This week On The Revolution...we get you prepped for the Labour Day Rally at the Octagon (2pm). David Harvey at Marxism 2009 offers a dialectical conception of the assemblage of values necessary for an emancipatory socialist project. Check our post for Andrew Tait's (ISOs) take on the present political moment.
Playlist
Moody Scott - Gotta Bust Out the Ghetto
Organized Konfusion - Black Sunday
The Coup - Ass Breath Killers
Stevie - Higher Ground
Black Uhuru - solidarity
Erykah Badu - Honey
Curtis Mayfield - Keep on Keeping On
Highlanders Group - Funky 16 Corners
Raekwon
Gil Scott Heron - Pieces of a Man
The Itals - Run Bald Head Run
Mos Def - There's Only One
Jimmy McGriff - Blue Juice
Tekitha - Walking Through the Darkness
Eddie Bo - Funky Yeah
Common - Real People
The Roots - Mellow my Man
Ramsey Lewis - Spring too High
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Unite and the Campaign for a Living Wage
Branch talk, October 22, 2009
Mike Tait
In the last month or so, the International Socialist Organisation has put a lot of effort into building the Campaign for a Living Wage, which was launched by the Unite, New Zealand’s newest and most dynamic union.
Why have we chosen to work on this campaign, when there are so many other issues at the moment? The most pressing is the campaign to provide relief to the Pacific islands which were hit by a lethal tsunami. That campaign has attracted widespread support as New Zealanders recognise the close ties between us and other Pacific islands.
Another campaign we have supported, although not as strongly, is the campaign against cuts to ACC which will protect rapists by making it harder for victims of sexual abuse to access support.
The biggest campaign is the international day of action on climate change. The scale of environmental damage poses a threat not just to working people, not just to NZ and the Pacific, but to the whole of human civilisation. Why then do we not throw all of our weight behind this campaign?
The basic reason is that none of these challenges can be faced without a serious political perspective. Tackling climate change requires more than a change in individual consumption. While events like the Spring Food Festival organised by the 350 organisation raise awareness, they urgently need to move past that to develop serious political alternatives. The ACC cuts threaten the start of a whole scale attack on public health. It’s not enough to make good arguments. We need to find the forces in society that can defend public health and arm them with ideas that can win. Finally, the devastation in the Pacific is symptomatic not only of climate change but of the third world dependency maintained by a world order which privileges New Zealand and Australian business at the expense of Pacific people in the islands and in Australasian cities.
The campaign to raise the minimum wage is not just relatively privileged NZ workers asking for more money. It’s a world away from the politics of greed. We are building the unite campaign because we see working people, organised in democratic trade unions, as the most generous and potentially the most powerful force in society – a force that has an interest in public health, in protecting the vulnerable, in international solidarity, and in preserving the planet.
This campaign is first and foremost about raising the political consciousness and organised strength of workers so we can build a mass movement that can solve all of these problems in a rational way.
The campaign for a living wage was launched earlier this year. The aim is to collect 300,000 signatures by May 1, 2010, as the first step to holding a citizens’ initiated referendum. Even if this campaign does not succeed in its stated goal, it sets an ambitious target and encourages people to set their sights higher.
One of the problems with Labour is that elections raise people’s hopes only to dash them when, in office, promises are left unfulfilled. A campaign like this one, which is also used as an organizing tool for a fighting trade union, does not make promises to working people, but instead makes demands. If this campaign does fail then it will not be for want of public support but for want of organisation. If every trade unionist in the country signed the petition we would have the numbers for a referendum now. The failure of the CTU to act on its supposed policy is a sign of the weakness of mainstream unions.
The straightforward politics of the campaign are a relief after decades of leftists scrabbling to find ‘popular’, media-savvy slogans that would avoid the tired old issues of workers and wages. The Unite campaign has put those issues back where they belong – at the heart of the project and certainly, there is no lack of interest and support.
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What are unions?
After all, what are unions? There’s a good Billy Bragg song which says, “there is power in the factory, there is power in the land , there is power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand, there is power in the union.”
The basic idea is that, in an uneven world, working people (and students) need to unite, to pool their strength to defend our interests: “Money speaks for money, the devil for his own, who’ll come to speak for the skin and the bone? With our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in the union.”
The logic of the powerless gaining power through collective action becomes a logic of generosity. Because working people own very little, their private interests are not a stumbling block to taking a general, impartial view of the world. This is illustrated by the debate over climate change which is channeled through the mass media. I don’t know that newspapers are the most eco-friendly operations and I know that many of their top advertisers, such as car companies, are not. It’s a lot easier to persuade ordinary people that public transport as the primary means of transport instead of cars could improve their lives and much harder to convince those who run these industries - the old camel-needle problem.
But if unions are so great, and we’ve had them for a hundred years, why have they failed? Why are they weaker now than 30 years ago? Why haven’t all union members in the country already signed the petition?
History of trade unions
To understand this we need to look at the history of trade unions and how they interact with the economy and the state.
