The Labour Forum was held in the Auckland Trades Hall on Monday July 10 at 7-30. It was co-sponsored by Waitemata Unite! and the Rank-and-file group. 25 people turned up, rank and file members of 10 unions (possibly more I didnt see) and a few onside organisers. Political groups who had members there (not necessarily speaking for these groups) were Radical Youth, SWO and CWG. A useful step towards building an Auckland wide rank and file group I thought. Keith of Waitemata Unite! chaired the session where Bill Keats spoke about Howard's Workchoices. Keith made the point that that phrase was exact. Howard chooses how workers should work. Bill spoke for about 30 minutes. He introduced himself as a delegate from Standup a Sydney based unemployed workers union, funded by another union to visit NZ as a guest of Waitemata Unite!, and not least as a member of the Communist Left of Australia. Bill explained some of the history and context of the Workchoices legislation, like how some of the rightwing don't like it because it takes away the control of the states (which even under Labor state governments have bad industrial legislation) because they fear that even a right-wing Federal Labor Government might water down Howard's industrial legislation. He spoke about the actual provisions of the new laws which most people have a basic grasp of since its understood to be similar to our old NZ Employment Contracts Act [ECA]. And that already many employers are using it to sack people, re-employ them on wages as low as $6, etc. Most interesting and what stimulated a good discussion was the so-called 'fightback' or lack of it rather. Three big union organised rallies so far, well attended, but not raising the need to build strike action. Rather rallying 'wider Australia' around calls for 'fairness' and trying to build support among the better off workers to come back to Labor in the next election so that Beazley would win and repeal the legislation. Bill said that some left groups and some of the more militant unions were calling for strike action and trying to build support for strike action but the potential for that was as yet untested. This is backed up by other material posted on Aotearoa Indymedia. Bill's own position was to organise strikes in support of the strongest sectors of workers to pull the weaker sectors in behind them and generalise the strike action with the object of bringing down the Howard Government. The discussion was mainly around which groups were organising what sort of actions, and what lessons could be taken from NZ's experience under the ECA. There were a couple of comments along the lines of Aussie workers not repeating the ECA experience but getting the rank and file to initiate actions and chuck out the bureaucratic sellouts in bed with Labor, made by comrades who went through the 80s and 90s struggles here. This set the scene for a tea-break followed by a discussion on upcoming actions including Mapp’s Bill and organising, chaired by Alister of the rank- and- file group that has been meeting over the last couple of months. There was a lot of cynicism about the NZ Council of Trade Unions campaign against Mapp's Bill. People were participating in the leafletting and rolling actions but I detected little enthusiasm for the demands, poor organisation and almost non-events. One comrade pointed out that the reason for this slack campaign was that the NZCTU expected the Bill to be dumped on report back to the House. The general view was that it was important to attend all these 'events' and denounce the Bill, but to raise more direct demands on Labour like end youth rates now, and to concentrate on publicising support for any actual disputes going on, and the need to get active unionists organised across all the unions in a sort of rank and file ginger group. The next step was to organise an email and phone list so that information, actions and interventions could be coordinated. That was the note on which the meeting ended with the next meeting in around a month. Next Labour Forum: Monday July 31st 7-30 pm , Trades Hall, 147 Gt North Rd., Agenda: Waitemata Unite: Justice for the Kahui family and beneficiary bashing; Defend the right to ‘cluster’. Rank-and-file group: What’s next after Mapp’s Bill? Current Disputes. Organising and interventions.
Matt McCarten’s Unite Workers’ union sacrifices rank and file democracy for deals with bosses and parliamentary careers. McCarten is trying to enlist ‘his’ union as part of the World Social Forum reformist left bloc that tries to make deals between workers and ‘democratic’ bosses as the road to parliamentary socialism.
"My Union"
Unite Workers Association won a good wage increase from Restaurant Brands but how did it do it? By strike action! So far so good. Matt McCarten presented the victory as a “new historic deal” for young fast food workers. But then we hear that instead of taking the proposed deal back to a vote of the members he signed the deal behind the backs of the members. What was the rush? It may have got overwhelmingly support from the membership anyway. So why not take it back to the members? We know that some fast food workers were upset by the fact that Unite was calling on workers to go on strike by text messaging them. One worker we spoke to who was also a job delegate was called into work to fill in for workers who walked off the job without any discussion or a vote on strike action. She was called a scab by those who walked off. Were the Restaurant Brands deal and the charge of scab hurled at this young woman isolated cases of things going wrong? Or were they symptomatic of the McCarten political machine? We think the latter. This looks like McCarten using these young workers as media fodder to pressure politicians to back Sue Bradford’s Bill to eliminate discriminatory youth rates, at the cost of their own democratic right to discuss matters and vote on them. In other words the rank and file members of McCarten’s Unite branch are being used by him to back his own campaign to form a new reformist party on the left.
