“In the end we will
remember not the words of our enemies … but the silence of our friends.”
THE COUNTRY’S DHBs have embarked on a dangerous and deeply
cynical campaign to oust the Resident Doctors Association’s (RDA) long-time
champion Deborah Powell. One of New Zealand’s most effective employment
negotiators, Powell has become an intolerable hindrance to the DHB’s
determination to roll back the gains of health professionals in the nation’s
public hospitals.
The RDA represents roughly 3,500 of the 4,000 resident
doctors working in New Zealand. In 2017 it was successful in securing
significant improvements in its members working conditions – most particularly
in relation to the number of hours, consecutive days, and night-shifts the DHBs
could require them to work. The RDAs success did not come easily. Strike action
was required before the DHBs reluctantly agreed to the changes demanded by the
union’s members.
It is now clear, however, that the DHBs were not willing to
let the RDA’s achievements stand.
Around the middle of 2018, a very small group of resident doctors,
with logistical assistance from the Public Service Association (PSA) combined
to form a new union: Specialty Trainees of New Zealand (StoNZ). The new union’s
400 members very swiftly negotiated their own multi-employer collective
agreement with the DHBs. The improved conditions incorporated in the RDA’s
national agreement were not included in the SToNZ document.
That achieved, all the DHBs had to do was wait for the RDA’s
national agreement to expire. From 1 March 2019, the only collective agreement
available for a resident doctor joining the staff of a public hospital would be
the document negotiated by SToNZ – not the RDA. By running out the clock, the
nation’s DHBs could wipe out all the RDA’s gains and fundamentally undermine
Powell’s relationship with its members.
The strategy adopted by the DHBs’ negotiators bears an
alarming similarity to that adopted 107 years ago by the Waihi Gold Mining
Company. Step 1: Encourage the establishment of a small rival union. Step 2:
Use it to undermine the position of the much larger union resisting the
employer’s demands. It was a strategy which led directly to one of the most
bitterly contested industrial disputes in New Zealand labour history. The Waihi
Strike was only broken by a fatal explosion of state-sponsored violence.
Notwithstanding this alarming precedent, the NZ Council of
Trade Unions (CTU) has opted to make no comment on the tactics being employed
against Powell and the RDA. Sources within the trade union movement attribute
the CTU’s reticence to an ongoing and acrimonious row over membership
recruitment. On one side stands the Association of Professional and Executive
Employees (APEX) serviced (along with the RDA) by Contract Negotiation Services
(CNS) Powell’s private company. On the other, the CTU’s largest and wealthiest
affiliate, the PSA.
When it comes to Powell, the PSA National Secretary, Erin
Polaczuk, pulls no punches. In an e-mail leaked to Stuff’s Stacey Kirk,
Polaczuk writes: “The fact that workers are leaving CNS across the board should
come as no surprise given their infamy, modus operandi and history. PSA
strongly supports the CTU code of operating between affiliate unions and
disagrees entirely with the approach that CNS organisations take, which is to
poach organised labour”. Neither the RDA nor APEX belong to the CTU.
Curiously, Polaczuk’s e-mail makes no mention of the PSA’s
role in helping SToNZ get established. “Poaching” from “organised labour” is
clearly regarded as a much graver sin that facilitating the formation of a minority
union which employers later use to break the industrial resistance of the union
representing the overwhelming majority of workers in dispute. In the lexicon of
the trade union movement there’s a very ugly word for that sort of behaviour.
It would be a tragedy if the CTU’s refusal to follow the
example of the Nurses Organisation – the CTU affiliate which has proudly and
publicly expressed its solidarity with the striking members of the RDA – has
anything at all to do with the fact that the current CTU President, Richard
Wagstaff, is a former National Secretary of the PSA. Union rivalries should not
be allowed to obscure the very real threat posed to the New Zealand trade union
movement by the DHBs’ divide-and-rule strategy. If Powell and her CNS negotiating
team are beaten, and the RDA sustains a massive industrial defeat, then
employers in other sectors of the economy will not be slow to follow the DHBs’
lead.
The precedent set at Waihi: establishing a “scab”
union to facilitate the crushing of a real one; instantly became the template
for the destruction of militant unionism in New Zealand. Has the CTU lost so
much of its historical memory, is it so bereft of strategic acumen, that it is
willing to see the DHBs strip the resident doctors of their hard-won conditions
– and do nothing? Can it not appreciate how quickly the health sector bosses
will move on from the resident doctors to their senior colleagues? And from
them to the nurses?
If it is not appropriate for the CTU to draw a line in the
sand on this issue, then when will it be appropriate? When the only union left
standing is the PSA? And that only because the state sector bosses are holding
it up.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 January 2019.
