“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass
FOR 27 YEARS wage workers in New Zealand have been forced to
endure “labour market flexibility”. In the guise of, first, the Employment
Contracts Act (1991) and then, the Employment Relations Act (2000) a workplace regime
specifically designed to advantage employers has steadily whittled away
workers’ collective economic security.
Their legal power to act as a class, by striking in
solidarity with other workers engaged in industrial action, has been nullified
by the legislative strategies of both the National and Labour parties. The
consequent engorgement of employer power has fundamentally redrawn the contours
of class relations in New Zealand. Until they are redrawn again – this time in the
workers’ favour – New Zealand society will continue its long, slow slide into
narcissism and cruelty.
So entrenched has the employers’ advantage in the workplace
become that the Labour-NZF coalition government’s promised restoration of the
core content of the Employment Relations Act: those rights steadily whittled
away during nine years of National Party rule under John Key and Bill English;
is being represented by the employers as an example of how “ideology rather
than solid public policy [is] driving decisions”.
The bare-faced affrontery of this assertion is stunning. As
if the Employment Contracts Act wasn’t the product of the most clear and
uncompromising ideological calculation. The Act was widely regarded as a legislative
marvel, celebrated by right-wingers around the world as the most effective
means of taming the unions (short of deploying tanks and guns) which the
promoters of “free markets” had yet devised.
Its successor, the Employment Relations Act was, if anything,
even more ideological. Its Labour Party sponsors took care to give just enough
– but no more – to the battered trade union bureaucracies. The changes
contained in the Act permitted what remained of the New Zealand trade union
movement to survive – but not thrive. What it most emphatically did not do was
encourage the mass re-unionisation of the workforce, with all that implied
about bringing ordinary working people back onto the country’s political stage.
Not that the surviving union bureaucracies would have been
at all keen to see such a decisive shift in power relations. Prior to the
Employment Contracts Act, the “electorates” of the major trade unions ran into
the tens-of-thousands. To become a union secretary (the equivalent of a CEO)
one had first to be elected by the rank-and-file membership. This could involve
anything up to 35,000 union electors being eligible to cast a postal ballot.
Today, union leaders are elected by a few dozen hand-picked conference
delegates.
The annual conferences of the old Federation of Labour
(1936-1989) which attracted hundreds of politicised working-class delegates
have been replaced by the profoundly undemocratic Council of Trade Unions’
biennial get togethers. Gatherings that seldom attract more than fifty souls –
most of them paid union officials.
It’s facts like these that make the National Party’s claim
that the Labour-NZF Government’s reforms will “return us to 1970s-style
adversarial union activity” so utterly nonsensical. The “Fair Pay Agreements”
which, of all the proposed changes, come closest to resurrecting the bargaining
structures of the 1970s, cannot be secured by industry-wide strike action. The
employers have the Prime Minister’s word on that.
What’s more, the National Party’s Workplace Relations and
Safety spokesperson, Scott Simpson, has stated bluntly that: “The Employment
Relations Amendment Bill will go down as one of this Government’s biggest
economic mistakes and a future National-led Government will repeal the
provisions”.
The rights of working people will thus be traded back and
forth like chips on the political poker table. Neither National nor Labour are
really interested in hearing how workers themselves would prefer the modern
workplace to be organised, or in learning about ways that the twenty-first
century economy, with all its technological miracles, might be so regulated as
to ensure that the benefits of robotics and artificial intelligence accrue to
the benefit of the whole population – and not just to the shareholders of the transnational
corporations who own the patents.
What will it take for that to happen? Well, it will take a
lot more than simply voting for the Labour Party, the Greens or NZ First. [Who
are already showing signs of backing away from Labour’s proposed reforms.]
The first step towards the construction of a new union movement
is a commitment to learn from the past. Grasping the key historical fact that
the trade unions were not the creation of the Labour Party; the Labour Party
was the creation of the trade unions. That only a broad-based and independent
workers’ movement can generate the necessary industrial and political heft to
ensure that the interests of working people are not simply shunted aside by the
bosses and their enablers.
Such movements have happened before in New Zealand history.
Massive waves of unionisation, often followed by militant industrial struggle,
during which the employing class was given good reason to fear the power of
organised labour. In place of strife, the employers were moved to search for
some way of living in peace with the trade unions: an arrangement that was
capable of benefitting both parties to the employment relationship. Absent that
fear; absent that independent organisation; neither of the major political parties
will feel under the slightest obligation to address the interests of
working-class New Zealanders. National will look after its own, and Labour will
look after itself.
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) the freed African-American slave
and tireless toiler in the anti-slavery cause, wrote movingly of the
unavoidable nature of struggle:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess
to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without
ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They
want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be
a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical;
but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will.”
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 11 September 2018.
