Tapu Misa: Tough times getting tougher for workers on low pay

The Tongan in the family has just discovered that he looks Muslim to most Americans, and that this is not a good thing at present when one is travelling in the US. He complains he's been put through the wringer at every US airport at which he's had the misfortune to stop, and can't wait to come home to saner, safer ground.

Huh, I tell him, you think you've got problems. I've been supermarket shopping, which is no picnic either.

On my last trip, someone apologised for the empty shelves and explained that it was all the fault of the distribution workers and their unreasonable demand for a 30 per cent pay rise.

I sympathised at this outrageous demand, only to find out later that the union says it has asked for 8 per cent.

Not that I'm suggesting this misinformation was put out deliberately by Progressive Enterprises, which owns the Foodtown, Countdown and Woolworths supermarkets. It's just worrying that a company that employs 18,000 people and has a 45 per cent share of the New Zealand grocery market could be so wide of the mark.

The dispute between Progressive and its 500-plus distribution workers and their union, the National Distribution Union (NDU), is shaping up as a critical last stand for unions. "If we lose this," says one union organiser, "we'll go backwards."

Employers, too, see the dispute as an ideological one. Alasdair Thompson, the chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, said that "if they were to pull this off then it could well lead to other situations where other employers who operate nationally see this sort of thing tried out against them".

Thompson is right about there being an ideological barrier, but it seems in this case to be with the employer.

The sticking point is a national agreement on which Progressive says itwon't budge. The union wants equal pay for equal work for its Auckland, Christchurch and Palmerston North workers. The Palmerston North workers are paid about $1 an hour more than their Auckland counterparts and about $2 more than Christchurch workers.

Last year, Progressive promised the workers a national agreement. But that all changed in November when it was bought by Woolworths Australia, which recently announced a 24.3 per cent increase in profits of $1.2 billion.

That backtracking led to a 48-hour strike, which led to the company refusing to negotiate on the national agreement, and locking out its workers on August 28.

There has been a fair bit of emotive language since. On TV3 a couple of nights ago NDU leader Laila Harre, was intent on reminding viewers that this was an Australian company, "a guest in this country" who was being asked to play fair with its New Zealand workforce.

Manukau City Councillor Su'a William Sio has characterised this as a David v Goliath struggle. "This is a fight between ordinary hard-working people and the mean-spirited stance by a billion-dollar multinational giant."

And the workers? One veteran told me: "I don't think this is about the workers. I think the company wants to break the union." Certainly, it's hard to see why else the company would have dug in its heels.

Ninety per cent of the 330 locked-out Auckland workers are Pacific Islanders, and there's a Pacific flavour to the picket line at Progressive's Mangere headquarters.

When I called in a few days ago, there was Pacific music, chicken sandwiches, and a group of Tongan men sitting cross-legged under a tarpaulin, drinking kava and surveying the picket line.

But beneath the outwardly cheerful atmosphere was a grim determination.

One delegate told me many of these workers live from one payday to another. "They get paid on Wednesday and by the weekend, they've got $20 or $30 left."

Siaosi has a mortgage to pay and two kids. Daniel tells me he and his wife and son live with his wife's parents, so they're not as badly off as many of the others.

One man and his wife both work at Progressive, so the family's taking a double hit. They have three young children and are getting by only with the help of extended family.

I noticed an us-and-them mentality. A group of workers blamed that on the company. Even the annual Christmas party is a sore point - a marquee with all the trimmings for administration staff, and a lunch, in January, for the plebs.

Siaosi, who has been there about 15 years, says the workers feel they're going backwards. Two years ago they won the right to earn overtime after 40 hours worked; now the company is proposing that overtime kicks in after 45 hours.

Siaosi is right about going backwards. According to the 2006 Social Report, Pacific Islanders like him are worse off than they were 20 years ago: less likely to be employed than in 1986 and twice as likely to be on low incomes than the rest of the population.

It's a problem Siaosi and his workmates have in common with many American workers, who celebrated Labour Day this month with a median hourly wage that has declined since 2003, despite a rise in productivity over the same period.

The problem is the decline in union power, which as David Sirota writes in the San Francisco Chronicle has seen unions bashed to the point where they're referenced with terms reserved for military targets. Yes, terms like "terrorist organisation" and "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States".

"It is no coincidence that as union membership and power has declined under withering anti-union attacks, workers have seen their wages stagnate, pensions slashed, and share of the national income hit a 60-year low."