Because he once stood against Tom Skinner for FoL president, Danny Nichols will always rate at least  a footnote in bourgeois labour movement history.

Which is more than most other shop floor militants get, because so much of our working class history never makes the scholarly pages. But it’s a simple fact that to thousands of Hutt Valley workers, their Danny the Red is literally remembered as a central figure of the last century.

Dennis Allan Nichols came from a dirt poor London working class family to seek a better life in New Zealand. In the late 1960s he got a job at Ford’s Lower Hutt car plant and for a while just kicked back and enjoyed the job security, relatively good pay and nice climate. He had an easy operation in charge of the phosphate machine and like other class savvy British immigrants, he made a comfortable niche for himself in the softer kiwi job environment.

But as time went on, Danny  began to register the various injustices visited on less clued up workers in the unorganised plant. In those days there was no active union on site and foremen could and did sometimes clip a worker over the ear if he or she didn’t jump to it fast enough. Danny started making a few waves and began to revive the then defunct Coach and Motor Body Workers Union . In the course of this Danny got talking to union officials in the pub. Two of those officials were Ken Douglas and Pat Kelly. Ken suggested that the new fledgling car plant activists be delivered up to the Engineers Union. Pat came down to the plant and helped develop the Coach Workers into a radical independent job organisation. The main ingredients were a number of inexperienced but militant  Maori line workers and Danny’s extraordinary leadership.

Danny was an active short statured man with a quick mind and a loud voice. He came from generations of proletarian stock and personified shop floor attitude.

The largely Maori workforce warmed to Danny’s decisive uncompromising leadership and together they forged a formidable union team. With the help of Pat Kelly and Con Devitt, Ford’s Seaview plant became a bosses’ worst nightmare. Each of the separate departments – Body Shop, Metal Finish, Paint, Trim Line, Finishing Shop and Upholstery came to be policed by a senior delegate, supported by half a dozen line delegates. One union delegate for every four or five workers. On most days there was a senior delegates’ meeting at smoko and each week or so there’d be a wider meeting in one or other of the departments. Mass union bulletins came out regularly and short strikes over health and safety issues were frequent. If any Ford worker of that era had a grievance of any kind he’d go straight to his union delegate, with the expectation of getting rapid satisfaction.

At the top of this working class army as undisputed plant convenor general was Danny. His job on the phosphate machine didn’t take long and he spent most of the day striding around the factory looking for trouble. If a luckless foreman had left material blocking an aisle for a second Danny was on his case yelling like a banshee. The plant became so safe that you could wheel a twin pram through any area any time of the day or night. In the bigger picture, wage rates became standardised and raised above the award with due recognition for skill , experience and long service. Actual car assembly was a secondary matter.

It was into that environment that I was lucky enough to arrive as a young Maoist student dropout wanting to help bring on the revolution. After I’d spoken up at a couple of mass meetings Danny encouraged me to stand as a delegate and, rather earlier than was sensible I found myself senior delegate for the finish shop in Plant 2. Whenever I had a union problem I’d wander over to Danny’s machine and we’d talk about it and sort something out. From his advice and example I learned about unionism. Danny tried to persuade me to seek a year’s scholarship to Ruskin College, the British school of unionism. I turned that down, because I thought I’d learn more at Ford’s and never regretted that decision.

For some years Danny and I cooperated very closely, through all sorts of strikes and struggles. He was only at a loss once, when the cleaners took action against the assemblers. Us line workers had our smoko in the plant. The old cleaners wheeled round filthy urns of stewed warm syrupy tea and we’d have that out of paper cups where we worked. Then, most of us dropped the cups on the floor and went back to work. The cleaners had to pick the cups up and got sick of it. One day they put the tea out but no cups. So all of us straightaway walked over to have a meeting in the lunchroom, as we always did in any time of trouble. “I don’t know what we should do here” said Danny, addressing the meeting. ” The cleaners have a bit of a point”. “We should put the blame on the company!” said someone. “Ok”, says Danny, “that sounds like a good idea. Let’s see how we can do that” And the dispute became one over getting better smoko facilities.

The thing was to take the workers’ side no matter what. When I got myself sacked for a silly piece of bravado Danny called an all up meeting and the whole place went on strike for several days. We went to see Pat Kelly for a bit of support. He was pissed off with us. “Don’s been to the well once too often” he said. “Too bad for him”. “That’s as may be” says Danny, “but those workers are all staying out the gate and you must do something to help.” Rather reluctantly Pat dug into his bag of tricks and pulled out a nasty compromising document he’d been saving for a rainy day. With that, he went to the government mediator and had a quick word. To the amazement and indignation of the company, the mediator reinstated me forthwith. But if Danny hadn’t held the line, none of the rest would have followed.

All sorts of other disputes and carry on took place at the Ford plant but the point of me raising this bit of history is related to the Labour Party.

While an inspirational and unequaled leader on the shop floor, Danny was a pain in the arse when it came to left politics. As time went by, he increasingly scoffed at  socialist organisations’ right to existence. His alternative was the Labour Party, or rather, a mythical new improved Labour Party that would embrace militant unionism. Over and over again Danny insisted “All you little splinter groups are wasting your time – if you want to do something useful for the workers, get into Labour and push it to the left!” I don’t think Danny was ever actually a Labour Party member himself, but his constant top volume message on this subject made it very difficult for socialists. One thing the WCL had right was a clear characterisation of Labour as a capitalist party and  our different views on Labour became a very sore point between Danny and I.

