Robert Reid is General Secretary of FIRST Union. This is his speech to CAFCA’s 40th anniversary event, Christchurch, 2/5/15.

Introduction

I’d like to begin by quoting from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland”:

“‘Cheshire Puss’, she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. ‘Come, it's pleased so far', thought Alice, and she went on. ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’, said the Cat.

‘I don't much care where’, said Alice.

‘Then it doesn't matter which way you go’, said the Cat.

‘… so long as I get somewhere’, Alice added as an explanation”.

At the time of publication of “Alice In Wonderland” in 1865, England was teetering on the brink of one of the first full-blown global capitalist crises. In 1873 stock markets around the world started crashing, and a panic on the US one brought down banks, railroad companies and other businesses, heralding the beginning of what has been called the “long depression”, lasting until 1896. While it’s probably a bit of a stretch to call “Alice In Wonderland” an anti-capitalist text, there are parallels between that time period and the global financial crisis of 2007-08 that still lingers with us today.

It’s only really when we reach a crisis, when capitalism breaks apart, that we normally take the time to be like Alice and think about where we’re going. But in order not to fall into the same trap as Alice, before we talk about where we are going we first need to know where we are at right now. In my view there are three markers that tell us where we are now.  Those markers are:

• the increasingly embedded nature of neo-liberalism,
• the rise of crony capitalism, and,
• the ongoing failure of New Zealand to deal with its settler colonial heritage.

Embedding Neo-Liberalism

It’s now over 30 years since the beginning of Rogernomics, and we can now safely say that Roger’s children have grown up, got a student loan, and entered a labour market over which they have little to no control.  New Zealand, perhaps more than any other country, can be said to embody the neo-liberal dream. The New Zealand Experiment was all about implementing a series of economic policies based on a strict and untested interpretation of market fundamentalism, combining Friedmanesque* monetarism, market liberalisation and free trade, minimal Government intervention in the economy, grinding fiscal austerity, the sale of more State assets than we ever realised we owned, labour market deregulation and attacks on beneficiaries. *Milton Friedman (1912-2006) is the father of neo-liberal economics. Ed.

These changes empowered finance while leaving working people out in the cold. In very simple terms we can see how the annual average income in New Zealand (in inflation adjusted 2010 dollars) of the top 1% increased from $176,500 in 1984 to almost $297,100 in 2011, while the middle wage stumbled from $25,900 to $30,800 and the bottom 10% has barely moved from an annual average income of $9,700 to $11,000. Recent analysis from the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) shows that wages at the top have grown even more steeply in recent times, with the top 1% average income rising from $298,000 in March 2011 to $382,000 in March 2013. The ruling class in New Zealand are literally leaving everybody else behind.

More recently our ruling class has taken even more steps to embed neo-liberalism, the kind of measures that lock the orthodoxy into place, make it immune to political changes and ultimately much more difficult to get rid of. Some of these measures include the trade and investment agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) that Jane Kelsey, Bill Rosenberg and Murray Horton have done so much work on; agreements that are designed to restrain how states can regulate, embedding presumptions around what regulation is supposed to achieve or rather allowed to achieve.

Another is the Reserve Bank Act, which governs how our central bank and, by extension, our money system, works. It is based on the principle of central bank independence – the idea that the money system should be insulated from political interference, as if the economy were somehow intended to be something completely separate from politics or democracy in the first place - an idea that is extremely political itself. A few years ago attempts to pass a Regulatory Responsibility Bill that aimed to embed light-handed regulation as a quasi-constitutional presumption were also part of this project of embedding. It never quite got off the ground, but more recently the creation of a Minister for Regulatory Reform (a role, of course, held by Minister-for-Everything, Steven Joyce) has revived this project. Neo-liberalism is the project of global finance capitalism. But our New Zealand rulers are not ideologically pure when it comes to trying all forms of exploitation.

Crony Capitalism

So, at the same time that we have seen the bedding in of neo-liberalism, we have seen a parallel rise in crony capitalism, a hallmark of National governments. Part of this is attributable to the inherent moral bankruptcy of the National Party Establishment and their dogged pursuit of profits and to repay their mates. There is now a pretty large list of examples:

On the one hand there are the hard-line Rightwingers of the Whale Oil/Collins faction, for whom neo-liberal ideology is an opaque cover-up for smash and grab corruption politics. The centrist and pragmatic Joyce/Kiwiblog faction have tended to be more effective at speaking to middle New Zealand and have successfully fronted a lot of the examples of crony capitalism that I have just mentioned, until their facing of Winston Peters in the Northland by-election. Then there is the Matthew Hooton/Simon Bridges faction; who have tried to model themselves on Dear Leader Key, but tend to make decisions that favour the oil or whoever-is-paying-Matthew-for-PR-advice industries. Now that Ponytailgate is making Key appear a bit of a lame duck, the battle for succession will no doubt cause further ructions in the Party.

