Union turf wars

It is vital that workers, especially in low-paid casualised jobs, are recruited to unions where they have rank and file control and can unite to build a strong labour movement. When union officials conduct turf wars over union members, it is the workers that will lose out. The poaching of one is an injury to all. Workers need to take action against poaching and for unity!

Air NZ: Ground staff turf wars

Both the EPMU (Engineers Union) and SFWU (Service & Food Workers Union) have members on the ground at NZ airports. Negotiators from both unions began talks with Air NZ management in August – September last year (2004).

Rex Jones of the EU stitched up a deal with Air NZ management back in December last year. Part of this deal is that the EU have agreed to work with Air NZ management on splitting the deal into 3 separate agreements; airports, cargo and retail, etc. After Jones’ promises to management, the EU members were offered an agreement which included backpay (or a bonus). This deal excluded members of the SFWU.

The bureaucratic style of negotiation goes on behind the backs of union members. The EPMU negotiation team stitched up a deal without informing members about what conditions they would lose in the deal. Then the EPMU take the offer to the whole membership.

This style takes the power away from union members and plays up the role of union officials as ‘great leaders’. We say ‘All power to the members’. Members must be fully informed of the progress of negotiations throughout negotiations. This means regular meetings of the membership and the negotiation team and members on the negotiation team. We support the right of members to dismiss and replace non performing delegates or officials.

The SFWU were after at least as good a deal as the EPMU, but with no loss of conditions. They were frustrated by Air NZ management’s lack of negotiation. Air NZ would not offer them the same deal as the EPMU. So the SFWU took strike action. During that strike the EU members continued to work! A divided strike was much less effective at impacting on the bosses business.

ERA adjudication

The SFWU failed to get a deal with Air NZ and went to the Employment Relations Authority for adjudication. SFWU continued to try to get as good a deal as the EPMU, but Air NZ implied that the EPMU was more deserving. ANZ told the adjudicator that they gave the EPMU members a “bonus” (as backpay) because the EPMU was more willing to improve efficiency and productivity (for the bosses) and to make changes and split the contract (into business units).

Class Struggle condemns the actions of the EPMU; bureaucratic dealing, settling first and promoting their “brand” of union above other unions. By doing so the EPMU has undermined working class solidarity.

Turf wars at Casino

Another turf war is going on at the Skycity casino where the SFWU succeeded in unionising most of the workforce. Now Unite officials (supposedly a union for the low paid, unorganised and unemployed workers) have moved into actively recruiting at the casino.

Unite officials have poached SFWU members. A Unite leaflet directly compares fees with the SFWU and then provides a form to send to Skycity payroll, for joining Unite and quitting the SFWU. The West Auckland branch of Unite! condemns those Unite officials’ actions.

All unionists must strongly condemn these actions of Unite officials poaching at the Skycity site. We call for the resignation of the official(s) responsible. Unfortunately most union rules do not allow members to dump rotten officials. Workers need to reclaim control over their unions and change the rules to let workers dump rotten officials.

Takeovers

We have heard that the EPMU is having secret talks with other unions, with the aim of amalgamation. This is another way to recruit members through takeovers. We call on those unions in talks to take proposals back to their members, and for the members to vote on which union they wish to join.

Working class answers to turf wars

Ban poaching! Members must regain control of the unions so they can dump rotten union officials who refuse to work for the benefit of the working class as a whole, and elect delegates and officials who are accountable to and recallable by the membership.

This means fighting for democratic, militant unions that are capable of acting independently of the state and its labour law ‘leg-irons’ which are all designed to make unions work within the bosses’ laws.

To do this we recommend workers stay with their union, and put up a real fight for their demands and for working class solutions, within their union. Only after attempts to raise demands within their own union, have got nowhere, should workers consider dumping one union for another.

End turf wars and unite to fight the employers for better wages and conditions. When workers are divided and fighting each other within different unions, this allows the bosses to screw down wages and conditions by playing unions off against each other.

We call for maximum unity among workers:

· MUCAs (Multi-Union Collective Agreements).

· MECAs (Multi-Employer Collectives)

· All union members to vote on agreements.