Because of his huge and deserved mana on the shop floor, Danny was listened to by militant workers when he trotted out his “push Labour to the left” mantra. Although the WCL prevented the Coachworkers union affiliating to Labour, that was a rather hollow victory. On the shop floor, Danny’s “push Labour to the left ” fairytale prevailed.  Although I recruited blue collar workers from other sites to the Workers Communist League, I never recruited any Ford workers.

Looking back on the Mana by-election I was rather vividly reminded of Danny Nichols constantly saying we should move Norm Kirk’s Labour to the left.

Today’s ace unionist Matt McCarten says: “I hope my message to Labour got through – that they can’t take their supporters for granted and must stand for something that isn’t National-lite”, and  “If it did,”then taking three weeks being a carpetbagger in Mana was worth it.”

In my book its time to take that old stuck record off the turntable and smash it.

Don Franks

Below the big beaming blue and red billboards it was vacuous capitalist personality politics as usual.

Labour’s candidate claiming to be “working for Mana’ was Labour Party leader Phil Goff’s press secretary.

The best National’s Hekia Parata could produce for a slogan was a bastardisation of her own name – Vote Parata- “Heck yeah!”.

In the end Labour’s Kris Faafoi won the seat with 10,397 votes to  Parata’s 9317.

National came within 1080 votes of snatching a safe Labour seat  while their party is in government. Parata shattered Labour’s previous 6000-plus majority, turning Mana from the ninth safest seat in the country and one of Labour’s strongest bastions to a marginal one for the 2011 elections.

Faafoi had been the favourite to win the seat vacated when Winnie Laban left parliament for a post at Victoria University. In the end, he was only saved by a massive desperate effort from Labour’s electoral party machine. On the final day, even Phil Goff was out frantically knocking doors.

Despite all the hype voter turn out was low, around 50% .

While the big parties cared only for grabbing numbers, late entry candidate Matt McCarten stood out by raising some working class demands, like raising the minimum wage  to $15 an hour and an end to GST.

The Workers Party supported  Matt as a genuine working class fighter with hands-on experience promoting workers’ rights.

Since kick-starting Unite union in 2003 Matt has been a prominent and committed figure campaigning for low paid casualised workers.

It was also a plus having a high profile candidate to the left of Labour because in the Workers Party view, that  helps to highlight how similar National and Labour are. (http://workerspartynz.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/15-matt.jpg>)

Matt McCarten’s campaign team put in long hours of hard work  focusing on three points: increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour; making job creation the goal of economic policy; and replacing GST with a 1 per cent financial transaction tax.

These policies were made into a petition and taken to 12,000 homes.

This large-scale exercise brought campaign staff into discussion of some basic social issues with a mass of employed and unemployed workers. Half of the people door knocked signed the petition.

This encouraging petition support did not, however, translate into votes. While the Unite leader had expected to get “over 5% and hopefully closer to 10%”, in the end his 816 votes amounted to 3.6% of the vote.

In socialist terms, the Unite leader’s election effort had a built in political weakness.

Although standing against them from the left, Matt’s attitude to Labour was basically like that of a caring man to his erring but recoverable sibling.

For instance, his central election statement said, “I’ve been supportive of Labour’s long overdue realisation that the new right agenda implemented by their party and carried on by National has been a disaster for New Zealand. But I have been disappointed at their timidity over what the alternatives could be.”

The day before the vote he wrote, “I hope my message to Labour got through – that they can’t take their supporters for granted and must stand for something that isn’t National-lite.  “If it did,” said Matt, “then taking three weeks being a carpetbagger in Mana was worth it.”

This view of Labour as a party which, with a few hard  kicks in the arse, might be made to serve workers’ best interests was repeated by key campaign officials like Joe Carolan, who insisted:

“Labour are too soft, and are bereft of any tangible policies that make a difference to the working class”.

The Workers Party doesn’t share those views of the Labour Party.

Far from being too soft, Labour has at times been the favourite party of big business and very capable of slashing workers’ rights and living standards as we saw in the 1980s.

Today Labour is a socially liberal capitalist party where middle class professionals outnumber workers 10 to one. While the party was founded in 1916 on a section of the union movement it was never a revolutionary party despite some socialist rhetoric in the early days. In government Labour has never even remotely undermined the rule of capital. In fact Labour governing in the last decade enabled the rich to grow richer far more dramatically than the previous decade under a National government. (See The Truth About Labour http://workersparty.org.nz/resources/the-truth-about-labour/ for  the Rich list figures on wealth in NZ).

When the system is booming Labour will deliver some crumbs to the workers – as will National – and when it goes into its usual bust cycle they – like National – will attempt to shore it up at the expense of workers’ rights and living standards.  Attempting to lobby Labour in a leftward direction, therefore, simply doesn’t work.  All it does is, at best, confuse the workers to whom the message is presumably directed or, at worst, create illusions in Labour – illusions which will lead only to demoralisation further down the track.

Labour has few links to the working class these days, although pockets of pacific Island working class suburbs like Porirua and Mangere have maintained almost blind loyalty to Labour. Most of the working class no longer consistently votes Labour; many workers don’t vote at all , and just as many vote for other parties.

Another weakness of  McCarten’s campaign was lack of internationalism. Matt had initially intended to highlight policy which defended migrant workers’ rights. That policy never made it into the core campaign message. Sticking up for migrant workers may not be an easy vote winner in the short term, but from a socialist point of view its indispensable. A strong movement for workers’ power can only be built on the understanding that we owe more loyalty to our fellow toilers overseas than we have with our own bosses at home.

