If only public service Unions could have been this brave when John Key was in power

1. One of the reasons people are striking is the low wages and high living costs of basic necessities and in Auckland there is major onslaught of bad decision making, that started with Rogernomics, wrecked havoc under the Key years of immigration and Supercity routs, and now Labour is going in the wrong direction and not looking at the practical reality of what ordinary people’s day to day lives involve such as the cost of public transport in Auckland and how long it takes to get anywhere.

   For example this is how long it takes on public transport from a wealthy part of Auckland to the airport. (I have already posted about how long and how much it costs just a family of 4 going two stages return on public transport aka 1.5 hours and over $60 if you have to buy 4 HOP cards). Or from places like Kaukapakapa which often have cheaper rents who have no journey available at all.

   So first it takes over 6 hours with AT to get the airport if you need to arrive before 8am to catch a flight or go to work there, as you have to start the night before. But if you can arrive to work much later in the morning then…

   they can do it in 1 hour and 48 minutes and it will cost you $21.30 one way or $42.60 return plus the $10 hop. Yep that journey to work costs you a cool $52.60 for one day of travel or $223 for the week.

   Imagine that if you are on the living wage and around 1/3 of your income goes on public transport as well as nearly 4 hours of your day. So that’s nearly a 12 hour work day door to door and a 40 minute walk return.

   The AT journey also relies on you walking 40 minutes of it.

   Here it is, from AT. They handily also have an uber link as even the computer can see it does not seem likely someone would want to do that journey from a very popular area of Auckland, but how is that solving congestion!!!!!

   They do not mention ferries maybe that is quicker and cheaper, who knows!

   Ngataringa Road, Devonport to Auckland Airport, Auckland Airport
   Departs at 6:36 am
   1hr 48min
   802X SKY HOP $21.30
   HOP $21.30 | $7.94 (child) | $20.45 (tertiary) Cash $23.50 | $9.00 (child)

   Ngataringa Road, Devonport
   994 metres, 15 min
   Walk to 187 to 192 Bayswater Ave, 192 Bayswater Ave
   UBER
   fare
   Taxi
   fare
   6:51 am
   802X
   Bayswater To Mayoral Dr Express
   Ritchies Transport
   Departs from 187 to 192 Bayswater Ave, 192 Bayswater Ave
   Stop 3546
   7:19 am
   Arrives at Wellesley St and Albert, Wellesley St West near Albert St
   Stop 7091
   Wellesley St and Albert, Wellesley St West near Albert St
   undefined metres, 1 min
   Walk to Wellesley St and Albert, 21 Wellesley St
   7:25 am
   SKY
   Downtown To Airport Via Mt Eden Rd
   SkyBus
   Departs from Wellesley St and Albert, 21 Wellesley St
   Stop 7001
   8:20 am
   Arrives at International Airport Arrive, Stop D International Terminal
   Stop 2010
   International Airport Arrive, Stop D International Terminal
   277 metres, 4 min
   Walk to Auckland Airport, Auckland Airport

   What I’d like to know is why Auckland Transport is the third highest priced service for public transport in the world and is so crap and nobody seems to care about how 54% of rates go to them as well as a significant amount of fares if you use their services.

   What is driving strike action is that people need more and more money to pay for basic costs which under the deregulation and profit based NZ system we have got high prices and high profits and low quality offerings.

   How the F can we get people out of cars, when we have the highest priced, most grossly management and consultant heavy transport agencies, but fail to pay reasonable wages to those who do the grunt work aka trains and bus drivers. They also have the most pathetic service available.

2. New Zealanders deserve a National government. Country of morons and jerks.

3. I’m pretty quick on the attack of Labour and their middling tweaking type policies, but I agree, strategically these particular Unions are not helping any slow stumbles to a potentially fairer and more inclusive economy by slamming Labour so early in the peace,
   But as for the idea that they are doing so “With a female left wing PM who is pregnant in power”,…eeek.
   Really not sure about that statement or sentiment. I mean, I guess its ‘chivalrous’ or something, but, you know, I’m sure you’d think it was seriously condescending if someone from National or Stuart Nash threw it into their musings.

4. PSA…the compliant enablers of National’s hate campaign. Fully embraced the ‘kick them when they are down’ philosophy of Key, English, Bennett and Brownlee et al.

