Racing To The Bottom, Or Chasing Our Tails?

Always Playing Catch-Up: Throughout the 1970s, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. Small wonder that New Zealand (and the rest of the Western world) was plagued by strike after strike, as the unions made increasingly desperate – and ultimately futile – efforts to catch-up. Neoliberalism has many faults, but encouraging inflation isn't one of them.

A NEW FRONT has opened up in an old battle. The New Zealand Initiative (NZI) a think tank funded by this country’s largest corporations, has come out swinging against this government’s proposed “Fair Pay Agreements” (FPA).

As the linear descendent of the Business Roundtable, of unhappy memory, this is hardly surprising. For the NZI’s principal funders, preserving the gains of the dramatic changes in employment law which rounded-off New Zealand’s neoliberal revolution remains a high priority.

In the ears of New Zealand’s biggest bosses, the FPAs sound too much like the old “Industrial Awards”, which, for nearly 100 years, underpinned the industrial relations system swept away by the Employment Contracts Act 1991 (ECA).

It has been an article of faith among trade unionists (and the Left generally) that the passage of the ECA led directly to a decisive shift in the balance-of-power in the workplace. Not only between the boss and the union, but also – and more generally – between wage and salary earners and shareholders. The ECA has caused the share of national wealth claimed by the workers to shrink, the Left insists, while growing the share claimed by the capitalists.

All the other arguments advanced by the labour movement: that the employment relationship, as modified by the ECA and its successors, has grown increasingly one-sided and unfair; is based upon this crucial statistic. If the size of the Capitalists’ slice of the national pie has, indeed, grown relative to the workers’ slice, then change is justified. If, however, the slices have remained more-or-less the same, or, if the workers’ slice is growing (albeit very slowly) then the Left’s case for change is weakened – perhaps fatally.

Hence the NZI’s latest offensive: a statistical dagger-thrust at the unions’ key argument that unjust employment laws are keeping the workers poor, weak and exploited. Here’s the point of the dagger:

“[I]t is claimed current labour market settings have seen a decline in the share of New Zealand’s gross domestic product (or “share of the pie”) going to workers. This concern is a myth. The share of GDP going to workers did decline in the late 20th century, but this fall largely occurred in the 1970s and 1980s (at a time when New Zealand had a system of industrial awards similar to the FPA arrangements proposed by the FPA[Working Group]). Since the 1991 reforms, the decline in workers’ share of GDP has been arrested and is now trending upwards.”

Could this possibly be true? Actually, the NZI just might be right.

A week or so ago, while researching another topic entirely, I had cause to refer to my late mother’s amazing collection of Encyclopaedia Britannica yearbooks. In the entry devoted to New Zealand in the year 1977, I read with astonishment that the rate of inflation recorded for 1976 was 15.6 percent. In March of 1977, however, the Wage Hearing Tribunal had awarded wage workers an across-the-board increase of just 6 percent. The unions had asked for 12.8 percent. In other words, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s real wage had shrunk by at least 6.8 percent – probably more.

No matter that union membership was compulsory in 1977. No matter that industrial awards mandated a minimum set of wages and conditions across entire occupational groupings. The purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by these seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. Small wonder that New Zealand (and the rest of the Western world) was plagued by strike after strike, as the unions made increasingly desperate – and ultimately futile – efforts to catch-up.

Clearly, there were more ways of killing the poor old worker’s cat than by hitting it over the head with the ECA.

The Council of Trade Unions may be right about the ECA and its workplace bargaining setting off a “race to the bottom”, whereby wages are constantly being suppressed by employers competing aggressively to reduce the size of their wage bill. But, the very same rigors of competitive neoliberal microeconomics are also preventing employers from simply passing on the wage rises secured through collective bargaining into the price of their goods and services.

While neoliberalism holds inflation in check – allowing workers’ real wages to rise – the trade unions will struggle for members – and relevance.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 July 2019.

Silence Of The Lambs: Why Is The CTU Saying So Little About The Resident Doctors’ Struggle?

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies … but the silence of our friends.”

 ─ Martin Luther King

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.

“Better Late Than Never, Jim!” – Bolger On The State Of The Unions.

Second Thoughts: It speaks well for Jim Bolger that he now recognises, albeit very belatedly, that the Employment Contracts Act, one of the key pillars of the neoliberal order which his government consolidated, has contributed hugely to the growth of inequality in New Zealand .

 

JIM BOLGER’S IMPLIED CRITICISM of his own government’s assault on organised labour is astonishing. The Employment Contracts Act 1991 ranks as one of the most extreme examples of anti-union legislation in post-war history. Certainly, the equivalent statutes enacted in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia pale in comparison. From the legislation introduced by Jim Bolger’s close friend and ally, Bill Birch, even the word “union” was excluded.

