Helen Kelly's Speech to the Labour Party Annual Conference 2010

Saturday, 16th October, 2010

E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga karangaranga maha o nga mata waka, me nga momo tangata katoa o te hui nei. Tena koutou katoa.

Acknowledgements

• Andrew
• Peter
• Phil
• MPs
• Members
• Affiliates

Thanks for time to speak

I am not going to spend much time at all in this speech talking in detail about the continuing attacks on working people that we are now seeing in this country.

I am assuming there is no need with this audience to tell you how the Government has turned its back on workers and their families or to make the obvious points about how bad and unfair the changes are, or that they are aimed at and well result in lower wages and reduced union representation. I am pleased with the opposition Phil and his caucus are putting up to these changes and the commitments Phil has made to restore these rights at the first opportunity.

I want to talk about the future. This is the time for new plans and new ideas and the CTU has been doing lots of thinking about that. We have been thinking about the type of society NZ could be if a new approach and new ideas were developed and how desperate life will be for workers and their families internationally as well as in NZ if things just continue on as usual.

A person’s standard of living, quality of life is impacted on by a number of elements. If any of them are not right, then chances are none of them will be.

Clearly the chance for employment is the first element – jobs have a huge impact on standard of living. There are 256,000 people in NZ that are jobless and 102,000 looking for more hours. The Governments only long term jobs policy is the removal of the right to appeal an unfair dismissal in the first 90 days. Somehow this is billed as providing job opportunities – and if this is it – the sum total of their plan – a policy that won’t actually create a single new job – then these figures are unlikely to reduce.

The second element that impacts on standard of living is hours of work – both not enough hours or too many hours has a serious impact. Many workers have to work long hours to pay the bills as wages are too low. NZ also has some of the most liberal opening hour laws making our retail and hospitality sector 24/7 operations – many workers work bad hours as well as long hours. The Government is planning to allow the sale of the fourth weeks annual leave – low paid workers will be attracted to sell – At the presentation of our submission to the Select Committee on these law changes, National MP Alan Peachy asked why when a worker walked into his electorate office that was working 3 jobs, nights and days, weekends etc, they should not be able to sell their holidays to make ends meet – he showed no hint of irony – this story says it all. If this is their response to the long hours’ problem, it will continue.

The third element is wages. Without adequate wages, even the basics of a decent life are unachievable. Wages in this country have stagnated at an unacceptably low level. Government’s reluctance to raise the minimum wage beyond very minor adjustments and their attack on a workers right to access the union combined with reduced security of employment through the 90 day provisions and other changes to the PG provisions will see wages further reduce.

The fourth element is tax – the recent rise in GST will impact significantly on the lowest paid’s standard of living. The opportunity to adjust the tax system to improve the standard of living of our lowest paid has been squandered by the tax swindle. The relative standard of living between a person on $30,000 and $150,000 (the wage gap) grew by $102 per week as a result of the recent tax changes.

The fifth element is benefits. The social safety net when a person is unwell, left solo to look after children or loses their job has a huge impact on standard of living. We are very concerned about the Welfare Working Groups recommendations and the obvious attack to come of those on the DPB, sickness benefit etc. The attacks on ACC compensation and rehabilitation will also reduce the standard of living of those suffering from injury.

And the final element is the social wage. Decent public services including health and education are vital. Cuts in ECE, night school, aged care, community support etc are a disgrace and with a plan to cut another 3 billion in Government spending, all services will be affected.

And if you think about these elements as the vital components to the quality of standard of living and you think about the changes – many, many, people will be effected by all of them – nowhere to hide, no way to compensate and with dramatic impact.

It is time for a new look. While this Government has proven to be a disaster in all of these areas, they have been able to get away with it because the current economic paradigm is still completely dominant and unchallenged. That paradigm tolerates poverty as a natural partner to wealth, that paradigm values wealth over any and all social values and that paradigm makes working people the victims of all and any of its failures.

