Jacinda Show can’t keep misreading its audience
If the modern business of government can be compared to a reality TV show – and unfortunately, in some respects, it can – then Jacinda Ardern’s promise of ‘‘transformational’’ government could recall The Swan. This forgotten artefact of the early 2000s carted contestants away with a team of dietitians, personal trainers and plastic surgeons to effect ‘‘startling transformations’’.
Like The Swan itself, after a barrage of justifiable criticism, Labour’s transformational rhetoric was cancelled in short order. Ardern’s government is now strictly committed to under-promising and over-delivering.
To continue to labour the analogy, Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood’s announcement of a new framework for fair pay agreements (FPAs) last Friday was less an Extreme Makeover of employment laws, and more of a revamped Queer Eye: unassuming, delivered with kindness, but with nonetheless enormous ambitions for long-term transformation. It is the most radical reform of employment and industrial relations law since the Employment Contracts Act of 1991.
The Government has long signalled it would take steps to bring in industry-wide bargaining to set minimum pay and conditions in the kinds of industries that it characterised as vulnerable to poor pay and conditions, such as cleaners, security guards and hospitality workers. In particular, FPAs are intended to prevent a ‘‘race to the bottom’’ in employee wages and conditions, where these are effectively the only means for businesses to compete on price for valuable contracts.
The framework as announced, however, goes considerably further. A ‘‘public interest’’ test can be applied to allow unions to negotiate minimum terms for an entire sector (including non-unionised staff and workplaces) if a sector has low pay or poor progression, low bargaining power or long and unsocial hours. However, any union can initiate bargaining if it has at least 1000 members in the industry (or 10 per cent of the total workers, whichever is less).
If agreement cannot be reached in bargaining between unions and employer representatives, the Employment Relations Authority will have the power to set the terms and conditions of an FPA. Unions cannot strike in support of FPA bargaining, but the revival of what is essentially an arbitration regime gives more ammunition against employers who may have otherwise been willing to endure industrial action, or like NZ Bus in Wellington, try and wait out workers by locking them out.
This means FPAs are a powerful bargaining tool for unions that are dominant in skilled and relatively well-paid industries, but have fewer members among the sector’s smaller workplaces. Many in the union movement see this as an opportunity to increase membership, which has been steadily declining in the private sector since the 2000 Employment Relations Act.
Wood’s announcement could be a model for his colleagues. It was sold on the clear basis of being rooted in the messaging and values that brought Labour to office. It has also landed in an almost uniquely favourable political climate: at the tail-end of a pandemic that celebrated the ‘‘essential workers’’ who ensure the smooth running of the middle class’s offices, brunches and nights out.
With falling unemployment, which never came close to pre-lockdown predictions, and still-soaring house prices, the fabled median voter is unlikely to feel insecure about their own economic circumstances, or have the stomach for austerity politics.
This mood was misread by two of Ardern’s most trusted lieutenants, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins, who bungled the fairly straightforward setting of public sector pay expectations. Hipkins broke a crucial taboo both with the public and Labour’s base when he said the majority of non-beginner nurses, teachers and police, while among our most worthy and hardworking workers, are relatively well paid (compared to most of the working population, if not their head office public service managers). But his and Robertson’s arguments in favour of ‘‘equality’’ fell on deaf ears.
The backlash against the wage freeze, and the relatively warm reception for FPAs and minimum wage rises, will play on Robertson’s mind in relation to other areas where the Government promised transformation, in particular child poverty and raising benefits. Is the stigma against beneficiaries, taken as an article of faith in politics, perhaps as outmoded as the common wisdom that voters imagine the public service as walk-shorted bureaucrats counting down to retirement?
If New Zealanders are counting their blessings after a brush with pandemic disaster – and in light of the Government’s surprisingly if deceptively strong books – do they feel less as if they will miss out if others are helped up? No less than the producers of The Swan, the creative minds behind the Jacinda Show will want another season. They can’t misjudge their audience.
No less than the producers of The Swan, the creative minds behind the Jacinda Show will want another season.