The Realm Of The Possible.

The People’s House: What would it be like to live in a country where a single sermon could prick the conscience of the comfortable? Where a journalist could rouse a whole city to action? Where the government could be made to respond to the people’s concerns? Where real change was possible? And we could make it.

IN A YEAR of important elections, some already held, some yet to come, one common factor has become very clear. The ideological shift that rescued mainstream political parties from the seemingly endless crises of the 1970s has, in the intervening decades, become a serious electoral liability.

Neoliberalism may have provided the political mainstream with the circuit-breaker it was looking for in the 1970s and 80s, and its success in burying the social-democratic orthodoxy of the post-war era may have provided mainstream politicians with a field cleared of credible opponents, but the problems its adoption was supposed to solve have not disappeared. Indeed, many have grown.

Certainly, forty years on from the Snap Election of 1984 and the neoliberal revolution it ushered in, New Zealand’s mainstream parties stand in urgent need of a new circuit-breaker. If a tsunami of radical populism is not to roll over the centre ground, then a new set of answers is required to the key questions of democratic politics: “What is possible – and what is not?”

Since the late-1980s, for example, nationalisation, or even significant public ownership of key infrastructure and services, has been rejected outright as politically impossible, or been characterised with some asperity as the least effective alternative to untrammelled private ownership. At virtually every level of government, and regardless of the manifest severity of key infrastructural failures, both legislators and administrators continue to shy away from the most obvious and financially rational solutions.

Since the state is far ahead of all other borrowers in terms of how much it can borrow and at what cost, it makes obvious sense for it to take over New Zealand’s “three waters” and carry out the necessary upgrading and extension projects that long ago exceeded the ability of local authorities to finance. Cost recovery could be negotiated with the local government sector over a period of sufficient length to render it fiscally bearable. Easy-peasy?

Apparently not. That the option of straightforward nationalisation was never considered seriously by either Labour or National bears testimony to the remarkable persistence of the neoliberal vision. Even in the United Kingdom, where the privatisation of water is an accomplished fact, the abject failure of the experiment – as attested to by the open sewers that were England’s rivers and streams – has been insufficient to make nationalisation the preferred option of anybody except the voting public.

Restoring the organised working-class as one of the great “estates” of the realm has similarly been dismissed as impossible by the neoliberal clerisy. Their reticence on this subject is understandable, since it was the growing power of the trade unions in the advanced capitalist states of the 1960s and 70s – especially their real or potential influence over the major parties of the Centre-Left – that made the identification and introduction of an ideological circuit-breaker so urgent.

New Zealand’s destruction of organised labour in the early 1990s was of a thoroughness unequalled in the democratic West. Over a period of 30 years, union density declined from just under half the workforce to less than 10 percent. Take out the unions representing teachers, nurses, salaried medical specialists and public servants, and the percentage of private-sector workers enrolled in trade unions shrinks away to something not much better than nothing.

Except that, as is so often the case with the neoliberal “reforms” of the past 40 years, the cure for the apprehended “socialist” disease has proved to be worse than the complaint. The elimination of union power removed one of the most powerful drivers of productivity. By making it possible for employers to keep wages low, investment in more efficient plant and machinery, and the uplifting of employee skill levels, could be more-or-less permanently deferred.

The consequences of making it possible for businesses to ‘live’ with low productivity are clearly illustrated in the widening gulf between wage levels in New Zealand and Australia. That this differential (upwards of 30 percent) acts as a powerful magnet for what skilled workers New Zealand has left, not only strips the country of the people best placed to lift its productivity, but also entrenches its status as a low-skill, low-wage economy. The downward spiral becomes self-reinforcing.

The stripping-out of New Zealand’s manufacturing base, justified by the neoliberals’ unbreakable attachment to the Eighteenth Century economic doctrine of “comparative advantage”, may have offset the effects of declining real wages by lowering the price of manufactured goods, but it also robbed the New Zealand working-class of the pride and dignity that attaches to those who make real things in the real world. Emptying container-loads of manufactured imports is a poor substitute for the satisfaction derived from participating in their creation.

Allowing your best and brightest workers to seek a better life elsewhere, while allowing the self-esteem and skill levels of those who remain to fall in unison, is a recipe for socio-economic polarisation. It encourages those positioned higher on the socio-economic ladder to look down on those below them – a disdain which is all too easily translated into self-reproach and self-loathing by those so regarded. Just because the comfortably positioned in the social hierarchy do not have to endure the hidden injuries of class does not make them any less real.

New Zealand was once a society in which the exploitation of citizens was deemed unacceptable. The most dramatic illustration of this determination to be a nation in which few were rich and none were poor may be found in the story of Dunedin’s “sweated” tailoresses – women and girls paid starvation wages for sewing garments all day and late into the night.

