Changing of the guard

Unite's Matt McCarten rallies workers outside Starbucks in Karangahape Rd. The protest led to considerable pay rises across the fast-food industry. Picture / Richard Robinson

They'll gather at the foot of Queen St as usual on May Day, the ageing rump of a movement that once held governments in its sway. They'll raise the red flag, sing We Shall Overcome, their presence in QE II Square affirming that the union movement is still breathing.

As stalwart unionists on Monday mark their umpteenth May Day under the Council of Trade Unions umbrella, the rebirth of unionism will gather at the other end of Queen St.

The new face of the union movement is strikingly young: casual workers in fast-food outlets, school children, God-fearing Pacific Islanders, militant students, and anarchists. In Aotea Square they will protest about youth rates to a very different musical backing. Then they'll march down Queen St to embrace the old guard. The new breed of unionist may know nothing of 1913 or 1951, but it's alive and kicking butt.

"It will be very symbolic," says Matt McCarten, the former Alliance Party president behind Unite, the country's fastest-growing union. "You'll have all the old codgers, the old warriors, and you'll have the new blood.

"It's going to be the old and the new."

Whether the dynamic, placard-waving hordes will be welcomed with open arms by the veterans is another matter. The vanguard may have endured 15 years of waning union influence, but McCarten's shock troop tactics have made some enemies within the union movement and re-opened political sores.

Unite can't take all the credit but unions are at last on the rebound. Research by Victoria University's industrial relations centre found union membership plunged under the Employment Contracts Act in the 1990s from 43 per cent to 21 per cent of the workforce, with the number of unionised workers falling to 300,000. The increase, although it has risen since the Employment Relations Act restored union access to worksites in 1999, has barely kept pace with the growth in the workforce.

In the private sector, the unionised workforce has slipped to about 12 per cent. And in the large retail, wholesale, restaurant and hotels sector which employs a quarter of the workforce, union membership in 2004 was only 4 per cent.

But if the multinationals and corporates which dominate this sector thought union decline was terminal, they hadn't reckoned on McCarten, looking for new campaigns after the break-up of the Alliance Party.

Unite's high-profile successes, culminating in considerable pay rises for thousands of workers at Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut and parent company Restaurant Brands' call centres, is causing both optimism and angst in the union movement. To some, it is a beacon of hope that a new generation will see the benefits of collective bargaining and solidarity. Unite's fee-paying membership has risen in the past year from 3500 to over 6000. McCarten says another 5000 members don't yet pay fees.

It has McDonald's in its sights and is about to enter negotiations at the Sky City Casino. Based largely in Auckland (with a small Wellington presence) until now, Unite plans expansion in Hamilton, Palmerston North, Christchurch and Dunedin, with financial help from the CTU.

And it has political as well as industrial targets, backing the campaign to raise the minimum wage and Green MP Sue Bradford's bill to scrap youth rates.

Unite sees its constituency as low-paid casual workers and "the deunionised" who work in hotels, carparks, petrol stations, quick-service restaurants, call centres and shopping malls.

These are the modern workplaces, says McCarten. Unions which traditionally focused on "sites" now have to reach into the community - petitioning in schools and churches, using music, texting and email.

Union membership in the malls is confined to a few national chains, but that's "for the moment", McCarten says. "St Lukes has 1800 workers on site - they're all casuals."

Peter Haynes, a senior lecturer in industrial relations at Auckland University, says Unite has overturned conventional wisdom that low paid workers in high turnover jobs are too hard to unionise.

"They are overcoming the problem of young workers who haven't experienced unions and who are more inclined to exit and get another job."

Its tactics have been inspired: low or no fees until it demonstrates the benefits of membership; high-profile campaigning such as the Supersize My Pay campaign at fast-food outlets; the use of music, street theatre, email and texting to schools and polytechnics to bolster protests.

"They have adopted a militant strategy where it fits," Haynes says.

This approach wouldn't work everywhere but still offers lessons for other unions which, in the face of law changes such as voluntary membership and limitations on access, had concentrated on organising large established sites. With the changing nature of the workforce, traditional unions had felt unable to reach dispersed, casualised workers in high-turnover jobs.

"The main difference is that Unite is simply going out and asking people to join the union regardless of their age or where they work," Haynes says.

Over at the National Distribution Union - the once-powerful amalgam of militant truckies and storeworkers which now takes in the retail, clothing and transport sectors - they're getting used to another seismic shift.

In a bitterly contested election last August, veteran union secretary Mike Jackson was toppled by Laila Harre, the former Alliance MP who fronted the Nurses Union's successful 2004 campaign for a national contract and substantial pay rise.