While Matt McCarten’s Mana campaign was broadly supported by the Workers Party, within the organisation there was debate on how best to engage with it. The majority of members wanted the party to maintain independence as an organisation and saw the risk of simply become foot-soldiers for a social democratic campaign. When some WP members became campaign employees the question of political independence became more complicated. A few argued that the experience of campaigning would in itself be invaluable.

The question of party independence while working on broader campaigns is not a new one. We have grappled with this in the anti-war movement and in trade union work. Inner party struggle is an uncomfortable but  positive thing. While the Mana campaign debate generated some heat it  also produced deeper understanding.

Matt McCarten’s candidacy in Mana was partly an experimental trial run for his aim of a ‘new left party’. Matt’s modest vote suggests that there is no base of support to launch such a party in New Zealand. Even among Unite union’s membership the political project has gained no traction. There is not space in this article to go further into the problems facing left social democracy – that is for a separate article – but it is very clear that as a movement in New Zealand and internationally it is in worse shape than revolutionary socialist movements which are beginning to win mass support.

This is a follow-up to the article in the last issue of The Spark where we welcomed the decision of the Victorian Electrical Trades Union to disaffiliate from the Australian Labour Party. This article looks at the problem of union affiliation to the NZ Labour Party; it is drawn mainly from our pamphlet, Labour: a bosses’ party.

Before the fourth Labour government, much of the blue-collar union movement was affiliated to the Labour Party. Since then however, very few unions have remained affiliated. The two main unions keeping the formal ties to Labour are the EPMU (Engineering, Printing, Manufacturing Union) and the SFWU (Service and Food Workers Union). In recent years, in particular since the collapse of the left social-democratic Alliance Party, several small unions (Rail and Maritime Transport, Dairy Workers and Maritime Union) have reaffiliated.

NORMAN KIRK : 6 February 1973

The main argument put forward by union leaders supporting affiliation is basically that it is better to be in the tent exerting influence on Labour policy than outside it simply opposing policy.

However, this argument is deeply flawed, as can be seen by looking at the actual history of union involvement in the Labour Party.

In 1918 there were 72 affiliated unions and just 11 party branches. In the 1919 general election, nine Labour candidates won seats, eight of them being active unionists. In 1938 three quarters of all union members were affiliated to the Labour Party; by 1971 it had fallen to just one half.

Even formal connections with the unions withered. For instance, after the 1951 waterfront lockout, in which the militant unions led by the wharfies were smashed, a Joint Council of Labour was set up involving the party and the right wing-dominated Federation of Labour (FOL). It met five times in the second half of 1952, after it was set up, but in the years 1967-75 met only four times. The fields it discussed became increasingly narrow. Basically, the parliamentary Labour Party was primarily interested in using the FOL to ensure the dampening down of any worker militancy, while maintaining the regular flow of cash from the unions into the party coffers and election workers every three years.

In fact, as early as 1937 it was clear that union influence was negligible. Peter Fraser, one of the central party leaders and later prime minister, told Labour Party conference delegates in 1937 that “he would be ‘dishonest’ if he let them believe that ‘any resolution passed compelled the government to do anything, regardless of the consequences’.”

Nor did workers all vote Labour. Even in safe Labour seats in the three elections 1978-1984 the Labour candidates in the thirteen safe seats averaged only 43 per cent of the votes of registered electors.

By 1972 only 27 percent of Labour MPs had active union backgrounds. By 1975, 49 percent of Labour MPs were businessmen, farmers and professionals and another 12.5 percent were public servants. (In 1919, not one single Labour MP had belonged to any of these categories). By the 2002 general election, of the top ten Labour list candidates, only one was an active unionist. The total number of Labour MPs with union backgrounds could virtually be counted on the fingers of one hand – and these were far from radical union activists. By and large, like the Labour bosses, these “unionists” see the trade unions as businesses and career pathways rather than as fighting organisations of the working class and schools for socialism.

The changes in the New Zealand Labour Party’s social composition and union involvement began, albeit slowly, from an early stage. In 1926, 60.5 percent of LP conference delegates were from affiliated unions. By 1945, after a decade of experience of the first Labour government, this had fallen to 47.2 percent. By 1955 it was only 33.8 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s, it continued to decline dramatically. In 1965, 30.2 percent of LP conference delegates were still from unions but by 1975 only 17.7 percent were. The experience of the third Labour government – that of Kirk and Rowling – certainly speeded up the decline in unionists attending LP conferences.

Moreover, while the number of unionised workers had expanded rapidly between 1940 and 1975, the number of union members affiliated to Labour through their unions actually fell slightly, from 185,500 to 184,700. Whereas in 1940 nearly 75 percent of the unionised workforce were affiliated to Labour through their unions, by 1975 only a little over 42 percent were. In 1950, just over 57 percent of all unions were still affiliated to Labour; by 1975 it had fallen to under 27 percent.

During the 1950s and 1960s there was a small increase in affiliation by the reorganised waterside unions and some labourers’ unions. However there was a much more noticeable decline in affiliation by biscuit, confectionery, clothing, iron and brass and shop workers, painters and decorators, carpenters, freezing workers, boilermakers, drivers, store workers and packers, and fire fighters. Today Labour-affiliated unions organise only about 15 percent of the unionised workers and a tiny percentage of the overall workforce. If you took away the engineers’ union, there’d be little left of union affiliation at all.