An 1888 sermon, “The Sin of Cheapness”, penned and delivered by local clergymen, the Rev. Rutherford Waddell, inspired a local journalist to take up the tailoresses’ cause in The Otago Daily Times. At a public meeting the following year middle-class and working-class activists, acting together, decided to form the Tailoresses Union. In 1890, the New Zealand Government felt sufficiently pressured to set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry into “sweated labour”. Legislation followed.

Harriet Morrison of the newly formed Tailoresses Union attacks the monstrous practice of sweated labour in this New Zealand Observer cartoon of 1892.

A Christian preacher, a crusading journalist, a conscience-stricken middle-class, an energised working-class, New Zealand’s first union for women, a Royal Commission, legislative reform, socio-economic change. In 1888, all these factors contributed to defining the realm of the possible in New Zealand.

It was precisely to reduce the constantly expanding scope of what was considered possible, and to address the radical implications of such expansion for the social and economic future of the nation, that persuaded so many powerfully placed New Zealanders to unleash the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1993.

Few would argue that they did not succeed in lowering Kiwis’ expectations of what their society, their government, and they, themselves, were capable of achieving. This shrugging-off of what were depicted as excessively onerous collective responsibilities made it much easier to believe that individual success had been made correspondingly easier, and that individual failure, while regrettable, was no longer society’s business.

But, forty years on, are we really better off for living in a political environment where so little is considered achievable? What would it be like to live in a country where a single sermon could prick the conscience of the comfortable? Where a journalist could rouse a whole city to action? Where the government could be made to respond to the people’s concerns. Where real change was possible?

And we could make it.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 June 2024.

The Affable Snake: Tony Simpson Remembers Stan Rodger (1940-2022)

A Man May Smile And Smile: Stan Rodger was an affable almost avuncular figure although it’s important to recall that no-one gets to the top of the then largest union in the country without exercising the skills commonly found in any political snake pit; ostensible bands of brothers and sisters are no exception.

THE DEATH of erstwhile Dunedin Labour politician and Cabinet Minister Stan Rodger on 29 May and the obituary note by Chris Trotter that followed a few days after raised a number of ghosts which I thought I had long buried; but ghosts have a habit of coming back to haunt and Stan’s role in the Lange government of the eighties is no exception. That government may be ancient history to many reading this but it represents a significant phase shift in our political past which needs to be regularly examined and analysed. As someone once said: those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it; someone else added “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” [1]

I knew Stan quite well when I was a senior advocate for the PSA in the early seventies and he was the union president. He was an affable almost avuncular figure although it’s important to recall that no-one gets to the top of the then largest union in the country without exercising the skills commonly found in any political snake pit; ostensible bands of brothers and sisters are no exception. Stan went on to parlay his union background into a safe Labour seat in Parliament. There was nothing exceptional about that. The trade union movement invented the Labour Party in 1916 to unify its parliamentary initiatives on behalf of working people and moving from union office to MP was quite common in past decades. As an experienced worker representative Stan was an obvious candidate for Cabinet when the Lange government came to power in 1984 and he became Minister of Labour and of State Services. And that’s where the fun begins.

It is now commonplace to recognise that that government repudiated the social democratic tradition which was central to its previous philosophies and replaced it with a thoroughgoing economic and social neo-liberalism which included an attack on some of the longstanding rights of workers in their trade unions. There was widespread outrage at this within the union movement; I myself abandoned my role with the PSA, at root because they refused to call out the Lange government for its anti-union policies, but immediately because the debate became so heated that there were fisticuffs in the office and I had to go, although I was subsequently to return as president to try and repair some of the damage.

The angry debates that government occasioned affected its Members of Parliament along with everyone else. Some, such as Jim Anderton walked away and set up an alternative party true to what they perceived to be the previous Labour traditions. Others, along with much of the previous mass party membership, disappointed and disillusioned, turned their backs and slipped away. But some stayed on in Parliament and saw the crashing defeat of Labour at the 1990 election. Stan’s erstwhile membership at the PSA showed their displeasure by revoking his honorary status at a subsequent Conference against the advice of the then platform leadership. It was subsequently restored but it is indicative of the fury among many committed unionists that it happened at all.

All of this created a dilemma for Stan. No-one likes to be labelled a traitor to a cause i.e. in this case the workplace rights of working people, whether such a characterisation is justified or not. Others who were confronted with the same problem took the obvious course and published a memoir in justification. [2] Stan didn’t publish a memoir as far as I am aware. But he did it seems invent a narrative of his motives which he vouchsafed to those around him such as the veteran journalist Richard Harman; it is one that finds its way into Chris Trotter’s obituary notice.

