to stick the pieces back together.

Meanwhile, the Leader of the Opposition’s Office, like a possum caught in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck, made no visible attempt to avoid the looming collision. Terrified at the prospect of having to attack a national "icon" like Sir Peter, they simply closed their eyes and hoped that the fearsome anti-union juggernaut now bearing down on the entire labour movement would somehow miss them.

Then Sir Richard unleashed his special effects – with devastating results.

At this point it should have been clear to both labour leaders that their forces were sustaining enormous losses. Constrained by the legal and moral undertakings pursuant to her agreement with the Hollywood moguls, Ms Kelly’s options were limited. But with Parliament in session, Mr Goff could have made full use of parliamentary privilege to launch a devastating counterattack against Sir Peter and his growing chorus of anti-union acolytes.

By refusing to fight back, the Opposition transformed what was rapidly escalating into a full-scale, Government-led attack on the entire union movement into a complete rout. In the absence of unassailable Labour counter-arguments, the mainstream news media stuck slavishly to Sir Peter’s anti-union script.

The week, which had begun with such high hopes for organised labour’s triumph, ended with its total, ignominious and unnecessary defeat.

If The Hobbit offers its audiences even half as much white-knuckle excitement, its box office takings will be huge.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 29 October 2010.

Misdirection (How "The Hobbit" Buried "Fairness at Work")

Misdirection: The furore reignited by Sir Peter Jackson and his minions over the production of "The Hobbit" occurred on the same day as 22,000 workers protested the National Government's plans to curtail workers rights. This fortunate "coincidence" (along with a vicious anti-union outburst from the country's DHBs) drove the issues relating to "Fairness at Work" clean off the nation's front pages.

THEY CAME HOWLING through the streets of Wellington like an army of bloodthirsty orcs. And striding at the head of this rabble of hysterical computer geeks, dull-witted gaffers and troll-like grips was the wizard of Weta Workshops, Sir Richard Taylor, energetically playing the role of Saruman to Sir Peter Jackson’s Sauron.

Meanwhile, the Black Gates of Mordor (a.k.a The Wairarapa) opened – spewing forth those two spiteful Nazgul, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens. Raising high their Dark Lord’s banner, they made a beeline for the White City (a.k.a the studios of Radio New Zealand).

Barring the way, their bright red banners glowing in the morning sunlight, stood a tiny army of elves and men (a.k.a. NZ Actors Equity and the CTU). At its head, awaiting the onset of Mordor and Isengard with drawn swords, were Robyn Malcolm and Helen Kelly.

And over all, untouched by the media lights in its multi-million-dollar fortress, the Eye of Jackson cast its baleful glare. Safe behind his impenetrable walls, Sir Peter will only ride forth when the final battle has been won and the last contract signed – the wheels of his midnight SUV rolling heedlessly over the corpses of slain actors and eviscerated unions.

* * * * *

AND WHAT A COINCIDENCE (if coincidence it was) that Jackson’s vicious display of anti-union fury should occur within 24 hours of 22,000 workers turning out to demonstrate their opposition to the National Government’s Employment Relations Amendment Bill.

And, of course, Jackson wasn’t alone. The DHB’s also chose 20 October to launch a full-scale assault upon the unions representing medical radiographers and laboratory technicians.

How convenient, because, who knows, without the scurrilous, unsubstantiated and completely self-defeating claims scattered around by the DHBs; without Taylor’s mob and Jackson’s scaremongering letter; the New Zealand public might have been able to concentrate their minds on the issues being raised at the CTU’s "Fairness at Work" rallies.

Without these spectacular employer provocations inflaming their passions and diverting their attention, decent New Zealanders might even have felt a twinge of sympathy – even empathy – for the plight of the invisible hundreds-of-thousands of working-class people who, day-after-day, keep this society functioning.

And don’t tell me that there is no such thing as "the working-class" any more. Don’t pretend that we are all, in John Lennon’s words: "so clever and classless and free". Because, if you had been sitting where I was sitting yesterday afternoon you would know what a dangerous and self-serving lie that is.

