RUTH DYSON was thrown out of the Buller Trades Council. She’s not alone in claiming this distinction because seven other women were thrown out with her. Why were they thrown out? Well, those were the days before, if I may quote Dr Damien Rogers: “the battles over gender equality and minority rights were largely decided”. Ruth and her sisters were thrown out for no other reason than because they were women.
One of three contributors to the Mary Dreaver Memorial Lecture, an event organised annually by the Labour Party to celebrate women’s suffrage, Ruth recalled the misogynistic attitudes prevalent throughout the New Zealand trade union movement in the 1970s. Nowhere, she said, was that misogyny more deeply entrenched than in the region where she was living in the 1970s. The region so often mischaracterised as the “birthplace” of the Labour Party – the South Island’s West Coast.
Now, it’s important to remember that while union membership may have been universal back in the 1970s, universal representation was not – as Ruth soon discovered. The local trades council was supposed to be the place where elected delegates from every union affiliated to the Federation of Labour (FoL) met to debate the issues of the day: industrial, economic, political and social. Except, in spite of the fact that some of the FoL’s largest affiliates: the Shop Employees Union; the Clerical Workers Union; the Clothing Workers Union were overwhelmingly female in their membership, on the Buller Trades Council there wasn’t a single female delegate.
What’s more, Ruth told the roughly 100-strong audience at the Fickling Centre in the Auckland suburb of Three Kings last Sunday (22/9/13) not only were there no women delegates on the Buller Trades Council, but, as far as she and her trade union sisters could discern, there had never been a woman trade union delegate on the Buller Trades Council.
Well, this was the 1970s. And while the second wave of feminism may not have lapped past the doors of the Buller Trades Council, it had crossed the thresholds of Ruth Dyson and seven other young women trade unionists living in Westport. Inspired by the words of a visiting speaker from the Women’s Council of the Labour Party – Margaret Wilson – Ruth described how she and her sisters had badgered their unions into supplying them with official delegate’s credentials to the Buller Trades Council.
Not a little trepidatious, the eight young women made their way to the trades council meeting and presented the Secretary with their credentials.
“Get out!” Was his reply.
The women protested – showing him again the letters from their unions.
“I’ll let you know the correct procedures” snapped the Secretary. “Now, get out!”
Needless to say, the women were, eventually, seated: Ruth among them. But the point of her story was well made.
As Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and freed slave had put it more than 100 years earlier: “Power concedes nothing without a demand: It never did and it never will.”
ONE MIGHT BE FORGIVEN for thinking that a lecturer in politics – like Dr Damien Rogers – would be familiar with Douglass’s famous quotation. But then, one might also assume that a teacher charged with encouraging critical, evidence-based arguments from his students would be ashamed to append his name to an article in which assertion unsupported by evidence takes the place of critical inquiry and argumentum ad hominem is substituted for respectful and considered debate.
If, however, one factors in the information that Dr Damien Rogers is the partner of David Shearer’s former Chief-of-staff, Fran Mold, then his pre-occupation with the conduct of Labour Party President, Moira Coatsworth, and Labour’s General Secretary, Tim Barnett, is a great deal easier to explain. And, if we further factor-in Dr Rogers’ former career as an agent of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), then his penchant for seeing dark conspiracies, where others have observed only the democratic expressions of Labour’s rank-and-file, becomes much less of a mystery.
There might, however, be just a hint of method in Dr Rogers’ analytical madness. If his quite unjustified attack on the integrity of Moira and Tim is read as an appeal to Labour’s social conservatives – the people whom, five years ago, I dubbed “Waitakere Man” and “Waitakere Woman” – to assert themselves against a “Head Office” riddled with “political correctness” and “identity markers”, then it could be read as an attempt to rescue David Shearer and his “ABC” backers from the Party’s candidate selection process.
If that really is the motivation behind Dr Rogers’ extraordinary commentary (“War Already Won Threatens Labour”, NZ Herald, Page A38, 27/9/13) then it explains a great deal about Team Shearer’s singular inability to maintain anything like a healthy relationship with the Labour Party organisation.
Their first and most serious analytical failure was, of course, to mistake “Waitakere Man” for a type of Labour Party member – as opposed to a type of Labour Party voter. The political consciousness of the average Labour Party member is quite markedly different from that of the socially-conservative disgruntled former Labour voter. No “Head Office” conspiracy was required to secure the selection of either the Ikaroa Rawhiti candidate, Meka Whaitiri, or Poto Williams in Christchurch East. Labour’s rank-and-file have for decades been imbued with the values of feminism, anti-racism and the political wisdom of making a political party look as much like its core constituencies as possible.
The wooing of Waitakere Man and Waitakere Woman was never a matter of pandering to the very same prejudices that National had inflamed in order to draw them across the great political divide. To win them back, Labour needs only a political narrative which values their contribution to New Zealand society, and a policy platform which guarantees their economic and social security.
Dr Rogers argues that: “Changing the composition of the Labour Party will not change New Zealand society.” I do not believe he could be more mistaken.
Think back to the Buller Trades Council. Did the change in its composition help to change the New Zealand labour movement? You bet it did! So much so that, thanks to the efforts of young left-wing feminists like Ruth Dyson, the FoL was able, in 1974, to elect Sonja Davies to its executive committee, and in 1980 to adopt as official FoL policy the revolutionary “Working Women’s’ Charter”.
Did the election of Helen Clark to the safe Labour seat of Mt Albert – the first woman to win an Auckland seat for Labour since Mary Dreaver, herself, in 1943 – make a difference to New Zealand society? Of course it did.
If Dr Rogers truly believes that “the battles over gender equality and minority rights were largely decided elsewhere during the early 1980s” then he knows alarmingly little about the politics he is teaching his students.
It wasn’t in the “early 1980s” that the Labour MP for Wellington Central, Fran Wilde, introduced, fought for, and, against extraordinary opposition, succeeded in passing the Homosexual Law Reform Act (1986). And Louisa Wall’s private member’s bill enabling gay couples to marry was only passed this year.
Dr Rogers fundamentally misunderstands the nature of democratic party politics if he cannot see that ruthlessly subordinating all questions of identity in favour of “jobs, education and lifestyle” must materially diminish a party’s capacity to deliver its message to the multiple constituencies that make electoral victory possible. The complex mixture of interests and affections that makes up a party’s voting base needs to see itself reflected in the faces of the candidates it places before them.
The party that refuses to acknowledge this need for diversity risks not only electoral impotence, but wittingly or unwittingly contributes to the creation of a social climate which places no value on either defending or extending the rights of “minority” groups. And the moment such political indifference becomes accepted practice then the hard-won rights of generations of party activists will themselves become the target of precisely those social conservatives Dr Rogers seems so eager to appease.
Frederick Douglass knew from bitter experience what such acquiescence would mean for those who struggled to be accepted as truly free and equal citizens:
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
“Get out!” Can never be the right – or the last – reply to those struggling to enter a larger world of freedom.
You’re on fire these days, Chris. Really like the connections you’ve been making past to present, plus picking off these dead-heads like Rogers who have been rallying among the ranks of the fearful literate conservatives.
I like the way you point out where and how things have actually changed in the past showing that concrete improvements can happen again. I was at JustAction and noticed that you did not let some of the high ideals presented there away without the challenge to making a grounded real difference to real people. At least that’s what it seemed to me you were concerned about.
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