· All up meetings – all union members meet to discus the progress of negotiations and offers.

· Open the books: show what the union owns and union officials’ salaries.

· Fighting funds that are used to support striking workers.

· Set wages of union staff at the average wage of workers.

· Allow unemployed workers to be members of the union at reduced rates. 

From Class Struggle 60 March-April 2005

Alliance search for workers ends in split

Break the unions from the state

Matt McCarten's move to the Maori Party is the last act in the sorry decline of the Alliance Party. Here we argue that the remaining ‘left’ of the Alliance needs to draw the obvious conclusion from more than a decade trying to influence the Labour Party in office, turn away from the electoral road and rebuild itself as a new workers party with a revolutionary socialist program.

New Labour, ‘old’ labour recycled

When the New Labour Party was formed in 1989 it held out the promise of uniting the left against the anti-worker policies of the Fourth Labour Government. But workers failed to follow it and Jim Anderton and Matt McCarten turned the NLP into their own voting machine to piss on Labour from outside the tent. They forgot that they were also pissing on Labour's worker supporters who came back to Labour in large numbers in 1993 to almost secure a Labour victory.

Anderton and McCarten antagonised these workers big time when they refused to support Mike Moore's push to form a minority government in 1993. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion to go back into the Labour Party it was as if Anderton saw himself as the messiah and that only he could save Labour.

Had Anderton backed Moore to form a minority government there was a fighting chance that it could have won the numbers and put a stop to National's anti-worker agenda in 1993.This would have given the left the chance of exposing Labour in office. The militants in the NLP could have pissed on Labour from the inside. We could have rallied the unions to repeal the ECA and restore the benefit cuts. That could have led to a fight for renationalisation of the privatized state assets under workers’ control. But the leadership of Anderton and McCarten was never going to submit to the Labour Party bureacracy except on their terms.

Anderton shacks up with middle class

Failing to act on this lesson the NLP and Mana Motuhake rank and file got dragged after Anderton looking for any political partners that could give him more seats. They took on board the Greens, a middle class outfit, the remnants of the old Social Credit movement in the Democrats, and populist Gilbert Myles personal vehicle, the Liberals, to form the Alliance. They buried whatever small worker support there was for the NLP along with Maori support for its sister party, Mana Motuhake, in this populist pot of stew.

Breaking up Labour's constituency left the field open to that other populist Winston Peters to campaign for the Maori vote. Leading up to the 1996 election Peter's conned Maori into deserting Labour on the promise that he would never go into government with National. He then exercised the 'balance of power' under the new MMP system to put National back into office. This was the first time a party abused Maori voters to split them away from their Labour base since Ratana made its historic alliance with Labour in the 1930s. Maori learned the hard way as Peters and the Tau Henare rat pack grandstanded at the expense of their jobs and welfare.

Having helped the Nationals use the 1990s to attack workers, the Alliance actually made it into government in 1999 and formed a coalition with the Labour Party. But by this time the Labour Party was not only locked into the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s but most of the 1990s economic reforms as well. Cullen swore by a balanced budget and an independent Reserve Bank. Rogernomics plus Ruthonomics added up to one hell of a 'social deficit'.

So Labour, as a capitalist government elected to manage kiwi capitalism, had to deliver growth in profits before it could try to make up the 'social deficit’ to its supporters. This forced it into a Blairite position where it made huge concessions to business in order to pursue its modest social agenda. The Alliance for the most part had to tag along.

When Labour went too far and supported the US invasion of Afghanistan, most of the Alliance split from Anderton. Without his seat, and failing to hit the 5% threshold in the 1992 election, the Alliance was out of parliament and questioning its future.

Radical stocktaking shows bankruptcy

Surely the time was overdue for a radical stocktaking. Sticking with Anderton had drawn a blank. Worse, the balance sheet of those 13 years was almost totally negative. Anderton's split in 1989 was too little and too late. When the NLP failed to win significant sections of union support in 1990 it should have seen the light and moved back into the Labour Party. Whatever the Alliance won for workers in government with Labour from 1999 it 2002 it lost a lot more by default in the previous decade.

