600 Air New Zealand jobs under attack

The Alliance came out with some radical ideas about worker occupations and workers control in response to the threat of job losses at Air NZ. CWG acknowledged these good ideas and took them further

In an article on Aotearoa Indymedia on 27 October titled "Creative destruction" by Air New Zealand’ Len Richards of the Alliance wrote:

“The announcement by Air New Zealand of the sacking of a highly skilled workforce is a massive disinvestment in New Zealand. If the government will not act, the workers can. They should take a leaf out of the Argentinean workers' book and occupy the maintenance hangers to keep them going.

Six hundred workers are to be thrown onto the economic scrapheap by Air New Zealand. The company, which is 82 per cent government-owned, has decided to transfer the heavy maintenance of its aircraft off-shore to Europe and Asia. This is expected to save $100 million over the next five years (ie $20 million a year on average). This is a company that made $250 million profit this year and expects to make $100 million next year. The redundancy costs will be $13 million.

Air New Zealand claims it cannot find enough work for all its maintenance engineers. Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Cullen, washed his hands of the announcement, saying that it is "company business". This is the government welcomed by the Council of Trade Unions as having a "commitment to an investment approach to economic and social development". The announcement by Air New Zealand of the sacking of a highly skilled workforce is a massive disinvestment in New Zealand. It is reminiscent of the closure of the railway workshops in the early 1990s which destroyed a similarly skilled workforce and dismantled another significant section of this country's industrial infrastructure. The CTU must demand that the government intervenes to prevent this act of economic vandalism. . .

. . .The newly elected Labour-led coalition government should act urgently and "creatively". It must step in to take direct control of Air New Zealand. These jobs can be saved if the government has the will to do so. If the government will not act, the workers can. They should take a leaf out of the Argentinean workers' book and occupy the maintenance hangers to keep them going.

The loss of these engineering jobs is completely unnecessary. It is not about the engineering operation losing money. It is all about return on capital. It is about extracting more profit to ready Air New Zealand for another round of privatisation. The company chairman John Palmer is blatantly promoting a sell-down of the government's shares. The government would do better to take-over the whole company. It could be run as a peoples' co-operative under the control of the workers who, after all, know better than anyone how to operate the enterprise most efficiently.”


CWG replies:

“Good point about the management preparing Air NZ for re-privatisation. And the NZ economy as 'third world' being driven down the drain by profit. This shows a grasp of the seriousness of NZ’s decline in the world and the need for a strong socialist stand to lead the way forward. Air NZs predicament is classic and opens the way for the nationalising of assets and trading with other third world countries as the only way to combat monopoly capitalism.

The demand right now should be to take up the workers criticisms of failed management and put the company under workers control. Opening the books to the EPMU heads won't prove anything other than cost cutting is necessary to return a profit. Profit in a state owned company should be rejected as the bottom line. The bottom line should be the public interest in a national asset build out of the labour of generations of kiwi workers.

So the demand should be to put the company under workers control and management to protect the accumulated wealth of workers as well the 'public interest'. Why should the 600 workers under threat of sacking put up with a state owned corp run by private sector cost cutters who destroy the skill base of the working class while they strut around in Zambezi gear?

The rising costs of fuel and airports are inevitable while we are subjected to monopoly capital. Nationalisation under workers control (with no compensation especially after all those massive state subsidies!) is the answer. The airports should all be renationalised. The big oil company assets in NZ should be nationalised and oil sourced from Venezuela in a swap for food and agricultural technology.

While it's necessary to demand that Cullen puts up a fight to keep these jobs, we know that he won't even consider it unless put under huge pressure from workers. The 82% state shareholding is just a subsidy to the private sector. He won't want to see the company profits fall and more subsidies being paid out when he wants to keep business on side.”

0n how to fight for occupations and workers’ control we added:

“It’s good that the Alliance has raised the example of the occupations in Argentina. Kirchner's just been re-elected. He is a left Peronist with official union support not too dissimilar to Labour in NZ. But neither has any interest to take-over companies and run them as workers' cooperatives. Cullen has said he will not subsidise Air NZ jobs. They HAVE to keep onside with global monopoly capital.

That's why the solution has to be posed right from the start as a workers' solution that workers' can only do INDEPENDENTLY of the bosses' state. So where to start at Air NZ?

The current Blairite partnership approach goes through the charade of the union officials doing their own audit for two months to see what cuts they can make the workers accept to keep some of their jobs. The EPMU logo is some for all, all for some. Meanwhile workers will be left out of the picture, worrying, or looking for other jobs.