1951 union march

The decline of union involvement in the 1950s, 60s and 70s also gives the lie to the attempts of National in the 1960s and 1970s to portray Labour as dominated by unions. While much was made by National, the media and the pro-Labour left groups of union “block voting” at Labour Party conferences, the reality was that between 1963-1975 only 6.3 percent of all remits at Labour Party conferences came from unions.

The role of unions and unionists at Labour conferences, in any case, was not to fight for working class interests but, as long-time leading Labourite of the 1970s and 1980s Richard Northey put it, to assimilate the views of Labour Party conferences (i.e. the party leadership cabal) and transmit them back to the union members. John Wybrow, who was party secretary for part of the 1970s, was even more blunt: the role of conference was “to discuss policy, not to formulate it.”

What this meant was that the real policy was set by the top leadership – essentially the MPs and a couple of top party apparatchiks, sometimes with a few top union bureaucrats along as well – and then handed down to conference delegates for transmission back into the affiliated unions and local party branches.

This realpolitik of the Labour Party was the opposite of the naïve, fantasy view of pro-Labour “revolutionary” groups like the Socialist Action League (the remnant of which is today’s tiny Communist League) that LP conferences could or would reflect any radicalisation in the working class and force a shift left by the organisation, creating a “class struggle left wing” and split which would lead to a mass revolutionary workers party! These illusions were being sown even while the third Labour Government had started funding private schools, opposed liberalising abortion law, and opposed homosexual law reform.

Because the real motion was in the other direction – the pro-capitalist leadership transmitting its ideas and instructions down to the ranks through vehicles such as party conferences – no “class-struggle left wing”, as dreamed of by the pro-Labour left groups, was ever on the cards.

In fact what actually happened was that Labour Party conferences became increasingly dominated not by radical rank-and-file workers but by professionals. Basically, workers began dropping out of the Labour Party in significant numbers as early as the 1930s, especially after 1938 by which time they’d had three years experience of the first (supposedly “socialist”) Labour government. They never returned.

As workers have dropped out of the Labour Party over the past seven decades, the middle class has increasingly joined, albeit providing much smaller numbers. Thus the fall in individual membership has been especially dramatic. There were 51,000 members of local LP branches in 1940, still mainly working class, but only 14,250 individual members by 1975 and even less after the party’s election defeat that year. The largest losses of membership were in working class strongholds. For instance, from 1940-1975 branches in Grey Lynn, Otahuhu, Napier, Westport and Port Chalmers, all of which had been among the party’s largest branches, lost 87-94 percent of their memberships.

When the process of “modernisation” of the party was undertaken in the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely by Jim Anderton, membership rose to 50,000. However, the new recruits came increasingly from the liberal middle class alienated by Muldoon and attracted by the “modernising” project in the Labour Party.

This project was a precursor of the Blairite “New Labour” project in Britain, consciously shifting the organisation away from the working class. Indeed, as early as 1963 John A. Lee had noted that Labour MPs were now recruited “from among school teachers, lawyers, journalists, small businessmen, and from the trade union secretary class” rather than from ordinary workers. This layer of new middle class members provided the base of the neo-liberal economic reforms and the accompanying liberal social reforms.

A leading political scientist, Jack Vowles, has noted the following clearly observable trend since the early 1950s: “Party membership declined, most particularly that of blue-collar workers and trade unionists, and most steeply during periods of Labour government.” When membership rose in the late 1970s, recruitment came mainly from white-collar sections. Vowles conducted an in-depth study of the social composition of the Labour and National annual conferences in 1983 and 1988. He found that in 1983, one of Labour’s largest ever national conferences, only 19 percent of conference delegates were manual and service workers, a figure below their weight in the labour force. By far the largest group of conference attendees were professionals, making up 26 percent, while teachers made up 16 percent. By 1988, 40 percent of the delegates to Labour’s conference had university degrees, compared to only 20 percent of the delegates at National’s 1988 conference. A third of the delegates at Labour’s 1988 conference earned over $57,000, a very hefty salary in 1988.

Not surprisingly, Vowles notes that by 1988 Labour “clearly over-represent(ed) elites, higher-paid workers, and those with higher education at the expense of the larger mass of workers in less attractive jobs on lower incomes.” The blatantly anti-working class nature of Labour had an effect on how workers saw the party and how they related to it at election time. Thus Vowles writes that by 1987, “members of the traditional productive core of the working class were no more likely to vote Labour than any others. . . and more likely not to vote at all. Labour’s working class losses to non-voting were offset by gains in the middle class.”[62] That this trend has, with some ups and downs, basically continued can be seen in the historically high non-voting figures for the 2002 election: 25 percent of the electorate did not vote. Abstention was highest in working class areas; in the Maori seats, for instance, it was almost 50 percent.

After the experience of the first three-four years of the fourth Labour government, membership collapsed again, to a mere 11,000 by May 1988 and possibly less than 4,000 by 1994.

Although membership rose again in the late 1990s to possibly over 10,000, middle class layers continue to dominate within this small remaining party membership. This is also reflected in the Labour list at election time, the list being dominated by academics, lawyers, managers and other members of the professions.

The Labour Party, like any respectable capitalist party, seeks – and gets – corporate funding. Big business spends millions of dollars backing Labour because it knows it can be relied upon to serve its interests. In 1999 Labour won the elections and formed a coalition government with the Alliance. In recognition of Labour’s thoroughly capitalist credentials big business gave just as much to Labour as to National for electioneering. Labour’s total declared donations came to $1.1million while National’s were $1.2. The Act Party got $805,000. The Engineers’ Union gave $80,000 to Labour’s campaign, big dollars for a union, but this was just a tiny drop in the bucket for the Labour Party. At a time when unions were in dire straits that money could have been much better used on union campaigns and organising resistance to the attacks on workers’ rights. In 2002 the Labour Party surpassed National, raising $1.6 million in election donations, mostly from big business.