 

Nor should it be forgotten that Jim Bolger had “form” in the union-busting business. As Minister of Labour in Rob Muldoon’s government he had, in 1983, been responsible for legislating compulsory unionism out of existence.

 

It was the catastrophic impact of Bolger’s legislation on union membership numbers that made the Federation of Labour (FoL) so biddable in the first flush of Rogernomics. New Zealand’s trade union leaders were willing to swallow just about anything from the Fourth Labour Government – in return for the restoration of compulsory union membership.

 

Labour obliged, but Stan Rodger, David Lange’s Minister of Labour, let it be known that this would be the last time that the political wing of the labour movement rode to the rescue of the industrial wing. The union movement, Rodger sternly insisted, must learn to stand on its own feet without the assistance of the unqualified preference clause.

 

To assist the unions, Rodger introduced the Labour Relations Act. The new legislation, in an attempt to make the typical New Zealand trade union bigger and better, mandated a membership base of 1,000, offered assistance for union amalgamations and encouraged the evolution of industry bargaining. Rodger also made it clear that the Labour Government expected the public and private sector unions to come together in a single peak organisation – the NZ Council of Trade Unions.

 

Rodger’s reforms sent a clear signal to Bolger and Birch that a future National government’s industrial relations legislation would not automatically be repealed by the next Labour government. They took this as a green light for a root-and-branch reform of the New Zealand labour market. With the assistance of the Business Roundtable, Birch and his advisers began drafting the legislation that would become the Employment Relations Act 1991.

 

In his interview with RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, Bolger volunteers the observation that the unions have become too weak. On the face of it, this is an extremely odd observation. After all, Bolger was well-aware of what would happen to union density in New Zealand the moment the prop of compulsory membership was removed. The experience of 1983-84 was there for all to see. The abolition of standard, occupation-wide contracts (known then as “awards”) applicable to everyone employed to do the same work, was similarly guaranteed to knock the stuffing out of the union movement. How could Bolger possibly entertain the notion that the Employment Contracts Act would not, in very short order, transform the union lions into lambs?

 

Possibly because the leadership of the NZCTU had reassured him that the reformed union movement: bigger and better resourced than ever before; was more than capable of weathering his storm.

 

I have been told by a former trade union leader that the President of the CTU in 1991, Ken Douglas, was convinced that the changes enshrined in the Employment Contracts Act would not cause a precipitate collapse in union density, and that employers would be amenable to the continuation of industry-wide bargaining and agreements. On the basis of Bolger’s recent remarks, it seems likely that Douglas conveyed this confidence to the newly-elected National Government. Certainly, it would explain why the Bolger Government felt able to introduce legislative measures which, in other jurisdictions (like France!) would have been met with massive resistance – up to and including a General Strike.

 

It is, of course, a matter of history that Ken Douglas and his allies in the public sector unions refused point-blank to support the private sector unions’ call for massive resistance. Not even the outpouring of tens-of-thousands of workers onto the streets in the early months of 1991 and the passing of multiple rank-and-file resolutions in favour of a General Strike, were enough to shake the opposition of Douglas and the public sector union bosses. At a special executive meeting of the CTU on 18 April 1991, a motion calling for a one day General Strike was defeated 190,910 to 250,122.

 

As things turned out, the grim misgivings of the rank-and-file and the private sector union leaders proved to be correct, and Douglas’s belief that the new, improved union movement could handle anything the Nats threw at it was shown to be entirely unjustified. In just a few years union density (the percentage of the workforce belonging to a trade union) fell by more than half.

 

The fate of private sector workers over the past quarter-century has been especially hard. Union density in the private sector has fallen from just under 50 percent in 1990 to less than 10 percent in 2017. The cost, in terms of worsening working conditions and stagnant real wages, is plain for all to see.

 

If they were, in fact, given, any reassurances from Douglas concerning the unions’ long-term resilience have proved to be spectacularly misconceived. Their expression would, however, provide some sort of explanation as to why, twenty-six years on, the former National prime minister expresses surprise that New Zealand’s trade unions have become so weak. At the time, Bolger (who has always struck me as a fundamentally decent person) may have consoled himself that the Employment Contracts Act’s bark would be worse than its bite. It speaks well of the man that he now recognises that the signature legislation of his premiership has contributed hugely to the growth of inequality in New Zealand.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 22 April 2017.

Giving Workers What They Want: Honouring The Legacy Of Helen Kelly.

Helen Kelly - A Twenty-First Century Union Leader: The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

WHAT BETTER TIME could there be to talk about Kiwi workers’ rights than in the days following Helen Kelly’s death? Who has contributed more to this discussion than the NZ Council of Trade Unions’ (CTU) first female President? And what other contemporary New Zealand trade unionist’s passing could have left such large and stylish shoes to fill?

