Hobbit power game depressingly like the old days

OPINION: Tell you what - I'll work for Peter Jackson, and I'll take my own packed lunch. I'm perfectly capable of squatting down to hobbit size, or standing on a box to be an elf, and I don't expect to join a union for the pleasure. I'll do it for free.

People younger than me won't remember the days when the words "cooks and stewards", "boilermakers" and "watersiders" regularly struck the country numb. They've never heard of the Federation a Labour, as its former leader pronounced it then, either, but I remember, and the memory is not a pleasant one.

Such unions regularly held the country, and major projects, to ransom. The Cook Strait ferries were tied up year after year at the height of the holiday season while workers demanded better pay and conditions. Boilermakers held up one major building project in Wellington, the former BNZ building, in epic negotiations, and freezing workers would strike just when farmers needed stock killed.

The repercussions were serious for a country dependent on farm exports and tourism, and in those days union membership was compulsory. They had us by the short and curlies, and ultimately lost public sympathy.

The upshot was the abolition of compulsory unionism, with unpleasant consequences for many workers today who know nothing of luxuries such as time- and-a-half and meal breaks, let alone the caviar and crackers it took to get a ferry to sail in the old days. And for all the protests by watersiders, they couldn't turn back history. Container shipping happened, and the once powerful union withered.

Maybe it was inevitable that a union would tackle that mighty monolith Peter Jackson. There's great power and satisfaction, I should think, in threatening a major film production, and with it the hopes of New Zealanders who struggle to keep such projects coming here. Despite our distance from the northern hemisphere, where the massive amounts of money come from to make films such as The Hobbit, Jackson has been hugely instrumental in carving out a niche for us, and has become one of the most powerful film industry figures in the world.

I'm not aware of criticism of his treatment of the vast numbers of people he's employed, other than that he is distant. I'd need to hear tales of abuse first-hand from those who suffered under his lash before I'd sympathise with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the Australian union that is demanding The Hobbit be unionised.

Jackson says he's not anti- union, but the project won't go ahead here if the union wants to call the shots. "I feel growing anger at the way this tiny minority is endangering a project that hundreds of people have worked on over the last two years, and the thousands about to be employed for the next four years [and] the hundreds of millions of Warner Brothers dollars that is about to be spent in our economy," he said this week.

Losing The Hobbit would leave New Zealand "humiliated on the world stage," and other studios would steer clear of working here in future. Maybe the Australians - and the Americans - don't understand how this country takes Jackson's projects to heart, but the joy of a small population is that everyone is within one remove of a family member or friend who has worked for him.

We've been proud of the way his projects have showcased our country and its behind-the-scenes talent. And although Jackson has made a vast personal fortune out of his deals, he's at least invested a good deal of it back into Wellington, where so many people directly or indirectly earn a living because of him, thereby making the idea of a career in film possible for young people.

I hate to knock unions, because employers are not benevolent, but this stoush looks depressingly like the old days, when a union could call bringing an industry to its knees, and its jobs with it, a triumph. Maybe that attitude is why so many films aren't made in Hollywood any more.

If this project goes elsewhere, we'll be the casualties of a power game that doesn't give a damn about its downstream effects - which, oddly enough, is exactly how unionists once described the attitude of bosses.

- © Fairfax NZ News