The CTU along with other groups including the Labour Party are working on a new (as Peter Conway very flashily puts it) narrative for economic decisions to be considered within.

Part of the reason for this is the GFC – but that is not at all the only reason. The GFC highlighted the problems in a very dramatic way but the symptoms of the failure of the current paradigm have been inflicted on the poor way before the latest crisis.

Three factors drive us to seek a new economic paradigm:

1. A response to NZs long term economic problems
2. The unsustainability and unfairness of the current system
3. The Global Financial Crisis

And while this debate is now live – it is not without its fierce opponents and it while for many of us we were sure the GFC which saw even the wealthy lose money, would show once and for all the emperor has no clothes, it is clear in the aftermath that some people are still prepared to let the emperor run around naked.

The worlds response is spilt in to two camps – the naked half that are using the collapse to drive austerity measures and shift even more of the worlds resources to the rich – dominating the democratic decisions of the people of countries like Greece and Spain where left wing Governments are being bullied by the new right takeover of the EU to massively cut work rights and wages, and in another stark example, stopping in its tracks the change demanded by the US population with the election of Obama though the use of their extensive resources to destabilise public opinion. In contrast – the other half are those Governments that have managed to retain political sovereignty and follow a different approach – Argentina, Brazil, Australia and respond to the crisis by investment and using the levers of Government to pull the country through. Here, in NZ, the Government has taken the naked approach and as we know the legacy effect is long and disastrous.

As many of you know, the CTU has launched its Alternative Economic Strategy – it could be equally called an Alternative Social Strategy. It aims to set out a framework where the economy works for everyone, where the aims of fairness, participation, security (from booms and slumps in the economy), improved living standards, sustainability and sovereignty, are pursued and policies prove themselves against that framework rather than the single measure of GDP as a sign of success. For those that read the website "the Standard" I was amused to see that when they highlighted our strategy they pointed out that this Government has no economic strategy at all so we did not need to call ours an "alternative". Simply a strategy would be accurate.

And I want to acknowledge that Labour itself is doing this thinking and that there are overlaps in our strategies. The work you are doing regarding the quality of life of a child - effectively looking at life through the eyes of a child is exactly in line with what we are talking about – when taking an outcomes approach which your strategy does, then the polices that follow change and are holistic. Asking the question "what do we want kids to see and experience when they are growing up in this country" you get a comprehensive set of polices and they will include the ability of their families to shelter, feed and care for them.

I don’t have time to go through the whole of our strategy and I do want to spend a bit more time on the elements around work rights but there are over 100 policy ideas in the paper at both the macro and micro level that are aimed at the outcomes I have mentioned.

To give you an idea of some of them and in relation to those elements I listed earlier that make up a standard of living let me mention a few.

On jobs – the strategy includes suggestions for a more active labour market – where workers that lose their jobs are supported in the transition to new work though wage protection accompanied by retraining and job search particularly during the first year of unemployment, it includes a skills fund to maximise the opportunities for people to find work in the new economy but also ensures NZ has a workforce skilled up to compete in the world, it sets a new test for Government supported industry development where industries get support if they support training, innovate to reduce environmental damage etc and it promotes ideas for things such as life-long learning, responsible contracting and using the significant leverage of Government to promote decent work. It also emphasises NZ infrastructure needs and I note the remit today on Cabotage which is the only solution to ensure this little island nation has a sustainable shipping service and which will also provide protection for the wages and conditions of seafarers in what is one of the easiest areas of employment to offshore.

On tax it promotes a new taxation level at $150,000 and above – 3 times the average wage but it also calls for all income to be taxable including for capital gains with the exception of the family home. It calls for the phasing out of GST.

On benefits it proposes as I have said ALM policies but also linking benefits to the average wage rather than just inflation.

On the social wage it recognises the triple bottom line benefits of strong public services, investment in education, state housing etc.

And on work rights and wages it has many recommendations to ensure that the wealth created by the economic system has a fair way to ensure distribution.

