Grant Morgan, Auckland
Any worker in New Zealand, if she or he heard Australian PM John Howard’s comment about people loving “labour market reform”, would respond: “What a load of rubbish!”
New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act, passed by the right-wing National government in 1991, brought between 300,000 and 500,000 NZ workers onto the streets in this country’s biggest-ever protests. That was around one in five adults.
This anti-union legislation remained the single most-hated law in the land. That’s why Labour, upon returning to government in 1999, had to carry out its promise to repeal it.
Labour’s replacement law, the Employment Relations Act, re-recognises unions, allows union officials a right of entry to job sites, gives some protection to collective contracts and makes a few other concessions to workers.
However, Labour’s law kept all but one of National’s savage restrictions on workers’ right to strike, and increased the already harsh penalties for defiance. That means it’s still illegal for NZ workers to go on solidarity, political or general strikes, or indeed any strike during the term of a collective contract.
The rising tempo of union struggles suggests that NZ workers could well defy Labour’s anti-strike law. Already, workers in a group of Auckland factories have gone on illegal strikes, acting on the lead put forward by our series of Unity leaflets.
The Workers Charter movement, launched on July 2 by an array of leftists and unionists, will be seeking to end the legal bans on the right to strike. All the indications are that we will get a massive hearing from workers. Those “labour market reforms” of 1991, which remain in law, are still hated to this day.
[Grant Morgan is the secretary of NZ Socialist Worker and a convener of the Workers Charter movement.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 27, 2005.
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