Seated in the Telstra Clear Event Centre in Manukau yesterday, watching the thousands of union members as they slowly filled up the vast space in front of me, it was as though I had been transported to a wholly different New Zealand.

This wasn’t the bright, white world of the television ads: the world where everyone is beautiful and everything is new. Nor was it the world of Ken and Barbie news presenters, breathlessly relating the details of the latest celebrity scandal. The faces of the men and women in front of me were lined by care and etched with hardship. Many of them were wearing the livery of their masters – like the servants of 18th Century aristocrats. Others came straight from the factory floor in boots and overalls.

And, overwhelmingly, the working people in front of me were brown-skinned. Maori and Pasifika, Asian, Middle Eastern and African. Represented on that rapidly filling floor were scores of languages and dozens of cultures. It was another New Zealand altogether, and upon its collective back, every day, the New Zealand of the rich and the comfortable does its business.

Whether the rich and the comfortable allow themselves to be carried in wilful ignorance, or callous indifference, matters much less than the fact that the people upon whose backs they ride have become invisible to them.

The hopes and fears, struggles and triumphs of working people simply don’t matter to this rich and comfortable New Zealand. It never drives through their neighbourhoods, it doesn’t drink in their pubs, it knows nothing of the great rows of factories, warehouses and shops where they work. The people who drive the trucks, who unload the ships, who keep the water flowing through the taps and the electricity flowing down the wires are seen as mere appendages to the machines they operate. They are not people – they are services, servants, things.

And things are not supposed to talk back, complain, ask for more, demand a say: things are supposed to work when they’re switched on, and to shut-down when they’re switched off.

I wish the rich and the comfortable – the New Zealand that switches human-beings on and off – had been in that hall yesterday. I wish they could have heard the great shout that went up when Robert Reid, Secretary of the National Distribution Union, cried out:

We will defeat this bill, nothing is surer! If not today, we will defeat it tomorrow; if not tomorrow, we will defeat it on the streets, we will defeat it in the workplaces, we will defeat it next year when we throw this anti-union Government out! We defeated John Banks and got Len Brown in ... We can win, we will win, we will throw this bill and this Government into the dustbin of history!

That’s what rich and comfortable New Zealand has forgotten, you see: that these "things" they switch on and off have votes – and are learning how to use them.

The sword that was broken is being reforged.

The Dark Lord hasn’t won yet.

"All Politics Is Local"

Winning hearts and minds doorstep by doorstep: Phil Goff must reconnect with Labour's base if he is to have any chance of winning next year's election.

WHAT’S GOING ON? At the local government level voters execute a sudden lurch to the Left, while nationwide opinion polls show them simultaneously clinging to the Right. As the Lost in Space robot used to say: "That does not compute."

Let’s try to make it add up.

The former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Phillip ‘Tip’ O’Neill, said that "All politics is local."

In other words, unless there is a real connection between politicians and voters: in the places where they live, and at the level of their day-to-day lives; electoral success will likely prove elusive.

It’s not enough to simply offer the public what they want, they’ve got to be convinced you can deliver it. Nor is it sufficient to simply reflect the voters’ concerns, you have to make them believe that you share them. That you, in the words of the ‘great empathiser’, President Bill Clinton, "feel their pain".

As Labour Party members gather together in Auckland for their annual conference, it is sobering to reflect that while the city’s newly-elected Mayor, Len Brown, ticks all of Tip O’Neill’s boxes, Labour’s leader, Phil Goff, does not.

What’s lies behind Phil’s lack of connection with the voters?

His working-class background and his obvious political competence should both argue strongly in his favour. And yet there are doubts – and an obvious reticence on the electorate’s part to invest emotionally in the Labour leader’s quest for the top job.

As an historian, my instinct is to explain the present by looking into the past.

Phil’s past is very instructive.

He’s one of a whole generation of young Labour politicians (including Mike Moore, Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas) who took away from Labour’s disastrous 1975 election defeat some very painful lessons about the acute political vulnerability of radical governments.