I want to talk more about that but before I do let me say there are also recommendations on increasing contributions to Kiwisaver, developing a NZ exclusive scheme to increase NZ equity through a Kiwibond system and a number of recommendations on worker participation and alternative measure of economic success – measuring what matters rather than simply GDP.

On work rights – not only are their some specific recommendations about living wages etc but also for a new system for collective bargaining.

The current system has not delivered the rights to collective bargaining or the outcomes from the bargaining in the way it was envisioned when the Labour Party and the CTU collaborated together to develop the ERA.

Many, many, workers are unable to effectively have any say in their terms and conditions at work and are denied the internationally recognised rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining despite these rights being universal.

Some of this is to do with union performance and we need to sort that out. But it is also to do with the framework. If you take for example a worker in a Four Square in Kaitaia. Currently almost all her terms and conditions are determined unilaterally by her employer. Her opportunity for accessing her right to collectively bargain is denied by the current framework. She has to join a union (and find one that will have her) but filling in the form, giving it to her employer and hoping she is rostered on the next day, organise the other 2 or 3 workers in the shop, initiate bargaining and have sufficient economic power to achieve a collective – it just isn’t going to happen.

CTU has got to the stage of having a new and comprehensive draft of an alternative approach – it is outcomes based – any worker could walk into a workplace and find a collective agreement reflecting genuine bargaining outcomes between unions and employers in place and with a sustainable form of union membership also available to them should they chose to join a union.

We have researched and thought about this new approach – it contains concepts used in many different parts of the world including parts of Europe, South America, parts of Canada, South Africa and others. It is sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of changing businesses and to secure the rights of workers to fairness at work.

It includes the concept of "extension" used in many of these jurisdictions. If for example a union is dominant in an industry and bargaining collective agreements with employers in the industry, then the standards identified in those agreements would be extended through an industry agreement to other workplaces within that industry that are not bargaining collective agreements. So for example, the NDU would bargain and achieve collective agreements with the major food retail outlets (say Progressives and Foodstuffs and others) and the standards from those agreements would be extended to the Four Square in Kaitaia. Similarly in Aged Care. The NZNO and SFWU would organise and agree collective agreements in all the major aged care providers and the standards would be extended to all the rest of the aged care sector that is extremely difficult to bargain in currently.

Under this model employers will have the choice – a collective agreement negotiated between them and the relevant union or the industry standards negotiated by others in their industry. They won’t have the choice to avoid bargaining. Upholding the right to collective bargaining requires employers to bargain – it is as simple as that.

And let’s get ahead of those that fundamentally hold the position that collective bargaining and unions should be banned but are too canny to actually say that – lets pre-empt their arguments:

Claims of inflexibility will be false with the choice to bargain at either level.

Claims of industry agreements that don’t match the needs of industry will be false when industry documents will reflect the standards agreed over multiple collective agreements in those very industries.

And our new approach also provides for employers that choose to organise into industry organisations to be able to bargain at that industry level if they desire.

When this happens (and I hope it will but it will represent a true change of heart) then industry documents can also include skills development etc and these groups could develop industry development plans including building social partnerships with Government as I mentioned earlier.

A commitment to this new approach to IR from Labour is extremely important to us and is consistent with Labour policy.

While the approach to employment rights is one of the starkest areas of contrast between the National Party and Labour – without a new approach Labour will always have to fight every desired change to work rights through using the minimum code and we have seen that this doesn’t work as effectively as anyone wants particularly around distribution but also it can be easily unpicked and leaves workers unorganised and without voice when you get a government that treats them all as slacker, skivers an liars as this Government does.

It is justified as fitting with a new approach to the economy, it is justified on any rights analysis and it will improve the standard of living for many, many, working people.

So can I finish by again thanking you for allowing me this time in your conference – to tell you on behalf of union members that we miss you as a Government and to commit to you our continuing recognition of your commitment to our issues and give you our pledge to keep working with you in the close way that we do.