CTU Resolution Backs The Junior Doctors – Over Its President’s Strong Objections

Not Smiling Now: The carrying of a resolution in support of the Resident Doctor's Association over the strong objections of the CTU President, Richard Wagstaff (above) represents a rare assertion of the interests of private sector workers within the CTU – as well as an important breaking-of-ranks within the usually dominant “Big Four” public sector unions. Together, Wagstaff’s opponents have delivered a stunning blow to his presidential mana, greatly reducing his chances of being re-elected to a second term as leader of the CTU.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the upsurge in strike action across New Zealand since the Coalition Government assumed office. The National Party and its allies are insisting that this can only mean a return to the bad old days of the 1970s when, as National’s Workplace Relations spokesperson, Scott Simpson, told RNZ, unions would go on strike “at the drop of a hat”. What Simpson and his right-wing colleagues probably don’t know is how much worse things might have been had the Coalition Government not been able to rely on the moderating influence of the President of the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) Richard Wagstaff.

The CTU President, it is important to note, won his spurs as a senior official in the Public Service Association (PSA). Important, because the PSA has wielded a decisive influence over the CTU for more than 30 years. Crucially, that influence has been used to promote moderation, not radicalism. Both the PSA and the CTU have been consistent advocates of “partnership”, through “constructive engagement” with both the state and the private sector.

This is the jargon of the Wellington bureaucracy. The PSA is driven by the interests and priorities of the thousands of state-employed professionals and managers who make up its membership. These workers are deeply embedded in the governmental apparatus and their jobs very often entail monitoring, servicing and, in some cases, “sanctioning” the nation’s poorest and most marginalised citizens.

Work of this kind tends to encourage a high degree of identification with the administrative and political authorities on whose behalf public servants are required to act. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the PSA (with 70,000 members, New Zealand’s largest union) has, since the CTU’s inception in 1987, exerted a powerful restraining influence over the whole trade union movement.

Its influence has only grown stronger as the percentage of the private sector workforce belonging to a trade union has declined to the point where, today, fewer than 10 percent of private sector workers are unionised. Accordingly, for close to thirty years, trade unionism in New Zealand has largely been defined by the state sector unions: the PSA, the Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) the NZ Educational Institute (NZEI) and the NZ Nurses Organisation. Well-supplied with both members and money, these state unions have been willing to take a stand in defence of their own workers. Tragically, however, they have consistently declined to campaign for the rebuilding of trade unionism in the private sector.

The election of Helen Kelly to the presidency of the CTU changed its tone dramatically. She was much more willing to take a stand on behalf of workers in the private sector – winning significant moral victories against the logging industry and the Ports of Auckland. Her stand against Peter Jackson, while unsuccessful, was inspirational in its steadfast refusal to bend the knee to either Hollywood or the Beehive. The loss of Kelly, to lung cancer, robbed the CTU of its most inspirational leader ever. The New Zealand working class lost a true friend and champion.

Wagstaff, Kelly’s successor, has taken a very different leadership path. Not at all a street-fighting man, he prefers to work behind the scenes, taking full advantage of the capital city’s myriad power networks to neutralise enemies and cultivate friends. What Wagstaff lacks in charisma and rhetorical inspiration, he more than makes up for by his intimate knowledge of exactly which people are attached to what strings – and when they should be pulled.

The most recent example of Wagstaff’s leadership style was his handling of the prolonged and bitter dispute between the country’s District Health Boards (DHBs) and the Resident Doctors’ Association (RDA). One school of thought has it that Wagstaff, well aware of both the DHB’s and the Coalition Government’s desire to be rid of the Resident Doctors’ highly successful advocate, Deborah Powell, encouraged his old union, the PSA, to facilitate the formation of a rival union, which the DHBs could use to undermine the bargaining power of the RDA. Certainly, the almost total silence of the CTU on the increasingly vulnerable position of the RDA, vis-à-vis the DHBs, did little to encourage alternative explanations for Wagstaff’s unwillingness to become involved in the dispute. His explanation? The RDA were not affiliated to the CTU. What happened to the junior doctors and their troublesome advocate was not, according to its President, the CTU’s business.

Other affiliates, most particularly the two unions most closely associated with the RDA: the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) and the NZNO; begged to differ. Urged on by private sector unions anxious for the CTU to express its solidarity with the junior doctors, the ASMS and the NZNO took a resolution to the National Affiliate Council (NAC) of the CTU held in Wellington on Thursday, 28 February.

It read:

That the CTU expresses concern in the strongest possible terms to the district health boards for the collective bargaining strategy adopted in their MECA negotiations with the Resident Doctors’ Association which includes (a) the undermining of a union that is in bargaining with the potential effect of ‘union busting’ and (b) taking advantage of the vulnerability of resident doctors due to their dependence on changing DHB employment for their training.  Further, the CTU urges the Government to urgently require DHBs to discontinue this strategy forthwith and to communicate this resolution to the DHBs and Government.

The resolution was carried 9 votes to 4, with 2 abstentions.

Sources close to the NAC have stressed the importance of this vote. They have noted Wagstaff’s implacable opposition to its passage and the vehemence with which he argued against its adoption. They have also pointed out that while the PSA and its usual allies, the PPTA and the NZEI, stood with Wagstaff, at least two of his normally reliable allies, the E Tu union, servicing workers in the manufacturing and service industries, along with the Dairy Workers, chose to abstain.