One of the most important of those lessons was the need for economic credibility. The fate of both Bill Rowling and Gough Whitlam convinced Labour’s ‘Young Turks’ that if the leading elements of the business community, the civil service and the news media remain unconvinced by your government’s economic policies they have the power to undermine and, ultimately, destroy it.

The faction to which Phil Goff attached himself in the early 1980s was absolutely determined that the very same forces which had stood in front of the Third Labour Government would be standing behind the Fourth. Nothing which he has said and done so far as Leader of the Opposition suggests to me that Phil has abandoned this objective.

He has had no "Greenspan Moment". No dramatic public admission (as there was by the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve) that the economic policies he and his colleagues adopted to secure the backing of big business, Treasury and the nation’s editors have now been tested to destruction.

On the contrary, Phil still believes that: "a well-functioning market system is the most effective and efficient way of organising an economy".

For those on the left of New Zealand politics, indeed for all those who’ve voted Alliance, NZ First or The Greens because they simply could not bring themselves to vote for the party of Rogernomics, this is profoundly disappointing.

More importantly, it’s disconnecting.

On Saturday afternoon, the CTU president, Helen Kelly, will come to Labour’s Conference bearing the trade union movement’s Alternative Economic Strategy – a document based on the principles of Fairness, Security and Participation.

Assuming Phil comprehends the importance of atoning for the sins of his neoliberal past, he could use his own keynote speech to Labour’s Annual Conference to reassure his base that the distilled ideas and aspirations of organised labour will once again constitute the bedrock upon which the Labour Party assembles its policy platform.

The CTU’s strategy contains a host of fresh solutions to meet all those "simple, mundane and everyday concerns" that Tip O’Neill understood to be the prime drivers of politics.

Re-connect with the local, Phil, and by Christmas next year you’ll be Prime Minister.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 15 October 2010.

The Pitch

Right[s] on the Button! The campaign of the Australian Council of Trade Unions against John Howard's WorkChoice Australia attack on workers' rights was crucial to his government's 2007 defeat.

THE GRUEN TRANSFER, is a fine example of what a real state broadcaster, dedicated to genuine public interest television, can achieve. Produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) this half-hour television show takes a light-hearted weekly swipe at the global advertising industry.

One of the most enjoyable segments of the show is called "The Pitch" – in which "Creatives" from competing agencies are given an outrageous/impossible brief (in a recent episode they were asked sell ice to Eskimos) and told to come up with a 30-second TV spot.

Perhaps the most famous of these briefs involved making the case for an Australian invasion of New Zealand. "100% Pure NZ", runs the opening line of the winning entry. "0 air force", it continues. "100 percent there for the taking", gloats the penultimate caption as Aussie jet fighters streak across New Zealand’s undefended skies firing missiles on the helpless inhabitants below. The triumphant ending: "100% Ours".

Pondering the enormous difficulties currently confronting the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) as it attempts to mobilise public opinion against the National Party’s employment law "reforms", it struck me that "Create a favourable public perception of the New Zealand trade union movement.", would definitely qualify as a future brief for "The Pitch".

And before you shake your head and tell me "it can’t be done", let me tell you about a programme I recall from the days when New Zealand, too, had a "real state broadcaster dedicated to producing genuine public interest television".

It was called the Dean/Edwards Show (after its eponymous hosts Michael Dean and Brian Edwards) and was broadcast in front of a live audience from the Avalon television complex in the Hutt Valley. Dean/Edwards came under the rubric of Television One’s News and Current Affairs and was, to put it mildly, politically challenging.

The programme in question had taken advertising as its theme and its producers had approached a local agency to demonstrate the awesome powers of the industry. They were to come up with a positive ad’ for the most loathed trade unionists in the country at that time – the infamous Cooks & Stewards Union. These were the workers responsible for looking after passengers on the Cook Straight ferries, and they were notorious for timing their industrial disputes to coincide with public holidays.

The 60-second ad the agency produced featured the theatrical skills of the actor Ian Mune, and more than met the Dean/Edwards Show’s producers’ expectations. It was, quite simply, a little masterpiece. In just one minute the villainous Cooks & Stewards were transformed into no-nonsense working-class heroes.

