The unusual dispute between actors and the producers of the Hobbit film production has been the biggest political issue of the year in New Zealand. Following on from the previous blog post entitled ‘We are not for the Hobbit workers, and we are not against them’ – Labour Party, I’ve been attempting to write a further post that looks at the political lessons of the event, especially in terms of the policy making process, the power of business, the state of the media, and the influence of nationalism on domestic politics. But obviously images are often more powerful than words, and so the following blog post omits my analysis in favour of all the satirical cartoons that I’ve been collecting – the good, the bad, and the silly – in the hope that they better convey the lessons of the dispute.
The industrial dispute over the filming of the The Hobbit in New Zealand is a long way from reaching the status of seminal political events in New Zealand history such as the 1951 waterfront lockout or the 1981 anti-Springbok tour. But it’s certainly got some similarities. As with those highly important events that divided the country, the Labour Party has been highly pragmatic in its attempts to keep its distance lest any actions or statements of principle have any possibility of damaging its electoral popularity. So just as in 1951, when Labour Party leader Walter Nash declared that ‘We are not for the waterside workers, and we are not against them’, again in 2010 Labour is essentially saying the same thing, desperately avoiding having to take the side of the workers against the torrent of the campaign against them. [Read more below]
The Unite union has taken on the ambitious project of ending poverty wages by initiating a Citizen’s Initiated Referendum petition. Its campaign aims to achieve an immediate rise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, leading eventually to it being pegged at two-thirds of the average wage. In this blog post, guest blogger John Moore – who is currently collecting signatures to help Unite obtain over 300,000 signatures within the next 12 months – examines both the merits and limits of Unite’s drive to fight poverty pay. He argues that although this campaign is worthy of support by unionised workers, leftists and the low paid, it unfortunately falls short of seriously countering the current crisis of working class living conditions in New Zealand. He proposes more radical demands. [Read more below]
Chris Trotter paints a very dark picture of the political health of the Labour Party in his From the Left column today. Not only has the Auckland Labour Party membership plummeted below 2,000, but the party is also now a ‘democracy-free-zone’ that is ‘at serious risk of imploding under the weight of its own extraordinary timidity’. In his column, entitled, 'Labour: Political Party or Cosy Club?', Trotter pays particular attention to the political nature of the new party president, Andrew Little, who he characterizes as a friend of business who is ‘as exciting as a wet week in August’. [Read more below]
The best leftwing coverage of the Jobs Summit has been that put out by the World Socialist Website - see: New Zealand “Jobs Summit” places burden of recession on working people. This article provides a very nice summary not only of the actual Job Summit but also of the nature of the recession in New Zealand. A number of examples and statistics are provided that show the severity of the continuing global economic meltdown, and its impact on New Zealand. The article writer, John Braddock, argues that 'Bill English is preparing a horror budget' in response. And Braddock's particularly scathing about the role of the union movement in helping business and the Government implement their attacks on workers, and that this 'underscores the role they have played, over the past two and a half decades, as enforcers of the government-corporate agenda against the working class'. Furthermore, he warns that the union movement is heading down the same nationalist pathway that we've recently seen in other Anglo Saxon countries: 'This is a New Zealand version of the same reactionary nationalist and protectionist policy that is being pursued by trade unions in Britain, the US, Australia and other parts of the world. It is nothing but a means of tying workers behind their "own" banks, corporations and employers to prevent the development of any unified and independent struggle in defence of jobs, wages and conditions'. You might not always agree with the analysis put forward by the World Socialist Website, but its occasional commentary on politics in New Zealand are always well written, researched, strongly opinionated, and thus worth reading.
It seems that the mega-union amalgamation of Unite, the National Distribution Union, and the Service and Food Workers Union is now officially scraped. Although this has been the informal word for some time, it's finally news today in the NZ Herald - see NZ mega-union plan scrapped. You can also finally now read online David Fisher's Listener cover story on the State of the unions (but not the background piece on the history of Labour and the unions). In this, Unite leader Matt McCarten states that the mega-union merger broke down over issues of political affiliations: 'According to McCarten, the SFWU “wanted one choice and that was Labour – and that wasn’t going to wash with us”.' Interestingly, in a reply-letter to the Listener, the SFWU's John Ryall disputes this, saying that it 'was caused by other issues' but doesn't refer to these, but instead makes an argument for his union's continued support for Labour.