Since the beginning of class society, weaker groups have always seen the need to combine forces. The saying ‘unity is strength’ is far older than the trade union movement but only with the emergence of the industrial working class did a section of society so combine immediate powerlessness with potential strength. The working class in Industrial Revolution England was the most impoverished group in society but also directly produced the goods that made Britain the greatest power the world had ever seen.
Early trade unionists: The Tolpuddle Martyrs were farm workers who formed a union, and were convicted and sentenced to exile in Australia.
Trade unions were formed spontaneously – but with a great deal of effort and self-sacrifice – by workers who realised this basic fact and drew on ideals of solidarity and hopes for a better future.
The early trade unions won many huge gains – the right to vote, to free speech and free assembly, the right to organise and better living standards for all. In Britain and Germany, the second most industrialized country, trade unions formed millions-strong workers parties and cooperatives for everything from food and education to soccer, singing and cycling.
But the organizing successes of the working class movement exposed the political weakness of unions. Unions are the basic combat organisations of the working class but they are primarily defensive. Unions react to attacks from business but rarely put forward another vision. There’s another side to unions too, in that the primary job of the officials who staff them is to sell labour to business at the highest possible price. In times of prosperity seems that the socialist utopia will arrive simply by bargaining piece by piece for slightly higher wages each year. In situations of crisis, where whole sections of industry are collapsing, union officials often end up seeing their job as protecting the bosses, not the workers, so that they can continue to sell labour to them in the future.
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The early trade unions and working class parties formed a powerful international – the second International – in a time of prosperity. In Britain and Germany, and other European countries, their hopes of an evolutionary arrival at socialism were dashed by the First World War, where only the Russian section of the international stood by the principle of international solidarity as the major parties of the working class sent their own members out to kill each other.
After the War, the working class movement took heart from the Russian revolution and the first workers’ state and grew in leaps and bounds, but failed to make up the ground it had lost before the crises of the great depression and the Second World War. What should have been an opportunity to put forward an alternative vision for the economy and the world was lost, as Labour reformists and the communist parties, now no longer autonomous but foreign policy tools of the Stalinist regime, urged struggle when the enemy was strong and retreat when the time for battle came.
Post war boom and New Zealand unions
After WW2, the world economy entered its longest and strongest period of growth, until the 1970s. Again in this period, there seemed little reason to think outside the box, as industrial arbitration – that’s wage bargaining organised between unions and bosses by the state – delivered wage rises year after year and unemployment was negligible. At one stage in the sixties it’s said there were 12 people unemployed and the minister of labour knew each of them by name.
Strikes were regular occurrences and they were necessary to keep the advance going, but they followed a set pattern, with a season occurring annually around national wage rounds. Leading a union became a bureaucratic task. There was little need to organise in unorganized sections of the workforce and little need for strategy or creative, imaginative tactics.
This ‘golden weather’ came to an end, in NZ and around the world, in the 1970s. The oil shocks were the sharp reminder that capitalism has periods of boom and bust and that class divisions can be papered over but not done away with.
The trade unions fought hard in NZ and around the world in the 1970s but they had no political or economic perspective past national reforms. Meanwhile, their political wing, the Labour Party, which was supposed to come up with these perspectives, had also realised the old model, which worked during the Long Boom, was out of date. But instead of looking to working class democracy and international struggle, the supposed principles of the labour movement, key figures like Roger Douglas and David Lange abandoned them for the latest so-called free market thinking coming from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The end of the long boom saw the end of a cosy relationship between unions, the bosses and the state, where Beehive gin was merrily drunk by National Party PM Robert Muldoon and trade union leaders. When the ‘national interest’ was threatened, the state took sides with the interests of business and opted to restructure NZ along capitalist lines.
The failure of unions to respond to this was not a failure of strength; it was a failure of strategy. This is crucial. In 1980, 69 per cent of workers were union members, compared to only 22 per cent now. 1977 and 1979 saw the biggest strike waves in the history of NZ. Many of our parents were young workers then, when one in ten was out on strike. Among the rank and file, socialist ideas were common and the top leadership were almost all members of supposedly socialist parties but there was no interest in breaking with the Labour Party, reformism, and the national interest.
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The 1980s saw huge layoffs in nationalised and protected industries. Unemployment sapped the strength of the union movement and emboldened the National Party, when it came to power in 1990, to attack union rights and beneficiaries. Finance Minister Ruth Richardson asked dietitians to cost out a minimal food budget – then cut it 20 per cent and set it as the basic dole.
When the ECA was introduced by National in 1990, the union leaders were given a mandate from members to call a general strike – polls were running heavily against National and the ECA – but despite the wishes of the rank and file, the leadership did not move. Why? Because destroying the ECA would have meant destroying the National Government and the unions had nothing other than the discredited Labour Party to offer.
What’s the alternative?
The alternative is to rebuild a working class movement – that means fighting, democratic trade unions and a workers party - that is able to genuinely represent the interests of working people. This does not mean opposing reforms. We believe that the best way – and in times of crisis, the only way – to win reforms is to use revolutionary means.