Wagstaff is reported to have pressured the nurses into withdrawing their support for the junior doctors, but the latter, strongly supported by the “senior doctors” of the ASMS, held firm. Joining them in the vote were the First Union, covering transport, warehousing and retail workers, Unite, covering casino workers, security guards and fast-food workers, and the unions covering the maritime and railway industries.

The carrying of the resolution thus represented a rare assertion of the interests of private sector workers within the CTU – as well as an important breaking-of-ranks within the usually dominant “Big Four” public sector unions. Together, Wagstaff’s opponents have delivered a stunning blow to his presidential mana, greatly reducing his chances of being re-elected to a second term as leader of the CTU.

Wagstaff’s defeat is also a defeat for the Minister of Health, David Clark, as well as Labour’s ministers in the Coalition Government. The National Party may decry the upsurge in industrial action of the past 12 months, but if they’d realised how assertive the trade unions might become if the CTU is led by someone less steeped in the machinations of Wellington, they might have held their tongues. If Wagstaff and the PSA continue to be outvoted, both the Government and the Opposition should get ready for “trouble at mill”.

As Al Jolson puts in The Jazz Singer, the world’s first ‘talking picture’:

“You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 February 2019.

Political Sadism, Or Moral Inertia? Explaining David Clark.

Whadaryah? It is hard to believe that Health Minister, David Clark, could have gratuitously refrained from speaking out against the latest decision of the Waikato DHB. So egregious has been the Board’s treatment of Dave Macpherson, Jane Stevens and their family, that the thought of Clark personally endorsing its conduct is repellent.

CLEARLY, DAVID CLARK never got the “Politics of Kindness” memo. In the face of the appalling behaviour of this country’s District Health Boards, the current Minister of Health’s deafening silence is proof of either political sadism or moral inertia. Neither option is acceptable in a government so loudly committed to the “well-being” of its citizens.

It is hard to believe that Clark could have gratuitously refrained from speaking out against the latest decision of the Waikato DHB. So egregious has been the Board’s treatment of Dave Macpherson, Jane Stevens and their family, that the thought of Clark personally endorsing its conduct is repellent.

That said, any decent Health Minister would have picked up the phone the moment he discovered what the DHB was trying to do, and instructed its CEO to cease and desist immediately. Dave and Jane, having been vindicated by the Coroner, deserved much better of the Waikato health bureaucracy than this reprehensible attempt to have the whole inquest re-staged. Not content with contributing to the death of Nicky Stevens, Dave and Jane’s deeply troubled son, the Board seems intent upon recommencing the slow torture of his parents.

So, if Clark isn’t a vicious political sadist, then what is he?

The answer, presumably, is that Clark is yet another of those all-too-familiar neoliberal heroes – the politician who has trained himself to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak only when advised that it is “appropriate” to do so. Like the hapless participants in Dr Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment, Clark keeps dialling-up the pain. Never questioning the moral probity of those issuing the instructions. The Waikato DHB’s insurance company wants Dave and Jane put back on the rack? Well then, the Minister must not, under any circumstances, intervene.

It would be nice to think that Clark: an indisputably well-educated man; a member of the Labour Party; and – may God forgive him – a self-confessed Christian! might have demonstrated the moral courage of those participants in the Milgram Experiment who stood up to the men in the white coats. The ones who said “No.” Who flatly refused to participate in a process that, as far as they knew, was inflicting ever-more-dangerous electric shocks to the errant subjects screaming in an adjoining room.

Sadly, Clark’s refusal to address the bad behaviour of a single DHB, acting on its own, is more than matched by his failure to rein-in the Boards’ collective aggression towards their own staff.

There was a time when Labour Party ministers came from backgrounds where strike action, and the solidarity that makes striking possible, were the stuff of personal experience. A Health Minister with that sort of heritage would instantly recognise the DHBs’ negotiators’ current tactics vis-à-vis the Resident Doctors Association. He would see them for what they are: a deliberate attempt to run down the clock, so that the scab MECA (multi-employer collective agreement) negotiated by SToNZ will, on 1 March, become the only agreement available to junior doctors.

An “old school” Labour cabinet minister, one who’d held a union card, would have put a stop to such scabrous tactics. Clark’s behaviour, however, suggests that his most formative professional years were the ones he spent working for Treasury. Certainly, it’s the Treasury way to prioritise “fiscal responsibility” over anything as subjective as the young doctors’ commitment to offering the best possible care to their patients. Care that can only be compromised by being forced to work 12 days straight without a break.

Unfortunately, “fiscal responsibility” has been so fetishized by this government that Clark felt morally justified in telling the DHBs that they must operate strictly within the unrealistically tight budgets imposed on them by himself and Finance Minister Robertson. The Coalition’s “Budget Responsibility Rules” are not for breaking; which is clearly being interpreted by the DHBs’ negotiators to mean – the  junior doctors’ union is.

Is this the behaviour of a Minister of Health inspired by the “politics of kindness”? Are these budgetary constraints intended to foster the nation’s “well-being”? Not really. They are, however, entirely consistent with the neoliberal assumptions which continue to underpin the New Zealand Labour Party’s political behaviour.

The most important of these continues to be the assumption that only bad things can come from the “politicisation of economics”. Ministers must be directed by the numbers – and only the numbers. The human heart is a poor guide to rational administration. Patient care, and the care of patients, is to be defined by the data – nothing else.

David Clark does not appear to have a metric for moral force. The calculation of our health system’s ethical obligations seems beyond him. How, when all is said and done, does one measure a family’s sorrow, or calculate a young doctor’s dedication?

What is the market-price of kindness?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 15 February 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.