According to this story there was a left wing Marxist conspiracy against the PSA led by another of its erstwhile presidents, Jack Lewin, who by the deployment of a sinister body called The Korero sought to take over the union and turn it by stealth to its own left wing purposes. This group it is alleged, playing some master game of which the puppet master had been Bill Sutch, were trying to use their position within the PSA to turn our polity in an extreme left direction, and had already attracted the attention of not only the scurrilous right wing newspaper Truth but the SIS. Stan, by playing a major instrumental role in getting David Lange into Parliament, his story goes, and then into the leadership of Labour saved the nation from this Marxist conspiracy. His role in the Lange government was an on-going part of that brave enterprise. Its problem as a narrative is that it bears little or no resemblance to the facts of the matter.

That there was a group referred to informally and partly in jest as ‘the korero’ is true, and Jack Lewin who was also well known to me not only existed but was considerably more colourful and larger than life. I also knew personally quite a number of the other activists involved including Jim Turner and Jack Batt, both subsequently union presidents. But to understand what this was all about you must go back to the creation of the PSA in 1913 in the wake of the passage of the first serious attempt to create a professional and non-political civil service in this country, the Public Service Act of 1912. This Act was predicated on the assumption that some organisation would be in place representing the interests of the newly created professional public service workers, and so one was accordingly created – the PSA. But if you called it a union you would probably give its founders a heart attack. Even its name eschewed the word ‘union’; it was an association, and its rules to this day contain a clause forbidding it to affiliate to any political party. It sternly rejected the suggestion that it should register under the then Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act because it had a paranoid fear of anything resembling compulsory membership and was from its inception to this day a wholly voluntary body.

But times change. By the late nineteen fifties New Zealand had gone through a cruel Depression, the first Labour government, and the trauma of the Second World War. This had created a generation of committed unionists to whom the PSA as originally constituted was no longer fit for purpose. But neither were they Marxists or Leninists or any other of the communist sectarians who are always with us but who have also had little or no influence on the direction of the trade union movement in this country, except perhaps in the fevered imaginings of the SIS or populist politicians in search of a bogeyman such as Robert Muldoon, and sometimes only in their own minds.

What Jack Lewin and the so-called ‘korero’ were all about was ending the cosy relationship between the senior public service of the day and the leadership of the PSA and replacing it with a leadership transparent and accountable to its rank and file members. In this they succeeded admirably. I would venture to say, from my own observation, and as someone with a highly sensitive nose for bull shit and subterfuge that during my period working at a senior level for the PSA it was genuinely responsive to the views and requirements of its members and probably more so than any other union in the country. Those were its agendas and nothing else despite efforts from time to time by various groups to take it over or assert influence on it – including at various points a strange right wing philosophical group calling itself Moral Rearmament, the ubiquitous sectarians of the communist left, and some of the more socially conscious groups within the Catholic Church. None of them came within a bull’s roar of gaining their objectives or even enjoying other than minor influence.

Ironically, it was only when the Lange government repealed the State Services Act – not on Stan’s watch but that of Geoffrey Palmer - and replaced it with legislation which effectively shut out the PSA from any influence on the direction of government workplace policy, that there was serious damage done to the professional and politically neutral ethos of our public service. In a very real way we have returned at least partially to the situation which pertained prior to the passing of the 1912 Act when the New Zealand civil service was subject to gross political patronage and inappropriate interference by politicians.

I last saw Stan and chatted briefly to him at the centenary function of the PSA in 2013. He remained at a personal level what I had always known him to be – an affable and avuncular figure who came over as someone who wouldn’t harm a fly. In that regard I would simply remind you reading this that appearances, particularly when power is involved, can be very deceptive, and that Stan survived and flourished in one of the most unforgiving of all social environments - the trade union movement.

Tony Simpson.


[1] There are many claimants to have invented this dictum, including Winston Churchill and a Spanish philosopher George Santayana but the most likely candidate is Edmund Burke (1729-1797) with the coda added by Karl Marx.

[2] The prime instance of this is Reform by Geoffrey Palmer (2013). There were others I will not mention, some so egregious as to beggar belief. In its subsequently published centenary history the Labour Party also glossed over the whole matter.

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Unmistakably Labour Legislation.

The Age-Old Question: The idea of laying a solid floor of wages and conditions beneath the feet of workers in industries notorious for engaging in exploitative “races to the bottom”, but keeping the way clear for improving upon these base “Free Pay Agreement rates” in case-by-case collective bargaining, will act as a highly effective recruiting sergeant for the unions.

AT LAST! The Sixth Labour Government has finally introduced legislation the First Labour Government might recognise. Labour Minister Michael Wood’s “Fair Pay Agreements Bill” is the first real effort since the Labour Relations Act of 1987 to materially strengthen the hand of New Zealand’s beleaguered trade union movement. If the Bill’s intent is not watered-down in the process of making its way through Parliament, and if the Labour Government is re-elected, then trade unionism in this country is likely to expand rapidly.

