GUEST BLOG: Sam Huggard – Global Labour Perspective

The first panel at the hui in October 2018  on What an Alternative and Progressive Trade Strategy for New Zealand Should Look Like was on the Big Picture, with an overview on foreign policy, labour and women’s perspectives. This is the exchange on the perspective of global labour.

Sam Huggard

National Secretary, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions

Laila Harré, chair. Labour activists and trade unions have a long history of association with trade policy and workers issues have been at the heart of the protection versus free trade arguments for time immemorial. What do you see as the trade unions’ interest in the free trade agenda? The unions have been at the table often and have supported agreements, globally though not necessarily locally, on the basis that they are seen as articulating core labour rights or giving some machinery to argue about that. Has that worked? And what have been the gains from being at the table? Because the decisions we have to make as a movement is the extent to which we engage in and challenge the Trade for All agenda of the current government.

Sam Huggard: Unions have had a long interest in trade and investment issues. Jobs are not the only part of our lives – there’s kids, recreation – but jobs are a big part of our lives. So we have an interest in issues that have a big impact on jobs. Not only the impact that trade and commercial agreements have on working and conditions for jobs, but also in terms of the wider social wage that workers experience in terms of our need for strong public services. That’s a pretty key part of our interest in trade.

There’s also the wider interest in some of the massive issues that are facing our globe, which are totally absent from trade and investment agreements. As we often say in the union movement in respect of climate change, which is one of the biggest issues facing us, there’s no jobs in a dead planet. Yet in the international architecture of trade and investment there’s very little there about climate. I read in bits that have come out about the NZ EU negotiating process, not from the most recent round, but the prior one. There was some reference to climate, which is a good start. We have looked to having some firm commitments, such as countries’ nationally determined contributions being part of trade and investment agreements, rather than the voluntary non-binding nature they currently are in the Paris Agreement.

So we have a wide range of interests. There’s a lot to it. It’s hard to outline what are the core features for trade unions in trade agreements, because of the architecture of them and the neoliberal framework that underpins them for the last 30 years – you have to address that before we can look at the way it manifests itself in terms of trade and investment agreements. It’s a long-term challenge in terms of the economic relations we would want to see.

Within that construct, a critical one for us is retaining the right to regulate to protect decent work. That is in part to close some of the gaps in labour law coverage that have been exploited, for example, by gig economy employers.  But also we don’t know what the nature of work is going to look like in the coming years. McKinsey’s figures are often quoted on the impact on jobs. One is that 60% of occupations now could have up to 30% of their work automated. Just as we don’t know as much about the future of work and jobs, we also can’t forecast what the future economic relations are between workers, labour and capital. If we are not reserving the right to modernise, protect and defend the governance of those arrangements then that’s a pretty big problem.

We are really keen on mitigation plans in place for any decisions we make in trade agreements, to have a dedicated and focused mitigation strategy. It links to the work we are doing on climate change and the just transition strategy for workers in carbon-exposed jobs. There was no mitigation in place for workers in the clothing and textile industry when the tariffs came off in the 1990s. We would want to see in future trade and investment agreements that propose some change to industries that we have a dedicated plan in place to address that. And the recognition that trade is not just about economic trade between countries, we think it should be driving good social outcomes across the board.   

It’s important that there is a proper Tiriti grounding and the recognition that Maori self-determination is pretty poor for our country, including economic self-determination aspects of self-determination and the Crown’s recognition of that.

There’s some other things we would want to see, but those concerns are largely around protecting and supporting domestic policy making.

In terms of our role at the table, I haven’t been at the table in my time. Our predecessors had to some extent, perhaps most in respect of the China FTA. Overseas unions possibly have more. But in reality, the labour movement has mostly been at the table as an advocate or lobbyist alongside other civil society organisations. Direct involvement, seeing and contributing to negotiating texts has been very limited. I guess some examples with the China FTA would be slowing down, and not hastening, the phase out of textile tariffs between the two countries. But in response to the political question of how we engage – my constituents would have an expectation that we are engaged in the government process and we are happy to do that. In a way we rely on work that Dr Bill Rosenberg has done on what we would articulate as a positive agenda in our People-Friendly Approach to Globalisation document.  As we do in other areas, we are at the table negotiating for good ACC policy outcomes, but also active members of an ACC Future Coalition that reserves its right to determine what a good ACC policy should look like.

On the situation in the Pacific, one of the challenges we have faced, and we have discussed this with government, is that we want NZ to play a responsible role and use whatever influence they can. We are a relatively tiny nation compared to other players. But that role of leadership in areas where we do have some influence is relevant to us. Picking up on the Australian and NZ interest in the PACER-+ negotiations with the Pacific, NZ and Australia went through that encouraging Pacific Island states to change the way their support their economies, away from tariffs, which are one of the few sources that Pacific states have to raise revenue in order to deliver social services, and instead to adopt what we have as GST in NZ, a value added tax, which is a regressive tax that punishes the low waged and poor. If you have very low national income and very low incomes of workers and communities, why on earth would you remove one of the very few fundamental ways to raise revenues and then push the tax burden onto families and consumers. It seems an utterly nonsensical approach to us, and one of the reasons why we couldn’t support PACER+. So NZ has a role to play in the international institutions, but close to home we could be playing a much better role than we have with PACER+.

Laila: What do people think about the Trade for All Advisory board?

Sam: We don’t know yet. There’s a Cabinet paper from April that’s worth reading. There’s a general strategy which is out there. They are going to be announcing this ministerial advisory group. We don’t know if it’s going to be like Todd McClay’s ministerial advisory group or a wider involvement of civil society. But the agenda they set out focused on issues like SMEs, gender, indigenous populations and so on.  It hasn’t from what I’ve read fundamentally addressed some of the concerns you will hear expressed today and tomorrow – the real issues we would want trade and commerce agreements to address in order to gain some confidence in them.

Workers have strong support for greater interactions with other countries and for trade. Members of ours who are working in jobs that are export-oriented in the food manufacturing sector, elaborately manufactured goods, and others, have a strong interest in growing relationships with other countries in terms of export of goods. We just want international commerce agreements that serve the populations’ needs, rather than being subservient to international commerce.

If the Trade for All agenda is to be successful, one of the things it will have to grapple with is to foster an open and honest, frank and evidence-based assessment of the trade-offs that come with trade and investment policies. The public recognise that in any negotiations, be it trade, workplace relations, or with my 7 year-old for his music screen time of an evening, there are winners and losers when you are negotiating. I think people would not expect there would not be winners and losers for trade. But those wins and losses, who benefits and who doesn’t, the inequalities, are never part of the debate. And that needs to be central to our discussions if Trade for All is to be successful.

You can partly do that through greater transparency. The EU is pushing greater transparency to some degree in these negotiations, including with us. So we would want to see more of that – the regular releasing of negotiating texts, the draft mandates, and so on. Wider, pluralist involvement of  civil society participation in those discussions, not just corporate interests. Transparency is one way of doing it. But national interest analyses are another really critical, and poorly used, way of doing that, in respect of the economic gains and losses, the impact on inequality, health and access to medicines impact assessments, environmental impact assessments, before the negotiating period and after as it goes through Parliament for ratification. Those are some of the areas that need significant strengthening.