Ross Wilson to Labour Party Conference 2003 (Christchurch)

Christchurch, November 8, 2003

It is my honour and pleasure to once again bring warm greetings from the Council of Trade Unions.

I personally welcome this annual opportunity to address your conference.

In one respect it is talking to friends playing a different role in the same movement.

That includes fellow CTU Officers, staff members and colleagues from affiliated unions.

It is significant this year to acknowledge the Dairy Workers Union who have voted overwhelmingly to affiliate to the Party and play a more active political role.

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

It is now almost four years since Helen and Margaret came to our National Affiliates Council meeting and we made a joint commitment to work closely together in Government.

Helen said then that we should continue to campaign in support of our issues, and we have done so.

It has been a successful relationship, and a lot has been achieved for our shared constituency of working people.

And we are grateful for what has been achieved. That is what we worked for during the dark days of the 1990s. To elect a Government which respected and valued working people, and the value of unions in modern democratic society.

Significant steps have been taken, including repeal of the Employment Contracts Act, increases in the minimum wage, stronger workplace health and safety protection, improvements to ACC, paid parental leave, and the promotion of retirement savings, as well as many other measures which contribute to the social wage

And can I take the opportunity to acknowledge once again the strong working relationships we have developed with Ministers, MPs and staff. They are, I think, mature relationships based on a mutual expectation of substantiated advocacy for our respective positions.

I would like to particularly acknowledge and thank Margaret who so often has to take the flak from critics who have yet to come to terms with the reality that New Zealand's neo-liberal experiment ended in 1999.

At last year's pre-election Congress I noted that it was becoming increasingly clear that National had chosen to pick up where it left off in the 1990s.

That agenda was obscured, a little, by Bill English's ambiguous leadership but the election of Don Brash leaves nothing in doubt.

He is the National Party leader who has made clear that he supports:

• tax cuts for the rich
• cuts to the minimum wage
• privatization of everything, including the public education system
• an increase in the eligibility age for N Z superannuation to 70 years.
• time limited social welfare benefits - not to mention requiring unemployed workers to queue daily at their local post office ... if they can find one.

A National Party under his leadership is clearly committing itself to a return to the disastrous policies of the 1990s, and to political oblivion.

That is their choice. It should not divert us from continuing to develop the inclusive strategies of economic and social development which are grounded in the successful experience of other countries.

And there is a need for us to clarify for ourselves, more specifically, what it is we are committing to.

As a union movement we have claimed the right to social partnership with Government, and business; the right to be involved in the development and delivery of the economic and social development strategies which have the potential to create more and better jobs for our members, and their children and grandchildren.

We reject the neo-liberal model which excludes workers and their unions.

We have asserted the right, and are developing the strategies, to empower workers collectively to shape their own work environment and futures.

Those strategies include the health and safety initiatives, the skill and economic development programmes we are developing, the work/life balance strategies, and the amendments to the ERA.

But when we turn to focus on this main vehicle for restoring relative income returns there is now clear evidence that the ERA is not delivering on its stated objective of promoting collective bargaining.

The CTU has argued strongly for amendments.

Three years experience has shown that our assertion that the ERA was a modest and moderate law was correct.

And even that modest and moderate law has been undermined by Court of Appeal decisions and sophisticated legal strategies developed by employers.

The good faith provisions of the ERA have proved to be inadequate to challenge strategies by employers who:

• Actively induce workers not to join unions by promising them the benefits of union deals regardless of whether they join the union - the freeloader problem
• Go through the motions of bargaining without any intention of agreeing to a collective agreement
• Deliberately undermine collective bargaining when the clear object of the Act is to promote collective bargaining.

Unions have worked very hard over the past three years to try and make the Act work but we are not gaining ground in collective bargaining.

We have continued to experience the ideological and arrogant strategies of the many employers who undermine and show contempt for the ERA and unions, particularly towards unions whose members have limited bargaining power.

There is an urgent need for the Government to amend the ERA so that it achieves what it was intended to do, which is to promote union-based collective bargaining as international legal conventions require.

And we won't have truly left the ECA workplace behind until we have protections for vulnerable workers on the sale or transfer of a business, or the contracting out of work.

The CTU is not asking for these amendments to the ERA as some sort of political favour. We are promoting them because they represent the implementation of international legal obligations under ILO Conventions which require Governments to promote collective bargaining, in law and in practice.

And we ask that you see the predictable attack from business for what it is; political rhetoric.

We saw the bitter anger of business towards unions and the Labour Alliance Government in 2000 when ACC was re-nationalised, the ECA was repealed, and the minimum wage was increased.

And business's dire predictions have proved to be completely unfounded. In fact the ERA has made little change for many workers; the legacy of the restructuring, de-regulation and the ECA is still with us.

Yet the braying and threatening continues.

We'll once again see a hysterical campaign from employer organisations and opposition parties like National & ACT.

And once again they will be crying wolf.

The reality is that the amendments are all required to redress the bad faith behaviour of those employers who are still stuck in the Employment Contracts Act mentality of the 1990s.

They are the employers who still think that slashing wages and attacking unions is the key to business success.

It is those sort of attitudes which are holding back our productivity and economic growth.

And we hear the constant claim that we are different from other countries because of the number of small employers. Ninety-seven per cent of our employers employ less than 20 employees, the same percentage as the UK and Australia. But what must be recognised is that the other three per cent of firms employ nearly 60 per cent of the workforce. So a small firm, compliance-cost approach, is a very limited view on how to improve productivity and growth.

The CTU is challenging employers to put the past behind them and engage constructively with unions, and Government, in developing a higher skill, higher value sustainable economic base for a better New Zealand.

