Matt McCarten: Collective union forces gather to fight Key attack

Prime Minister John Key. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This was supposed to be a good week for John Key and the National Party. It wasn't.

Key's strategists had secretly staged their weekend's party conference at Auckland's casino for some good old-fashioned union bashing, which always gets the party faithful hollering. It's in their DNA.

The intent of throwing red meat to the salivating pack was obviously to distract them from embarrassing Key by bleating about him being too chummy with Maori or asking uncomfortable questions about mining, particularly as we now know he was about to surrender to Princess Xena and the greenies on that front the next day.

Therefore he planned to use his leader's speech to launch a broad front war against workers' rights on behalf of his corporate backers.

This was to be a sneak attack because until recently he had been reassuring the Council of Trade Union leaders in private that he didn't have an anti-worker or anti-union agenda.

Unfortunately for him a draft paper outlining his intentions was leaked.

Included in the paper were some nasty policies that Key had specifically promised union leaders would not be considered by his Government, such as union members being able to have their representative at their place of work without an employer's veto.

When the CTU president Helen Kelly learned of Key's treachery she called an impromptu demo outside his conference to show her displeasure at his double dealing.

This is a new side of Key that most of us aren't familiar with.

It gives some credence to a claim from Bill English's camp several years ago that Key had promised to back English against the Don Brash coup but betrayed him in a secret deal with Brash.

At Sunday's protest, union leaders differed on whether we kept the demo as a rally away from National's conference or initiated a direct challenge by marching to the conference doors. In the end we did both.

Union speakers articulated the arguments against Key's proposed changes to several hundred assembled union workers.

After the rally most of the attendees then marched to the police lines guarding the convention doors Key was hiding behind.

Of course the police had no intention of letting us through.

Unfortunately for them they didn't have all the doors guarded and some of the crowd stormed through the main casino hotel entrance.

I had to go in after them and get them back. It led to a bit of gleeful ribbing by Key in Parliament about John Minto, Sue Bradford and me, saying we would all be sacked under his new laws for storming the wrong building.

It's a bit unfair on Minto as he wasn't actually in the fray, although I was delighted that the former Green MP was right in the thick of it.

Who says Parliament makes you soft?

More seriously, Key's attacks on workers' rights were a surprise though and are the biggest attack on workers' rights in 20 years.

The union movement will have to win public opinion over his more insidious changes.

In 1991, the then leadership of the trade union movement capitulated to that onslaught and workers have been on the back foot ever since.

The difference this time though is that the entire movement will fight.

On Thursday, unions representing 350,000 workers met in Auckland and unanimously committed to a mass mobilisation campaign to defeat Key's attacks.

Obviously individual unions will have differing tactics depending on their culture and membership base.

But I was heartened that every union, state and private sector, staunchly committed themselves to be part of a united campaign.

The example and huge success by the environment movement this week in halting mining isn't lost on trade union leaders.

Neither is the about-turn by the Liberal Party leader Tony Abbot in the Australian election.

He is now promising that his party's earlier attempts to change their employment laws are "dead and buried".

Abbot knows he has no chance of winning an election on an anti-worker platform.

Key might like to reflect on that.