The reason for this is simple: the Bill not only makes joining a trade union look like a good bet; it makes it look like a safe bet. The idea of laying a solid floor of wages and conditions beneath the feet of workers in industries notorious for engaging in exploitative “races to the bottom”, but keeping the way clear for improving upon these base “FPA rates” in case-by-case collective bargaining, will act as a highly effective recruiting sergeant for the unions.

Something very similar happened when the First Labour Government made membership of a trade union a legal prerequisite for enjoying the fruits of compulsorily arbitrated “awards” – the model for Wood’s FPAs.

Following the legislation’s passage in 1936, vast, hitherto unorganised, swathes of the workforce were swiftly enrolled in a clutch of new trade unions. The largest of these was the Clerical Workers Union which, for the first time, allowed the overwhelmingly female workforce of office clerks to join the ranks of the industrial army. In the years that followed, workers as varied as journalists and law-clerks were enrolled. There was even a Musicians’ Union.

The “Awards” negotiated by these unions were the brainchild of the Labour Party’s predecessor in progressive social reform, the Liberal Government of 1890-1912. Its 1894 innovation, the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, was hailed across the world for its enlightened approach to labour relations.

The IC&A Act empowered an Arbitration Court, composed of judges representing the employers, the unions, and the state, to issue legally binding sets of minimum wages and conditions, negotiated by the representatives of workers and employers from across entire industries. The Arbitration Court could also issue “General Wage Orders” lifting the incomes of workers across the entire economy.

The problem, of course, was that if an industry remained unorganised, then the Court was unable to “award” its workers and employers wages and conditions minima. Caring and responsible employers soon found their less scrupulous competitors undercutting them on price by requiring their employees to work harder and longer for less.

Such were the tactics that set off the aforementioned “race to the bottom”: a business model predicated on the maximum exploitation of an industry’s workforce. Putting it bluntly: the lower the wages, the higher the profits.

This was the problem the First Labour Government’s introduction of universal union membership was designed to remedy – and it worked.

The National Party’s spokesperson on “Workplace Relations & Safety”, Paul Goldsmith, was quick to respond to Minister Wood’s introduction of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill, promising to oppose it “stridently”. It was, he said: “an ideological overreach, deliberately going to war with employers at a time when we’re facing huge economic challenges”.

One can only admire Mr Goldsmith’s cheek. The political party guilty of “ideological overreach”; the party guilty of “going to war” against its fellow New Zealanders; is not the Labour Party, but the National Party.

The Employment Contracts Act 1991, introduced by Mr Goldsmith’s predecessor, Sir William Birch, stripped New Zealand workers of workplace rights they had enjoyed for nearly a century. It set in motion the relentless shift of corporate surpluses from wage-earners to shareholders that has seen today’s workers earning thousands of dollars less per year than would have been the case had Mr Goldsmith’s “flexible labour market” not destroyed the inherent Kiwi fairness of the system it replaced.

The destruction of the trade union movement is the most important achievement of New Zealand’s Neoliberal Revolution. In 2022, fewer than 10 percent of the private sector workforce is unionised. In dramatic contrast to 1990, today’s typical union member is a tertiary-educated female, working in the public sector, and earning a salary well above the median New Zealand income of $59,000 per year.

Michael Woods Fair Pay Agreements Bill represents a first – and unmistakably Labour – step towards re-empowering all Kiwi workers.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 April 2022.

Burning Down The House: Will The Greens Be The Death Of The Left?

Collateral Damage: For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the whole progressive movement.

CAN THE GREENS get themselves back on track? Once a political party has made the decisive turn towards identity politics is there anything short of electoral disaster capable of inducing a change of direction? There are two problems here. The first relates to ideology, and is at least theoretically fixable. The second is about the political praxis of identity politics – how Greens actually perform politics. Sadly, to fix that you’d need a neutron bomb. [A particularly nasty kind of nuclear device that kills people, but leaves structures standing. – C.T.]

Tom Walker is a British comedian whose alter-ego, Johnathan Pie, has gained a worldwide audience by addressing the follies of – well – just about the whole cast of characters encompassed by the United Kingdom’s manifold political catastrophes. One of Walker’s latest offerings depicts the dire consequences for Pie (supposedly a journalist covering politics for one of the big television networks) that flow from his innocently allowing a participant in a pro-Brexit rally to take a selfie with him. It is a chillingly funny piece of satire – as applicable to the New Zealand Green Party as it is to the increasingly “woke” workplaces of the UK media.

The toxic culture satirised in Walker’s vignette is the inevitable result of interpreting events through the severely distorting prism of identity. Once embarked upon, this journey proceeds towards its inevitable denouement in utter organisational disintegration and failure.