One recent example of crony capitalism shows the true hollow nature of ideology, as it begins to undermine the institutions of embeddedness, as discussed earlier. Late in April 2015 it was announced that former Federated Farmers Chief Executive, and brother of the Finance Minister, Conor English, had been appointed as a monetary policy advisor to the Reserve Bank, raising questions about the Government’s actual commitment to the doctrine of central bank independence.

Settler Colonial Legacy

NZ is still battling with the legacy of its settler colonial past. There still remain significant outstanding unresolved Treaty claims, and for many Maori the transfer of wealth and resources to iwi under existing Treaty settlements has made little material difference to their day to day life. The legacy of settler colonialism is evident in the disproportionate representation of Maori in crime and unemployment statistics, as well as poor health and education outcomes. The neo-liberal model and the axing of State services exacerbates existing social inequalities, and the strongest response to this by the New Zealand mythmaking class has been to blame Maori for their situation and attendant poor work ethic.

We have fallen down a rabbit hole of social amnesia in which our own history is readily discarded and replaced with a dominant narrative of reactionary nationalist jingoism. We have rarely taken the time to remember New Zealand’s own settler colonial wars and the proud tradition of resistance practiced by Maori chiefs and tribes like Te Rauparaha, or the passive resistance of Parihaka. However last weekend (i.e. the Anzac Day long weekend) we saw record turnouts to the 100 year anniversary of Anzac celebrations, where young New Zealand and Australian men were sent off to Turkey to die by the British Empire as part of the great game of imperial folly which has characterised so much of New Zealand history. The NZ Labour Party was founded in 1916 by and large on the basis of opposition to conscription into this imperial endeavour. You wouldn’t know this from watching the Labour Party’s Anzac Day video, which ignores the struggle of conscientious objectors and the hard labour they faced for their opposition, including my own relative Archibald Baxter. It ignores the anti-conscription campaign of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS) in the early 1970s of which many in this room were a part of. And it ignores the wars to subjugate Maori only 50 years earlier. Instead this video and all last week’s “celebrations” fall into the familiar pattern of remembering the “sacrifice of our forefathers”, with no critical reflection at all.

Where Is The Country Going?

The path that I have described above, of embedded neo-liberalism, crony capitalism and historical amnesia, doesn’t sound particularly rosy. There seems to be no vision whatsoever from our ruling class, apart from seeking to dominate and exploit our land, labour and resources for personal profit or, where this is too hard, facilitating some of the bigger dogs to do the same but on a bigger scale. This kind of thinking is strictly short-term, and only serves the self-aggrandisement and political mythmaking of a corrupt few.

These directions are fundamentally unhelpful for workers or the country and we need to be working on fundamental shifts for a pro-worker and pro-people direction for the country. CAFCA is one of the organisations doing that, as are a number of unions. However the alternative voices for socialism are quieter now than they have been for a very long time. Part of this silence can be attributed to the corporatisation of NZ media and the stacking of those media outlets with anti-worker voices. On the one hand we’ve seen actions like the funding freeze on Radio NZ, the axing of TVNZ 7, the loss of actual journalists Carol Hirschfield and Julian Wilcox from Maori TV and the threat to remove Campbell Live from the airwaves (which has since become reality. Ed.). On the other we’ve seen the systematic dumbing down of what’s left, with basically all political commentary being ushered through a filter of privileged white males like Mike Hosking and Paul Henry, or infotainment like Seven Sharp replacing actual analysis.

In our own small, and dare I say it, reformist way, FIRST Union has tried to do something to counter this dominant narrative. We have adopted a strategy for the four years that we are currently in to focus our agenda on what we call decent work. The decent work agenda emerged from an International Labour Organisation report that was initially published in 1999, which saw decent work as being part of what was required to create a decent society. Decent work was proposed as a universal concept for all workers, that stressed the idea of basic rights but situated them within a broader economic, social and political framework and that took a truly global approach. As a union we’ve picked up on four aspects of decent work that we see as critical to addressing our situation here in New Zealand.