The Labour Party in recent years, certainly from the late 1990s until 2008, has been the most well-funded party. Not content with big business donations, Labour also receives substantial funds from the public purse. In all, the extra-parliamentary Labour Party organisation appears to operate on a budget of about $2.5 million per year. Compared to this, the Parliamentary Service provides the parliamentary wing of Labour with $5 million in Party and MP Support alone. The Labour parliamentarians also receive about $12 million worth of Services to MPs, and Labour ministers in government received nearly all of Ministerial Services’ staffing budget of over $15 million. These lucrative resources greatly overshadow the party organisation’s finances.

When the Labour Party is overwhelmingly funded by business and the state – with the sort of funds unions could never match – is it not clear who calls the shots? Funding sources alone indicate how little sway unions have on Labour policy. However, if unions have little influence on Labour policy, Labour certainly has substantial influence on union policy. This influence is utterly woeful – it is all about getting unions, especially affiliated unions, to lower their horizons, to not undertake industrial action (especially when Labour is in power) and to not do anything that may rock the boat for Labour. Union affiliation therefore subordinates workers’ interests to the interests of the Labour Party, a party which is utterly dedicated to managing the capitalist system and draws its leaders from the technocratic and managerial elites within society.

The list of anti-worker laws introduced by Labour is long. To cite a few: it was the Kirk Labour Government that issued injunctions against the Drivers’ Union in 1975. This was one of the first major uses of injunctions in industrial disputes. The 1984 Labour Government intensified anti-worker legislation with the Labour Relations Act, making injunctions against workers and their unions a powerful weapon in the bosses’ hands and enabling employers to bring huge damages claims as in Tory-ruled Britain. This legislation was the forerunner to National’s Employment Contracts Act.

The experience of the fourth Labour government indicated how totally powerless affiliated unions were to prevent the biggest attack on workers’ rights, pay and living and working conditions since the Depression of the 1930s. Union affiliation to Labour hamstrung any attempted fightback by workers – the affiliated union officials, as Labour Party members, were always expected to put the interests of the top Labour leadership ahead of the interests of the working class. And they did.

The leaders of the remaining affiliated unions have to answer a question: are you going to put the interests of workers or the interests of the capitalist Labour Party first? If you are going to put the interests of workers first, then you simply cannot remain affiliated to Labour.

The full pamphlet, including sources for figures and quotes, can be purchased from the Workers Party for $3 or downloaded at: http://workersparty.org.nz/resources/the-truth-about-labour/

In July this year, the Victorian branch of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) took an important step forward and disaffiliated from the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Over 85% of those who took part in the vote voted to disaffiliate. Dean Mighell, the secretary of the Victorian union, told the paper Green Left Weekly, “Our members have watched over a long period of time as the ALP has attacked their union. . . They like the idea of their union being politically independent and putting their interest first and not the interests of any one party. We didn’t get any sense that members don’t want us campaigning on political issues that affect them. But they don’t see themselves as wedded naturally to the Labor Party.”

Affiliation hinders workers

Mighell noted the affect that being affiliated to the ALP has on unions campaigning for their members, saying, “What I’m bitterly disappointed about is that the union movement only seriously campaigns when the conservatives are in power. In reality, we’ve got conservatives in power now.” The union “looked at how we achieve political change for our members and what the most effective way was to do it”. They decided that they would be much more effective politically by ending their affiliation to Labor.

The process in Australia which provides the background to this disaffiliation is neatly described in the September 10 newsletter of the Socialist Party in Australia. They note that the long period of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments saw systematic attacks on workers, bringing about growing working class disillusionment with Labor and questioning of the usefulness of union affiliation to a party which was attacking their wages, conditions and living standards.

“Since the Hawke-Keating ALP governments of 1983-96,” the newsletter records, “the relationship between the ALP and the more militant unions has slowly begun to unravel. The ALP now stands for privatisation, user pays, and a general diminishing role for the public sector. Unions are expected to sell these cuts to workers on behalf of the party. This is the role that the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) plays today.

“The past 20 years has not only seen the party shift to the right but it has been emptied out of its working class base. It lacks even the most basic level of democracy and it is now just as connected to big business as the Liberal Party. These developments have not gone unnoticed by some sections of workers.”

The newsletter also notes that the Victorian ETU has regenerated itself in the past 15 years, from “a stale branch into a dynamic, strong organisation that is full of active members.” This change in the union in turn brought about “growing pressure in the branch to ditch the link to Labor and this was proven by the overwhelming vote to disaffiliate.”

NZ Labour and the unions

In New Zealand, a process of disaffiliation of unions from the capitalist Labour Party began much earlier, during the fourth Labour government in the mid-late 1980s. Only two significant unions, the Engineers (now the EPMU) and Service and Food Workers (SFWU) remained affiliated. Their leaderships continued to act as conduits for the economically right-wing politics of the Labour Party to be filtered into those unions.

Since the demise of the Alliance party as a significant political force, several small unions have unfortunately drifted back towards Labour, most recently the Maritime Union.

In the next issue of The Spark we’ll look at how poorly union affiliation to the NZ Labour Party served workers historically and why no unions should remain attached to a party which is dedicated above all to managing capitalism.

The Dominion Post warns of a malicious workers’ enemy currently lurking in New Zealand.