The NLP stalwarts believed in the mission to replace Labour from the outside. They did not understand that the Labour Party will not be removed as a roadblock to the workers movement except as a result of an internal class struggle.

In NZ the history of the labour movement for nearly 100 years has been tied to the life of the Labour Party. It was formed in 1916 after the experience of bloody defeats in strikes to take the fight for socialism into parliament. It was the main vehicle for the rising prosperity of NZ workers after the war. Its shift to the right was dictated by the weakness of the NZ economy and the weakness of organised labour. Yet for most workers it’s still the only game in town.

This means that the working class will not develop any real independence until it stages a fight to the death to revive and split the Labour Party from inside the Labourite unions. And it can only do this by first rebuilding the unions under rank and file control. Trying to push Labour left from the outside without a base in the unions is a futile exercise that further weakens the labour movement and sets back the day of reckoning for Labour.

But instead of learning this lesson, what was left of the Alliance followed Anderton's main bother boy McCarten into his scheme for building a personal army of workers to get him elected in Auckland Central. This was a sort of caricature of Anderton's electorate machine in Riccarton.

Tragedy becomes comedy Central

McCarten took over the shell of UNITE! a tiny, almost stillborn union, founded by Alliance unionists including Robert Reid back in the mid 90s. UNITE! was set up to be a union of lowpaid workers, unemployed and beneficiaries. McCarten rebranded it as lowercase Unite without the emphatic (!), formed an ‘workers’ branch in Auckland and did his best to keep unemployed and beneficiaries out. McCarten and his left handyman, Mike Treen, ex-Socialist Action activist, set about recruiting show dancers, fast food workers and English language teachers.

The intention to build a union of the low paid (even without the unemployed and beneficiaries) is good and necessary. (See UNITE! report in this issue). To his credit, McCarten instinctively saw the need to unionise the thousands of casualised service workers left alone by the established unions. But he didn’t want to the burden of organising the unemployed and beneficiaries. He picked the eyes out of sites that could get him the numbers and financial backing to build his electoral machine.

Instead of creating a democratic union that could be a model for rebuilding the rest of the unions, McCarten created separate branches for each worksite where only he as the 'secretary' of all these 'unions' could control them. Not until this method of union building came into conflict with other Alliance members working in unions whose members were being poached, did McCarten come under fire. And even then it wasn’t McCarten's strategy but his poaching that raised the ire of other Alliance unionists. But by then McCarten was already preparing to take the Alliance and his 'Unite' into the Maori Party.

When Anderton supported the Labour Government in sending troops to Afghanistan, the stand taken by other Alliance MPs and the party against this was principled. The problem, however, was that the Alliance had no union base to mobilise against the war. McCarten's new union was not built on a political program but his personal patronage. Unite lite was no base to oppose the war.

Unite lite and Alliance left back cops

In fact Unite lite couldnt even oppose the cops. McCarten proved this when he crossed the picket line formed by UNITE! members of the UNITE! West Auckland, against his partner, Alliance member Kathy Caseys exhibition 'Comrades and Cossacks' that was co-sponsored by the NZ Police and publically opened by high-ranked police officers. As he crossed this picket line opposing NZ working class history being funded by policewho had played a key role in smashing the 1913 general strike, McCarten challeged the picketers to attend one of his recruitment rallies!

While McCarten got some internal criticism from other Alliance members for his fraternatisation with the cops, other Alliance ‘lefts’ also crossed the picket line relegating class struggle to academic ‘history’. Then McCarten was re-elected leader shortly afterwards. At the same time the Alliance left was regrouping around a new Manifesto in which the Alliance was identified as a 'socialist party' based on 'working people'. Yet nowhere in this Manifesto was there any serious orientation to the unions as the base of any 'socialist' party. Class struggle had been relegated to the history of ‘Comrades and Cossacks’ and Parliament remained the holy grail.

But the Alliance was still outside the Labour Party and with no prospect of getting a base in the wider labour movement. McCarten's search for an 'army' of workers to get him elected in Auckland Central was more like pissing in the wind. The demise of the Alliance looked certain when the political shit hit the Foreshore and Seabed fan.