This is the same blackmail that the US unions are using right now to force autoworkers to sacrifice their health insurance in the vain hope they can keep their jobs. As long as the union officials share the same view that companies must be profitable at all costs, the workers are the losers. see http://www.rankandfilers.blogspot.com/

The rank and file engineers need to organise now and take the dispute out of the hands of the EPMU officials. They need to reject the bottom line of profit, and the payment of a dividend to the state that goes straight into the consolidated fund to run the capitalist system. Anyway as an SOE Air NZ is doomed as a national carrier in this global environment and will be gobbled up by Qantas or Singapore sooner or later.

Instead the rank and file should put up a new bottom line - the workers' need for safe, reliable air transport that can survive the oil shocks (get the oil from Venezuela!) and the race to the bottom of cutthroat (ours!) international airline competition. The engineers would have a say in whether it’s good for the peoples' airline to buy carbon fibre planes at $170 million a pop.

That's why Venezuela is a better map than Argentina of the socialist road. The factory occupations there are taking place as part of a society wide revolution where workers are pushing Chavez further and further towards outright expropriation. Oil, paper, gas, steel, and land is being nationalised and a huge fight is going on to turn co-management into real workers' control. The result is that there is a better chance that when Chavez finally baulks, or if the US invades, the workers will be able to defend and complete their socialist revolution.

The great thing is that Venezuela is not a blueprint but an ongoing experiment, and it exists in the flesh and is not fated in advance to be either a pie in the sky reformist utopia, or a discredited Cuban style Stalinist regime. It is an open book where the workers are doing the reading and writing.

A page or two would go down well at Air NZ right now. A campaign to renationalise Air NZ under workers control could be generalised to extend to Telecom, Toll rail, CHH, BNZ . 

From Class Struggle 64 Nov 05/Jan 06

Aotearoa: New Employment Relations Reforms

 

The ERA (Employment Relations Act) is a failure in the eyes of both union and bosses. It failed to rectify the damage done to unions by the Employment Contracts Act of 1991 which decimated the unions. But it was also an irritant to employers who saw it as a shift back towards union domination of the economy. The new reform Bill has revived these antagonisms on both sides. But is it really such a big deal? Class Struggle does its analysis of the Reform Bill and puts the case for workers taking the law into their own hands.

ERA weak

The Government is making some minor changes to the Employment Relations Act (ERA) to strengthen the role of unions. The ERA was designed to restore a balance to industrial relations after the ECA had almost destroyed the unions. Labour’s Blairite approach is to make the unions ‘partners’ with business so as to regulate the labour force and encourage increased labour productivity. But to do that unions have to first get coverage of workers. The ERA failed to give the unions sufficient strength to significantly increase their bargaining power with business. Bosses could refuse to agree to collective agreements and workers did not see the advantages of joining unions. After 3 years, union membership has recovered slightly from being around 18% of the workforce to about 20%. But today only 12% of workers in private industry are unionised compared with 50% in the public sector.

The CTU lobbied Government to improve conditions for unions. They wanted to make it harder for bosses to avoid participating in MECAS (multi-employer collective agreements), to promote collective bargaining, to make the good faith requirements stronger so bosses could not ignore them, to protect vulnerable workers when businesses are sold and to stop free-loading by non-members. The Government took these issues on board:

The Changes

• Fines up to $10,000 if employers do not act in ‘good faith’

• Vulnerable workers get more protections when businesses are sold

• Employers could be fined if they pass union-negotiated wages and conditions to non-union workers

• If MECAS (Multi employer agreements) are sought, employers must attend at least one meeting

• A new system of non-binding 3rd party facilitation when parties can't reach a settlement,

• If the facilitation fails and a collective agreement can't be reached, a settlement could be imposed by the Employment Relations Authority

• Labour Dept inspectors investigate complaints over equal pay

Bosses’ offensive

The employers are objecting to the changes in the Bill. While Labour Minister Margaret Wilson says that stronger unions will actually contribute to economic growth in the whole country, bosses want weaker unions and more control over their worksites. They strongly opposed the ERA when it was first promoted in 2000 and Labour made concessions to them. Even Roger Kerr of the Business Round Table admits that the original ERA was “watered down” and “remained enterprise focused”. Despite Kerr’s plain talking, most capitalists running businesses and employing workers, still hate the ERA and don’t want a bar of the new Bill. They miss the freedom of the ECA to hire and fire at will. So they are running a scare campaign to frighten Labour into submission.

