It’s time for progressive activists to step up. The working class needs you.

On May Day – International Workers Day – we have launched a new union: UTU for Workers Union. Our mission is to build a working class, grassroots, campaigning movement to stop exploitation and end workplace abuse in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The international trade union movement is in a fight for relevancy to the majority of the working class. Decades of relentless attacks on the workers’ movement have been devastating.

In New Zealand, out of more than 1.5 million private sector workers, less than one in fourteen (7 pecent) are members of a union. If we exclude the large private companies, unionisation in the private sector is effectively non-existent.

More than half of the workers employed in the private sector do not even have the option to join a trade union nor be covered by a collective agreement.

Despite the good work the present unions do for their own members, the rest of the working class has lost ground in terms of income and protections.

Non-unionised workers have no power to improve their position. They are at the mercy of their boss.

As a result, when workers in non-unionised workplaces have an employment dispute, they must seek support from an expensive lawyer, lay advocates, or a friend. Most exploited private sector workers receive no access to justice. Unscrupulous bosses know this.

The increase in vulnerable migrants and widespread casualisation, along with the growth of labour hire companies and dependent sole contractors, has seen the number of precariat workers in New Zealand explode.

This has led to a culture of fear and isolation. As a result, workers’ power, incomes, job security and self-confidence have declined.

The situation is similar in most Western countries, and if we don’t shake it up, the international union movement in the private sector will descend into irrelevancy.

It is unacceptable that we morph into a network of staff associations for relatively better-off workers. That would be a betrayal of our history and all the working-class fighters who came before us.

A new activist movement
The old ways no longer work for the overwhelming number of private sector workers. The only question any serious worker rights activist must consider, is not if we protect and organise all workers, but only: how?

It is clear we need new forms of organisation.

I have been part of the One Union project group for the last three years. We have been actively trialing various models in our attempt to find a sustainable and effective way to meet the new challenge.

We believe we now have the solution. Today we announce the formation of the UTU for Workers Union.

The mission of UTU for Workers Union
Our purpose is to build a mass movement to stop exploitation – migrant and non-migrant – and end unchecked workplace abuse that non-unionised workers routinely suffer.

The use of UTU is deliberate. We summarise it in Māori terms – justice. When a victim is exploited or abused, their mana has been diminished and it must be restored. That is UTU.

As the first step, we have to actually help individual workers with their immediate problem. For the last year we have been providing representation to any worker from non-unionised workplaces who needs help.

The jungle of predator employment advocates and lawyers scamming vulnerable workers is sickening. They get screwed by the boss, and then again by their advocates, some of whom do sweetheart deals with bosses.

The advocate gets their fee, but the worker is forced to accept a few crumbs. Simply outrageous.

The good news is that when we have backed up our representation with a direct campaign, through picketing or media exposure, the exploitative boss has realised the power of the worker feeling they have got justice.

More careful in future
The boss knows to be more careful in the future. We have had some success in having bosses agree to ongoing compliance monitoring.

We have found that workers want to join a union. In almost all occasions, there is no union. If there is, they don’t use their resources to help non-members.

That might make sense if you look at unions as business units, but completely wrong if you see them as a justice movement for workers. There are only two categories of workers – those in unions, and those we must get into unions.

Up until now we have not asked workers to join us. From today we will accept workers as members and supporters.

Our membership is open to everyone, whether they are employees, or dependent contractors. We will help any worker who is in distress.

What must unite us is not what work we do, or who our boss is. Instead, we have to join together as a working class.

The old and true clarion call, “an injury to one, is an injury to all”, is as relevant today as it ever was. All unionists must fight for justice for all workers.

If any applicant is from a unionised site or sector covered by another union, then of course they must join that union. It must be noted that we are solely focused on the vast majority of non-unionised private sector workers who are exploited and abused in the non-unionised world.

By having an inclusive and broad strategy, we believe many workers and allies will step up to build a powerful workers movement dedicated to stopping exploitation and workplace abuse.

How do we rebuild working class confidence?
We can do this in three phases.

Help victims first
If we claim to be pro-worker, we have to earn the right. Our first priority is to resolve individual workers’ immediate problems. This is the most important thing to anyone. Support any victim, and they become a union ally – and in time, an activist.

We currently force exploiters to pay thousands of dollars of unpaid wages and backpay legal underpayments. We have prevented unfair sackings, stopped harassment and bullying, and won compensation and fair outcomes for hundreds of workers.

In the last year alone, we have won hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims. This is only the tip of the iceberg. We need more people to help. Until they do, exploitation will continue.

Our case work is now carried out by the One Union Trust, which operates in partnership with the union. The trust has a dedicated legal team of three lawyers led by a former senior trade union official.

Confront criminal bosses directly
We have a dedicated UTU Squad. We hold UTU Vigils for Justice actions directly outside the businesses and homes of exploiters and abusers. Every community needs a local UTU Squad.

