A MONSTER UNION OR UNION MONSTER?

As the Aussie comrade says, amalgamations, while making unions bigger, usually build bureaucratic monsters (or similar words). It is important for the rank and file to fight back now to take control of any amalgamations and rebuild the unions as fighting democratic organisations.

If you look at the Unite! and NDU (I don't know about SFWU) constitutions, they look good, especially the Unite constitution that aims at unionising lowpaid workers, unemployed and beneficiaries. The NDU one looks good too in that it seeks to represent industrial sites, has locals which bring local sites together, and represents 'special interest' groups like women and Maori.

Problem is that in practice these unions are anything but democratic in their representation of the members. The delegates may be formally elected by members but there is no obligation to actually represent the views, report back to, or be accountable to members. The 'supreme' decision making bodies, annual or biennial congresses or AGMs are reduced to rubber stamps of the officials and tame delegates.

Of course its got to be this way as the union officials are empowered by the bosses law to regulate and control their members. They must stay inside the limits of the ERA or risk court decisions against them and penalties such as loss of union assets etc.

And of course the officials cover their backs by saying that the members are inactive, passive, and need to be led by experienced 'unionists'. Of course they are if they are led to believe that the only thing they can do is follow the officials orders, stay inside the law and vote every 3 years for Labour. You can't get much more passive than that.

Getting active does not mean turning your back on this monster being born. After all the unions today are the rump of very powerful unions that were created over a century ago and which have survived against all odds putting up heroic struggles against the bosses and their state.

We need to reclaim the best traditions of that history of militant unionism. This means organising the rank and file to demand proper all up elections of delegates standing for the principles of rank and file democracy and campaigning for a living wage and decent conditions.

It then means pushing those policies to the limit and working for mass support and industrial unity across all unions to break the ERA and force employers and the state to concede the right to strike and of mass pickets. In the process the union officials will be left high and dry backing the ERA and the bosses.

We need new unions like those of 1890, Red Fed of the 1908-13 period or a TUC of the 1951 lockout. The popular wisdom (bosses mythology) is that these radical union movements were defeated. Yes they were, by overwhelming class forces. If they hadnt NZ would be a very different place today. Yet without these struggles the labour movement would be even weaker than it is today.

In the 1890s the new unions forced the bosses to go to court to deal with workers rather than face a spread of militant unions. This allowed the militant unions to develop and be strong enough to split in 1908 to form the Red Federation. The threat of revolutionary upsurges in 1913 and internationally in the immediate post war period forced the creation of the Labour Party to divert industrial struggles into parliament.

The price of this was compulsory unionism that gave the labour movement real power such as allowed the militant wing to prepare to take on the bosses and the state in 1951, when again internationally, in the face of decolonisation and the Chinese Revolution, the ruling class decided to try to smash the workers again. The bosses survived that one only by imposing a semi-fascist state clampdown on the country and bringing out the army to work the ports and mines.

Even though the '51 lockout was a defeat for the unions, its result was to entrench compulsory unionism and create the organised basis for workers to take back some of the value they produced in the form of social welfare and relatively high living standards in the decades that followed.

So it is a myth to argue that these militant struggles led to total defeats. Each time workers were defeated, they were never forced to concede all of their historic gains. They kept their organisations and to some extent their material gains.

Rogernomics and the ECA did not force labour back 100 years as some argue. The unions were not smashed rather they were quietly deregulated. Ken Douglas and Co kept the lid on the fightback. But again, the old Labour tradition of state arbitration that goes back to 1894, was revived in the form of the ERA in 2000 by the Labour and Alliance Coalition Government.

This proved to be a charter to empower the officials to go onto job sites and recruit members. It was the only real result of the Alliance split and MMP. Of course it created the labour movement foundation for former Alliance leaders to get into the unions and put pressure on Labour from the left and to plan for a return to a Micky Savage-type Labour government in the future.

The proposed amalgamation above is a step towards the fulfillment of that plan. Building the biggest union in the growth area of the NZ semi-colonial economy, casualised cheap labour, will create the constituency for a future New Labour Party.

Today that party is conceived in the image of both 1930s Labour but increasingly 21st century socialism as it is taking shape in Venezuela. This is not some wild utopian dream either. NZ is heading downwards in the OECD and is virtually a colony of Australia. The populist politics of Hugo Chavez, and the indigenist politics of Evo Morales win lots of sympathy among young and Maori workers in Aotearoa.

The problem is that unions tied to populist parties there or here, cannot develop the working class struggles beyond parliament. Parliament is one branch of the bosses state, and for workers to get a living wage and decent conditions it is necessary to take power, smash the state, and expropriate the bosses property. Unions tied to the capitalist state hold back and prevent workers from taking power. That is there job.

To educate workers in what is needed to take control of their unions and turn them into organs for workers power, the battle must be to build fighting, democratic unions now - in a phrase, we need a new Red Fed.

Dave Brown