What is the difference between revolutionary and reformist means?
Revolutionary means seek at every turn to increase the power of the working class, where reformists take the working class for granted and see their power as something that can be bargained away for concessions.
Most union bureaucrats see their job, if they think about it in this way at all, as ensuring the best wages for their members. Socialist trade unionists see the struggle in a broader sense. Higher wages that are not secured by a strong movement will be taken away as easily as they are given.
Here are three examples: the Maritime Union, which is one of the most left-wing unions and has done an enormous amount of good work, had a campaign about four years ago to renationalize coastal shipping and regulate it through a union-government-employer arrangement. The idea was that foreign shipping would be cut out, allowing the union to better defend and regulate working conditions. The problem is that in order to get an agreement from business and the state, the union would have to discipline its rank and file, cut down on militancy and reduce democracy. The nationalisation of the shipping by Labour could be undone by the stroke of a National government pen but the damage done to union organisation on the waterfront would take years to fix.
The second example is Working for Families. The Labour Government cycled a great deal of money to working people through the tax department. This in effect left beneficiaries behind and created a big laundromat, where money paid in tax by working people was redistributed by the IRD – even as the share of tax paid through flat taxes like GST increased. This subsidises low wage employers and creates dependency on the state. It has been integrated into the budgets of so many working class families that National had to promise not to touch it but if it were not for this subsidy, union struggles for better wages would inevitably have taken place, leading to increased confidence and shop floor organisation that would have gone past the limits set by Labour.
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The third example is the most extreme. In the 1980s, the Labour government saw its role as selling out the whole of the country to local and international finance in order to “save” capitalism and hopefully create more work somewhere down the line. In the same way that the EPMU allowed Sealords to lay off staff section by section in the hope of saving some jobs, Labour shut down whole parts of the economy.
The result was a severe weakening of the strength of the working class. As Mike Treen writes on the unite website: “Official data on wage movements in New Zealand point to a real wage decline of around 25% between 1982 and the mid 90s that has never been recovered.”
“Productivity has increased by 80% between 1978 and 2008. So real wages are 25% lower but our output is 80% higher.”
“Households made up for the loss in real wages by working more hours (principally more women and young people) and going into debt. A report by Simon Collins in the NZH 25/11/06 found that average family income in 2001 in constant dollars was the same as in 1981 despite the fact that the proportion of women working went from 47% to 61% and the percentage of families working 50+ hours a week went from half to two thirds.”
This makes a mockery of the idea of the “national interest” or the argument that fighting for higher wages is self-defeating because it raises inflation. If inflation and strikes were higher in the 1980s, but living standards were better, then the industrial peace and economic recovery of the last decade is exposed as a fraud practised on the majority of the population.
The revolutionary approach is perhaps still best summarised by Karl Marx, in the Communist Manifesto: “The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
Why we support Unite
Unite is a fighting trade union. Since the 1980s, or even the 70s, the union movement has been on the defensive, trading away strength to preserve past gains, thus paving the way for future defeats. Unite, by contrast, started out by organising the supposedly unorganisable. The leadership – including people like John Minto, Mike Treen and Matt McCarten – is experienced in political campaigning and Unite tactics are more creative than any other union. McCarten is a former leader of the Labour left and the Alliance party, but he started his political career in his early 20s, organising transient workers in the Queenstown hospitality industry. Unlike former colleagues, like Phillip Taito Field, McCarten has constantly worked towards building an independent working class movement; he split from Labour and then Alliance to turn back towards building the movement from the ground up. The successes of Unite – their spectacular growth, the wage rises they have won for members and the abolition of youth rates testify clearly to the effectiveness of this strategy.
The campaign for a living wage and supporting Unite provides a great opportunity for socialists in relatively isolated cities like Dunedin to have a national impact and raise the expectations and strength of working people and students in this city.
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Long road to freedom
The successes that Unite has enjoyed so far should not lead anyone to suppose organising a working class movement is easy. As McCarten says, “we are playing chess, not checkers”. This is the beginning of a long process of rebuilding basic working class organisations and a revolutionary socialist political current.
We cannot rely on any of the traditional institutional supports for progressive politics – whether in government departments, city councils, the universities, the education sector, mainstream union leadership, the Labour or Greens party, or any section of business. We want to build a working class movement that can win the support of small business, but that can’t be done by building a party that represents small business or manufacturing and workers equally, as the Alliance tried to do.
This task will demand hours of work and constant organisation from hundreds, if not thousands of people, in the same way that the workers parties of the past were built. You should wear out your shoes and lose your voice more than once, without any expectation of financial benefit or a cushy job. Revolutionary organisation demands that socialists forsake the safety of institutional politics and rely on the support of the as-yet-silent working class majority. In fact, in the face of renewed attacks on health and education, on jobs and benefits, and suicidal environmental and military policies, we are convinced that this is the only safety to be had.
Join the struggle – study, organise, build a workers party.
Study, Organise, Build a workers party!
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