One of the very first local instances of organisational collapse brought on by identity politics was the New Zealand University Students Association (NZUSA). Beginning in the late 1970s, the student movement’s activist minority persuaded NZUSA to restructure itself to reflect the growing strength of the so-called “New Social Movements” – especially Feminism, Anti-Racism and Gay Liberation.

NZUSA “Vice-Presidents” proliferated accordingly, and the May and August meetings of the organisation became ideological battlegrounds where the identarians fought to wrest control of the student movement from the Marxist Left. With every passing year, NZUSA drifted further and further away from its core functions until, in the early-1990s, the entire “politically correct” (originally a left-wing term) structure was demolished by the champions of “ordinary” (i.e. conservative) students.

A very similar fate awaited the highly successful aid organisation, CORSO, which was taken over by Maori nationalists and transformed into an instrument for promoting the early-1980s movement for “Maori Sovereignty”. Unsurprisingly, the tens-of-thousands of Pakeha donors who had built CORSO weren’t having a bar of it. They voted with the feet – and, more importantly, with their chequebooks. CORSO’s new managers received these defections as proof positive of the pervasiveness of Pakeha racism – even on the political Left. They may well have been right, but being politically correct wasn’t enough to save CORSO.

Similar challenges assailed the trade union movement, but the entrenched power of the traditional Left was more than equal to the task of stopping the identarians in their tracks. It took Bill Birch and the National Party to destroy what identity politics couldn’t dent. Interestingly, by the time the Employment Contracts Bill became law in 1991, a great many of those engaged in identity politics had already made their peace with the hegemonic ambitions of the neoliberal economic and political order. The latter was only too happy to see the activist energy formerly devoted to smashing capitalism diverted into building iwi corporations, placing upper-middle-class women on the boards of New Zealand’s biggest companies, and seizing the commercial opportunities of the pink dollar.

What is truly surprising about the Greens is how long a party more-or-less constructed out of the new social movements of the 1960s and 70s was able to resist the centrifugal forces inherent in identity politics. So long as the battle to save the global environment remained the central focus of the party, and so long as in fighting for the environment the Greens were willing to pit themselves against its deadliest foe – Global Capitalism – then the other social movements, while important, were unwilling to dilute the political potency of the party’s prime directive: Save the Planet!

In this respect, they were assisted immensely by the charismatic leadership of individuals like Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke, Sue Kedgely and Nandor Tanczos. These individuals could not, however, hold at bay forever the claims advanced on behalf of Te Tiriti, gender equality and the rainbow agenda. Neither was it possible to drown out forever the siren song of parliamentary power, nor the ideological compromises necessary for its acquisition. If the Tangata Whenua, Third Wave Feminism and the Rainbow Community could make their peace with the realities of neoliberal globalism, then why not Green Environmentalism?

Could the Greens be argued out of their present, deeply compromised, political orientation? Theoretically, yes. Never before in human history has the need to resist environmental despoliation been more urgent or self-evident. If Capitalism is not defeated, then the fate of humankind is sealed. The evidence admits of no other conclusion: uncompromising resistance to the capitalists’ wilful destruction of the biosphere is the only rational political choice. A strong leader would have little difficulty in making out this case in a movement whose prime directive is – Save the Planet!

And, therein, lies the problem. Organisations which have fallen victim to the self-consuming logic of identity politics become viciously intolerant of anything even remotely hinting of strong leadership. Nothing twists together the component strands of identarian culture faster than the prospect of a single individual taking back control of the political narrative. And, almost always, those strands end up being twisted around the offending individual’s neck. What this process fosters is not leadership, but the very worst sort of “palace politics”. All trust is lost; every back becomes a target; nothing strong or inspirational is permitted to survive; and the hard-won wisdom of experience is dismissed with a snappy “Okay, Boomer!”

For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the whole progressive movement.

And with the time remaining to save the planet so very short, that would be a crime.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 February 2020.

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.

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.

“Nothing Without A Demand” The Need For A New Union Movement.

“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.

Can The Nurses Win On Their Own?

The First Of Many? If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.

NEW ZEALAND’S NURSES are about to discover whether their store of public good-will is big enough to see them through a strike. New Zealanders with experience of this country’s public health system almost always speak very highly of its staff. Nurses in particular draw the public’s praise and respect. In our overburdened and understaffed hospitals they display the weary-but-unflinching professionalism of workers required to operate in an environment of more-or-less permanent crisis.

No one knows better that this country’s frontline health professionals how potentially dangerous this situation can become. New Zealand needs more nurses – lots more nurses. But to keep the staff it already has – let alone attract new recruits – nurses insist they must be paid more. Lots more.