So, you see, it can be done.

And if you need any further convincing, just take a look at the series of ads the Aussie unions ran in 2007 against the Liberal Party’s detested "WorkChoice" legislation. According to most Australian political commentators, these ads played a crucial role in defeating John Howard’s government.

There’s no doubting our own CTU has the resources to fund such a campaign, but do they have access to the sort of skills that turned the Cooks and Stewards into heroes? And, even if they secured the services of a top-flight agency, would the major networks agree to air their product?

When it comes to getting controversial ads broadcast, New Zealand unions have had some very bad experiences. For some reason the Advertising Standards Authority has found it extraordinarily difficult to affix its seal of approval to union-produced television advertisements. Somehow they’re always deemed to be in breach of the Authority’s strict rules.

Even so, were I in CTU President, Helen Kelly’s, shoes I’d be thinking long and hard about commissioning a series of ads designed to change the public’s perception of what unions – and unionists – are about. And I wouldn’t just be looking to the big ad agencies for ideas. In this age of the Internet and cheap computer software, I’d be appealing to every young digital designer, every student-flat Fellini, to send me their ideas as well. And if the ASA stood in the way, well, there’s always You-Tube.

As Forest & Bird and Greenpeace know only too well, there’s a whole new arsenal of weapons available to political activists in the 21st Century that simply weren’t available to the trade unionists of 1890, 1913 and 1951. Policemen can shut down and confiscate a printing-press, but they can’t seize every PC or shut-down the Internet – not unless they want a real fight on their hands.

What Helen Kelly and the CTU needs is the equivalent of Greenpeace’s "Sexy Coal" video clip – and the power of celebrities like Robyn Malcolm and Lucy Lawless to sell it. Below the radar of the despised "MSM", that one clip did more to put 40,000 anti-mining marchers on the street than any other piece of propaganda.

The Pitch is "Union Power". Any takers?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 August 2010.

The CTU Cannot Survive A farce

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

IT COMFORTS ME, sometimes, to recall that when he wasn’t bludging off his wealthy mate Fred Engels, Karl Marx earned his living by writing political commentaries. His most celebrated journalistic effort is the lengthy article he penned during the winter of 1851-52 for a New York German-American magazine called The Revolution. Entitled "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" the article examines the combination of social and economic forces giving rise to the political phenomenon later known as fascism.

The article is well worth reading for its own sake – Marx was a brilliant stylist – but is principally remembered for the oft-quoted observation: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

Marx’s wry aside was constantly running through my head last Sunday morning as 300-400 trade unionists and their supporters gathered under Auckland’s soaring Skytower to protest the package of employment law "reforms" Prime Minister John Key was scheduled to announce to the National Party Conference (meeting fifty metres up the street at the Sky City Convention Centre) at 11 o’clock.

Certainly, there’s no disputing the fact that the National Party’s first great package of employment law "reforms" – The Employment Contracts Act – was an unmitigated tragedy for the New Zealand trade union movement.

In 1991, when the ECA came into force, there were roughly 675,000 unionised workers out of a labour force of just under 1.5 million – a union density rate of 45 percent. Significantly, most of those unionists worked in the private sector. Two decades on, union density has fallen to about 20 percent, most of it concentrated in the public sector. In the private sector, barely one in ten workers remain unionised.

But the dramatic fall in union density is only half the tragedy of 1991. The other half was the catastrophic failure of union leadership. To the utter consternation of the National Government, its draconian anti-worker legislation – modelled on the union-smashing laws of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet - was fastened around the neck of the New Zealand working-class without a fight.

The CTU’s leaders, backed by their public sector allies, bluntly refused to organise (let alone lead) the general strike demanded by an overwhelming majority of the private sector unions. Essentially, if a worker wasn’t lucky enough to have the state as his or her employer, or to work on a large, well-organised site, then he or she was just plain out of luck.