We name criminal bosses and expose injustices on our union website, utu.org.nz, and our Facebook page, @UTUForWorkersUnion.

We host a weekly radio programme on 104.6 Planet FM, Wednesdays at 12.40pm. We tell the truth about these exploiters and abusers.

We organise online Action Station petitions to mobilise support for victims, and let communities know about their local exploiters.

Build solidarity
After a boss has been found to breach minimum employment standards, we monitor compliance and enforce legal minimum codes. Thousands of workers in small workplaces don’t get their minimum entitlements. We can fix that through constant vigilance.

We also monitor visa compliance. 350,000 workers are reliant on a boss for their visas.
Workers will feel safer by regular check ins. Over time, we will patiently build a more collective confidence in their workplace.

Migrant exploitation
The most exploited and abused group of workers are migrant workers on temporary visas. Any project to eliminate worker exploitation in New Zealand must include campaigns that focus on migrant workers. We are judged as unionists on our commitment to the most vulnerable members of the working class.

The Migrant Workers Association partners with us and leads this work. The One Union Trust provides practical case representation for victims. MWA and UTU spearheads campaigns that rally the community against specific cases of injustice. Their fight is our fight.

A call to action
Progressive activists have to step up now. We need action. Go to this page for 8 practical steps you can do right now.

Matthew “Matt” McCarten is a New Zealand political organiser and trade unionist, of Ngāpuhi descent. He has been involved with several leftist or centre-left political parties, most prominently as the leader of the Alliance.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

May 1st is International Workers Day, which is a good time to reflect on what’s happening with workers’ rights and industrial action under the Labour-led Government.

Of course, in New Zealand we don’t have a strong culture of celebrating May Day. You’ll barely find a mention of it in the media and the day goes unmarked by leftwing politicians and even most trade unions. May Day has become even more of an anachronism in recent years, with the decline of unions and the labour movement in general. Overt working class politics went out of fashion a long time ago.

This is discussed today by John Moore in May Day and working class politics. He says: “Is May Day an archaic event? This working-class day came to prominence at a time when class-centred politics was at the fore. During a large part of the early to mid-twentieth century, a mass working class movement existed, in the form of trade unions, labour parties, and a wider socialist and communist movement. However, in the later part of the twentieth century, working class politics was declared effectively moribund.”

Class politics is, however, currently enjoying a revival Moore says: “Even in places such as New Zealand, strikes and unions have become cool again. And even socialism and communism are becoming increasingly trendy amongst politicised youth.”

Certainly, a revival of working class politics can be clearly seen in the significant increase in strikes over the last year. For a pro-worker analysis of a current dispute, see Gordon Campbell’s Why we should support the junior doctors.

How to explain this revival of industrial action? Earlier in the year, Debrin Foxcroft took on this question, asking: In 2018 unions took to the streets to make their demands heard, but were they?

Former prime minister Jim Bolger is quoted suggesting that the rise of industrial action is reasonable and in fact just part of a global reaction to increased inequality: “I think what we have in New Zealand, mainly from white-collar groups, is significantly different than back in the 1970s and 1980s. What we have, in my judgement is a moderate, in fact very moderate version of what is happening across Europe where the people going on to the streets.”

University of Waikato labour and union specialist, Michael Law, is also quoted explaining that frustration with pay and conditions had been mounting for a while: “For younger people the frustration over wages has been compounded by the frustration over galloping house prices. If people are working long hours, not getting any increases in pay and the price of houses is galloping away from them and every week they are further behind then, you get a frustration and anger that either manifests itself by immigrating or leaving the industry.”

And CTU president, Richard Wagstaff also explains that an increase in industrial action was due regardless of the 2017 change of government, saying simply that “the largest collective agreements have come up for bargaining – the teachers, nurses and other healthcare workers”, and that “unions had been planning for the last two or three years to address the grievances being expressed by members”.

For a very good examination of the revival of worker militancy, see Massey University academic Toby Boraman’s recent article, Overworked and underpaid: the revival of strikes in New Zealand. Boraman points to a variety of economic and political factors that have produced what he says is “the highest number of people involved in strikes since the late 1980s, and possibly the most working days not worked due to stoppages since 1992.”

Boraman agrees with some analysis coming out of the National Party that “that government has raised expectations that wages will increase”, leading to workers being readier to strike in the belief that they deserve and can achieve better conditions and pay.

But he says that this is a minor factor compared with the reality of the economic squeeze employees have been feeling for a long time: “The [suppressed] level of government spending is a significant factor in causing the strikes simply because the government employs most workers who have gone on strike. Long-term neoliberal austerity has caused public sector workers’ wages to fall well behind those of most others.” Therefore, “it seems this is a ‘catch-up’ strike wave to reverse decades of stagnant or declining real wages.”

Despite assumptions to the contrary, Boraman also points out that this class struggle has a strong female component in New Zealand recently: “women have led the strike wave. Women made up the majority of participants in most strikes, and female union delegates were often at the forefront of disputes. Indeed, stoppages have mostly occurred in majority female occupations such as teaching, nursing and government sector work in general.”

