Potent unions good news for workers
Even before the underperforming National Government was made redundant in November, the remnants of the union movement were popping their heads above the parapet and taking a pot-shot or two.
Within weeks of the election of the Labour-Alliance coalition, at least one of them - significantly the Waterside Workers Union - had begun flexing its muscles. It called a 24-hour stoppage on the day of the funeral of a woman who had been killed on a Lyttelton picket-line. She was not a union member and nor was her husband. A four-hour stoppage would have been plenty.
Now I don't for a moment blame the unions for feeling their oats in anticipation of promised amendments to the Employment Contracts Act, the most nefarious piece of legislation passed in this country since the Maori landgrabbing statutes of the 19th century.
But if the unions have any ideas of regaining the sort of economically and socially destructive power they wielded in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, they had better think again.
It was the thoughtless, selfish actions of unions representing such as the wharfies, freezing workers, boilermakers, seamen, miners, printers and railwaymen that made it necessary to clip their wings and free up industrial relations.
But, as it did so often when carrying out what it called "reforms," the National Party allowed its far-right ideologues to draft legislation - the Employment Contracts Act of 1991 - in such a way as to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The result was that the nation's workers - and with them their unions - were effectively rendered powerless and the employers given rights not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
And the result? As the Ministry of Social Policy has reported, the gap between rich and poor is growing faster here than in other developed countries and most people's real incomes have stagnated or declined in the past decade.
"The top 10 per cent of households are now considerably better off in absolute terms," the report said.
"The next 20 per cent are just holding their own, and the bottom 70 per cent are generally worse off than they were 10 years ago."
We are not alone. The same thing has been happening in Australia and the United States. An academic study about to be published in the US shows that between 1983 and 1997, 85.5 per cent of the increase in that nation's wealth went into the pockets of 1 per cent of the population. Workers produced more each hour (up 17 per cent since 1983) while keeping less of it - wages dropped by 3.1 per cent.
The figures for Australia are similar. And if the Social Policy Ministry is to be believed, ours must be worse.
A modern-day industrial revolution has been going on in this country ever since Labour's Douglas, Caygill, Prebble et al lost their marbles back in the mid-1980s. The centrepiece, the Employment Contracts Act, was put in place by Ruth Richardson and her National ilk, and the workers of this country - without whom very little real wealth at all can be created - have been increasingly exploited since.
They told us the industrial and economic reforms would create more jobs, yet within a few years scores of thousands of employees had been made redundant and their unions were largely powerless to help them.
They told us that industry, commerce and the public service would become more efficient, but within a short time there had been created a new class of unproductive worker called a "manager," whose sole task in life seems to be to make things as difficult as possible for people who actually do the work.
They told us there would be more freedom in the workplace, but what emerged was a climate of fear, insecurity and resentment that, probably more than anything else, negated any prospect of the prosperity for all which was supposed to result.
So I, like most workers, look forward to amendments to the Employment Contracts Act and to a rejuvenated and virile union movement that will redress the balance between workers and employers, most of whom have proved beyond doubt that they cannot be trusted in a free-market labour environment.
* garth_george@herald.co.nz
<i>Dialogue:</i>Garth George
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.