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!
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