Along Comes Tariana

At first the Alliance backed Labour's decision to block the Appeal Court's decision and turn the F&S into 'public domain'. But the Hikoi changed that when McCarten and Treen found a few thousand potential voters marching to Wellington. Never mind that the Hikoi was against putting the F&S into 'public domain' the Alliance turned on its toes and next thing we know is McCarten is offering to run Turia's election campaign in Te Tai Hauauru. The Alliance Council came out in support of the new Maori Party without any idea what its program would be.

With Turia's overwhelming by-election victory the Maori Party seems set to challenge Labour for all the Maori seats. The scene is also set for a deal between the Alliance and the MP to campaign against Labour. But while the Anderton split with Labour damaged the Labour movement by pissing into Labour's tent, the Maori Party looks like splitting the labour movement and pissing into its own tend somewhere in 'middle ground' of parliament. The Maori Party has made it clear that it is organised on an ethnic basis and will canvass support for 'Maori' interests from both Labour and National.

Matt backs Turia, left splits?

By backing this move by the MP and taking his workersinto this party McCarten is creating a potentially more damaging split with the labour movement than Anderton did 15 years ago. While Anderton's Alliance spent a decade in the wilderness failing to renew the fight inside the Labour Party, McCarten's propospal for a Maori Party/Alliance shackup looks like taking Maori workers out of an already weakened labour movement into tribal politics where they will be abused as electoral fodder for a bunch of iwi bureaucrats, politicos and capitalists.

This is dragging the best working class fighters, who can revive the labour movement and lead the fight against imperialism and kiwi crony capitalism, into the arms of their class enemies – Bush and Brash. The corporate ‘warriors’ in the Maori Party who have benefited from the Treaty settlement process will try to use the 'balance of power' to pressure the bosses to get a larger share of the profits of kiwi capitalism distributed into their pockets.

But they will be even less successful than they were under the Treaty settlements that funded the birth of small-scale Maori capitalism over the last 20 years. The imperialist ruling class and its kiwi cronies will use MMP to buy off the Maori bosses at the expense of the vast majority of Maori who are members of the casualised working class.

What to do?

Those few hundred members of the Alliance who are serious about building a 'socialist party' based upon working people,who are for 'democratic socialism' in practice, must turn their backs on their attempts to rebuild the Labour Party from the outside.

The debates taking place inside the Alliance are still dominated by electoral strategy and tactics to recruit members (See Jill Ovens ‘Strange saga of the Alliance’ Red &Green No 3, 2004 p.75). Liquidating into the Maori Party or the Greens abandons the real fight inside the labour movement to build united democratic unions. But building an independent party of the left without a base in the unions also avoids the basic issue. The way to remove the Labour roadblock is to fight for a new workers party by smashing the labour bureaucracy’s hold over workers in the the unions.

Leon Trotsky writing just before he was killed in 1940 on: “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” says that because the unions have become “semi-state institutions” it is necessary to “struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of the labor aristocracy…The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/1940-tu.htm

Workers will remain trapped inside Labour until they begin to rebuild their unions under rank and file control and break from the bureaucracy and the state. Those Alliance members who are serious about socialism should dedicate themselves to the task of workers democracy and repudiate McCarten's sell-out into a Maori Party splitting the labour movement and diverting workers into 'cargo cult' deals with Brash or Clark and away from united working class struggle.

Communist Workers Group has made clear its stand on the necessity and urgency of mobilising a united working class to fight the sell-out of the F&S against the dead end of the parliamentary road. Equally we have insisted that such mobilisations will not happen unless all socialists put their practice where their rhetoric is and fight to rebuild the labour movement to break from the labour bureaucracy of the 'big three' unions and the Blairite ideology of the Labour Government.

Finally, none of this will happen if NZ workers remain trapped in patriotic alliances with any bourgeois party trying to negotiate deals with Australian, US or other imperialist interests to defend our jobs and freedoms. We have to build internationalist unions capable of defending the jobs and freedoms of workers everywhere. CWG pledges to play its part in all united fronts where socialists unite to “strike together, but march separately.”

