Ross Wilson to 2001 CTU Biennial Conference

Speech to CTU Biennial Conference October 2001 Ross Wilson President

Welcome to Conference. It is hugely encouraging to see so many of you here.

This is your conference, and another chance for you to influence the direction and growth of our movement.

Conference is a time to celebrate our successes, and to analyze our failures.

We have a lot to celebrate after two action-packed years. Almost two years ago in this hotel we had the first National Affiliates Council meeting under the new leadership.

There we were, a somewhat nervous new CTU leadership, asking the National Affiliates Council, to break into groups and to tell us where they thought the New Zealand union movement should be by 2002.

To our relief our union leaders did so willingly and there was a high level of consensus in their views.

They saw one united trade union centre as being an important objective. ..and a very special part of this conference is to celebrate that unity.

With the coming together of the TUF and the CTU, the return to the CTU of unions like the NDU, and the affiliation of other unions to the CTU for the first time we have established a solid, and broad based critical mass from which to re-build our union movement.

And a union movement in which, I think, affiliates increasingly identify as part of, not apart from, the CTU which was another NAC objective.

But as well as being a celebration of our unity it is equally important that this conference is a celebration of our diversity and inclusiveness.

A celebration that we are workers as diverse as cleaners, university academics, nurses and doctors, port and railway workers, teachers, from a spectrum of jobs and industries in the State sector and the private sector and from increasingly diverse cultures and backgrounds and are coming together here as sisters and brothers in the union movement and working together on common strategies.

In doing so we are working on other NAC objectives.:

-strategies to build our membership, co-operatively between affiliates, and focusing in particular on unorganised sites -strategies to increase participation levels of workers in unions particularly Maori and Pacific workers, -strategies to build union education programmes to encouragegreater awareness and activism in workplaces. I think we are making good progress.

By implementing these strategies we are building our relevance to working people as organizations that can deliver for them and with them.

Unions have an important role to play in a democracy. When union rights are threatened, as they were during the 90s, democracy itself is threatened.

So we have to fight for our rights and for our place in our society. We have to become a campaigning moyement :

-campaigning to achieve better conditions of employment -campaigning to achieve our political programmes. -campaigning as the voice of working people and social justice in New Zealand.

We are moving in that direction and today we can celebrate the successes, so far, of our Fairness at Work Campaign.

The Employment Contracts Act is gone. ..within 12 months of the Labour-Alliance Govt being elected:

-ACC is being re-built -Health & Safety rights are being strengthened

And we can celebrate the other Government achievements because they are also our successes:

-Increased N Z superannuation levels -Reduced State housing rentals -Increases in the minimum wage -Programmes to start closing the gaps of disadvantage created by the Employment Contracts Act and other policies -Abolition of bulk funding in schools -New apprenticeship schemes -Easing the burden of student loans and many more.

The NAC also wanted us to achieve a greater level of solidarity and unity between unions, particularly around disputes.

From the first major dispute at the Port of Lyttelton almost two years ago we have taken the approach that if workers decide collectively to take strike action, we will respect that decision and support them ...and we will also playa role in organising and co-ordinating support from other unions.

Tragically the Lyttelton dispute also resulted in the very sad death of Christine Clarke who was run down by an arrogant businessman who had no respect for picketers rights or, apparently, for human life.

The light sentence from the Court is a sharp reminder to us that we have to fight for respect for collective rights and those who exercise them.

So we remember Christines support for those workers as a member of the Lyttelton community, and think of her two young children and partner Glen who, in a letter to me at the time, said:

"Christine will be smiling down on us. When things get tough representing those less fortunate use Christines beliefs as inspiration to get you through -she was an extremely special woman."

Since Lyttelton we have supported workers (nurses, cleaners, meat workers, wharfies, journalists, factory workers, casino workers, teachers) on picket lines allover the country and have organized support from other unions.

I have been overwhelmed, as have the unions in dispute, by the support and generosity from other unions. Thanks to you all. That is what solidarity is all about.

