Helen Kelly, Dominion Post Column, Monday Oct 22

DomPost Business Column.
Monday October 22 2007.
Helen Kelly, CTU president.

As unions, we know we need to be leading the debate on the future of work.    Over past years the Council of Trade Unions has encouraged initiatives towards a workplace of the future that can nurture a high value, high skill, high wage economy. 

We know that it is necessary for workers and their unions to be involved in developing the economic and social strategies that will directly affect us, our children and our grandchildren, not only because it is our democratic right, but also, because the experience of other successful, small countries has shown that our participation is essential to success.

Last week at our conference we launched a new booklet, discussing what we are doing now to build the workplace of the future and what the challenges are going forward.

Much has improved in recent years, in such areas as annual holidays, minimum wages, paid parental leave and health and safety.

But the working lives of many workers are still characterised by low pay and a sense of being undervalued in workplaces that remain hierarchical and dysfunctional.

This is a long way from our vision of a modern workplace where participation in decent work is a vital part of our democracy and essential to the lasting success of our social and economic development.

We think the workplace of the future will have five key elements.  It will be high wage and high value; it will be highly skilled; workplace practices will be based on fairness and respect; industries will be well networked and the importance of public services understood; and it will be healthy, safe and sustainable.  And we have views on the detail in each of these areas.

The Council of Trade Unions also released our political strategy leading last week.  It focused on three key policy areas, protecting and enhancing workers rights, stronger public services, and higher wages.

Low wages are now an intrinsic barrier to the economic transformation of New Zealand, and we think there is a strong case for a three pronged approach to address low pay. 

Firstly, that the Government supports an increase in the minimum wage to a level that is two-thirds of the average wage, secondly that the Employment Relations Act is significantly amended to genuinely promote industry and multi-employer collective bargaining and thirdly continuing to link workforce development including decent pay and conditions to sustainable industry development. 

The first of these unsurprisingly received a lot of attention last week. A lift in the minimum wage to a level that is two-thirds of the average wage, as recommended by the Royal Commission on Social Policy, would take it to $15 an hour. 

We do not want to see growing wage disparity and indexing the minimum wage to the average wage is an effective way of doing this.

The CTU accepts that for overall wages to rise there will need to be sustained lifts in productivity along with a much stronger distributional impact through collective bargaining.

Improving the Employment Relations Act to improve multi employer bargaining will benefit industry as well.  They should compete on the quality of their products, not on low wages, and having industry standard agreements will discourage a ‘race to the bottom’ on wages.  It will also enable industries as a group to discuss issues such as recognition of training and transfer of staff and include useful growth provisions in the discussions on bargaining.  These types of provisions are not possible to develop when most bargaining is still done at the enterprise level.

We need to be careful in the tax cut debate.  A tax cut of just $15 a week for all income earners adds up to $1.5 billion. That’s almost as much as working for families provides a year to the families that need it. And they get a lot more than $15 a week.  That level of tax could also be used for example to pay for 10,000 more teachers or for new DOC camp grounds or for many of the other things that New Zealanders value.

And from a union perspective, we will continue to argue that the main problem with take home pay is the low wage paid by employers. 

So while there may be tax cuts coming – they must not undermine the public services we need now and in the future.  New Zealanders expect and demand high quality public services that are accessible to all. 

We think the recent attacks from the business community on government spending are misplaced. We are in a period that requires a high level of collective investment into health, skills and other areas. We want momentum maintained on investment.

Our political strategy is also seeking commitments to enhance and protect the core work rights that working people have. 

We want to keep building stronger support for worker participation on key issues such as health and safety and the right to learn new skills.

We want to see progress on minimum rest and lunch breaks, enhanced paid parental leave, tackling excessive hours and greater support for hours of work and work practices that take account of family, caring responsibilities and ‘whole of life’ needs. 

We want to introduce measures to address casualisation, labour hire and those on precarious work arrangements.  And we are seeking commitments to respect the fundamental right of workers to have a fair hearing in their first 90 days at work.

On Labour Day today, I am pleased to reflect that the union movement is in good heart, and we are focused and are unified. It was my privilege to take up the reigns as CTU president last week.