What “it” supposedly “wants to see (on workers tables) are scraps of stale bread and cups of cold water.” Along with “the power and the phone cut off, holes in the roof, and the car up on blocks in the front yard.”

“Nothing delights it more than the sight of padlocked factory gates, and the sobbing of laid-off workers is music to its ears.”

According to Dominion Post columnist Chris Trotter, this inhumanity embodies none other than the revolutionary component of the political left.  He specifically cites the Workers Party as an example.

According to Trotter:

“The more the National Party cuts back and hacks away at the workers’ economic and social rights the better the revolutionaries like it.

“The far Left is always at its unhappiest when Labour is in power. In no time at all they’ve got the power and the phone reconnected, filled up the fridge, got a bit of a fire going in the grate, slipped a couple of pizzas in the oven, and cracked open a few cool ones.” (From The Left, Dominion Post 12/12/2008)

Chris may have forgotten that it was under Labour that Mrs Folole Muliaga tragically lost her life when her power was cut off.

He has also forgotten – or is unwilling to acknowledge – the last Labour government’s promotion of privilege at working people’s expense.

On July 21, 2006 the National Business Review (NBR) published its annual Rich List. The list contained the richest 187 New Zealand individuals and 51 families. This super-rich group had increased their wealth by just over $3.7 billion in the past year. That increase is as much as the entire wealth of the entire Rich List back in 1992. The people on the Rich List now have wealth estimated at over $35.1 billion.

By the time the last National Party government went out of power in 1999, the Rich List had 135 individuals and 36 families, with wealth estimated at just over $9.8 billion, so the growth of the fantastically rich has speeded up under Labour. The graph of the rate of growth of wealth by these parasites is therefore interesting. Under National in the 1990s it went up relatively modestly, and then after Labour entered government in 1999 it curved dramatically upward. The rise in the 2004-2005 year – when the super-rich got over $9 billion richer -makes the upward curve especially pronounced.

By contrast, during the period that Labour has been in power since 1999, wage rises have averaged between 2 and 3 percent per annum, barely keeping up with inflation. Some years, real wages – what you can buy with your pay – have actually fallen. Median household income grew by a mere 13 percent between 2001 and 2004, while the super-rich saw their wealth increase by 75 percent in those same years.

Meanwhile poverty remains endemic, especially child poverty. The number of people living in “extreme hardship” has risen from 5 percent of the population to 8 percent under the current Labour administration.

The above three paragraphs are an excerpt from the Worker’s Party published book The Truth about Labour, by Daphna Whitmore and Philip Ferguson.

The Truth about Labour concludes: “as we’ve noted here, time after time workers’ living conditions and democratic rights have actually got worse under Labour governments. Our experience under National, Labour and all the other capitalist parties points to the need not only for a new workers’ party but a new kind of workers’ politics.”

The Workers Party has been consistently putting that line of argument since its formation, in our magazine, on line, at meetings and throughout our recent election campaign. As a well-informed political correspondent, Chris Trotter cannot but be aware of that. But instead of addressing our actual position, Chris finds it easier to invent an opposite idiotic position and then attack that.  Thus, he sneers:

“The election of a National government is always the Far Left’s equivalent of Christmas. Overnight, their world is transformed. All the old and familiar class enemies are restored to their proper places, and all of the old banners and placards can be taken down from the shelf, dusted-off and returned to service. “

Of course, some placards have been in unbroken service since 1984, such as those opposing Labour’s anti-worker GST. But as protesters all over the country can attest, during the last 9 years of Labour government we’ve had to make and display a great many new banners and placards. Like the ones we painted when Labour supported the US bombing of Afghanistan. The ones demanding Ahmed Zaoui be released . The ones against Labour’s Jobs Jolt, the ones demanding paid parental leave and  the many opposing layoffs and low pay. Or the ones against the recent police Terror Raids – which Chris Trotter defended.

Chris Trotter is at pains to differentiate and counterpose “the far left” and “workers”. During my 37 years in the far left I’ve been unable to help noticing that most of us are workers.  Members of the left who aren’t workers tend to be tertiary students, as Chris himself once was. Leftist students go various ways after completing their formal education. Some continue various forms of political activism and some leave politics altogether. A few, for reasons best known to themselves , crawl beneath the fence and offer their skills and services to the other side.

Continuing with the New Zealand employers’ labour-flexibilisation drive, Prime Minister John Key has announced the introduction of a 90-day probationary employment bill that will allow new workers to be sacked without appeal, and it will come into force in March 2009.

What it means for workers

Those whose conditions will be directly attacked are the employees who are or will be in their first 90 days of employment at firms employing less than 20 people.

Slightly more than 30% of employees are employed in firms with less than 20 employees. The Council of Trade Unions has observed that of all employees, approximately 100,000 are in the first 90 days of employment, with a small employer, at any one time.

At the introduction of the probationary period slightly under one-third of new workers will have lesser conditions imposed on them. New employees will form a greater proportion of the workforce as a result of the higher labour mobility created by the probationary period.

While this is significant in terms of loss of rights, lowering of workers expectations over time, and the production of more class differentiation across the workforces of different sectors, other
sections of the workforce are being indirectly attacked as a collective. The probation period will produce a general downwards shift in an environment that already has a low level of job security.

What it means for employers

While the majority of workers are employed by firms with more than 20 employees, the majority of enterprises employ less than 20 workers. Over 90% of enterprises employ less than 10 people. At the expense of workers employed by small firms, the probationary period will hugely benefit these small capitalists who have increased their influence in the employers’ associations.