• Jobs for all. We have consistently spoken out on the issue of monetary policy and exchange rates, as well as the need for Government employment schemes when unregulated markets fail to deliver jobs. We have supported groups like Auckland Action Against Poverty and the Mangere Budgeting Service in the work they do in tackling the worst kinds of poverty in New Zealand and advocating for the rights of unemployed workers and against welfare cuts. We understand how important structural unemployment is to the ruling class, how maintaining a base rate of unemployment puts pressure on the wages and conditions enjoyed by other workers and undermines the struggles they have fought. We will fight these policies and ideology.
• A living wage. I have already discussed the ongoing wage repression felt by so many New Zealanders and their families, and this has broad implications on health and wellbeing. Too many New Zealanders struggle week-to-week and are forced to take out loans to supplement the weekly expenses, sometimes heading to venal payday lenders that often charge around 700% interest. We have actively supported the Living Wage Campaign, both in terms of resourcing and public support. We are proud to say that FIRST Union, like CAFCA, is a certified living wage employer. We have made huge strides in the past couple of years in organising in Pak’n Save stores around the country. Although we have not yet lifted these wages to the Living Wage, in many instances we have now brought Pak’n Save wage rates up by around $2 an hour.
• Safe Work. The most notable piece of work that we’ve undertaken on this theme has been our work alongside the CTU in the forestry sector. Forestry is NZ’s most dangerous sector and 2013 was an absolute disaster year in which ten workers were killed at work, four of whom were under 30. We pushed hard for an independent inquiry and together with the CTU we’ve been holding employers to account through prosecutions proceedings. But it’s not just forestry, we have been pushing health and safety concerns across all our sectors.
• Secure Work. We are all aware of the successful campaign that our friends at Unite Union have run against zero hour contracts in the fast food sector. We are proud to stand beside Unite in doing this work, and were more than ready to join them on picket lines around the country to encourage McDonalds to reject zero hour contracts. The mere threat of this taking place was clearly much too great and McDonalds folded before we even arrived! And we are also running our own “Secure Our Hours” campaign that looks at similar phenomena, such as low contracted hours, temporary work, labour hire and triangular employment relationships, casual work, seasonal work, fixed-term contracts as well as the “salaryisation” of low wage jobs. According to CTU research at least 30% of the NZ work is in some kind of insecure work and the figure could be much higher. We are also concerned with how growing rising work intensity (in the form of targets, box rates, scan rates, production quotas and so on) feeds into job insecurity.

As well as these four aspects of decent work we’re also campaigning on some of the bigger picture issues that are central to the neo-liberal paradigm. FIRST Union’s office has been the coordination base for the movement to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), an agreement that we see as a neo-liberal assault on the planet, its people and workers. It needs to be stopped. We are proud to have helped in bringing this issue to working people. Workers at our annual stopwork meetings in the smallest of NZ towns are asking questions about arcane trade policy that might have previously been consigned to rooms of men in suits with private school educations. And, most importantly, we’re proud to have contributed to the successful mobilisations that have taken place around the TPPA, particularly those on November 8, 2014, and March 7, 2015, both of which mobilised 10,000 Kiwis in 22 different towns and cities with the commitment to stop this deal. We are also proud at the mammoth effort we put into the campaign to stop the sales of State assets. And, even though we may have lost that campaign in terms of the sale of the assets themselves, our advocacy and the advocacy of many others helped in the education of workers around the country.

Conclusion

We need to celebrate all our small victories, especially when they are won under a hostile National government. There is a sense of renewal and excitement in my union, FIRST Union.  We are currently running an organising school to train five new organisers. As part of the school this group of trainees, together with some of our current organisers have just organised Pak’nSave stores in Tauranga, Papamoa, Rotorua and Taupo. Altogether our union recruited almost 2,000 new members into the union over the last three months. We achieved a great victory at Cotton On which tried to use new Government legislation to take away the right to meal and tea breaks. But the union movement can only ever be one aspect of a people’s front that can take the country from where we are now to where we want to be.  This front must:

• Include groups like CAFCA, and It’s Our Future.
• Link with the self determination movements of the Tangata Whenua.
• Address the issues of patriarchy, male violence and homophobia.
• Be part of the environmental movement, especially on issues of climate change, as Naomi Klein says: “This Changes Everything”.

Our programme has to be national and international.

It has to be Maori and Tau iwi.

It has to be men and women.

It has to be economic, social and environmental.

There is a glaring need for something to be done about housing.

We need to switch taxation from a Goods and Services Tax (GST) to a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT).

The programme has to be needs-first based not pander to the interests of capital.

Power

In the end, the thing that will determine where the country is going is power.

So what power does a group of people (many of us beyond our prime – but not our use-by date) meeting in a Presbyterian Church Hall in Christchurch have? We have much more than we think. Look at ourselves. Look at each other. Look at the networks that we come from. Look at our ability to organise. It is up to us and similar groups of people in this country and around the world to develop a counter-power, a counter-hegemony to the rich and powerful 0.1% that rule the world today.

Just like the Paris Commune of yesteryear, we see evidence of counter-power breaking our across the world; whether it be Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, on the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson in the US, the squatters and new trade union movement in South Africa, Foxtel workers in China. A number of years ago, a wise leader in an Asian country much larger than New Zealand and in much worse poverty said: “The road is long and torturous, but the future is bright.”  Let’s share his optimism, let’s continue our long march.

Be strong.

Kia kaha!