E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha, tēnā koutou
Delegates – It’s so good for us to finally meet face-to-face, after trying to do so a couple of years ago and being denied by COVID for three attempts at staging a face-to-face conference.
We did meet virtually, and despite the pandemic, we had quite a lot to celebrate. Not only had we played our part in protecting workers health and jobs, but we were also pushing hard for better jobs and better terms and conditions of employment. We had a real sense of momentum.
While we were enduring COVID, nonetheless we had a spring in our step, and we said we needed to Build Back Better – not to go back to the tired old and failed approaches of the past.
We had many ‘irons in the fire’ like FPA legislation, PE claims, collective bargaining, recruitment efforts and so on. But despite the heroic efforts by unions and the people in this room, momentum was lost over the period.
But delegates – we all know a week is a long time in politics – and two years can feel like an eternity in New Zealand’s industrial and political environment.
Let me talk about the gains we made over the past couple of years.
On the picket line
You’d have to be living under a rock if you didn’t notice the growing activism and confidence of the New Zealand trade union movement over the past couple of years – whether it be in collective bargaining, for better H & S, demanding our voice be heard. Unions have been fighting for and winning a better deal for members day in, day out, and doing so with strong public support. We’ve shown up on the job, on the street, in the media and stood our ground and got results.
In the past couple of years Pay Equity Settlements have also been a hugely successful activity by unions in the state sector.
After bedding in the amendment to the Equal Pay Act at the end of Labours first term, unions were able negotiate and settle many important and significant PE deals for workers:
In education – we got numerous settlements over the line for administrators, librarians, Māori educators, science technicians, with more still in the works.
In health – we got PE deals for NGO social workers, nurses, allied health workers, admin health workers, Midwives – again with more in the works.
These gains have been truly impressive
And we are very keen to extend these settlements to the private sector, but also beyond gender, and to ethnicity as well.
Combined union COVID response
I want to acknowledge the effort we all made to save lives in the COVID pandemic.
I’m talking about 20,000 lives saved, according to a recent study, thanks to the collective action we took as a nation to keep COVID at bay.
Unions played a special role in this, advocating for essential workers so they could keep working safely, and advocating for those who couldn’t keep working too.
This incredible result seems to be glossed over now days or swept under the carpet.
Minimising that incredible COVID performance in the public narrative has the effect of minimising and diminishing the work of essential workers – the Bus drivers, the security workers, cleaners, health workers, public servants, supermarket workers, border workers and so on. The very people who did a heroic job, putting themselves in harm’s way and keeping things going for the rest of us.
Minimising the tremendous fight New Zealand put up against COVID has the effect of not only minimising the value of essential workers, it also minimises and undervalues the role of the state, and the value of public services.
That is no accident – it’s part of an attempt to reshape the narrative.
FPA working group cover
And of course we got Fair Pay Agreements over the line in the past couple of years, with the passing of the FPA Act.
This is foundational – it’s been a long time coming and it’s a wooden stake to the heart of the remnants of the 1991 Employment Contracts Act that was designed to demolish industry bargaining and the NZ trade union movement.
And now affiliates have successfully initiated half a dozen FPAs (bus/supermarket/Hospitality/cleaners/security/ECE/ with more pending (Ports).
We’ve begun negotiating one for bus drivers and staff.
The key to FPAs is the establishment of industry standards of core working conditions that can’t be under cut. Industry standards are common practice in countries that do better than ours – by that I mean countries that have better paying jobs, have more successful businesses and have higher productivity. We need look no further than Australia’s modern award system to see that.
But unlike the Australian modern award system, and many of the systems in other countries, the FPA process involves the workforce and employers negotiating the rate in the first instance, only if they can’t agree does it go to a third party to set the rate. In Australia it goes straight to the third party who imposes their decision on rates, without the opportunity of the workers and employers to come to any agreement first like FPAs.
And it’s this step that Business NZ, National and ACT really object to… But why?
Why wouldn’t you want the chance to negotiate and get a settlement before going straight to a third party to fix the rates? It seems counter intuitive and out of step with other industrial processes where the parties almost always prefer to reach agreement in the first instance.
I think it’s because many employers and political advocates can’t tolerate the idea of workers coming together collectively and experiencing a form of collective bargaining.
They fear the experience of employees discovering their collective consciousness as workers – their trade union consciousness.
They can’t live with the idea of workers coming to the realisation that they are not alone, that together with the co-workers they have strength, and in their union they can find both a voice and ambition for a better job.
I have been the lead advocate in the bus driver/workers FPA – and I went to the workers meeting in Christchurch to talk about our claims, the process etc. We had 400 plus people in the room – many were union members and were used to this kind of meeting. But it became clear many workers – especially migrant workers – couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They couldn’t believe they had the right to challenge their boss or be part of negotiating better pay and conditions. It was a great consciousness raising episode.
And it’s this very thing that many employers can’t support or tolerate. They can’t stand collective bargaining and union organisation getting anywhere near ‘their’ workers and have thrown the kitchen sink at the policy.