Unite to Occupy the Foreshore and Seabed!

Build Fighting, Democratic Unions!

Solidarity campaign for Iraqi workers!

Endorse the Abdul Raheem Appeal! 

From Class Struggle 57 August-September 2004

When Comrades become Cossacks: Betraying the 1913 General Strike

This November is the 90th anniversary of the 1913 General Strike. As the most revolutionary event in NZ’s history we have a duty to commemorate the dedication and bravery of the workers involved, to remember those workers who died, and to continue to draw the lesson that the police and the state forces are the class enemies of workers. The Exhibition “Cossacks and Comrades” jointly sponsored by the Auckland University of Technology Institute of Public Policy and the NZ Police, along with a number of unions, to ‘commemorate’ the “1913 Waterfront Dispute” is a falsification of history that seeks to relegate class struggle to the museum and promote the bosses’ agenda of ‘class peace’. For unions to co-sponsor and fund such an event is an act of class betrayal.

On Monday the 24th of November rank and file members of UNITE union and their supporters picketed the Comrades and Cossacks conference and exhibition at Auckland University of Technology. The 20 or so picketers objected to the way union bosses and the police were co-sponsoring this 'commemoration' of the 1913 General Strike, an event which saw state violence against workers on a scale never equaled in the rest of New Zealand history.

Comrades and Cossacks had as its centrepiece the release of new police research on the 1913 strike. In a press release promoting the event, academic Cath Casey, police ‘strategic analyst’ Cathie Collinson and police spokeswoman Catherine Gardner described the research as a contribution to “The international review of police of models of reservism”. An article in Auckland's Central Leader paper quoted Cathie Collinson "This is a crucial piece of research because we need to know what works for different policing styles." The Central Leader stated that Casey and Collinson are visiting various police forces and research institutes around the world to “further their understanding of policing methods”.

The General Strike of 1913 has much to teach the student of policing. Anxious about the growing appeal of the 12,000-strong and openly revolutionary ‘Red’ Federation of Labour, the Massey government of the day mobilised all the forces at its disposal to defeat the wharfies and miners who spearheaded the strike. As the police patrolled with long batons and the army set up machine gun posts in the large cities, thousands of farmers were turned into ‘special’ police, and put to work attacking workers and working the waterfront.

Comrades and Cossacks comes at a time when ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation is giving the New Zealand state sweeping new repressive powers, and the New Zealand police are aggressively persecuting opponents of New Zealand’s part in the US’s War of Terror. The lockup of Ahmed Zaoui and the persecution of anti-war activists like Bruce Hubbard (see article), Jarrod Phillips and Paul Hopkinson gives the talk of Collinson and Casey a chilling ring.

Comrades and Cossacks has caused a furore amongst unionists and left activists around the country. In an attempt to defuse complaints, exhibition supporter and Alliance leader Mike Treen e- mailed Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA) members to tell them that 'Comrades and Cossacks' was not sponsored by the police. In fact, as an angry GPJA member pointed out in a reply to Treen, the police logo was plastered all over the promotional material for the exhibition.

UNITE leader and Alliance member Matt McCarten e-mailed GPJA members to tell them that UNITE's rank and file members were 'ignorant', and were only planning to picket the exhibition because they wanted to 'suppress working class history'.

On the day a number of the unionists who had been scheduled to appear at the exhibition did not turn up. Others walked out in solidarity with the picketers. About a dozen uniformed police attended the exhibition, and there was a police presence outside to stop the picketers gaining access. Matt McCarten emerged from the exhibition dressed in a business suit and flanked by two well-built cops, and proceeded to abuse the picketers, shouting 'you're not real workers - go away!'. After being confronted by angry picketers McCarten retreated behind the boys in blue, with whom he joked and chatted before disappearing back into the exhibition.

In the aftermath of this furore, UNITE members around the country are holding the Unite leadership to account at a number of AGMs. The Alliance also faces an embarrassing internal debate now that key members of the Alliance ‘left’ like former Trotskyists Mike Treen and Len Richards who would like to see the Alliance become a ‘Socialist Alliance’ have been associated with the Exhibition.