   If I were in charge, I’d be ignoring the whining of the most guilty. Only after the most badly affected of their victims have had their needs addressed would I even think of giving them the time of day.

   By which time some of them just might have grown their backbones back.

   Oh, the irony.

5. Bomber you are suffering from historical amnesia in demanding that Nurses should have struck against National, rather than embarrass the Coalition in front of the right as unable to control strikes.

   The ranks of all the public sector unions are due massive wage increases to catch up with the deficit of the last few decades at least since the 1980s.

   The union leadership that holds back workers to serve the bosses are the problem not the workers. Throughout modern history the union leadership has acted as the agents of the bosses in the union movement.

   It was the most radical unions, such as you laud above, with strong rank and file democracy – the miners, wharfies, railway workers, construction workers etc., that challenged the union bureaucracy and broke with the state arbitration courts in 1908 to for the Red Federation.

   That led to a showdown at Waihi and the general strike in 1913 smashed by Massey’s Cossacks (farmers as special cops) and the military.

   The infamous Labour Party was formed in 1916 to steer the now tamed labour movement onto the parliamentary road.

   But workers and poor farmers were still a force and their protests and struggles during the depression forced the first Labour Govt to enact a reform program to insulate the economy and provide social security.
   But that didn’t stop it from turning on the unions during the war and after the war when workers fought for better conditions.

   Labour’s colors changed from pink to puce (dragging the red flag in the mud) with the mood of the bosses. It sent workers to the imperialist war and subordinated labour to the Cold War falling in behind the US ‘new world order’.

   Then it was the wharfies locked out in 1951 and their allied unions (mostly ex-Red Fed) strike action in support which forced the Labour Party into a passive bloc with the Nats who also used emergency regulations and the military to smash the lockout after 151 days. That split the labour movement with the breakaway TUC under Jock Barnes outlawed from the FOL under the sell-out rat FP Walsh.

   One of the prominent wharfies victimized after the ’51 defeat, Bill Andersen, ended up a leader of the union movement in Auckland. He used to say that after ’51 the unions clung to the Labour Party because it was the only party able to help workers. The deal was better conditions for industrial peace. So strikes were OK against national but not Labour.

   He admitted after 1991, when the Nats brought in the ECA in a deal with CTU head Ken Douglas to block a general strike, that he had been mistaken in calling off the industrial action at Marsden Point in 1984 to help a Labour victory. The union pressure should have been maintained against what turned out to be an extreme right Labour Govt.

   Relying on handouts from Labour by maintaining industrial peace, weakened the unions, and turned them into beggars not fighters. To rub it in, Douglas’ justified his refusal to act on the majority union vote for a general strike in 1991 to stop the Act, saying “he could work with both Labour and National”.

   Douglas later stated his rational for the existence of unions – to increase labour productivity so that it could be fairly shared by labour and capital.

   In other words Douglas was echoing the philosophy of the Labour movement from the time of the IC&A act of 1894, introduced to conciliate (class collaboration) and arbitrate disputes (the Court made wage ‘awards’ provided the economy and the bosses could afford them.)

   This philosophy of state arbitration has underpinned Labour’s approach to industrial relations from the start, and every Labour Govt has tried to keep it in place. It required a balancing act between labour and capital overseen by the state. It was broken by the Nats for the first time in 1991 with the ECA deregulation of the labour market, and the abolition of compulsory unionism.

   The Clark Labour Govt partially restored the key role of state intervention by amending the ECA with the ERA in the 2000s to shift the balance back slightly toward the unions. But membership remained voluntary and the unions never recovered their former influence.

   National jerked that balance back towards the bosses under the Key regime, pushing individual contracts, excluding unions, 90 day fire at will etc. So while the Nurses who went on strike in 1991 against the NACTs ECA to defend their own pay and conditions, when the union movement was in much better condition to mobilise for a general strike, doing the same against the Key Regime had many barriers to overcome.

   If you want to blame anyone for their failure to strike then, rather than now, the first to blame is the Labour Party that has used the union bureaucracy to maintain the historic deal between labour and capital that rewards labour only if capital can afford it.

   Since this paternalist state regulated approach has repeatedly failed to meet the needs of workers, and prevented any real shift of power in favour of workers who produce the wealth, by putting profits first, why should workers remain trapped in that antiquated industrial relations system?

