Silence Of The Lambs: Why Is The CTU Saying So Little About The Resident Doctors’ Struggle?
THE COUNTRY’S DHBs have embarked on a dangerous and deeply cynical campaign to oust the Resident Doctors Association’s (RDA) long-time champion Deborah Powell. One of New Zealand’s most effective employment negotiators, Powell has become an intolerable hindrance to the DHB’s determination to roll back the gains of health professionals in the nation’s public hospitals.
The RDA represents roughly 3,500 of the 4,000 resident doctors working in New Zealand. In 2017 it was successful in securing significant improvements in its members working conditions – most particularly in relation to the number of hours, consecutive days, and night-shifts the DHBs could require them to work. The RDAs success did not come easily. Strike action was required before the DHBs reluctantly agreed to the changes demanded by the union’s members.
It is now clear, however, that the DHBs were not willing to let the RDA’s achievements stand.
Around the middle of 2018, a very small group of resident doctors, with logistical assistance from the Public Service Association (PSA) combined to form a new union: Specialty Trainees of New Zealand (StoNZ). The new union’s 400 members very swiftly negotiated their own multi-employer collective agreement with the DHBs. The improved conditions incorporated in the RDA’s national agreement were not included in the SToNZ document.
That achieved, all the DHBs had to do was wait for the RDA’s national agreement to expire. From 1 March 2019, the only collective agreement available for a resident doctor joining the staff of a public hospital would be the document negotiated by SToNZ – not the RDA. By running out the clock, the nation’s DHBs could wipe out all the RDA’s gains and fundamentally undermine Powell’s relationship with its members.
The strategy adopted by the DHBs’ negotiators bears an alarming similarity to that adopted 107 years ago by the Waihi Gold Mining Company. Step 1: Encourage the establishment of a small rival union. Step 2: Use it to undermine the position of the much larger union resisting the employer’s demands. It was a strategy which led directly to one of the most bitterly contested industrial disputes in New Zealand labour history. The Waihi Strike was only broken by a fatal explosion of state-sponsored violence.
Notwithstanding this alarming precedent, the NZ Council of Trade Unions (CTU) has opted to make no comment on the tactics being employed against Powell and the RDA. Sources within the trade union movement attribute the CTU’s reticence to an ongoing and acrimonious row over membership recruitment. On one side stands the Association of Professional and Executive Employees (APEX) serviced (along with the RDA) by Contract Negotiation Services (CNS) Powell’s private company. On the other, the CTU’s largest and wealthiest affiliate, the PSA.
When it comes to Powell, the PSA National Secretary, Erin Polaczuk, pulls no punches. In an e-mail leaked to Stuff’s Stacey Kirk, Polaczuk writes: “The fact that workers are leaving CNS across the board should come as no surprise given their infamy, modus operandi and history. PSA strongly supports the CTU code of operating between affiliate unions and disagrees entirely with the approach that CNS organisations take, which is to poach organised labour”. Neither the RDA nor APEX belong to the CTU.
Curiously, Polaczuk’s e-mail makes no mention of the PSA’s role in helping SToNZ get established. “Poaching” from “organised labour” is clearly regarded as a much graver sin that facilitating the formation of a minority union which employers later use to break the industrial resistance of the union representing the overwhelming majority of workers in dispute. In the lexicon of the trade union movement there’s a very ugly word for that sort of behaviour.
It would be a tragedy if the CTU’s refusal to follow the example of the Nurses Organisation – the CTU affiliate which has proudly and publicly expressed its solidarity with the striking members of the RDA – has anything at all to do with the fact that the current CTU President, Richard Wagstaff, is a former National Secretary of the PSA. Union rivalries should not be allowed to obscure the very real threat posed to the New Zealand trade union movement by the DHBs’ divide-and-rule strategy. If Powell and her CNS negotiating team are beaten, and the RDA sustains a massive industrial defeat, then employers in other sectors of the economy will not be slow to follow the DHBs’ lead.
The precedent established at Waihi: establishing a “scab” union to facilitate the crushing of a real one; instantly became the template for the destruction of militant unionism in New Zealand. Has the CTU lost so much of its historical memory, is it so bereft of strategic acumen, that it is willing to see the DHBs strip the resident doctors of their hard-won conditions – and do nothing? Can it not appreciate how quickly the health sector bosses will move on from the resident doctors to their senior colleagues? And from them to the nurses?
If it is not appropriate for the CTU to draw a line in the sand on this issue, then when will it be appropriate? When the only union left standing is the PSA? And that only because the state sector bosses are holding it up.
Interesting article on the resident doctors’ struggle. . .