The involvement of Alliance leaders in Comrades and Cossacks is no surprise. After all, from 1999 to 2002 the party helped to run a capitalist state, as the junior partner in a Labour-led government. Alliance MPs voted for the anti-strike provisions of the Employment Relations Act, for the denial of summer dole to students, and for the participation of New Zealand troops in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The Alliance’s social democratic ideology made its leaders believe they could reconcile the interests of bosses and workers by taming the capitalist state. When the interests of workers and bosses inevitably collided, they chose the interests of the bosses, and used the state against workers.

The Anderton-instigated split and the electoral disaster of 2002 have made some Alliance members reconsider their ideas, but the leaders of the party have continued on the old path. Ex-MPs and their staffers have moved from government into the bureaucracy of the trade union movement and have merely promoted a slightly more activist-orientated, ‘left’ version of the same old social democracy. These bureaucrats played a leading role in Auckland’s anti-war movement, helping to ensure that the movement stuck to lobbying the Labour government to act against the war rather than mobilising workers and their supporters to take direct action against US government and military facilities in New Zealand.

Recent support for the racist cabotage campaign (see article) and for the ANZAC-led occupation of the Solomons shows that Alliance party policy is still based in a misplaced faith in the common interests of New Zealand workers and New Zealand capitalists. Comrades and Cossacks only symbolises the bankruptcy of the party’s social democratic politics. Alliance members should learn from history, dump social democracy for revolutionary socialism, and get rid of Beehive retreads like McCarten and Treen.

We need a real Socialist Alliance that pushes workers’ direct action in New Zealand and links up with and learns from with the revolutionary movements shaking South America. Socialist groups already in existence can show Alliance members the way forward by forming a nationwide United Front to campaign on burning issues and show the revolutionary alternative to the discredited ideology of social democracy. It’s time to rediscover the militant labour heritage of 1913, and the revolutionary Marxist heritage of 1917.

From Class Struggle 53 November 03/January 04

Jobs Jolt, Profit’s Fault

Soft cop Maharey

Poor Steve Maharey. He is the one who has to put the spin on this little experiment in workfare to pretend it really, really, isn’t. But why feel sorry for him. Even though he is probably nearing the age of concern, he has a job, he doesn’t have to live in a caravan, and he was trained at state expense. But as a Blairite social democrat, Maharey is the ‘soft cop’ who comes along after the ‘hard cop’ has failed to get the beneficiary to confess to welfare scrounging. So his job is to introduce workfare under the guise of caring social work.

The Jobs Jolt will target 55-59 year old beneficiaries whose location and skills need to be matched with the available skilled jobs, DBPs, and long-term unemployed (over 8 years). The initiative will spend $100 million in a bid to get more people into work. It includes work testing for people between 55 and 59 and benefit suspensions for people who move to remote areas where there is no suitable work. Even if they have already moved to find work, or to find cheaper accommodation, they are expected to move again to fill these jobs vacancies (unless there are Maori in tribal areas –a concession to Blairite political correctness.)

They will get personal case management from contracted private sector managers to fit them up with jobs. Government wouldn’t do it, says Maharey, unless we knew the jobs were there, and were prepared to match the people to the jobs. He says he can find jobs for about 20,000 over three years. Hullo? What jobs is he thinking of?

Jobs Jolt won’t work

Jobs Jolt cannot live up to its spin because the only skilled jobs that are available are ones that demand an expensive and recent education in IT, marketing, management etc. These are the jobs that have replaced the jobs that many of the unemployed 55-59 year-olds, DPBs and long-term unemployed lost as a result of the restructuring of the economy over the last 20 years. The time to match people to jobs was then not now. The reason it didn’t happen then, and won’t happen now, is that it was too costly to up-skill middle aged workers when young skilled workers, paying for their own education, can do the work for less cost to the boss. That’s why many bosses gave older workers the boot.