   What you are advocating is the same old state arbitration that serves the interests of capital that has been kept alive in some form since 1894. The Coalition is obviously going to rebore the Act in the form of new state conciliation and arbitration mechanisms.

   If the nurses fall for the excuse that Labour is contrained by fiscal responsibility to offer no more than the present offer, they may get something, but the unfair system of industrial relations will not be challenged. The class collaboration of the Labour Party to pacify workers in the interests of profits will not be challenged. The sell-out role of the labour bureaucracy in bed with the politicians will not be challenged. Fiscal responsibility which is being used by the Coalition to ration out spending that does not put pressure on profits will not be challenged.

   Most of all, 100 years after the defeat of the Red Fed and pacification of the labour movement by the formation of the Labour Party, will not be challenged.

   Its clear that whatever the Coalition wants to do it is surrounded by well established right wing institutions that will fight to the death to make workers pay for the failing capitalist system.

   Climate change changes everything as Klein put it. Sustainable economic growth, renewable energy, reversal of climate change is a precondition of social security. It will not come from any government with both feet in the camp of finance capital which speaks out of both side of its mouth. Moreover, as the global crisis hits and climate catastrophe comes closer, no capitalist govt is going to seriously challenge the status quo. A death sentence for the biosphere and our species.

   Such radical change can only come from organized labour which has the power to challenge the death wish of capital. And the way to revive the unions as the economic power house is the means. That will not happen until workers have fought for what they need now by striking for basic social reforms, rejecting state labour regulation, and uniting all strikes and struggles into one massive workers movement that takes power out of the hands of capitalists and puts it in the hands of working people.

   • That should be a blogpost in its own right. *thumbs up*

   • Spot on!

     The Big Question though….how bad will things have to get before the working class majority assert themselves, and we recreate a socially and environmentally responsible system ? We seem a long way off (especially here in the sleepy Shire).

     The Sixth Mass Extinction continues apace.
     Whilst I have faith the planet will repair itself eventually, the opportunity for humanity to remain a part of that future is dwindling at a similar rate.
     When ecological collapse begins to impinge on our species ability to survive and reproduce, it will already be too late I fear.

6. This is a copy an email sent to an address supplied by the CTU but it keeps getting kicked back…I wonder why.

   Hi Richard Wagstaff,

   I never trusted you when you caved into Roger Douglas a few decades ago, when you did deals with Ruth Richardson when she took over, lets hope your dealings with Richardson’s old boss pans out…and that your promise of a better deal works out this time around, thirty years too late I might add… have you really become a born again trade unionist? I will always stand firm in my belief in good trade union practice but I’m afraid my belief was badly damaged when I saw the way the PSA behaved during the Roger Douglas era and since.

   Peter Wheeler
   Ex-PSA Central Districts Chairperson and PSA Organiser.

7. MWU members have been locked out, shit on, fought back and are still standing in the worst of the worst companies. And what they tell me is they support any group of workers fighting back ; I don’t detect resentment, just maybe a tiny bit of frustration as they face their bosses still offering 1.5% pay increases. But they will support workers who strike. As they always have.

8. The so called “left” wing trade unions have been infiltrated and weaponised for precisely this purpose for when Labour gets in government. Just as James Shaw is their man in the Greens working to sabotage the party from within. Wonder how and who does this then read this article:

   NEOCONS Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

   In 1974 Britain’s intelligence services plotted the overthrow of their own elected government which they had convinced themselves with their own lies had been infiltrated by KGB agents from Moscow whom they, themselves had invented.

   As revealed by West German intelligence officer Hans Langemann in a 1982 Der Spiegel Magazine article titled “Victory for Strauss,” throughout the 1970s Crozier facilitated “a transnational security organization,” that helped to successfully replace numerous labor, liberal or centrist governments with ultra-conservative ones. Working alongside right-wing elements of business, the military and police in France, Britain, Switzerland and the United States, a variety of tactics had extended to “Covert Financial Transactions for Political Purposes”… “Organizing public demonstrations…” “Carrying out international campaigns with the aim of discrediting hostile personalities…” “Recruiting writing contributions by certain, well-known journalists in Britain, the U.S. and other countries,” “Ensuring a lobby in influential circles…” and the establishment of offices “with full-time coordinators and operational plans for London, Washington, Paris, Munich and Madrid.”

   article:https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/06/26/neocons-russia-1/

9. Hi Martyn – The Problem of Auckland
   Your article is excellent

   I spent a few years in Auckland. It is a lovely piece Aotearoa. But it amazed me just how lacking in design and forward thinking the Town is. It simply has no concept of planning whatever.