The CTU’s refusal to organise effective resistance to the ECA represents the most tragic and unconscionable failure of leadership in New Zealand trade union history. Hundreds of thousands of private sector workers were simply abandoned to the tender mercies of an employing class that could hardly believe its luck.

I think that’s why there were so many ex-unionists and activists at the Auckland rally on Sunday. We’d all lived through the tragedy of 1991, and now we were in need of some reassurance that the CTU’s 2010 response to National’s second great attack on workers’ rights wasn’t about to play out as farce.

We needn’t have worried.

The swing vote in the 1991 CTU "debate" on whether or not to call a general strike against the ECA had been cast by the Engineers Union. Twenty years later, the Engineers Union’s successor organisation, the EPMU, was among the first to lay down a challenge to the bosses.

Standing on the back of the radical Unite union’s flatbed truck, EPMU official, Bill Newson, declared: "If employers in this country want chaos – we can do chaos."

CTU President, Helen Kelly, reassured the protesters that she’d be seeing them all again soon – "on the streets".

John Key had done what all the militants couldn’t do: he’d left moderate leaders like Mr Newson and Ms Kelly with no other strategy except full-on resistance.

As I enveloped the startled CTU President in a congratulatory bear-hug, I recalled another great quote from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please ….. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

The CTU only just managed to survive its self-inflicted tragedy – it cannot survive a self-inflicted farce.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 23 July 2010.　

Memorandum No. 2

"Forward, and remember, what our strength always was and shall be! In famine and in plenty, forward, and remember, it's solidarity!" - Solidarity Song by Bertolt Brecht

FROM: Chris Trotter
TO: The CTU National Council
RE: Your decision to fight back
DATE: Friday, 23 July 2010

CONGRATULATIONS and thank-you to all the affiliates of the CTU for your unanimous decision to organise a broad-ranging fight-back against the National Government’s assault on workers’ rights.

There will be many other decisions that you will have to make in the months ahead, but this – the first – was the most crucial. The decision to fight – as all trade unionists know – is always the most fraught with risk. A wrong choice at this point precludes so many others.

I hope you will forgive me for listening to the fear-driven rumours – now proved to be false – that the public sector unions’ hearts were not in this fight. I allowed the dark shadows of the past to unnerve me, and for that I offer you my sincere and deservedly embarrassed apologies.

In the bright sunlight of a new day, let’s remember the words of Bertolt Brecht:

Forward, and remember
What our strength always was and shall be!
In famine and in plenty
Forward, and remember
It’s solidarity!

ENDS

Memorandum No. 1

Never again!

FROM: Chris Trotter
TO: The CTU National Council
RE: The Future of the CTU
DATE: Wednesday, 21 July 2010
　

FEW INDIVIDUALS or institutions are given the opportunity to put right a great wrong. Tomorrow the CTU National Council has that opportunity.

The CTU’s failure of leadership in 1991 condemned hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders to a working life without effective union protection. Its refusal to heed the clear call of its own affiliated membership – which was to take direct action against the National Government – allowed Bill Birch to pass the most draconian piece of anti-worker legislation in the democratic world. The result was a catastrophic fall in union density – especially in the private sector.

The union leaders most responsible for the CTU’s failure in 1991 were those "representing" public sector workers. Over the past 48 hours rumours have begun circulating throughout the wider labour movement that, two decades later, the leadership of the public sector unions are again attempting to preserve their own positions by selling-out their brothers and sisters in the private sector.

If these rumours prove to be correct, the CTU will strip itself of whatever residual moral authority it possesses. In such circumstances there would be no ethical, tactical or strategic justifications for any private sector union remaining within its ranks.

If the public sector union leaders once again refuse to stand in solidarity with the workers of the private sector; and if behind-the-scenes machinations are set in motion to blunt the fightback against the National and Act parties' renewed attack on workers’ rights; then the only ethical alternative available to the leaders of the private sector unions will be to get up and walk out.

The President of the CTU, Helen Kelly, along with the national and regional leaders of the EPMU, the SFWU, the NDU, MUNZ, AWUNZ, the dairy workers, meat workers, railway workers, building trades workers, Finsec and Unite must make the consequences of cowardice and obstruction crystal clear to the leaders of the PSA, the NZEI, the PPTA and the Nurses Organisation:

"Refuse to fight again – and the CTU is finished."