The historic and weakened relationship between trade unions and the New Zealand Labour Party is the subject of the cover article of this weeks’ Listener magazine. Written by David Fisher, the article interviews a number of key unionists and Labour Party sources. He asks whether the unions still slavishly follow Labour? And ‘How does a revitalized union movement best represent its members?’ Fisher details how the union-party linkage used to be vital, but it’s been weakened, and now the linkage only really exists at an elite, non-organic level. He says, that ‘Born out of working men’s desire for political change 92 years ago, the Labour Party has all but severed those ties, turning its attention to middle class issues’. [read more below]
According to the latest Metro magazine (May 2008), Matt McCarten is one of “Auckland’s Toughest Bastards”. In fact he's rated 8 out of 10 for his bastardry. And as if to reinforce this, McCarten’s most recent Herald on Sunday column is a prime example of just how ruthless he can be to those that that cross him and the cause of workers in NZ. [Read more below].
The Electoral Finance Act and the recent debate about political finance in New Zealand has brought attention to the links that political parties are said to have to a number of ‘third parties’. This post looks in extensive detail at the Labour Party’s various societal third party linkages over its history. It shows that the Labour Party's organic links to civil society have eroded, and its legendary relationship with trade unions barely exists anymore in any meaningful sense [Read more below]
The Labour Party has successfully appropriated the revolutionary tradition of Blackball on the West Coast of New Zealand, and sadly they continue to subvert it for their anti-worker agenda. This political theft was dealt with by Chris Trotter in his column on Friday. Trotter correctly points out that all the ‘Cabinet Ministers and high-ranking trade union officials’ who turned up in Blackball for the recent centenary celebrations of the historic 1908 strike were there ‘to celebrate the myth of Blackball, not the reality’. And the reality is that the miners’ illegal strike had little in common with the reformist Labour Party that emerged a few years later – in fact, according to Trotter, the new moderate party represented the repudiation of the insurgency and militancy of Blackball [Read more below]
A Labour Party-affiliated trade union, the EPMU, Is attempting to register as a ‘third party’ under the Electoral Finance Act (EFA), even though it isn’t required to and isn’t necessarily eligible to. This raises some interesting questions about the relationship between unions and the Labour Party, and about further problems with the EFA. [Read more below]
The NZ Herald has published a few good articles recently detailing the plight of Auckland's low-paid workers. Simon Collins talks to a cleaner who works from 5am to 10am cleaning Qantas House and then 6pm to 11pm cleaning a Newmarket office. His wages of $570 a week ($400 in the hand) also support his wife and four kids. Greg Ansley gives further examples of hard work for low pay: Sue Lafaele cleans from 11pm to 7am six nights a week at the Auckland Airport for $427. Part of the problem, of course, is the failure to unionise these industries. As the article points out, while 'In Australia unions represented about 30 to 40% of cleaners' in NZ the SFWU has an average union coverage amongst cleaners of only 12%. So it's good to see the Unite union now on the scene making much more of an effort. For a more stark but inspiring article, check out the New Statesman's New dawn for the workers, which looks at the desperate state of cleaners in places like London's Canary Wharf office area and compares the state of the class struggle to previous times such as the 1889 strike. The article is by Paul Mason, who has published an interesting sounding book entitled Working or Die Fighting: how the working class went global.
Despite rhetoric and out-dated tales to the contrary, the Labour Party obtains only very limited funding from the few trade unions still affiliated to it. Therefore when the then general secretary of the Labour Party, Rob Allen, was asked in 1999, about the degree of dependence the party has on union funding, he replied that the party was ‘Virtually not dependent at all. The income from unions is a very tiny, tiny proportion of funds – almost insignificant’ (Allen, 1999). The bigger picture is that there has been a reduction in the traditional class pattern of donor-party relations: the Labour Party is no longer reliant on trade unions and party members for its financial resources, just as the National Party no longer has a near-monopoly on business funding. Obviously there has been an increasing homogeneity of party finance that few commentators acknowledge. [Read more below]
The National Party has been on a charm offensive with the union movement, in a bid to draw a line between the old union-hating National Party and the new more sophisticated middle-of-the-road Key-English National Party - see Newsroom's Nats Try Softly Softy Approach With Unions.
As the article points out, the party under Brash had no real communication with unions and the previous spokesperson on Labour, Wayne Mapp, 'used to talk of union militancy and warned that "if you give unions powers they will use it"', but the new spokesperson promoted by John Key, Kate Wilkinson is at pains to have a constructive relationship with unions and promote National's supposedly more worker-friendly policies. National now says that it values unions and believes they have an important role in representing workers. According to the article, National says 'Unions could be important information conduits, play an important collaborative role, be influential in improving productivity and bring balance to bargaining powers.'
The CTU has confirmed the softer approach and says they are having 'very amicable' and ongoing discussions with National. The movement welcomes the change, but wants to see real policy change from National.