But, how much more? That is the question. In an economy where roughly half the paid workforce have not had a pay-rise for close to two years, will the NZ Nurses’ Organisation’s demand for an immediate, across the board, 11 percent increase strike the average Kiwi as “about right” or “too much”. With an experienced registered nurse’s salary set to rise from $66,755 to $77,386 by December next year under the present offer, will the two-thirds of workers who earn considerably less than that sum (in 2016 the median NZ income was just $48,800) regard the union’s proposed strike action as reasonable – or unreasonable?

The offer on the table also guarantees that an additional 500 nurses will be recruited to the national health-sector workforce. This is clever. The single most important contributing factor to the crisis in the nation’s hospital wards is chronic understaffing. More than anything else it is the personal toll extracted by the excessive workloads caused by understaffing that is fuelling nurses’ anger and impatience with the District Health Boards’ management. It would be interesting to know whether the 9 percent offer on the table would be deemed enough if nurses could be convinced that their workloads were about to be reduced very rapidly to more bearable levels.

The DHB negotiators have also been clever in advancing the figure of half-a-billion dollars as the all-up cost of the settlement on the table. Many New Zealanders will see this as an extraordinarily generous sum – especially when the money on offer has been drawn from their taxes. In rejecting the offer, the Nurses’ union runs the risk of being dismissed as either unrealistic or greedy – or both.

The best way to avoid this perception taking hold would be for the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) to present the Nurses’ claim as the first of many. After nearly a decade of both public- and private-sector wage restraint, the unions should argue, the time has come for working people to make up the lost ground. The CTU should also emphasise the fact that Nurses are not the only workers in New Zealand who have been expected to work harder and longer for no appreciable improvement in their overall living standards. Nurses are, however, the first occupational group to vote in favour of doing something about it.

If the CTU pledged itself to ensuring that the Nurses fight does not turn into a solitary struggle. If frontline health professionals could be presented as merely the first of many workers ready to embrace the tactics necessary to win substantial improvements in their wages and conditions, then trade unionism in New Zealand could have a new birth of freedom.

If the nurses are left to fight this battle on their own, however, then, sadly, there is a better than even chance that the politics of envy and resentment will prevail over the politics of solidarity.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 19 June 2018.

A Labour Code Worthy Of Inspection.

Labour's Inspector-In-Chief: Since the Minister of Labour, Iain Lees-Galloway, has already ruled-out the only reform measure capable of reinvigorating the trade union movement: the restoration of compulsory membership; and in light of the fact that he is publicly pledged to expand the MBIE inspectorate; the idea of creating one big multifaceted “Labour Bureau” is not entirely fanciful.

AS A YOUNG trade unionist, back in the early 1980s, something always bothered me – the Department of Labour. Many of the issues confronting trade union organisers were straightforward breaches of the law relating to wages, conditions, holidays and, more importantly, the health and safety of the employees on site. This latter issue should not, strictly-speaking, have been the responsibility of the trade unions at all but of the Department of Labour’s safety inspectorate. Why were these Labour Inspectors so incredibly reluctant to intervene in workplace disputes?

The secretary of my union patiently explained to me just how delicate the balance was between the employers, the unions and the Department of Labour. Too much interference from the unions and/or the Labour Department’s inspectors in the employers’ “managerial prerogatives” would inevitably escalate into a political crisis from which, in the end, only the bosses would emerge victorious. Official intervention was, accordingly, reserved for only the most egregious breaches of the law. For the most part, the resolution of workplace difficulties was accomplished informally by paid union officials, or Departmental staff, having “a quiet word” with the delinquent employer. Only very rarely did matters end up in court.

To make doubly sure that enforcement did not get out of hand, the number of Labour Inspectors was kept ridiculously low. Even had the inspectorate been minded to act proactively against poor (or even dangerous) employment practices, there was simply too few of them to enforce the law effectively.

The unions, too, had received an unforgettable lesson in what was – and was not – acceptable industrial behaviour, from the National Party in 1951. Industrial militancy – especially when undertaken with overt political intent – would not be tolerated. If the unions wanted the legal mechanisms which made union membership compulsory to remain in place, then they would limit themselves to meeting the “bread and butter” needs of their members. Politically-inspired union militancy was off the agenda.

Bad though this state-of-affairs undoubtedly was, the arrival of “Rogernomics” made it much, much worse. Free market capitalism required “labour market flexibility”, “light-handed regulation” and the unfettered exercise of managerial prerogatives. With the passage of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991, the scope for interfering union officials and labour inspectors was dramatically reduced.

The consequences: whether manifested in the blatant criminal tragedy of the Pike River mine disaster; or, more insidiously, in the steady reduction in the share of the nation’s wealth afforded to working people (as opposed to shareholders) are all around us.