And that is why we have:

• Developed a training project to increase worker participation in industry training organizations
• Joined with the Government and Business NZ to promote a "Skill New Zealand" message to all New Zealanders
• Contributed, through our membership on the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board, to strategies to build our economy to a higher skill, higher value plane.
• Engaged with Business NZ in a dialogue on improving productivity in New Zealand workplaces - by building value rather than slashing labour costs.
• Developed a training partnership with ACC which will see more than 5,000 workplace health & safety representatives trained by May next year.
• Participated in industry training, and regional and industry development initiatives in industries such as the wood industry, the TCF sector, and the health sector.

And I think we can all feel pride in restoring hope for more than 6,000 young workers and their parents through the Modern Apprenticeship Scheme since it was introduced three years ago.

We accept the need to encourage an education and skills culture in New Zealand.

We understand the reality that many of our union members will not get significant real increases in income unless we can move our economy up several notches to a higher skill, higher value, level.

But we are at a watershed in the implementation of the growth and innovation framework.

A huge collective commitment is required if we are to ever achieve the higher skill, higher value economy which we jointly aspire to.

And it is clear that too few firms see the need to opt for a high quality/high skills agenda with its necessary focus on the interaction of people, skills and the organisation of work in the workplace.

It is equally clear, given the experience of the 1990s, that New Zealand workers will not be easily motivated to commit to a growth strategy.

From the CTU perspective there are several building blocks we could contribute to:

Firstly, there is a need to actively implement a learning agenda in the workplace. The Blair Government and the TUC are doing this very successfully in the UK with a substantial Government-funded project delivered through the TUC. It is based on the concept that workers are more comfortable discussing their learning needs (whether basic literacy or numeracy, or life long learning) with a worker adviser, than with their boss. The project has evaluated very well and could easily be replicated here.

Secondly, there is a need to provide resource and institutional attention to the dynamics of workplace organisation.

In Finland, Government-initiated tripartite programmes have led the modernisation and democratisation of workplaces to unleash the innovation potential.

Recognition of the essential value of labour has led to the improvement of working conditions and occupational health, as well as a quality of working life agenda.

This workplace modernisation has played a vital role in the transformation of Finland into a high quality/high performance economy.

The CTU is convinced that a similar approach has potential here.

Thirdly, we believe that we can provide leadership in implementing these necessary components of a sustainable growth strategy. No strategy will succeed unless we take the people along with us.

But a fundamental condition of our union support is that the benefits of growth are shared.

Not just in increased earnings from skill based pay systems, and through more productive collective bargaining, but also in measures which improve the work life balance for the thousands of workers who have been under pressure from the intensification of work and extra hours of the past decade.

It is important for the sake of our families and communities that we help people to get more balance back into their lives.

That is why paid parental leave was an important achievement, and why the Prime Minister's announcement on four weeks annual leave is such an important acknowledgement of the pressure on families in the 21st century and of the value of extra time for rest, recreation and family and community activity.

The CTU congratulates the Government on this very welcome decision. We take pride in our campaigning role in achieving it, and acknowledge the support we have had from MPs, and the active Progressive campaign by Matt Robson.

This is an excellent example of successful union movement advocacy on behalf of all working people.

And good employers know that workers with balanced lives are more productive workers.

We have also advocated for the New Zealanders who are casualties of the 1990s; for the beneficiaries have had no real increase for years, and for the working poor who are struggling on very low rates of pay. We support the indication from Government to use the strong budget surplus to address these poverty issues, and to ensure that everyone has a real opportunity to participate in society and decent work.

As unions we accept the challenge to negotiate fair conditions which provide proper rewards for skills, which eliminate discriminatory gender and ethnicity-related pay rates, which ensure safe working conditions and which allow workers to meet family and community responsibilities.

But we need a fair legal framework of rights to do it.

We still face a huge challenge in rebuilding our union movement after the blitzkrieg of the 1990s.

Two weeks ago we held our CTU Biennial Conference. As well as celebrating the wonderful diversity of the union movement today we endorsed strategy papers outlining the next step up in our development, both in building union membership and in building our contribution to economic and social development strategies.

The next step for us is to engage with Government and the question is whether as a labour movement, both industrial and political, we can develop a joint strategy for the high road to a high value social democratic economy, or whether reactionary business pressure will push us back towards the low road agenda.

In the past few weeks we have seen the resumption of extraordinarily bitter attacks on unions, including the bizarre performances by Deborah Coddington of ACT and Alastair Thompson the EMA Northern at the Commonwealth Study Conference presided over by the Princess Royal. It must have seemed like home.

But there are many other employers who have recognised the need to work together with Government and unions to make Government policies a reality.

I am confident that our work over the past four years has positioned the union movement to take up the challenge. I share Mike William's confidence that this Government, under Helen's strong leadership, has raised the prospect of Labour led governments continuing to build the social democratic agenda into the forseeable future.

To do that we need to work closely at all levels. We won't always agree but I ask Ministers, as most do, to be prepared to front up and debate the merits of some of the more controversial ideas which we sometimes first read about in the media.

There is a concern within the CTU that perhaps communication and dialogue between some Ministers and the core constituency of unionists hasn't been as good as it could have been.

The CTU-Senior Ministers Forum and the Palmerston North regional forum are excellent models.

It is through honest debate on issues that we will continue to build and broaden the social movement which will ensure the continued support for the social democratic agenda we are building together.

The CTU will be continuing to campaign and engage with you to influence that agenda as we work to build a better New Zealand for all New Zealanders.