John Key says that a National government would make no major changes to employment relations laws. National have been softening their labour policies for some time, but Key’s statements are highly significant in positioning the party much closer to Labour, and in correctly highlighting that Labour never actually made significant changes to Bill Birch’s ECA:
we haven’t argued for some time that we would go all the way back to the Employment Contracts Act, largely because the Employment Relations Act is 85 per cent a rewrite of the Employment Contracts Act anyway
The District Health Boards are currently refusing to negotiate a collective agreement for low paid health workers. This has caused the Nurses Organisation and Service and Food Workers Union to deliver a petition to Parliament demanding from the Government ‘increased pay, a boost to staffing, and better training. The Nurse Organisation indicates that caregivers can expect to earn between $10.25 and $12 per hour’. Meanwhile, strangely for a so-called Labour Party leader, Helen Clark has singled out and blamed a trade union leader for the industrial action.
A very good Guardian opinion piece - Champions of the people - argues that unions are currently not very relevant, but as inequality increases they might become central to people's lives once again. There is also another Guardian summary, What is the state of the unions?, which says there is some optimism for British unions - union density is currently 19%, and in 2003 and 2005 this rose for the first time since the 1970s.
There is obviously some degree of re-energisation occuring in the New Zealand union movement - mainly in relation to unions serving those on low incomes. The Unite union is particularly impressive, and of course there is also a very important supermarket pay campaign, "Shelf Respect", in which workers have been locked out. For more info and ways to help, see: http://www.shelfrespect.org/ and the wikipedia report.
The current industrial dispute in supermarkets is clearly one of the major union struggles of recent years. It's a still a strong possibility that these very low paid workers could lose, as they won't have the funds to withstand a protracted battle against a major Australasian company that made makes over a billion dollar profit each year. This raises the question of whether NZ unions should be building up strike funds instead of wasting money on the Labour Party. It should be obvious that Labour aren't particularly interested in the lot of such workers. What has Labour done to support workers in this dispute? Nothing of much relevance. Instead they've merely retained much of the anti-worker laws that were in the Employment Contracts Act - in particular the anti-strike provisions. This makes it particular clear that the Service and Food Workers Federation wasted the $240,000 they spent in support of Labour in the last election.
Investigate magazine has run an article on the Service and Food Workers Union and its support for Labour in the 2005 general election. Apparently, an internal union report says:
Overall the Union spent $237,364 during the election campaign. Around $100,274 was spent on printing, photocopying, postage, petrol cost, telephone tolls, the delegates' election conference and delegates' expenses. The cost for staff inovolved in the election activities was $137,090. Our Union dedicated almost 7% of [its] totalfinancial resources as well as one-month labour force for the election campaign.
I'm sure many of these union members think this is a huge a waste of money frittered away on a party and government that obviously doesn't care much about these workers. Such a huge donation to Labour is tragic, especially when you think about the levels of wages of those in this union.
Further to the stories on the union numbers, George Lafferty of the Victoria University Industrial Relations Centre emailed me to say:
Just a bit more clarification on this. Collective bargaining coverage in fact increased over the past year (by around 7%). Both public and private sector coverage increased, although the public sector increase was significantly greater.
Obviously the previous reports on collective bargaining were even more confused than I thought. I'll post more information as it becomes available. But in the meantime, you will find a PDF file attached to this posting that is the most recent journal article on union numbers.
Statistics released by Victoria University's Industrial Relations Centre show that proportions of workers in collective employment agreements has dropped. Reports in the media say, for example, that private sector employees in collective agreements has dropped from 21% in 1995 to only 9% now. Such stats have been reported here by NZPA, here by the Independent, and here by David Farrar - but all of these reports appear to confused collective employment agreements with union membership. The Vic Industrial Relations Centre hasn't reported on union membership since 2004, and will be doing so in a few months, but as I understand it, they don't expect to see much difference between the figures for 2004 and 2006. See below for more from the (confused) Independent story:
In Britain the Trade Union Confederation has launched a new website that allows workers to access details of their bosses pay and profits. As the Guardian reports, 'workers can look up corporate details such as turnover and a company's pensions commitments. They can discover not only what the boss is paid, but also what the average worker earns, and whether shopfloor rises have kept pace with the executive suite.' What a great idea. The CTU should be doing the same in NZ - although it is more likely that Matt McCarten's Unite! union will take up this type of useful innovation. With such inequality in NZ workplaces, it only seems fair that employees should be able to know what's going on in their own workplace.
The latest WSWS article about NZ politics concerns the Wayne Mapp private members bill to 'create an entire layer of insecure, disposable employees, whose position will be used to undermine the wages and conditions of every worker.' The article correctly points out that the campaign by the CTU and Engineers union is rather 'limited and desultory' and that they 'are intent on confining the growing opposition to lobbying and petitions, while deflecting popular anger over attacks on working conditions, living standards and basic rights away from the Labour government.'