To date, most of the reform effort has been concentrated on heeding the lessons of Pike River. The law relating to occupational safety and health has been strengthened and that part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) responsible for the enforcement of workplace legislation has become much more assertive.

The most startling evidence of MBIE’s new proactive approach emerged only this week when, in a test case brought before it by the Ministry, the Employment Court ruled against the practice of not paying employees for business-related activities undertaken before and/or after their agreed hours of work.

The public reaction to this case, from and on behalf of what could easily end up being thousands of workers required to provide similar unpaid labour to their employers, raises an interesting question. What would happen if the functions of the entity we used to call the Department of Labour, and the much-diminished trade union movement, were combined in a single, legislatively-mandated and publicly-funded workplace law enforcement agency?

Since the Minister of Labour, Iain Lees-Galloway, has already ruled-out the only reform measure capable of reinvigorating the trade union movement: the restoration of compulsory membership; and in light of the fact that he is publicly pledged to expand the MBIE inspectorate; the idea of creating one big multifaceted “Labour Bureau” is not entirely fanciful.

In essence, it would require the enactment of a comprehensive code of employer/employee rights and responsibilities; the creation of an institution empowered to establish minimum rates of pay across all industries and occupations; and the recruitment of a veritable army of Labour Bureau Inspectors charged with the rigorous enforcement of both. As part of that enforcement, these inspectors could issue a cease-and-desist order to any business in violation of the code until such time as the breach is remedied.

These orders could be called “Strike Notices”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 May 2018.

What Happens When The Generators Of Social Solidarity Fall Silent?

Crumbling System: With the steady decline of organised religion, organised labour and organised sport, New Zealand's most crucial generators of social cohesion have largely ceased to function. As a result, New Zealanders no longer tend to define themselves by the things that draw them together, but by the things that drive them apart.

THE INTERNAL MIGRATION of Maori from the countryside to the cities changed New Zealand society forever. For decades, this country’s race relations regime had operated on the cynical proposition that so long as Maori could be kept “out of sight”, they could also be kept “out of mind”. Such complacency could not, however, survive the constantly rising demand for labour that grew out of the extended post-war economic boom. The needs of the construction and manufacturing sectors were such that tens-of-thousands of mostly young Maori were lured away from their rural communities and into New Zealand’s rapidly growing urban centres.

The late Dr Ranginui Walker wrote often of the massive cultural dislocation which this rapid shift from rural to urban occasioned. That it did not produce (at least, not immediately) the dramatic social pathologies evident in other countries experiencing similar internal migrations (Italy, for example) has been attributed to the strength of three intersecting institutions: the churches; the trade unions; and the sports clubs; all of which swiftly sank deep and binding roots into the new city-based Maori communities.

The powerfully integrative effect of these three mass institutions (augmented by specifically Maori organisations like the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Maori Wardens) made New Zealand’s experience of massive and rapid internal migration comparatively painless. It also contributed hugely to that most enduring of Pakeha myths: “New Zealand has the best race relations in the world.”

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it has become clear how important the churches, unions, and sports clubs were to the lives of ALL New Zealanders – Pakeha as well as Maori. Since the 1970s, their relentless decline has not only reduced dramatically the opportunities for the two cultures to come together in pursuit of common interests, but also, in the space where common beliefs and aspirations once flourished, a vacuum has been created into which a host of very different, and often divisive, ideas has migrated.

It was the churches that went first – and with them the common Christian narrative that had allowed New Zealanders to view their social and economic problems through a single ethical lens. In Pakeha culture, the morally amorphous secularism which rushed in to fill the vacuum offered multiple opportunities for non-religious belief systems to take root and flourish. Some of these, like “New Age” spirituality, were harmless. Others, like Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism”, and the New Left’s “Identity Politics”, would prove dangerously corrosive of social cohesion.

In Maori communities, the vacuum created by the Christian churches’ declining persuasiveness was quickly filled by a revival of traditional indigenous beliefs and practices. Overarching and mobilising this “Maori Renaissance” was the much broader and politically-charged narrative of tino rangatiratanga – Maori Sovereignty.

The triumph of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s only speeded-up the disintegration of New Zealand society. The collapse of trade union strength which followed the passage of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 led directly to the elimination of penalty pay-rates. With them went the institution that had made so many of New Zealand’s sports clubs viable – the common Kiwi Weekend. For Kiwi sportsmen and women, the imperative very quickly became: commercialise or die.

With the traditional generators of social solidarity no longer humming, cast adrift New Zealanders retreated to that most fundamental identity marker: ethnicity. Maori had got there first and had a ten year start, at least, in developing the rhetoric of difference. But, as the extraordinary response to Don Brash’s in/famous “Orewa Speech” made clear, Pakeha racial chauvinism is not all that difficult to conjure-up. Both here and in America, more and more disenchanted whites are tuning-in to the unrelenting tinnitus of the tribe.