Due to the competition that exists between capitalists it is likely that larger firms, including monopolies, will soon move into lobbying for the probationary employment periods to be extended to their own list of anti-worker rights. They were defeated when National’s former Industrial Relations spokesperson Wayne Mapp failed to pass the original version of this bill in parliament in July 2006. It may not be until National’s second term that an extension to 90-
day coverage is sought, but the new `softer version’ 90-day bill is likely to be the thin end of the wedge. The left cannot be lenient on small capitalists. With larger business interests, they have a common interest in driving down workers’ conditions.

The Labour Party’s role

Inside and outside of government the Labour Party has shown a general opposition to the introduction of a 90-day probationary period. Correctly, Labour Party opposition leader Phil Goff has criticised John Key for putting parliament into urgency in order to pass the 90-day bill and other legislation.

However, the left should not help translate Labour’s position into political support for them. There has been a proliferation of casualisation/flexibilisation during the last nine years of Labour
government. Unregulated franchises and temping agencies, for example, have flourished. Restructures, partial redundancies, and closures have characterised the last period of the fifth Labour government, so much so that they had to enter debates with National over schemes for laid-off workers. When in power, Labour kept many of the features of National’s Employment Contracts Act and it is likely Labour will either completely fail to repeal future National Party legislation, or will only make minor amendments.

Left intervention

The passing of the 90-day bill should help cement broader ideas for the workers’ movement. Sections of the working class that are not directly affected by changes must, in their own interests, defend the sections that will be affected. There should be no political leniency for the section of small capitalists that can function as the Trojan horse for bigger interests. There should be no cultivation of support for Labour despite its better position on this particular issue.

Coupled with the crisis in the financial sector, the introduction of legislation such as the 90-day bill forms a basis for genuine and immediate socialist and left-union intervention in the industrial arena. Heightened awareness amongst working people, and the inability of bourgeois parties and many top union leaders to fight it out on the pavement, makes it possible for the socialist left to play a key role in a generalised fight-back against sackings, partial redundancies, and closures. Pickets, strikes, and occupations are being put on the agenda.

During the 1990s under the National government union membership fell by 50 percent. In 2000 just after Labour came in to office 69 percent of the public sector workers were covered by collective agreements and 21 percent of workers in private sector jobs.

Did that situation improve during nine years of “a worker-friendly government”, as the CTU leadership describe Labour?

Not at all. This year 59 percent of public sector workers have collective agreements, and a mere 10 percent of private sector workers.

The table below shows the grim reality.

And while the public sector collective agreement coverage declined, it is still significantly higher than the private sector.

A really serious trade union movement would look at assisting the private sector through subsidies from the much better off public sector. We need a union movement that takes the interests of the whole of the working class. That’s the sort of solidarity that would help build up unions in the private sector, which is where exploitation of the working class originates.

The end was swift. Stepping down on election night Helen Clark ended 16 years as the Labour Party’s leader and nine years as Prime Minister. As Labour’s longest serving head, she was one of its most capable and helped shape the organisation into an urban liberal capitalist party.

Clark personified the new type of Labour politician. She came from a middle class farming background and was university educated. She studied politics and lectured for a few years at Auckland University, then headed straight to parliament in 1981.

In 1984 Labour won the elections and launched Rogernomics. There was not a peep of opposition to this rabidly neo-liberal programme from Clark. Later on she would try to distance herself from that period but as David Lange once quipped, Clark “was so dry she was combustible”. According to Michael Basset, who was a minister in that government, Clark begged Roger Douglas to return to the finance minister’s role in January 1990 when the party was rife with internal divisions over Rogernomics.

By 1987 she was a cabinet minister, and in 1989 held the important Health portfolio. She sacked the elected health boards and closed down around 20 hospitals with the sort of gusto that would make any Act MP today proud.

In 1993 she became leader of the party by ousting Mike Moore with the time-honoured method of the knife in the back. Unfortunately for Clark Moore’s vanity wouldn’t let him die a quiet political death, and he haemorrhaged resentment all over the house. The messy takeover left Clark’s popularity rating close to the margin of error for years to come. In 1996 she was nearly toppled by Phil Goff, but she managed to hang on through sheer determination and a new hair do. While Muldoon’s grizzly mug, and the porcine proportions of Lange had never affected their popularity, Clark’s bowl hair cut and makeup-less face were the subject of endless public comment. The sexist scrutiny never entirely went away but her popularity grew with each makeover and in 1999 Labour won the elections and Clark became prime minister.

The new Labour and Alliance coalition had promised to repeal the anti-union Employment Contracts Act. They did that, but the Clark years can in no way be described as a revival of unionism. She kept in place most of the restrictions on strike action and while union membership stopped declining it generally failed to expand. Strikes became more rare each year and the pro-Labour union leadership failed to find a way forward. Whimpering “vote Labour” for decades was never going to be the basis on which to build a strong workers’ movement.

Clark clearly had a desire to make history and she had dreamed of becoming New Zealand’s first woman prime minister, but that prize was Jenny Shipley’s. While Clark’s leadership was seen as a sign that women’s rights were advancing in New Zealand, and a number of top posts  were held by women, the gender pay gap remained almost unchanged. Overall, the Clark years were not a period of significant progress for women.

When it came to causes like pay parity or paid parental leave Clark was no trail blazer. Reluctant to even introduce paid parental leave, she proposed a pitiful six week payment. While a campaign outside parliament was building, and inside the government the Alliance Party was promoting legislation for 12 weeks paid parental leave, Clark’s response was to say it would be “over my dead body”. In 2002 the 12 week provision was introduced, and five years later it was extended to 14 weeks. Eventually Clark even talked of extending paid parental leave to 12 months but quickly ditched that idea at the first sign of the financial crisis.

