Key's union bashing uncalled for and a big step backwards
BY CHRIS TROTTER
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Chris Trotter
OPINION: There are days when I feel like rushing out on to the street, grabbing passing strangers by their lapels and shouting loudly in their faces.
"Now listen - this is important! Don't you realise what's happening?" It's how I felt on Friday morning, after digesting the Government's proposed changes to this country's employment law. As a former trade union organiser, I knew what the "reforms" of Prime Minister John Key and his Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson would mean for ordinary workers - and I was outraged.
Where had this come from? Who was driving it? What (or who) had persuaded Key to jeopardise his reputation as the "Mr Nice Guy" of New Zealand politics by embracing that most cherished of National Party prejudices - union bashing? With his party 21.1 percentage points ahead of its nearest rival, what had he to gain?
A cynic might say that Key is picking on the unions precisely because National is so far ahead of Labour in the polls. Many of his supporters in the business community believe that Key's refusal to put such a huge stock of political capital to work constitutes a serious failure of leadership. Like the biblical servant who buried his gold in the ground, the Prime Minister was refusing to put his good fortune to good use.
The bosses did not need these reforms (it wasn't as if the unions were about to batter down their doors and pillage their profits) but that wasn't the point. For employers, increasing the scope of managerial prerogative is always a good idea - and what better time to do it than when unemployment is high and both the trade unions and the Labour Party are at a historically low ebb?
Key was very aware of these subterranean rumblings and, shrewd risk assessor that he is, identified his party's annual conference as the ideal occasion to prove to his true-blue supporters that when it comes to putting the boot into conservative New Zealand's traditional enemy - "the bloody unions" - Key is made of exactly the same stuff as Sid Holland, Rob Muldoon and Jim Bolger.
The fortuitous leaking of National's union-bashing plans to TVNZ's Guyon Espiner offered a couple of additional advantages. First, it forestalled any grass-roots criticism of the Government's highly contentious relationship with the Maori Party. Second, by prompting a surge of loyalty and goodwill towards Key it helped take the heat off National's beleaguered president (and prime- ministerial protege) Peter Goodfellow. The National Party leader's "reform" programme - delivered over the clamour of 300 CTU protesters banging drums, blowing vuvuzelas and waving union banners outside the conference venue - went down a treat.
Of such stuff is the casual oppression of our fellow citizens contrived.
How many of us would tolerate a situation where employers were given the power to turn away inspectors from the health or labour departments on the grounds that the timing was inconvenient, or that the inspectors might interfere with the smooth operation of their business? Quite rightly, most of us would insist that the health and safety of the workers on the site must take priority. Why then are we so willing to let employers deny trade union officials similar as- of-right access to their workers? What is it about facilitating the internationally recognised right to collective bargaining that prompts normally decent New Zealanders to sit back and watch as National governments write and rewrite employment law in their supporters' favour?
Could it be that, deep down, we know that the employment relationship is absolutely fundamental to the way our sort of society operates? That, in ways we don't like to think about, the civil and political rights we enjoy outside the workplace are of considerably less importance than the power our employers wield over us inside the workplace? Outside the factory gates and the office doors democracy prevails: inside a kind of feudalism still reigns. Do not mistake this for a metaphor: the relationship between your employer and yourself is still legally defined as the relationship between a master and a servant.
Trade unions are reviled by conservative New Zealanders because they attempt to put the employment relationship on a more equal footing: for insisting that Jack is not only as good as his master, but that he and his workmates must have a collective employment contract to prove it.
It is this insistence on codifying workers' rights and obligations that makes the perennial bosses' boast that "most employers are good employers" a fact. It is the rules and laws we impose upon ourselves that keep our society on the straight and narrow path of civilised conduct.
Weaken those rules, or take them away altogether, and the only law likely to prevail is the law of the jungle.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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Unions are a form of communism. The free market should decide your worth.