But he doesn’t believe the current wave of unrest is in any way a return to “the alleged ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s”. Instead, “legal restrictions that outlaw most forms of strikes” and the fact that most industrial action is in white-collar industries, means there’s less likelihood of the country coming to any sort of standstill.

For a similar analysis, Ross Webb writes that “the strikes are a positive sign that organised labour can and will pressure governments when they promise transformational change” – see: The Strike Returns to New Zealand. This article puts the current wave of actions in an historic context, and details the variety of different industrial struggles that have been taking place.

Webb discusses the role of the Labour-led Government in dealing with the demands for pro-worker reforms, pointing to some of the progress: “increases in the minimum wage and the establishment of ‘Fair Pay Agreements’ across entire industries to prevent the “race to the bottom” and improve the ability of unions to bargain collectively”. But, questions remain about the extent of pro-worker changes, with Webb pointing to Labour’s broken promise “to repeal the “Hobbit law” introduced by the previous government, which scrapped a number of workplace rights for film workers in order to appease Warner Bros”.

In addition, “wider existential issues remain: precarious work, the continuing issue of technology and its impact on workers, climate justice and the ‘just transition,’ and the exploitation of unorganised workers (especially migrant workers) who remain largely out of the reach to organised labour.”

This issue of the “gig economy” and what it means for workers’ rights and conditions is dealt with very well by David Cormack in his January column, The crappiest gig. He says we shouldn’t be fooled by how wonderful this new style of working might sound: “We’re getting screwed and it’s so that those with power and money can entrench their power and money while at the same time reduce protections, stability and security for those actually doing the work. It’s called the “gig economy”, a name to make it sound cool and accessible.”

In many ways the “future of work” is looking rather scary, and perhaps something the labour movement needs to get to grips with: “The more we believe the ‘gig economy’ is just a new cool, convenient way for us to work on our own terms and not a concession of our rights as workers, the worse it will become. We have no bargaining power if we are competing against each other. If we come together as workers, cooperate as larger groups, then we can get better working conditions, better pay and consequently a better life for everyone.”

Union membership is still incredibly low – having fallen most recently from about 20 per cent of workers in 2012 to about 17 per cent in 2017. Could this Government help turn this around, and address its goal of ameliorating inequality? That’s the upshot of a recent piece by four New Zealand and Australian academics – including former Labour Minister, Margaret Wilson – who make the case that high levels of union membership leads to lower levels of inequality – see: How a default union membership could help reduce income inequality.

Here’s their main point about increasing union membership: “In our research we propose an innovative solution, drawing on insights from behavioural economics, which involves defaulting employees to union membership in workplaces where unions already have some members or a collective agreement. Once employed, employees would be automatically enrolled in the on-site union, but retain the freedom to opt out at least after some time.”

This Government is making two other important employment changes that are worth noting on May Day. The shift towards a minimum wage of $20/hour is being slowly-but-surely implemented. For one of the most interesting commentaries on this, see First Union general secretary Dennis Maga’s The minimum and living wage gap in closing, but not fast enough. He says: “New Zealand wages adjusted for the cost of living have fallen from sitting in the middle out of 23 OECD countries in 1990 to the fifth lowest out of the 36 countries in the OECD. We are also amongst the lowest for labour income share – this is the share that working people get of the nation’s total income, or the wealth their work produces.”

Maga has also written positively about the Government’s proposed new industry-wide bargaining model, saying that this offers “a potential opportunity to turn around our low-wage economy and regulate our lowest-paying industries” – see: Fair pay agreements: We can turn around our low wage economy.

And for an interesting discussion of the extent of the current low-wage economy, see Richard Wagstaff’s It’s not enough to grow the pie, workers need a bigger share. Here’s his main point: “work done by our economist Dr Bill Rosenberg shows that if working New Zealanders’ wages had grown with the pie since 1981 we’d all be $11,500 a year better off on average. In other words, while improving productivity is crucially important, sharing these gains and giving working Kiwis’ a fair slice of a growing pie is fundamentally important. And therein lies the key to the real problem. Even as we have grown our wealth as a nation there has been a systematic decline in the share of that wealth that goes to wage and salary earners.”

Even those at the bottom who were supposed to be getting a better deal from the historic pay equity settlement aren’t quite getting the progress that many expected – see Katherine Ravenswood and Julie Douglas’ Historic pay equity settlement for NZ care workers delivers mixed results.

Finally, May Day is supposed to be a celebration of international workers’ rights, but many foreign workers are still terribly exploited in this country. Newshub’s Michael Morrah has been doing excellent work in recent months to expose some of this – see: ‘Treated like slaves’: Overseas students claim they’re underpaid, overworked, threatened, and Chinese workers in New Zealand allegedly left without passports, food, toilet paper.