Unionism: back from the brink

With new industrial legislation due in the House next month, MATHEW DEARNALEY finds the sleeping giant of unionism about to reawaken.

Don Presland lives in the shadow of what diehard fans of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 see as an industrial Jurassic Park, its dinosaurs poised to terrorise the land again.

For the former Mangere Bridge boilermaker, however, the dark age was the past nine years, during which he believes New Zealand workers were in thrall to one of the world's most severe pieces of anti-union legislation.

As the country stands at the threshold of a renewed collective bargaining regime - although by no means a full circle back to compulsory unionism - the bridge symbolises past struggles for which Mr Presland feels no need to apologise.

"People will remember the strike, but don't make the link with their own conditions - they'll snatch the dough off the table but forget history," he says.

For a union movement which has lost half its pre-1991 strength of 600,000 workers to individual contracts with the demise of large industrial awards, a kiss of life from the new centre-left Government cannot come too soon.

Already unions are gearing up to recruit a new generation of members and to push into workplaces from which they have been excluded.

Mr Presland, who joined unions long before the contracts act - and who recalls eight weeks of industrial action in 1963 for a penny-an-hour pay rise - is vowing to "re-educate" employers who may have forgotten the art of wage-bargaining.

But he reassures them that the organisation he now heads as national president, the 56,000-member Engineering Printing & Manufacturing Union, has no wish to destroy businesses as that would only hurt his members.

And despite dire warnings of looming industrial strife from the Opposition, the panic button is not being pushed by some of the more pragmatic employers' leaders.

"The imminent advent of a new employment relations regime is not the end of the world," declared Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association spokesman Peter Tritt in the employers' official journal.

Noting that a new generation of "rampant individualists" had started work since 1991, he suggested that the collectivism championed by the new Government might seem as quaint to them as nursery rhymes.

Unionists, although full of hope about the Government they fought so hard to elect, are also under no illusions about the difficulty of rebuilding their movement from a surviving membership base of just 300,000 workers.

Northern Amalgamated Workers Union secretary Ray Bianchi says workers have become inured to wholesale cuts to conditions, and the new legislation will simply be a starting point on a long road to recovery.

Service and Food Workers Union secretary Darien Fenton, whose membership has slumped from 70,000 to 20,000 despite a major merger, also faces a daunting task.

She acknowledges the difficulties of organising a new generation of workers isolated in small workplaces, including cafe and restaurant staff once covered by a national award for 18,000 employees.

But she has been encouraged by phone calls from workers inquiring about joining the union in the belief that this has suddenly become "allowable," where previously they would have feared for their jobs.

The president of the Council of Trade Unions, Ross Wilson, reckons the union movement, even in its diminished form, remains the country's largest democratic organisation and retains the critical mass needed for renewal.

Mr Presland says the onus will now be on employers to learn how to deal with unions again after nine years when too many had preferred to dictate.

His own daughter, a professionally trained cook who earned $16 an hour with tax-free allowances before 1991, is now lucky if she makes more than $12 in casual employment.

Although Mr Presland was not involved in the raft of industrial disputes that made the Mangere Bridge an eight-year standing joke among Auckland motorists before its completion in 1983, he was happy to be photographed beside what many see as a notorious relic of union muscle.

He invites people to look past the bridge dispute to the cumulative benefits gained by workers joining common cause.

Construction at Mangere stopped dead for 21/2 years after a push by unions for redundancy pay. Interminable demarcation rows also marked the project.

But, says Mr Presland, the flow-on effects from such campaigns should not be underestimated.

"All the politicians, chief executives and newsreaders who get redundancy pay shake their fists at the boilermakers and others who fought for it to start with."

Redundancy pay is one benefit that has surprisingly thrived in recent bargaining, but others such as penal wages and meal money for working unsociable hours are distant memories for many.

But how hard unions will be able to fight in the new era is under debate.