ENDS

Defeat Is Not An Option

The mask falls away: In announcing its employment law "reforms", the National Party has revealed to the CTU what it truly is: an entity which, like the killer cyborg in The Terminator, "can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

"IF EMPLOYERS in this country want chaos – we can do chaos." The EPMU’s Bill Newson isn’t noted for making threats he can’t keep. So, if he's standing on the back of the radical Unite Union’s flatbed truck and threatening to unleash chaos in New Zealand’s factories – that's probably something the National Government should think about.

And while they’re at it, they might also like to ponder the words of the National Secretary of the Dairy Workers Union, James Ritchie:

"If this 90-day rule is used against any of our members, I can tell you that there will be a stop-work meeting called immediately to decide what action the site should take in response."

Ritchie’s dairy workers keep New Zealand’s milk-processing plants operating – it’s hard to think of another group of workers with more strategic economic clout.

There were many more impassioned attacks on the National-led Government’s proposed employment law "reforms" delivered from the back of Unite’s flatbed truck this morning (Sunday, 18 July 2010).

The NDU’s Maxine Gaye spoke about the National Party’s hatred and contempt for working people. Garry Parsloe, from the Maritime Unions, wondered aloud whether those who had voted for John Key because it was "time for a change" were expecting "this sort of change?" Unite Union organiser, Joe Carolan, asked the 200-300 unionists present to see Key’s attack on the union movement as "our silver lining": a chance to mobilise the New Zealand working-class against the grim legacy of the Employment Contracts Act.

But, for me, the most important words spoken at the rally came from CTU President, Helen Kelly. Thanking all those present for turning up at such short notice on a Sunday morning, she wound up the protest by telling them that the CTU’s National Council would be meeting on Thursday, 22 July, and that she was sure they’d all be joining the CTU again very soon – "on the streets".

"If you only knew how long I have waited to hear a CTU president utter the words ‘on the streets’!" I said to the startled union leader as I enveloped her in a congratulatory bear-hug.

I seriously doubt whether John Key and his colleagues have the slightest idea what they have done in driving the likes of Helen Kelly, Bill Newson and James Ritchie "to the streets". These union leaders are not cut from the same cloth as firebrands like Joe Carolan or John Minto – the rally’s superb Master of Ceremonies. Their preference has always been to, as far as possible without surrender, work with the employers and the government – not throw rocks at them. Kelly, in particular, put her credibility on the line by taking an active role in the Prime Minister’s "Jobs Summit". She and the CTU were willing to wear the scorn of the militants if it meant establishing a sensible working relationship with Key and his cabinet.

This is the thanks they got.

The combined effect of the measures announced to the National Party Conference by the Prime Minister and his Labour Minister, Kate Wilkinson, will be to gut the much-diminished New Zealand union movement of whatever limited effectiveness it still possesses. Kelly and the other moderate union leaders now have no choice but to launch an all-out fight for the very survival of their organisations.

With Key’s address to the Conference, the last wisps of illusion have been blown away and the last vestiges of good faith and trust shredded. Kelly and her colleagues now know that a National Party unrestrained by an organised working-class – like the ominous mass of the old FOL under Fintain Patrick Walsh – is simply incapable of treating the trade unions with even the faintest semblance of decency or respect.

The urge to grind working-class New Zealanders’ faces into the dirt is obviously hard-wired into the rudimentary mental machinery of the reactionary rural bigots and smug suburban fascists that make up the National Party’s rank-and-file.

As I said to the Labour MP, Carol Beaumont, who was present at the rally, the National Party has shown itself to be just like the killer cyborg in the movie The Terminator. As the movie's hero, Kyle Reese tells the heroine, Sarah Connor:

"Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

And in this sense, at least, Joe Carolan is right – National’s attack on workers’ rights should be seen as our silver lining. Because now, at last, we know what we’re up against – and why defeat is not an option.

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.