I should mention as well that we do try and resolve disputes as well as wind them up. Both Paul and I spend quite a lot of our time in that sort of mediation role.

All of this has contributed to the achievement of another NAC objective. .. A higher CTU profile among workers and the public. As we increase our level of activity we are able to increase our profile.

National Council also recognised the vital importance of maintaining political influence, while maintaining our independence as a union movement. Preparing countless submissions on a range of issues over the past 18 months, working with Ministers and officials, working the issues through with affiliates and lobbying MPs and Ministers on our views. ..

But its not our influence, its your influence. We only have credibility because we are representatives of a quarter of a million organized union members.

So, overall, I think we can feel completely justified in celebrating our successes over the past two years. they have been substantial and we have come a long way from that dark decade of the 1990s.

For me it has been a great two years. ..a steep learning curve but you have all been tremendously supportive. So thanks for the privilege of doing this very rewarding and fulfilling job.

I want to thank all of you, and all the thousands of union officials, support staff, delegates and members in our movement who have been working so hard and unselfishly rebuilding the foundations, and putting up the framework, for a stronger house of labour.

As I said at the beginning, we are here to celebrate our successes and analyse our failures. Ive spent quite a lot of time talking about our successes Being an elected official Im not going to talk about our failures. ..we dont have any!

We call them challenges. And there are certainly plenty of them.There is the challenge of organising effectively:

-Young workers -Maori workers -Pacific workers -Migrant workers -Women workers.New sectors -Part-time, casualised workers

The challenge of building capacity:

-Resourcing recruitment & organising -Resourcing participation -Resourcing a campaigning approach -Building regional activity

The challenge of increasing union density from the present 20% to beyond 30%.

By organising and building union density we are building our power and influence, both industrially and politically. ...we are building that power and influence so we can deliver for our members and their families!

We know from the bitter experiences of the past decade we have to work hard and relentlessly to build that power and influence.

We have learned to base our legal rights on the human rights standards of the International law laid down in ILO Conventions.

Given the hostility of the English Common law to unions we do need the protection of the law but we have learned. ..or at least I hope we have. that it is false security to be unduly reliant on the law.

There is no doubt that the ECA was intended to destroy unionism in our country. By destroying unions the National Party intended to destroy its political opposition. Well Bill Birch is gone, Jim and now Jenny have gone and were still here.

 

So we still have a very important job to do in building our strength as a movement:

-by building the level and activism of our members, and -by building a political constituency for the programmes which have been started by this Government.

The Conference programme has been organised around the sub- themes of "Celebrating Diversity", "Organising for Growth", "Fairness at Work" anti "A wider role for unions" to reflect our objectives.

I hope the conference will take us a stage further in focussing on these challenges and encouraging us to look outward to the communities we are part of.

We have to be out there re-establishing our legitimacy in the public mind. We have to re-establish the role and image of unions as a force for workplace and broader social justice.

In some ways the experience of the past 10 years has led New Zealanders to a greater understanding of the role of unions.

In a television phone-in survey just before the 1999 General Election 96% of callers agreed that the decline in living standards for working people in NZ was related to the decline in union power.

The challenge now is to improve living standards as we increase our power and influence.

Our Fairness at Work cam-paign has been successful but there is a lot more to be done:

As immediate objectives we have:

-Paid Parental leave -Improvements to the Holidays Act -Transfer of undertaking protections for vulnerable workers. -A vital focus for us after the destructive ECA era is to help workers get some control and balance back into their lives: to address the issues of excessive hours, intensification of work, stress and fatigue.

The Assistant Secretary of the ACTU Richard Marles has come over from Melbourne not only to convey fraternal greetings (and to confirm that the Aussies are still our mates) but to talk about the ACTU "Time for Work -Time for Life" campaign which has struck a real chord with the Australian public and has been the basis of the ACTU "reasonable [working] hours" claim to the Industrial Relations Commission.

We are intending draw on the ACTU experience and develop our own "Get a Life" campaign over the next year.