Why doesn’t this surprise us? Well we’ve seen it coming for years. Back in 02 when the Alliance lost out in Parliament we predicted that McCarten would regroup and try to find a union base for his politics. It took him about 3 years to insert himself into Unite by forming his own branch in Auckland, Unite Workers Association, and start recruiting members, but deliberately excluding beneficiaries and the unemployed. All the while we kept up a running commentary on McCarten’s methods. First, he exposed workers to unnecessary risk of sacking by his flamboyant, high profile advocacy. Second, he started poaching workers from other unions. Third, he structured UWA so that he controlled the union from the top down. Fourth, he associated the union with the police in the ‘Comrades and Cossacks’ commemoration. Fifth he ran, and continues to run, a scurrilous campaign against Waitemata Unite! a branch of the union based on beneficiaries who have been openly critical of his bureaucratic methods and his exclusion of beneficiaries over several years. But in spite of these problems, CWG backed the initiative of recruiting non-unionised workers especially young fast food workers. For us this is elementary united front politics. But we always said to Unite organisers that the members had to be in charge. We pushed to make Unite a genuinely rank and file based union. Those inside Unite who were in agreement with this principle assured us that they too were fighting for this objective. It seems however, with the Restaurant Brands deal, that our fears have been justified, and their hopes have been defeated.
Radical Youth ‘walkout’ Radical Youth originated the campaign against youth rates taken up by later by Unite which then steered it behind Bradford’s Bill. The ‘walkout’ organised by Radical Youth in March could not be contained by McCarten’s Unite. Both the Alliance and McCarten praised the walkout but then tried to steer the youth’s actions behind parliamentary reforms to make capitalism a ‘fair’, ‘democratic’, 'socialist' society. But there is no future in such activism. It is no more than media fodder to support parliamentary reforms. Similar street activism was the routine tactic of the Peoples Centre in Auckland when Sue Bradford ran it in the late 1980's and 1990s without much success. It was also the preferred method of the university students against user pay fees in the 1990s. They made their point, but the protest fizzled because it was always designed to put pressure on parliament. We don’t think that radical youth were prepared to be used as rent boys and girls on McCarten’s parliamentary roadshow. We see the walkout as part a wider movement of young workers globally that is taking on capitalism itself? This is a movement that goes beyond immediate reforms towards revolution? In this they are not alone. Young people in France, migrant workers in the US, and oppressed Iraqis, all know there is no way that capitalism can afford ‘democracy’ and a living wage for them. Sure fast food outlets may pay more in NZ, but they are going to screw workers in other ways and in other countries to make their profits. Capitalism today is about taking these rights and conditions away from the weakest. And even the best organised workers in the world, the US autoworkers, are facing crippling job losses and pension and health ‘takebacks’. So the more pressure radical youth puts on companies here, the more they will find that they are still exploited so that its not just low wages but the wage system that is the problem. Just like the youth in France right now i.e. facing wage slavery. The French youth won a small victory against the CPE, but it will take an unlimited general strike to stop the ruling class from bringing in the measures it wants in some other form. French Lessons In France the recent student rebellion proved that students, youth and workers can unite to fight not only bad laws but can mobilise to bring down a government. They were aiming for a general strike to defeat the law. But the union bosses are as usual playing a treacherous role. The Communists and Socialists think that a ‘social Europe’ can be won through parliaments to do everything they can to stop a real all –out general strike from happening. But not only the open reformists. The leading so-called ‘Trotskyist Party’ the LCR joined with the CP and SP and the Greens to sign a statement begging Chirac to throw out the new law and sit down to talk with the ‘left’ about a ‘consensus’ i.e. ‘compromise’. In other words the so-called ‘far left’ took the struggle off the street back into parliament to do a deal behind the backs of the young workers. The LCR in France has close relations with the SWP and the Socialist Workers in NZ. The LCR talked about a general strike but did not put this demand on the union officials to force them to call one. This is the same politics of the Workers’ Charter and McCarten’s Unite in New Zealand. They try to contain the spontaneous struggles of the youth, students and workers by making backroom deals with the bosses and with governments. Their reformist perspective is to build a popular front in which the ‘left’ can pressure the right. Fat chance! Right across the world, the parties of the ‘new type’ are no more than the broad left leg of the popular front alliance with the ‘democratic’ capitalists, sowing illusions in young, militant workers that they can deliver parliamentary socialism from above, and disarming them in the face of imperialist attacks. Where to from here? Fight for rank and file democracy! Challenge the leadership? Make McCarten accountable! Insist that all issues are debated at all up meetings. Insist that delegates are elected by the rank and file and are accountable and recallable. Stand up for your rights! Unite for workers power, not bureaucratic power! Build fighting, democratic unions, not parliamentary careers! Reject the McCartenite, Workers Charter local kiwi branch of the World Social Forum bloc that draws young workers under the influence of the bourgeois and restorationist leadership of Chavez, Castro, Morales and Lula that is containing and strangling the revolutionary masses in Latin America!