 

Few would dispute that Kelly was by far the best leader that the CTU has so far produced. The way she was able to combine rock-solid principle with PR smarts made her the labour movement’s most effective twenty-first century union boss. Though she couldn’t quite match the Unite union’s Matt McCarten at street-level campaigning, Kelly’s keen intellect and her winning ways with the news media allowed her to keep the ideals of trade unionism alive in an era notoriously hostile to the claims of collectivism.

Had she not succumbed to lung cancer, it is likely that well before the end of this decade she would have made the transition from the trade union movement to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Once in Parliament, her rise to the top would have been inexorable. In relatively short order New Zealand would have had its second Labour Prime Minister called Helen.

 

All of which makes it one the great counterfactual questions of our history: “How different would New Zealand have been if Helen Kelly had not died of cancer at the tragically young age of fifty-two?” It is only when we attempt to answer that question that the true magnitude of the nation’s loss is brought home to us.

 

Labour has made great play of its current Future of Work exercise, but it has been much less enthusiastic about discussing the future of workplace relations. Indeed, Grant Robertson seems much more comfortable discussing how vital it is that workers are made ready for the challenges of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. We hear a great deal about the importance of continuous upskilling and labour flexibility, but nothing like as much about ensuring employees have a genuine say in how much they are paid and under what conditions they work.

 

For a party calling itself “Labour”, this is a critical deficiency. The power relationships of the workplace have a huge impact on people’s well-being. How much we earn and how we work continue to dominate our existence in much the same way that they have done since the first industrial revolution. More so in the first quarter of the twenty-first century than in the second half of the twentieth, because the effective destruction of mass trade union membership in the 1980s and 90s swung the balance-of-power decisively in the employers’ favour.

 

Anyone raising these issues, however, will be told that they are living in the past, and that the world has changed too much for any social-democratic party to contemplate a return to the industrial relations regime of the 1970s. And it’s true, times have changed: although not enough, apparently, to destroy the master/servant relationship, or eliminate the commercial necessity of legally limited liability; but certainly enough to make joining a union a career-threatening move for 90 percent of private sector employees.

 

The most important challenge facing today’s Labour Party is how to render workplace power relationships more equal without mobilising the entire neoliberal establishment against it. Simply legislating for the restoration of compulsory unionism and industry-wide contracts is not the answer, because a change of government would instantly bring about their legal demise.

 

The truth of the matter is that restoring equality in the workplace will not be accomplished by top-down, bureaucratic, institutional solutions. To enjoy the confidence and active support of ordinary working people, a fit-for-purpose, twenty-first century system of employment relations would need to have emerged from a consultative exercise of unprecedented size and thoroughness. In the simplest terms: it would need to be the product of the workers themselves.

 

Such an exercise would need to be established and protected by legislation. The body responsible – let’s call it WorkRight NZ – would aim to, and be empowered to, approach as many working people as possible in their workplaces and have them fill in a comprehensive questionnaire intended to identify both the good and bad aspects of working life in twenty-first century New Zealand. The survey would also ask workers how their rights, as citizens and employees, might best be protected and exercised within the workplace.

 

The WorkRight NZ legislation would also establish a second investigative unit, dedicated to drawing upon the knowledge and experience of existing trade union and employer organisations; the experiences of employers, unions and working people in other countries; and the research and insights of New Zealand and overseas academic employment relations specialists. The goal of this investigative unit would be to establish local and international best practice in relation to collective bargaining.

 

The results of the consultative exercise would then be collated, analysed and written up in the form of a comprehensive report by WorkRight NZ. Contained within the report would be a draft bill, incorporating the participants principal recommendations, for presentation to Parliament.

 

Interestingly, a similar exercise in mass inquiry was undertaken by the First Labour Government. The Social Survey Bureau was set up in 1937 to discover the actual conditions prevailing in New Zealand’s farms, factories, shops, offices and homes. Its first major inquiry – into the living conditions of dairy farmers – produced such shocking findings, however, that the responsible cabinet minister, Peter Fraser, tried to suppress the research report and, when that failed, shut the Bureau down.

 

Asking the right questions has always been the essence of political radicalism. It’s what made Helen Kelly such an effective trade union leader. If the CTU and the Labour Party are looking for a way to honour her legacy, then finding out what workers want from their employers and their workplaces – and giving it to them – would be a great place to start.

 

This essay was jointly posted by The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Sunday, 16 October 2016.

Helen Kelly 1964 - 2016

Helen Kelly - Trade unionist. Who reminded us how good the best can be.

The Truly Great

By STEPHEN SPENDER
          

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Not By "Bread And Butter" Alone: Making The Case For A More Inclusive Left.