Building a new unionism:

With the renewal of our union movement we also have the opportunity to build a new unionism unions have always been agents for positive social change and our values will remain constant.

But the world is changing rapidly and we have to constantly change and adapt to make sure that we are unions which are effectively and efficiently empowering our members and collectively meeting their needs.

Do we know what members want to achieve through union membership?

In a comprehensive survey of what Australian union members want of their unions David Peetz in his book "Unions in a Contrary World" Noted several key requirements:

-That they deliver well or at least makes a good effort around the traditional issues of wages, conditions, rights, job security etc. -That they are democratic and listen closely to what the members are saying -That they co-operate with management in making the business successful -But are independent of, and not an apologist for management

So as well as focussing on organising and building our movement we must also think about the development of relationships with employers; forms of engagement which empower workers in their workplaces and enable them to influence their conditions of work in the broadest sense.

We need to be able to take advantage of the opportunities which a system of elected health and safety representatives (soon to be legislated by Govt) provides for us to build strong workplace organization which can help to get the accident crisis in many New Zealand workplaces under control. A strong workplace is a safe workplace.

We need to link that strong workplace organization with other programmes which we need to develop jointly with Government and employers to maximise upskilling and learning opportunities.

We need to distinguish between the good employers and the others and apply our industrial strategies accordingly.

Our members need constructive relationships with employers but they also need bad employers to be brought into line.

Look, there are positive reasons why workers should have a say in the businesses on which they depend, and in which they have the hands on skill and knowledge.

How many of you have worked in workplaces during the past decade where you have had to stand by and accept management decisions which you thought were stupid and which had adverse consequences for both you and the business on which you depend for your security?

In 1995 Business Roundtable Chair Douglas Myers said conditions in New Zealand were ideal for business, which had only itself to blame if it didnt flourish.

Since that time ANZ Bank research has shown that major public companies have managed to destroy $19 billion of shareholder value, out of a total sharemarket value of $50 billion.

And the brilliant Selwyn Gushing has wiped another billion dollars of Air NZ value in a few months.

Business dont have a monopoly on good ideas.

But we must also use that strength to influence wider issues of social justice rather than a narrower employment related agenda We must develop strong linkages to activist campaigning with community and social issue pressure groups We have a role to play in society as a voice for all working people. We must build the political constituency for the policies of the Government which have benefited working people over the past two years.

Those policy initiatives are only the start of rebuilding a new society, and they need time to grow. And with the world in its current state of tension it is important to reflect on the work of the international union movement in which we playa small but important role.

When world leaders gathered at the end of the Second World War and reflected on the appalling devastation of the war, and its origins in the economic, social and political instability of the inter-war years, they concluded that there could be:

-No peace without social and political stability -No social and political stability without fairer wealth distribution -No fairer wealth distribution unless the inherent inequality in the employer- employee relationship is redressed

As we know the ERA is one of our laws directed at balancing up that inequality and based on the standards laid down in the international law at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

We are privileged to have at Conference as a special guest, Patricia ODonovan, a senior official with the ILO, and a former Irish union leader.

Her presence here enables us to highlight the importance of labour standards which, like an international minmum code, set down the minimum standards of workplace decency which every country is supposed to subscribe to.

But many countries dont. And as globalisation has advanced so the greed of corporate business has intensified and extended inequality, exploitation and discrimination.

We are part of a global economy and we need to trade with the world. But along wlth the international union movement we need to campaign and to promote a fair and enforceable system of labour standards for the protection of workers, whether through trade agreements or other mechanisms.

The rules of the World Trade Organisation must change, and a system of fair trade developed which gives underdeveloped countries a chance and the worker in those countries protections and union rights.

We shall be considering some of these issues in the final session of Conference.

So fellow delegates, we have a very full few days ahead of us, and some very real challenges in the years to come. . We have to develop the strategies to rebuild a progressive, exciting, effective union movement not only for our members of today, but their children and-grandchildren.

That is a huge responsibility. Lets be courageous and make the big decisions to get it right.

Tena Koutou. Kia ora huihui mai tatou.