I wonder how many of the "hire a mob" protesting at parliament last week actually had jobs. Unions are for the weak, and for Poms and Scot's who can't get a proper job to "lead" the weak. It's simple. If you want to work, work hard etc etc no right minded employer is going to sack you. It's the whingers, moaners and slackers who typically make up unionists who are worried here as they may loose the cushy number they have at the moment. Unions are going on about this like it's a real problem, highlighting their latest "cause de jour". I see they even got Minto in. He obviously didn't have a job to go to (or does he get paid to protest, like Sue)
When I worked as a manager at a cinema, the union turned up, Friday evening just as it was getting busy, demanding to be able to talk to all staff - apparently I had to legally comply. So I did, I showed the union rep to an office, and sent staff members in 1 after each other until they had all chatted to him. This was despite the fact that we were busy as hell.
After he left, one of the staff members( a 16 year old) came to me and said he had some concerns - turned out the union rep had told him(and others) that if he joined the union, they could negotiate for him to receive paid 30min breaks, at least $2 an hour above minimum wage and would guarentee that he didn't have to work late on weekends. When he voiced his disbelief that this was possible, the union rep said, "if they(the cinema company) don't comply, you can take action by working slow, and giving away food items for free to customers".
Imagine telling this to kids who don't know any better? I am sure some unions do a world of good, BUT just like employers, landlords, teachers, cops and priests there are some with questionable ethics.
Below arew all the countries that have trial periods. NZ's is mild compared to some.
1. Argentina (3 – 12 months) 2. Armenia (3 – 6 months) 3. Australia (3 – 6 months) 4. Austria (1 month) 5. Belgium (up to 6 months) 6. Brazil (90 days) 7. Canada (3 months renewable) 8. Cyprus (6 months) 9. Czech Republic (3 months) 10. Finland (4 – 6 months) 11. France (1 – 3 months) 12. Germany (6 months) 13. Ireland (12 months) 14. Italy 15. Japan 16. Jordan (90 days) 17. Korea (3 months) 18. Latvia 19. Luxemburg 20. Republic of Moldova 21. Pakistan 22. Portugal 23. Russia (3 – 6 months) 24. Serbia 25. Slovenia 26. South Africa 27. Spain 28. Sweden 29. Switzerland (1 – 3 months) 30. Thailand 31. Turkey 32. Ukraine 33. UAE (6 months) 34. UK 35. US (6 – 12 months)
These changes are all about 1) weakening workers' ability to organise and collectively bargain, and that means wages will be driven down and 2) increasing the power of the employer in the workplace.
That is bad for all workers, unionised or not, as collectively negotiated wage increases set the rate across many industries: metals and manufacturing, dairy, aviation, mining, health, education to name but a few.
New Zealand is regularly reported in WTO surveys as the second easiest country in the world to do business (after one party state Singapore) so why 'good' employers need even more power is a mystery.
Was waiting in the queue at the polling booth at the last general election. Just in front of me was an acquaintance. We chatted. She remarked "I'm not voting for National despite their slick PR". My response was "Neither am I, remember what they did last time". Am an Aussie expat, shame Kiwis are not capable of seeing where their best interests lie and to stand up for them.
I thought John Key wanted us to move closer to Australia? The Unions in Oz are way stronger than here. They have major clout.
Oh Chris, please, the union movement is effectively dead.
I have been through the early Telecom restructing days when we were scaremongered into believing a move from collective to individual contracts would be calamitous for our working conditions... it wasn't, and I got ahead as a result.
Unions protect the mediocre. Believe it or not, employers actually want GOOD employees, why should they have to put up with bad ones?
And yes, like other respondents are saying, try yelling in my face as well, please!
Hey Mike #1 - "National protects profits for employers and corporations, not employees"
Please explain how an employee's wage increases if the employer/corporation doesn't have an increase in it's profits?
Trotter, yell in my face sometime and see what you get back.
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Reliance on the market to provide appropriate outcomes is all very well, but in order for the market to perform as economis theory indicates, then the actors in the market have to be rational and they all have to have perfect information. As the current financial crisis has indicated, in the absence of appropriate external regulatory forces, neither of these conditions will be met and the outcomes will serve to disadvantage those actors starting in the weaker position.