McCarten sees it as a further sign of grassroots desire for change in the union movement, particularly among low-paid workers. Jackson, a career unionist, had worked in the shadow of Auckland union godfather Bill Andersen, who died early last year, and might have expected a long reign. But Harre, says McCarten, was asked to stand by a faction within the union hierarchy.

Harre was elected, on a growth platform, to a union which once boasted 60,000 members but is now a shadow of its former self. She sees considerable potential in supermarkets, where union membership is "reasonable" in the Progressive-owned Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown chains but non-existent in New World and Pac'N Save, owned by Foodstuffs. Harre says Foodstuffs employees earn $1 to $2 an hour less than their unionised counterparts.

"We have strategies both for increasing our membership and activism at Progressive and for unionising Pak'N Save and New World. There's clear evidence for workers that union agreements in that industry deliver better pay and conditions of employment."

The union has also appointed a small team to focus on membership growth in non-union areas, employing "better public relations and new campaigning approaches".

Harre, unlike some unionists, gives credit to Unite. "There's no question that people given the opportunity to be active will grasp it. Supersize My Pay has really raised expectations of a lot of workers. "There's an energy out there. People are being attracted into a movement bringing a whole range of networks and skills which are new and represent the new workforce. Most of the workforce is very different to the traditional unionised workforce of the 50s and 60s.

"Unite has attracted seasoned and new grassroots activists to its campaigns with a kick-arse committed attitude to organising.

"They are people who've got confidence in the power of workers to stand up for themselves.

"But in the end workers will only get what they try for. It's about rebuilding the power of workers."

But having the left-wing Alliance pairing as spearheads of a union revival is causing unease not just for bosses but among union officials and in the Labour Party.

Deliberately or not, Unite has muscled in on the traditional territory of the Service Workers Union, which includes hotel and hospital workers, food workers and cleaners. McCarten and several of his top officials are from service workers' backgrounds. Unite's forays into sites like the Sky City Casino and Middlemore Hospital have led to poaching disputes and CTU intervention.

"They weren't there," McCarten says of the service workers' casino presence. "Only two hotels out of 33 in Auckland were unionised. There was no one in the picture theatres, no one in fast foods.

"We've only had four sites out of about 500 where we've shared with another union, so you've got to keep it in perspective. Any new union on site is not exactly going to be welcomed by some - they'll see it as competitive. It keeps us all on our toes. I think it sharpens our act up. The CTU have mediated in some cases and we've followed their protocol."

The upshot at the casino is that Sky City management face negotiating two agreements for workers who do similar work, a form of parallel bargaining.

McCarten says the inter-union friction has abated. After some persuasion, he is working more actively with the CTU executive.

"We're part of the furniture now. We haven't spent our time worrying about these things. At the end of the day, it's only results that matter."

While Unite has captured the headlines, it's wrong to think traditional unions are still in retrenchment mode. The campaigning style of unionism is not confined to Unite. Harre says the turning point, if any, was the nurses' pay parity campaign in 2004, when employers agreed to meld 15 site agreements into one and grant hefty wage increases to many. That campaign, she says, followed "years of active rebuilding" within the union.

Last year's Engineers Union campaign for a 5 per cent pay rise lit a fuse which spread throughout the movement. Its success sent a signal to thousands on individual contracts about the benefits of collective bargaining.

The Service Workers Union launched a "healthy pay" campaign in hospitals last month. And last week it began a long-planned international campaign to boost the money earned by lowly paid cleaners.

It's possible, also, to make too much of the political ramifications of a union revival led by former Alliance MPs with militant left-wing backing.

Union support remains crucial to Labour's chances of a fourth term - and no union is closer to Labour than the service workers. When former national secretary Darien Fenton was elected to Parliament on the Labour List last year (joining fellow "ex-servos" Rick Barker, Mark Gosche, Philip Field and Winnie Laban), she singled out the hard work of the union's delegates for Labour's narrow victory.

But CTU president Ross Wilson says the days when union officials told members who to vote for are long gone and it's simplistic to portray Unite - should it continue to grow - as a potential threat to Labour's re-election chances. Under MMP, he says, unions have supported a range of parties including the Greens and the Maori Party (for whom McCarten worked for eight months as Tariana Turia's campaign manager).

Wilson expects the same to apply to Unite. "The way unions operate these days you have diversity within any group."

But McCarten is happy to play up the new union's potential as a political force. At the very least, he sees it as a way of getting Labour to honour its promises in areas like youth rates and the minimum wage. "My general view is that politicians will never lead, they'll follow the mood. What we've got to do is create support in the community first. By doing that it gives politicians the safety to support things. If you'd asked me six months ago about Sue Bradford's bill [to scrap youth rates] I would have said 'no show'. Now I'd say it's a 50:50 chance.

"You've got to have a political agenda and you've got to have an industrial agenda."