Emancipation and Solidarity: Powerfully illustrated in the 2014 movie Pride, the emancipatory impulse has the power to transform and enliven the labour movement. An authentic human identity is only available to those who insist on being something more than the means to someone else’s end. Who we are now, and what we may yet become: both conditions drive us forward. In this respect, “progressive politics” and “identity politics” are one and the same.

 

STEPHANIE RODGERS IS RIGHT. It is impossible to build a mass movement for progressive change by ignoring or rejecting, “issues faced by the majority of people in society.” In fact, a movement in which demands for action on these issues are not thrust forward constantly is, almost certainly, not a progressive movement at all.

 

The longing for emancipation, like lightning, cannot be caught in a bottle. It is as wild and dangerous as it is beautiful and brilliant – and it will not be gainsaid. Nor should it be, because the quest for social progress is about nothing if it is not about creating a world in which an ever-increasing number of people are free to live happy, rewarding and fulfilling lives.

 

The past successes of the Left owe almost everything to honouring the emancipatory impulse, and its failures are almost all attributable to the fear generated by emancipation’s disruptive effects. Where this fear takes hold, it typically manifests itself in attempts to narrow the movement’s objectives; manage its members’ expectations; and strictly control their conduct.

 

Nowhere is this narrowing, managing and controlling strategy more in evidence than in the trade union movement. Even in “the glory days of compulsory unionism” it was, more often than not, the standard operating procedure of organised labour.

 

It’s years ago now, back when I was a young union official, but I can still remember the extraordinary speech delivered by a regular rank-and-file delegate to his union’s annual wage negotiations. He passionately condemned year-upon-year of compromise and surrender by the union’s leadership, and ended by thumping his clenched fist on the bargaining table, and shouting: “I say we FIGHT!” The impact of his words on the other rank-and-filers was electric, and the union’s paid officials all looked to me, a fellow bureaucrat, to break the delegate’s spell, lower the members’ expectations, and generally calm the whole discussion down. When I said simply, “I have nothing to add to _____’s contribution”, my colleagues were aghast. The vote was to strike, and the strike was won, but I was never again invited to join the inner-sanctum of official union negotiators.

 

It was only when the unions were prevailed upon to widen the scope of their concerns that their enormous progressive potential was revealed. Not only did Sonja Davies’ championing of the Working Women’s Charter open up the whole issue of the role and status of women in the trade union movement, but it also forced male trade unionists to think about how women were treated in society generally.

 

In a movement peopled by “hard men” and “militants” this was a challenging proposition. Was the bloke so quick with his fists on the picket line equally pugilistic on the home front? What did it mean that his wife was more frightened of him than any scab? And why, when the bosses’ advocates told such awful sexist jokes in the hotel bar after a deal had been signed, did so many of the union delegates join in the laughter? When the debate was about working-class sexism and homophobia, that old union standard “Which Side Are You On?” took on a new and unsettling meaning.

 

Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s the debates raged. More and more women began taking the lead in union affairs; more and more issues were making their way onto the agendas of union conferences. Over six years, the Fourth Labour Government’s Trade Union Education Authority trained thousands of union delegates. For decades the labour movement had limited its purview to “bread and butter issues” – no more. Workers needed little encouragement to begin thinking of their movement as something much more than simply a provider of “bread and butter”.

 

Just how ready they were to assert that wider view of workers’ – and human – rights was demonstrated at the end of 1990 when National’s Bill Birch introduced the Employment Contracts Bill. In a curious way, the ECB’s objectives weren’t that far removed from those of the old-style unionists: to narrow, manage and control. (All the legislation did was cut out the union middle men!) The Council of Trade Union’s affiliated members were having none of it. In the first four months of the following year scores of thousands of them marched and met and voted and declared: “I say we FIGHT!”

 

Would that their officials had learned as much about democracy and emancipation as they had! A union friend of mine once observed of the Moscow-aligned communists in the Socialist Unity Party: “They’d rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side.” Never was that more true than in April 1991! Ignoring the wishes of their rank-and-file members, the leaders of the largest CTU affiliates voted down (by a narrow majority) the motion to call a General Strike against the ECB.

 

Narrowing, managing, controlling: isn’t that the story of the last thirty years? And isn’t the need for a movement driven by the emancipatory principle greater now than it has ever been? We have seen our lives narrowed, managed and controlled to the point where even the idea of rebellion now seems implausible, impossible, absurd. But an authentic human identity is only available to those who insist on being something more than the means to someone else’s end. Who we are now, and what we may yet become: both conditions drive us forward. In this respect, “progressive politics” and “identity politics” are one and the same.

 

If, in our “left-wing movement”, it’s become a sin to struggle for anything more than just “bread and butter”, then I, for one, range myself proudly on the side of the sinners.

 

“I say we FIGHT!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 20 January 2016.