In the latest edition of The Atlantic , journalist Peter Beinart writes: “Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organised religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasising morality and religion and emphasising race and nation.”

What does it say about the cultural malaise in which Western civilisation currently appears to be gripped, that the ideological radicals of the Left have, since the late-1970s, and with growing fervour, also been emphasising those aspects of human existence over which the individual exercises the least personal control: race, gender, sexuality?

Bereft of the mass institutions that once drew them together, New Zealanders are increasingly defining themselves by the things that drive them apart.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 April 2017.

Trouble At Mill.

Rising Like Lions: Between the early-Nineteenth and late-Twentieth Century, wielding their two “unvanquishable” weapons: trade unionism and the franchise; working people lifted their incomes; improved their housing; obtained an education for their children; and secured ready access to medical advice and care. In the space of little more than a century, working people had secured for themselves both a standard of living and a degree of political power unparalleled in human history. How were these lions turned into lambs?

 

A FEW NIGHTS AGO, I watched “The Real Mill” on Sky’s History Channel. Fronted by the ubiquitous Tony Robinson, the series investigates the historical background to “The Mill” – a docudrama set in early-Nineteenth Century Cheshire. What struck me most forcefully in the programme was the way in which the factory workers of the period fought back against the oppressive conditions of their working lives.

 

Bear in mind that these were men, women and (in alarming numbers) children, who had just spent at least 12 hours operating the relentless (and often lethal) machinery of the new “manufactories” – as their workplaces were called. And yet, overcoming their fatigue, they found time to read and write pamphlets; gather together to hear speeches; and march in their tens-of-thousands to great outdoor rallies.

 

None of them could vote. Even after the passage of the momentous Representation of the People Act, in 1832, only one in five of the adult male population were free to participate in parliamentary elections. The remaining four-fifths of adult males – and all adult women – continued to be excluded from the franchise.

 

It would require another century of struggle by the working men and women of Great Britain before universal franchise was finally achieved. (Roughly one third of the British soldiers who fought and died in the trenches of World War I were not entitled to vote for the Members of Parliament who sent them there.)

 

Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that, prior to 1824, it was illegal to form and/or belong to a trade union. Even after the repeal of these “Combination Acts”, trade unionism remained a risky business – as the 1834 “transportation” to Australia of the so-called “Tolpuddle Martyrs” attests. It was not until the passage of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 that the crucial right to mount a trade union picket was legally recognised.

 

So, what’s wrong with the working people of the early-Twenty-First Century? Like the mill-workers of two centuries ago, many of them are working long hours for scandalously low wages. Many of their employers utilise exactly the same employment strategies (sub-contracting, piece-work) that the mill-owners of the industrial revolution devised to depress the price of labour.

 

In sharp contrast to Nineteenth Century workers, however, the working people of today possess both the right to vote and the right to form trade unions, go on strike and picket their workplaces. The two decisive achievements of the working class’s long struggle for freedom and prosperity are both intact and available. How is it that these two mighty swords have rusted in their scabbards?

 

It was the romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly, writing in the same period as “The Mill”, who in his incendiary poem, “The Masque of Anarchy”, incited the oppressed peoples of the British Isles to:

 

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!

 

It was sentiments such as these which inspired the aristocrats and mill-owners of Britain (and many other countries) to resist extending the franchise to their tenants and workers for as long as they possibly could. If nothing else, the masters could count. Give an overwhelming majority of the population the right to vote, and very soon the laws of the land will reflect the needs and aspirations of an overwhelming majority of the population!

 

And so it proved – right up until the final quarter of the Twentieth Century. Wielding their two “unvanquishable” weapons: trade unionism and the franchise; working people lifted their incomes; improved their housing; obtained an education for their children; and secured ready access to medical advice and care. In the space of little more than a century, working people had secured for themselves both a standard of living and a degree of political power unparalleled in human history.

 

And then, quite suddenly, workers found themselves going backwards. In the late-1970s, the masters, fearing the “lions” were about to devour them entirely, launched a fierce counter-attack. Their behaviour, at least, was understandable. Less so, was the lions’ willingness to be restrained. The masters’ relentless propaganda: in which lions were portrayed as dangerous and selfish creatures which, for the public’s safety, simply had to be caged; proved to be astonishingly persuasive – not least to the lions themselves.

 

The legal restraints of Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch did not fall upon the working-class lions of the democratic West like dew while they slept. With a handful of honourable exceptions, like the British miners, the trade unions entered their masters’ cages voluntarily. An electorally decisive fraction of the working-class continues to vote for their chains.

 

Those Nineteenth Century mill-workers, marching beneath banners demanding trade union rights and the vote, would be appalled.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 November 2016.

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.