Matt McCarten: Workers' fate rests on fighting new labour laws

Unions are campaigning against proposed law changes. Photo / Dean Purcell

This weekend, the union movement opened a campaign against the Government's proposed changes to employment laws with rallies of activists in the main centres.

Ongoing action will follow, building to mass rallies in late October.

Organising and having support from non-union workers on a direct issue hasn't happened for a while.

Unions were spoilt with Labour in power for a decade and, up until a couple of months ago, the relationships with John Key were reasonably affable.

But it seems the era of partnership is over. Employer organisations want constructive union partnerships when Labour is in government but, as soon as National gets in, they quickly revert to their class interests to screw as much profit out of their workers as they can.

But this year is not like in 1991.

Nineteen years ago, the Bolger government tried it on with huge changes to employment law. The architects of those changes were hoping to get about a third of what they were asking.

They couldn't believe their luck when the union leadership at the time rolled over without a fight and they got the lot. The consequences have been profound.

The weakening of union and workers' rights is the main reason why the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand is so vast.

Those employment laws allowed intellectually lazy and greedy employers to hire staff on the lowest wage rate possible to maximise their profit.

In time, even good employers followed suit. It started with the unskilled workforce and, eventually, seeped right through the entire economy.

It was a race to the bottom. It's the free market baby, and look at the economic mess this country is in.

Many of today's union leadership were junior officials in 1991 and have seen the consequences of not resisting attacks on workers.

The good thing about unions leading a campaign against Key's proposed new laws is that it will educate workers about how politics affect their lives.

To be fair, many of the 37 proposed changes are minor and actually improve some things.

But the headline change - of extending the current right of small employers to sack a new worker without warning, without a reason and no appeal, to all employers - is frightening. It changes the employment relationship to that of master and slave.

Key smugly claimed that unions have not come up with specific examples where employers have unfairly sacked a new worker within their first 90 days. That's because the victims of the new changes are workers who are not in unions.

Members of unions are employed under union agreements that do not give employers the right to sack workers arbitrarily.

But Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly has produced a series of YouTube videos interviewing non-unionised workers, who were sacked without warning or reason under Key's new laws.

One case I'm involved in is of a young cook, Joanne Bartlett, employed at a non-unionised national fast food outlet (Burger Fuel, Mission Bay).

She said she had culinary qualifications and consistently received the highest grades in the employer's training programme.

She claimed she was given only one 10-minute break for lunch on her eight-hour shifts. Yes, you read right.

It's illegal, of course. She said she had an argument with her manager over the length of the break and, on her 89th day, she was sacked without a reason.

We are picketing the store and because of clumsy wording in her individual employment agreement we can and will file a case against the employer.

But this example shows that Key's new law changes will make this employer's alleged actions legal.

Members of unions are largely unaffected by these law changes - for now, at least. It's the vulnerable non-unionised workers who will get shafted.

"An injury to one is an injury to all" is what the workers' movement is all about. That's why the trade union has to, and will, fight the new law changes.