Mr Presland acknowledges that it will be a challenge for the movement to judge how much ground to try to regain for fear of lessening the re-election chances of a worker-friendly Government.

National Party industrial spokesman and former Enterprise Minister Max Bradford fears the worst.

He uses Mangere Bridge as an example of unionists holding New Zealand to ransom for too long.

"It was just warfare for week after week over the silliest things," says the former Employers Federation chief who later headed the parliamentary committee that shepherded through the contracts act.

He says he is already receiving calls from employers complaining that union officials are turning up at their doors demanding access to recruit members in advance of law changes.

"A lot of unions are saying it's payback time - they are driven by vindictiveness, not what is best for New Zealanders."

The contracts act removed unions' access to workplaces unless they had members there, but the Government intends to allow them back to recruit willing workers as long as production is not interfered with unreasonably.

Mr Wilson says Mr Bradford has accused him of "running around uttering warning words" to employers but this is untrue and mischievous.

He describes as nonsense rumours among employers that a contract has already been drafted to force Auckland wharf firms into multi-employer negotiations in an early test of new legislation.

But he has suggested setting a minimum code of conditions on the savagely competitive waterfront, saying this would lessen the need for a multi-employer contracts.

Mr Wilson says Mr Bradford's claim that workers will lose freedom of choice under new legislation - by being required to join unions as a condition of being covered by collective contracts - is spurious.

Job applicants have little freedom of choice now if employers make it a condition of hiring them that they sign individual contracts, he says.

Mr Bradford, though, maintains that Labour is being "cute in the extreme" in saying it has no intention of bringing back compulsory union membership.

Labour's policy countenances the survival of individual contracts, as long as they are not "inconsistent" with collective documents.

It does not sanction a return to national occupational or industry awards.

The consistency of contracts policy is one on which the Employers Federation is seeking clarification.

A Government official confirmed to the Herald that the policy was being interpreted as permitting contracts with conditions equal or superior to those of collectives.

As under the Employment Contracts Act, strikes or lockouts are unlikely to be allowed until collective agreements expire, meaning no return to a pre-1991 provision permitting industrial action up to 60 days beforehand.

There will be no third-party arbitration, abolished in 1987 by the last Labour Government, but the right to strike for multi-employer deals will be a compromise between old blanket award coverage and the contracts act.

Employers fear this will undermine competition, but unions say they should strive for a market edge with high-quality merchandise rather than low wages.

Waterfront firms are particularly worried that the Government may tighten the definition of what are essential industries where 14 days' notice of industrial action is required.

If the definition narrows to those necessary for public health and safety (such as hospitals), this could leave the waterfront, dairy companies and meatworks vulnerable to instant strikes, without time to make alternative arrangements for perishable goods.

Mr Tritt counsels his employer members not to panic, saying the Labour policy prescription bears little relationship to the pre-1991 regime.

But Mr Bradford says ditching the contracts act, which he claims has lifted competitiveness, is tragic, coming just as other countries are enacting similar laws.

Unionists dispute that the act has enhanced productivity.

They cite a study by Victoria University economics professor Bryan Philpott showing an average growth of just 0.8 per cent a year since 1992, compared with 1.6 per cent after 1984.

Mr Bradford says comparisons should be made with an earlier period than the late 1980s.

The country was then in the midst of economic restructuring at the cost of mass layoffs.

Engineering union secretary Rex Jones says the Treasury painted unions as villains before 1991, but the recent under-performance of an economy badly in need of an expanded production base has expose the fallacy of the argument.

He claims it is not the industrial environment of the contracts act that accounts for most of the 278,000 jobs created since 1991, but natural economic growth, heavily reliant on consumption spending fuelled by overseas borrowing.

In 1990, there were 137 strikes and lockouts which cost workers $48 million in lost pay.

By 1998, disputes had dropped to 35 for a loss of just $1.9 million.

However, unions say the 1990s should not be seen as a time of industrial harmony, but rather as a soon-to-end era of repression.