This means that the only jobs that will be found for the jolted will be menial and low paid. These are the jobs that nobody wants and can’t even be filled by new migrants who are trained as doctors and physicists. It is these new low-paid, part-time, casualised, non-unionised jobs such as in the service and tourism sectors that have caused the recent slight rise in employment. But despite the official unemployment rate dipping below 5% the real rate of people who are out of work, or working very short hours, is probably closer to 10% of the work age population.

Maharey has bitten off more than he can spin this time. The 55-59 age group is no push over. Most of them have a long record in work and many will be former members of unions. Nor are the DPBs who have resisted all of National’s attempts to force them back to work so far going to lie down. They know their rights to the DPB, to unemployment benefits, and to other benefits, and can be organised to fightback against this experiment in workfare disguised as welfare. They can be politicised by the Jobs Jolt to resist moves to workfare. But first they have to reject any responsibility for unemployment and put the blame where it really lies – on the bosses and their government.

Labourite Workfare

Workfare is the nasty neo-liberal recasting of welfare as work so that people get off benefits back into the workforce where they can compete for jobs and drive wages down and profits up. Of course National and ACT hardliners don’t admit this and claim that it is to make ‘welfare dependents’ independent. To make them self-reliant National and ACT would force beneficiaries to be ‘free’. The full-on program of National’s Katherine Rich wants people forced to work by withdrawing their benefits.

The Blairite Labour government of Helen Clark has no option but to move towards workfare. NZ has a weak, dependent semi-colonial economy that competes for foreign investment by cutting its costs to investors. To offer low tax rates it has to cut welfare spending. To offer cheap wages it has to drive them down by forcing more people onto the labour market. This is the only way that Labour’s agenda of 4% growth a year and returning the country to the top half of the OECD countries and guarantee a profitable return on foreign investment. To stay in power, Labour has to bow to the dictates of imperialism which has to suck more profits out of the country.

But unlike National or ACT Labour postures as a caring government that wants to encourage people back into meaningful skilled work on living wages. It has adopted the Blairite or ‘third way’ approach to running capitalism – a so-called middle road between neo-liberalism and socialism. Instead of openly blaming or victimising people, Blairism is about making people ‘take responsibility’ for their lives. First we offer you a derisory job subsidy, a relocation allowance, some personal training so you can ‘help yourself’. But if you reject this offer we take away your benefit! Only problem is that under today’s clapped out kiwi capitalism the best on offer for those targeted by the Jobs Jolt is cheap and menial labour. Even where retraining and relocation is subsidised by the state, this is a welfare handout to the bosses that is deducted from workers health, education and housing spending. Forcing beneficiaries into work will only increase the bosses’ welfare at the expense of workers’ misery.

Work/Life Balance ?

While we say the shorter working week is the workers’ answer to the Jobs Jolt, the government says it wants to restore a ‘balance’ to work and life. What sort of utopian horseshit is this? To have a ‘life’ under capitalism you need a job and a ‘living wage’. While spindoctor no 2 is running the Jobs Jolt exercise, spindoctor no 1, Margaret Wilson, is launching the Work-Life Balance project. Sounds positively socialistic. Maybe Maharey is finding us the jobs, and Wilson, the living wage. Or maybe they missed out the word “for” as in “work for life”. Anyway someone is saying workers should get a life. We say workers should take their life back!

The WLB seems to be a response to union complaints about the end of the weekend and long hours without overtime pay. All work and no play puts Jack off Labour they say. So the idea is to get the CTU to make some proposals for shorter hours and more job sharing. Problem is that this initiative seems equally driven by bosses to increase flexible workhours. That is jargon for working on the bosses’ time and only getting paid for what you do. This fits in with globalisation, just-in-time production and delivery of goods and services. The prostitutes we spoke of in the last issue are no strangers to rotating and split shifts, but for most workers this is still something of a novelty. In other words the end of the weekend, and the 8 hour day, and now in the name of balancing the bottom line, the end of regular hours and regular pay.

Ever since past President of the CTU Ken Douglas said that the job of unions was to make workers more productive to attract foreign investment we know what to expect from the CTU/Government. Creating a flexible work force means that the Government gets together with the bosses to try to keep the supply of labour ‘liquid’ so that workers can move in and out of work and around the country (Jobs Jolt!) as demand for labour fluctuates in response to the market.