“Junior doctors who are members of the Residents Doctors Association (RDA) have been striking this week in defence of their working conditions and for their Multi-Employer Collective Agreement (MECA). At the heart of this dispute sits bad faith negotiating by District Health Boards (DHBs), an attempt to undermine and expire the RDA MECA to impose an inferior MECA negotiated by a new rival union. . .”
full at: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/why-resident-doctors-are-striking/
A similar thing happened at Christchurch Polytechnic (CPIT, now ARA).
A group of older men who weren’t interested all this ‘politically correct’ Maori stuff, women’s equality etc. formed a breakaway union from the main ASTE union. The delighted CEO exploited the rift and members of the small renegade union were offered more money but less holidays . (but the men who formed the new union kept their original conditions which had been negotiated by ASTE). New staff were given the choice of which union to join and many unaware of the rift naturally chose the one which offered higher pay.The result is two rather weak unions.
Years later it seems that having realized the folly of allowing themselves to be divided there are moves to unify the two groups back into one united union. I hope so.
One would think that intelligent, educated people like doctors and tertiary tutors would see the advantages of union unity and resist divisive management chicanery.
CTU backing scab unions to undercut ‘associations’ that make gains for workers is typical of its acquiescence in neo-liberalism from the days of the 4th Labour Govt., when the CTU held back the unions while Roger Douglas ran rampant with his ‘better way’. In 1991 then CTU boss Ken Douglas notoriously vetoed a general strike (aided and abetted by delegates who sold out their memberships mandate) against the ECA to negotiate the continuation of the right of unions to be bargaining agents with the National Govt. The CUT puts the survival of its bureaucratic privileges ahead of the gains of workers.
In the case of the junior doctors, the scab SToNZ blatantly puts their own future careers as private specialists ahead of the work conditions of junior doctors and safety of patients. They cynically claim that the RDA’s success in winning time off for weekend work, slows down their training as specialists, and puts patient safety at risk! They acquiesce in the DHBs on-going neo-liberal regime because they are part of the privileged band of doctors trained at public expense, who expect to continue to use the Public system to subsidise their future careers in ‘health for profit’.
Brilliant article Chris. Very educational. Not only will the DHBs do everything they can to undermine and split the RDA with its tactics but it is also apparent that the PSA and CTU no longer look outwards towards supporting their members but instead look inwardly with a mean spirited attitude in a desire to increase their power base but only for their own political advantage. Game of Thrones in action.
As I said before, hang in their doctors – the majority of the public support you.
Ow, Trotter, ow. This kind of stuff makes my brain hurt. It is sad when the work that needs to be done is threatened by personal and political rivalries. If people can be divided, they can be conquered.
Your knowledge of the inner machinations of the unions in NZ is unmatched. Thank you for increasing my understanding. Let’s hope the RDA can prevail.
What’s a ‘union’? Asks the ill informed head in the sand consumerist.
These DHB’s are B/S we are only 4.5-5.0 million people the size of a small city overseas, why are we duplicating management all over the country. They have been a failure since word go.
Put the money into the Doctors, Dentists & other Health Professionals.
Our Health System has gone backwards badly in the past 40-50 years.
A Neoliberal Medical System designed by David Lange & Roger Douglas’s Labour Government.
Anyone with any knowledge of trade unionism in New Zealand would be aware that the psa has always been a govt. and management obliging organisation. To be honest i am astonished that it still exists, and has the cheek to call itself a union.
It isn’t necessarily because Wagstaff is a former PSA boss, but it is because he’s a complete lightweight. He became a PSA boss, too, because he is a complete lightweight, and he’s completely and utterly useless in the union movement, too, because he is a complete lightweight.
Rename Wagstaff to Wagtail, perhaps?
Fitting that the head of the scab union is a guy called Heath Lash.
[Comment declined for publication. – Scarletmod]
The issue that the CTU has with the NZRDA goes back well before Richard Wagstaff became head of it. I refer an opinion by Helen Kelly
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/388475/CTU-wades-into-union-over-strike. The points Helen made are still very real.
It is interesting of course of the NZRDA to complain of scab union,when it has actively undermined the PSA representation. We have a situation of what is good for the goose is apparently not for the gander.
Deborah Powell is not a friend of the union movement.
Produce some evidence of how NZRDA has undermined the notorious bosses’ union NZPSA who don’t represent doctors.
Oh look Labour is in power PSA have grown part of a spine.
The millions of members dollars that the PSA gave away in Auckland to backout of the bungled bargaining when they caused penal rates to be in play.
The PSA are no friend of workers wanting a union to protect their interests.