The bosses’ offensive against the Bill has been coordinated by the New Zealand Herald. The ‘business section’ of NZH has run a campaign against the Bill. It reported 3 surveys they conducted of small, medium and large businesses on their negative reactions to the Bill. The alarmist reactions are captured in the headlines in the series of anti-worker stories called ‘Working to Rules’. One headline said ‘More rights, less work’, another ‘Recipe for Ruin’ and another ‘Businesses must rise in Protest”.

For bosses, the most unpopular aspect of the reforms is strengthening the provisions for MECAS. They say that large groups of organised workers across several enterprises is a move back towards national awards and a restriction to right of each employer to hire and fire. They also object to the provisions which protect workers when businesses are sold or transferred. Neither do bosses like the restrictions on freeloading. They claim mediation is not working for them. They object to being forced into an Agreement by the Employment Relations Authority.

Prominent critic Simon Carlaw of Business New Zealand says the Bill is anti-enterprise and anti-growth. The penalty for breaching good faith is too draconian and signals a return to compulsory arbitration and loss of freedom for bosses. Transfer of provisions is yet another compliance cost. Stopping bosses advising workers not to join unions restricts their freedom of speech! Kerr ups the anti, claiming the new Bill aims to return to compulsory unionism, to compulsory arbitration and that multi employer contracts will create class warfare, which will be news to that rabid socialist Margaret Wilson.

Trade unions respond

Trade union leaders predicted businesses would complain and generate panic like they did over the original ERA. So how are unionists reacting to the hysteria? Although the Bill refers to the “inherent inequality of power” in the workplace the unions are treading softly on this argument. Instead, unionists are appealing to the ‘good business sense’ of the bosses. Bill Andersen, president of the National Distribution Union, in an article headlined “Only bad bosses need fear law change”, claimed that if a business was run on a sound investment plan, was informed by market research and had good labour relations, then the new law would be great for them. This echoes former union leader Ken Douglas who stated some years back that the bosses need unions to get the most productivity from workers! That’s presumably why on retirement from the union job Douglas offered his services to business.

Margaret Wilson defended her Bill by restating her philosophy that workers and bosses have interests in common - suggesting that good profits and improved working conditions go together. She appeals to bosses by arguing that the Bill will benefit business. She sees that improved working conditions for workers will be good for business and anyway, good employers are already practicing good faith in their dealings with their workers. She points out that the Bill brings NZ in line with the working conditions in most OECD countries. One lone CEO responding to a NZH survey thought the negative reactions to the Bill were alarmist, and said the worker protections matched those in OECD countries.

Carol Beaumont, CTU secretary, echoes Wilson's arguments, claiming “good employers won’t worry”. According to CTU president Ross Wilson, the CTU position is that unions will work with businesses to manage the economy by helping plan and organise work, to increase productivity and develop economic strategies. The Douglas line lives!

Class Struggle perspective

Will these arguments change bosses minds? While Labour and the unions are taking a soft line stressing partnership and mutual benefits, business is facing an increasingly tough environment with a high dollar and uncertain world economy. The unions are weak, facing further damage in the year ahead unless we can rebuild them on the basis of a strong rank and file. On top of that National has revived its fortunes on the back of a racist anti-Maori campaign. But its new leader Don Brash has a rightwing neo-liberal economic package lined up to follow the racist campaign. We predict that the bosses’ offensive will force another backdown from Labour on the reforms in this Bill that are most helpful to workers.

We say that no labour law can protect workers, unless workers organize and defend these rights on the job. The weakness of the current ERA is that it gave unions more rights on paper – we called it a ‘charter for union bureaucrats’ when it was passed – but it could not strengthen t he rank and file base of the unions. On top of that the Bill has nasty anti-secondary strike provisions that have to be broken if any strike is going to succeed. It cannot stop employers from using scabs as the waterfront dispute in 2002 showed. We also object to union negotiators being able to sign off on deals without the members ratifying them. Workers are the union, not the union bureaucrats.

Despite its inherent failings we support rank and file union campaigns to get the Bill strengthened. So long as workers think that Labour is on their side we have to demand that they prove it. That way we show that Labour’s Blairite policies are really the old new right policies in drag. After the new right smashed the unions, the Blairites came along with a sedative. Today it’s the Labour Minister and her cronies in the union leadership that dose us with the ‘partnership’ class A drug. Let’s demand the things we know that neither Labour nor the union bureaucrats can deliver without pissing off the bosses. In doing so we prove to workers yet again that the only rights they can be sure of are the ones they fought to win and fight to defend!

For the right to strike! For secondary strikes! For national awards! For the closed shop! 

From Class Struggle 54 Feb-March 04