While Clark’s government introduced measures to ease the pressure on the working poor with the Working for Families tax cuts, there was nothing for the most severely impoverished. National’s extreme benefit cuts imposed in 1991 were never reversed by Clark’s government. Throughout this period of significant economic growth, 200,000 children languished in poverty. Their parents were mostly beneficiaries. Meanwhile corporate welfare grew. Despite the common perception that National was the party of tax cuts, it was Labour, not National, that gifted the corporates with tax cuts. Clark  cut company taxes from 33 percent to 30 percent in 2007, an echo of Labour’s company tax cuts of 1988.

While the people on the Rich List saw their wealth grow by 300 percent under Clark, the government’s “closing the gaps” policy was short lived. It was supposed to narrow the disparities between Maori and Pakeha but was shelved early on. Labour’s hold over the Maori seats waned as people began to question the value of loyalty to the party. Clark’s handling of the  Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 was uncharacteristically clumsy and was seen by Maori as disenfranchising and arrogant. When the newly formed Maori Party won 4 seats in 2005 Clark was reluctant to engage with the party and referred to it as “the last cab off the rank” at coalition talks. There was a growing sense among Maori that they had been taken for granted by Labour for too long.

Clark was socially liberal but not a champion of full equality. So Muldoon’s anti-abortion legislation remained on the books, while doctors simply ignore the backward restrictions.  Civil unions were established but whether this becomes  a step forward or a block to full equality is yet to be established.

The campaign to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour was fought outside parliament by Unite union, and supported inside parliament not by Labour but by United Future and New Zealand First. By the time Labour enacted a $12 minimum, three years had passed and the cost of living had soared.

Critics and admirers all agree Clark was a capable manager and leader. Few people could have pleased both warmongers and peaceniks as Clark did. She showed what a close relationship there was with the US when she  signed New Zealand up to the “Coalition of the Willing” in the invasion of Afghanistan and sent in SAS forces. She just as effectively positioned New Zealand between the competing US and European powers on the question of Iraq, keeping the US happy with a token involvement in Iraq while not going in boots and all kept her on side with the Europeans. At home this enabled her to maintain an anti-war façade.

Clark’s government has been well supported by big business.  With Labour occupying the political “centre” National had little option but to adopt most of Labour’s policies to recapture this ground. In the end Clark’s liberal capitalist party was usurped by Key’s liberal capitalist party.  One prime minister moves out, another steps in, seamlessly.

Before the election, NZCTU President Helen Kelly had much to say about the two main parties. On April 13th she told the Labour Party Congress:

“Working people have been given the chance to get back on their feet with this government. This is not just because of good policies. It is because we have a Government made up of people who care about workers, who understand the difficulties they face, and who try to make things better.”

Kelly was not ­ quite – absolutely obsequious in her praise of Labour, adding:

“Of course this does not mean that we live in paradise! There is more to do. And workers are really feeling the pinch at the moment with high food prices, rising petrol costs and high rents and mortgage payments.”

Then, even this mild admonition was hastily qualified into nothingness, with the soothing:

“So we need more change and with the continuation of a Labour led government we know that will happen. Labour is the Government with a proven record of change for the better and we need more of it.”

And, after the vision of heaven ­ the warning of hell:

“We have seen National’s industrial relations policy and it is dramatic and will have a major negative impact on working people.”

“National’s plans for industrial relations are the same as in 1991″.

Just before I began writing this, I took a look at the NZ Council of Trade unions website, to see if there was any comment on the election result. Still, after two weeks, not a peep. As we supposedly teeter on the brink of another 1991! It would seem that if National’s plans for industrial relations are really the same as in 1991, so too are the plans of the CTU. Determined inertia. Remember when the top leaders refused to take up calls for a general strike to defeat National’s Employment Contracts Act?

If National is poised for launching a major negative impact on working people, wouldn’t it be the task of union leaders to start rallying and mobilising opposition from day one?

In fact, John Key has already met CTU leaders. Business is going on just as usual; CTU heads know and practice only the narrow strategy of themselves lobbying the government of the day. Mass organising is anathema to them. Even explicit criticism of the former bogey man is quietly put aside; you can’t very comfortably have polite chitchat with someone over morning tea and then call them a bastard in the afternoon. For top union leaders there is really only one difference between Labour and National; Labour offers them more individual career rewards in terms of safe Labour seats. Apart from that, it’s just another day at the office.

Of course, while all this mutual backscratching goes on, workers rights, relative incomes and living standards continue to fall away. The last few years have seen the greatest growth of income inequality in New Zealand’s history. A central problem of unionism today is top union leaders’ servile accommodation to capitalism. When praising Labour in her speech to their congress Kelly said:

“We know that when the party manifestos come out, there will be a stark difference. Labour’s manifesto will contain policies that continue to make New Zealand a good place for all to live in and actually for business to operate in (Labour’s achievements in building successful businesses in this country is also well worth noting)”.

Union leaders know that the idea of a party capable of serving workers and bosses equally is bullshit. When a majority of workers realise the treachery and act on it civilisation will make a huge advance.

The Workers Party has been rationally assessing the two main political parties for many years. This cartoon appeared with an article in The Spark February 2007 on the similarities between Labour and National.

Whereas a considerable section of the left had illusions in Labour and delusions about National, our analysis has proved to be sound.