We say workers should get in first. As Pete Seeger sang: Take it Easy –but Take It! Demand a shorter working week on a living wage! A 30 hour week with no rotating or split shifts. That way we can all work and live. Of course the bosses’ will choke on this interference with their ‘property’ rights to hire and fire on their terms. Well, we didn’t want to work for them anyway. We can occupy the factories and workplaces and run them ourselves without paying compensation to the bosses. That way we make our necessary work serve our life needs, and not use up our life to serve the profit of the bosses

Jobs Fightback!

Enough is enough! The Jolted can lead a fightback against the Blairite spin on workfare. Don’t take responsibility for cheap labour! Demand that the bosses’ take responsibility to provide decent well paid work. Organise in your union to fight the Jobs Jolt. If you are non unionized, join a union! Low paid, unemployed and beneficiaries, join you local UNITE! [see below] fight the Jobs Jolt! No work without decent pay, re-location allowance and job training. Work for all! Share the work around! Create jobs by renationalising state assets under workers’ control. Free health, education and child care! For a 30 hour week on 40 hours pay! Rebuild the unions as democratic, militant unions! Fight for a workers’ government and for a socialist economy!.

PICKETERS OPPOSE THE JOBS JOLT

On Wednesday the 24th, 2003 around 15 beneficiaries and supporters held a picket of the Queen St branch of WINZ to protest the Clark government's 'Jobs Jolt'.

A leaflet was distributed, signatures against the Jobs Jolt were collected, and speakers, including Greens MP Keith Locke, condemned the Clark government's attacks on workers. With new figures showing that the real average wage in New Zealand has declined by 6% over the last twenty years, the Jobs Jolt picket was a reminder that an attack on unemployed workers is an attack on all workers.

The picket organisers are working inside UNITE, a union of low-paid workers and beneficiaries, to help rebuild the union movement so that it can put some strong demands on Clark's government, and fight that government when it inevitably refuses to meet those demands.

The picketers' leaflet called for state funding to create real jobs which pay real wages and are aimed at socially useful ends. The picketers also called for a shorter working week without a reduction in pay to stimulate growth in employment and improve workers' lives.

The leaflet was headed “Revolt against the Jobs Jolt” It went on to say that Government attacks on beneficiaries are also attacks on our civil rights. “The jobs jolt removes the exemption for 55-59 year olds from having to seek work. It threatens to cut benefits of beneficiaries moving to the country to escape the appalling conditions created by high rents and low benefits. It requires job seekers to undergo drug tests and drug education. It pressurizes single parents and selected groups of sickness and invalid beneficiaries. All these groups will be intensively case managed, reducing people’s rights to manage their own affairs. In some cases this will be subcontracted to private enterprise” The jobs jolt will not cut unemployment or up-skill people, rather it is beneficiary bashing and subsidizing the employers. The picketers’ demands include:

Full Employment
A living wage for all workers and beneficiaries
Freedom to live where we choose
Retain the work-test exemption for 55-59 year olds
Free Education, Training and Retraining for all
Free Childcare
A 30 hour working week on full pay.

A disappointing aspect of the picket was the failure of some socialist groups to turn up. The Anti Capitalist Alliance supported anti-Jobs Jolt action in Wellington, but did not make it to either the planning meetings or the demo in Auckland. The picketers sent a representative to an Auckland branch meeting of Socialist Worker, hoping to get that group to send members to the picket. But Socialist Worker refused any cooperation, telling the picketers' rep that the protest was 'sectarian' and a 'diversion' from the 'rates revolt' protests. In fact, small actions like this are an essential part of the vital and difficult job of rebuilding the union movement in New Zealand.

WORKERS AND BENEFICIARIES UNITE AGAINST THE JOBS JOLT!
Join your union and demand that it opposes Jobs Jolt!
Join UNITE, the union for beneficiaries and low paid workers! unite.union@clear.net.nz

To contact the UNITE beneficiaries ring Roger or Warren on (09) 6278655 or e mail Janet at dpb_action@yahoo.co.nz 
Class Struggle 52,  September-October, 2003