Not only have we had to endure a lengthy disinformation campaign, it’s also been argued that FPAs were in breach of international labour law and the ILO. Business NZ insisted on putting the matter before the ILO Committee on the Application of Standards in 2022 hoping to get a ruling blocking the passage of the law. The ILO committee didn’t hesitate to rule that FPAs were entirely in keeping with human rights and good practice.
I think New Zealand has an image of itself to be a pretty fair minded, liberal democratic country. And in many respects, we are. But when it comes to industrial relations and attitudes to workers bargaining collectively, joining unions and having a voice at work, we have – in reality – fallen behind many of our peers.
The attacks on FPAs are just one example, but other experiences expose New Zealand’s position.
Just recently, New Zealand signed a Free Trade Agreement with the EU – and the EU said to us, if you want to trade with us, you have to uphold fundamental human rights – and that means signing up to core ILO conventions that are foundational to modern democracies, especially Convention 87.
The unsigned conventions include Convention 87 – ‘Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise’. It’s the most important of the fundamental conventions – because it enables workers to uphold their fundamental rights.
The reality is, despite our self-image as a fair and decent society, when it comes to workers’ rights to organise in unions, successive governments have just refused to sign it, despite ongoing pressure from the CTU and the ILO, for fear of upsetting the business community.
We are in good company -the countries in yellow are the ones that have ratified Convention 98, but not 87. New Zealand sits alongside Sudan and South Sudan, Kenya, Brazil and Nepal in this category.
How did we get like this?
New Zealand and the ILO
New Zealand was a founding member of the ILO in 1919!
When the ILO made one of its most important declarations in Philadelphia in 1944 – New Zealand was right there in the form of Walter Nash as President of the ILO Philadelphia conference, alongside US President Roosevelt and ILO Director Edward Phelan.
Freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress
Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere
Equal opportunity
And yet by the 1990s when the CTU took the National Govt and their ECA to the ILO because it breached fundamental conventions (and we won) – the National Govt said at the time that the ILO was old fashioned and out of touch with the modern workplace. Out of touch with their vision of individual employment agreements and flexibility.
Try telling that to the EU and to other countries that have a proud record of upholding and promoting ILO fundamental conventions.
I think it’s more accurate to say New Zealand has got out of touch with basic worker rights.
I often wonder – Just where does this resistance come from?
Of course we have big business and multinationals who despise organised labour that holds them to account and demand better conditions. But so does the EU countries.
The reality is that too many New Zealand firms have a misplaced fear about unions – even though the evidence is clear that it is union workplaces that promote higher wages, better work, better health and safety and higher productivity.
But we consistently face employers who fear workers with a voice, workers who have higher standards and ambition and are prepared to tell the boss what they might not want to hear through their union.
Our shameful treatment of migrant workers exposes again this attitude. An attitude where employees are just units of labour and sources of profit.
We also have to face up to the fact that the level of government support to get things done that are important to us was lacking.
Despite a lot of hard work, and the existence of a ‘worker friendly government with an absolute majority’, the past two years hasn’t panned out like we hoped and many of the things we were anticipating never materialised.
Going back to FPAs, we thought we would get the chance to negotiate and settle FPAs in several industries – but the Act just took too long to put in place.
We got the working group report out by the end of 2018, yet it took another 4 years to become law. And the government changed before we were even allowed initiate our first FPA.
Lessons have to be learnt about getting things done more quickly.
But it wasn’t only the need to move more quickly, it was the lack of action at all that was disappointing.
New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme
NZIIS was launched on 2 Feb 2022. Back then, it looked like we were going to achieve a game changer: a legacy policy that would forever improve the lives of workers.
New Zealand Income Insurance, or Social Insurance, has been a major CTU initiative that promised to deliver workers who lost their job through no fault of their own – through redundancy or health and disability – 80% current salary for up to 7 months.
The CTU successfully initiated the policy in the Future of Work forum, because we agreed with the OECD evidence that New Zealand workers and the New Zealand economy suffer badly from ‘wage scarring’ when workers are dislocated, because the vast majority of New Zealand workers don’t have a redundancy entitlement.
We managed to get tripartite support for a joint proposal, Business NZ’s Kirk Hope was even on record in the media following the launch saying we “can’t afford not to do it“.
So why did the Govt lose its nerve and back off?
Then there was the failure to make any meaningful impact on the crucial issue of Tax reform – remember the Tax Working Group that recommended introducing a full Capital Gains Tax back in 2019?
The working group was supposed to recommend a tax neutral outcome that considered how to make the tax system fairer.
The political debate was characterised by fear-mongering and a lack of leadership from the government.
And it resulted in a permanent commitment from the PM in April 2019 to never go there again so long as she was PM!
If that wasn’t enough disappointment, we had to relive the experience – this time with the promise of a wealth tax that was once again permanently dumped, this time under PM Hipkins. Let’s be clear, without a fundamental reset of our tax system, gross inequality will continue to haunt us and undermine our communities, our public services and our way of life.
I could add that:
Contractor Reform – which would have attended to the terrible treatment and wrongful classification of many thousands of workers who endure conditions where the employer has no employer duty of care, who have to cover their own costs of work and enjoys no minimum employment conditions.
