Bolger accepts hand on tiller to develop fair pay agreements
THE first and only award talks I attended as an officeholder of the old journalists’ union were a revelation.
It was shortly before the Employment Contracts Act 1991 was passed and while we had not yet amalgamated with printers, journalists and printers negotiated jointly with newspaper publishers.
My abiding memory of the talks was the negotiating style of one of the leading printers addressing the bosses.
He was passionate. He was rude. He was devastating. He engaged in oratory designed for a stadium rather than the room in a small building just along from the High Court at Auckland.
‘‘You pack of bastards!’’ he drawled at the top of his voice as he slowly paced the room, itemising a pitiful history of their pay offers over the years compared with their fat profits.
It was a long tirade, evocative of the militancy of the ’70s, which National says is waiting around the corner with the proposed fair pay agreements (FPAs).
A short while afterwards, the largest change in industrial law since the 1890s was passed by Sir William Birch in Jim Bolger’s government.
They removed the national awards system and the statutory monopoly of unions in bargaining and banned compulsory unions.
Major reform of industrial relations law had also occurred under the previous Labour government but it was more about resolving disputes than weakening unions.
They abolished compulsory arbitration, which had been in place since 1894, but by that time, governments had much more influence over wage disputes and wage setting.
Bolger, in Guyon Espiner’s excellent 9th Floor series of interviews with former prime ministers, may have said neoliberalism had failed but he did not resile from passing the ECA.
Now leading the FPA reforms, Bolger actually said the ECA was one of the biggest factors in the success of the New Zealand economy, although he did think unions had probably got too small.
Helen Clark’s Labour Government restored to unions the sole right to bargain collectively but nothing has since made up for the decimation of union membership under the Bolger government.
In all likelihood, the proposed fair pay agreements will not make a major impact on union membership either, although National suggests it is a device to ‘‘pay off the unions’’ at the expense of everyone else.
The FPAs were going to be one of National’s big targets going into last year’s election campaign.
But after Andrew Little resigned as Labour leader, the workplace policy did not have the electoral potency it could have had with a former trade union leader at the head of the party.
Labour learned from experience, over capital gains tax for example, that the best way to avoid becoming a slowmoving target for National is to avoid committing to the fine print on policies.
So during the campaign and now, FPAs are just an outline of an idea — the idea being to set up a new type of industrywide employment agreement, to set minimum wages and conditions for everyone, similar to the old national awards. The blanks will be filled in over the coming months by Bolger’s group including unions and Business New Zealand.
Much has been made of the involvement of Bolger as chairman of the group, as it should in such a contentious policy space.
But also worthy of note is the close cooperative relationship of Business New Zealand with the Government.
It is involved in the Hobbitlaw working group, chaired by Linda Clark. It has signed up to the tripartite Future Work Forum announced by Ardern just before the Budget.
Kirk Hope is continuing the approach of Phil O’Reilly before him to engage with governments of every hue in order to influence as much as possible the direction and detail of policy.
On the one hand, it is giving legitimacy to a system that will be bitterly opposed by many employers who will be forced into paying higher rates under new industry agreements.
But unless it takes part in such working groups, it cannot exert influence over the outcome nor mitigate its worst features. Boycotts are not an option.
There is much to disagree on. Comparisons between the process to get the pay equity settlement and designing or negotiating fair pay agreements are fanciful.
They are worlds apart, not least because the holder of the purse in the former was the government with a spare couple of billion and the holder of the purse in FPAs will mainly be the private sector.
Strikes by workers negotiating a fair pay agreement will be unlawful.
An FPA will set an industry minimum for pay and conditions but employees within an enterprise, for example, will almost certainly be able to strike in support of higherthanFPA rates.
One of the likely conditions of the parties entering FPA negotiations will be to agree to arbitration in the event of a breakdown in talks.
In effect, it will provide compulsory arbitration but for the small number of industries involved in establishing a parallel FPA system of negotiation.
The working group also has to come to an agreement as to what would trigger the start of talks — no simple task when the interests of employers are different from unions and can vary between employers.
Some employers are likely to welcome FPAs — the ones that pay staff well but who lose out under competitive contracts when they are undercut by companies offering lower wages, the socalled race to the bottom.
At this stage it is speculative as to which industries will be first up and who they will be but security guards and bus drivers have been suggested as early starters.
The biggest challenge for fair pay agreements is not the political attacks from National nor a return to the militancy of the 1970s. It is coming up with a workable design that lives up to its name.