   So much so, that if you live in Auckland you simply have to accept the chaos and the additional daily costs, or be smart and go to another town.

   Fortunately, nearly everywhere you go in New Zealand – the land and Landscape will be lovely ! The costs much more manageable.

   Sometimes Auckland talks about Trains. Most Aucklanders have never seen one. Just huge trucks and numberless clogging cars. Wasting hours and hours of everyones’ time. No wonder we have too low productivity.

   Sometimes I think that while Auckland reduces immigration and builds all the missing infrastructure, all affordable housing should be built in Towns outside of Auckland.

   Reducing the number of trucks and cars is of huge importance to Auckland. It is of importance in every Town. Public Transport is the only sensible option. Citizens will love it too.

   • Nurses Needs / Teachers’ Needs

     I see you have been chided for raising that Mr Key was not tackled nor troubled by needy nurses, but have vented themselves mightily against the new PM.

     This would indicate that Nurses are politically more happy with the neglectful Mr John Key who gave sweet nothing of substance to the two professions, and would express their big disappointment and blame with the new Government.

     The Two Professions are extremely important to the Community and the Nation. They would often also have two incomes in the same family.

     Most citizens support Nurses to the hilt. Because their profession is very demanding. They should be paid very well for that. they should be told when that Pay becomes available. They should be paid for overtime worked – promptly.

     Teachers, have a very demanding profession too. Enormous pressure. Unbelievable amount of paper work (unpaid for). They are worth their weight in Platinum.

     John Key put a strong effort into getting rid of State Schools. A lot of his effort flopped. But it meant considerably less resource for the State Schools. More stress for them. Which John Key would have been happy about.

     So what do New Zealanders think about our Nurses and Teachers ?

     My Answer is: Not very much. They allow their youth and adults to abuse Nurses – and abuse teachers. They don’t give a stuff about the violence or the anxiety they cause.

     Boys of massive size and height standing over an alone female teacher – all too common. But only because New Zealanders don’t give a fig.

     If I were Grant Robertson I would bend over backwards for these two Professions. But I would instruct the Minister of Police, and the Minister of Corrections to kick violent kids and adults out of our Hospitals and out of our Schools – and not allow them back in.

     No ifs or buts. Big Bullies have arisen because soppy tearful families are afraid to discipline their kids. Tell them soppy is not on any more!

     Teachers are not there to raise Kids. They are there to Teach.

10. I’d go so far as to suggest the previous National administration is so knee deep in it’s own cesspool of corruption and deceit, it has no choice but to lie constantly, just in order to stay afloat!
    A halfway decent 4th estate with the ability ask questions and fact check would have exposed this mendacity not long after the GFC hit and the Smiling Assassin took power!!

11. “The Union Wellington Leadership make the Green Party look strategically competent.”

    Putting the boot into two allies in one sentence. How efficient *facepalm*

    • Why not? Greens always structure campaign strategy way to big for the party that produce poor results. You congratulate that sort of thing.

    • Whoops, meant to read you “don’t” congratulate that sort of thing.

12. NZ has been a deliberately kept low income country for more years than one can remember and some employers take advantage of the fact they can pay workers whatever/when-ever(i.e zero hour contracts).
    Looking at the track record of the previous National government who disparaged or even breached the right to privacy of NZ citizens that criticised the government of the day then no wonder the NZ media eg Mike Hosking; is inferring that there has been more strike action since Labour became government than during the time of the last National government. Mike Hosking appears to believe that the sun shines out of the National Party rectum and they just cannot do anything wrong eg sexually harassing a waitress by pulling her ponytail.
    There is that quote that Two Wrongs does not make a Right. But lets say it is the right of NZ citizens who are underpaid, undervalued, manipulated, discredited and disparaged to take strike action.Yes some may construe the strike action as wrong but in this day and age where multi-corporates are probably still paying little or no tax here in NZ whilst NZers appear to be taxed to the maximum then it’s necessary.
    Where I work no Union is interested in us as we do not have the numbers for Union support. The work environment is not the best and OSH would have a field day. But we cannot take strike action because our employer is no obligated to the staff but to the almighty dollar signs.

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