Holidays Act – the underpayment to workers because employers have not followed the Holidays Act has run into the billions. Through a tripartite process, we agreed to amend the act to make it fairer and easier to implement – but where is it now?
Public Services Cuts – where our social infrastructure is already under massive pressure to keep up with demands from a fast-growing population and years of underinvestment, we are seeing cuts to budgets – and these cuts will hurt.
Take WorkSafe for example – within current settings (even before any change of Govt) – there is already a plan to cut over 100 jobs from our H & S regulator. To take WorkSafe back to a basic service that has pre-Pike River capacity in terms of the inspectorate staffing – and that’s not to mention the carnage in the so-called back office. WorkSafe is not alone, but its demise will have a direct impact on working people in a country where H & S is in dire need of improvement.
The fact is, we lost real momentum long before 2 weeks ago.
Political context
Stepping back and considering the wider political context, we can see that for the past few decades, despite the numerous failures – especially the financial crisis in 2008-09 and our $106 billion infrastructure deficit – neoliberal instincts and ideas continue to prevail to a considerable extent in New Zealand, no matter who is in charge of government.
We continue to be fixated with delivering on neoliberal objectives of small govt/ low tax/ and low debt, with an ongoing belief in trickle-down economics.
Many of you will remember how the 80s and 90s were a brutal experience of raw neoliberalism and how much power business had with the wholesale adoption of radical policies like these to privatise and commodify everything possible.
Perhaps worst of all – we kept being told There Is No Alternative – or TINA. (Hegemony)
You could be forgiven for thinking there still isn’t when the major parties both insist they have the most responsible economic policy that keeps public spending down, returns to surplus asap and reduces public debt.
But there is an alternative to this – a trade union alternative.
It’s an alternative where working people – with good stable well-paying jobs – are the priority.
It’s an alternative that supports collective bargaining – at both the firm and sectoral level – not individual flexibility.
It’s an alternative where Just Transition policies support whole industries and their workforces to become part of a high wage, high productivity, low emissions economy.
It’s an alternative that sees New Zealand – especially our government – stand up for workers’ rights; where ILO fundamental conventions and conventions (like c190) are proudly adopted; and heads of state stand on picket lines with striking workers like they do in other countries.
It’s an alternative that has been set out in part in the CTU Alternative Economic Strategy produced in 2022 and involves a fundamentally different role for the state, one where the state is driven by a set of missions.
It’s an alternative that is reflected in our conference statement that we will be discussing tomorrow.
Getting to this Trade Union alternative starts now – at this conference.
It starts with pushing back against those who would take us in the opposite direction – and that’s exactly what the incoming government seems intent on.
They’ve made undermining workers and trade unions their priority – so much so that repealing FPAs and extending 90-day trials is expected to be on their first 100 day plan!
Their other big plan to fix the cost-of-living crisis is to hand huge tax cuts to landlords and property speculators again, and pay for that by cutting public services we all rely on even further.
They plan to roll back the progress that has been made on honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, our founding document.
They have happily stoked anti-Māori racism.
They’ve also promised that New Zealand will meet its climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, but are planning to back-peddle much of the progress that has been made in recent years. We know that inaction on climate change will hurt workers the most.
Their plan is to ‘get us back on track’ – and we know what track they are talking about, the one where workers and union interests come a distant second to those of business, where Te Tiriti is relegated, beneficiaries demonised, essential services cut and inequality flourishes.
We will not sit on our hands while these attacks on working people and our communities are unleashed.
We have always had the courage to call out what is wrong, even if no one else will.
We have the organsiation in the NZCTU, over 30 proud affiliated unions and sector groups, whose purpose is to organise industrially and politically.
We’ve been here before, and we know what to expect.
We will expose these policies for what they are and make sure there is a real debate.
But more importantly – we need to take a longer view.
Simply defeating the incoming government’s agenda won’t be enough, because as we’ve seen over the past couple of years, we can’t assume the incoming opposition will simply deliver on our alternative vision.
What we need to do is build support for our alternative so that it is popular to implement.
Unless we can make our agenda politically popular, we will struggle to get enduring parliamentary support.
This won’t be easy, because our ideas threaten the big and the powerful.
But the trade union movement in New Zealand has reach, and we know workplaces are places where very influential conversations take place, in a world where superficial messages saturate.
All of you in this room – as trade union leaders – are crucial, and your support for a new approach is critical if we are to be successful.
We have great workplace leaders – our workplace delegates – who we can support by educating them about our alternative and encouraging them to talk about these ideas in the workplace.
And we need to take our message beyond the workplace and into communities, in the media, on social media, anywhere where we have the opportunity talk about a better life for working people in New Zealand.
While our adversaries are well funded and no doubt their government will enjoy a temporary honeymoon, it won’t take long for working people and their families to realise the true nature of getting ‘back on track’, with policies that will make us worse off.
We have to be up to the task of putting forward and fighting for something different.
We always knew that what comes around goes around, and that our job is now as important as ever.
We’ve been here before and we know that Trade unions were forged in adversity,
Let’s use this conference to reflect on our predicament, and to plan for a better future.
Only by doing that can we really say we are ‘shaping our futures’
