Most working people welcomed the new law, seeing it as legitimizing their right to join a union and removing obstacles to their ability to organize on the job. Unions have reported a significant growth in membership over the past year.

The new legislation makes some concessions to the labor movement, while seeking to divert workers away from struggle into legal channels and red tape.

Repeal of the Employment Contracts Act (ECA) was one of the central planks that Labour and its junior coalition partner, the Alliance, campaigned on in elections to Parliament a year ago. During that election campaign, for the first time since 1984, Labour politicians put forward a platform that sought to distance the party from "free market" policies followed by successive Labour and National Party governments over the previous 15 years.

This bipartisan course had seen sweeping privatizations of state-owned enterprises, the lifting of import tariffs and export subsidies, the removal of many protective labor laws and guaranteed prices to farmers, the erosion of publicly funded education and health care, and reductions in benefits and pensions.

The election of the Labour-Alliance coalition reflected a response to the growing mood of resistance among workers in face of the capitalist rulers' offensive. It registered a shift by sections of the New Zealand capitalist class who recognized the limits of what they had achieved and the need to find alternative ways to advance their assault on workers and farmers.

The Labour-Alliance government's first year in office has been marked by efforts to demonstrate to the wealthy rulers its responsible stewardship of New Zealand's capitalist economy and to counter criticism that it is "antibusiness." For example, Prime Minister Helen Clark and 10 cabinet ministers hosted 85 selected "business leaders" at an all-day forum in Auckland October 24 to "listen to their concerns."

Over the course of the past year, employers and their organizations mounted a vocal campaign against the proposed Employment Relations Act, blaming it for plummeting "business confidence" and threatening job cuts and factory closures if it became law. The government in turn sought to reassure the bosses that the new law would incorporate their concerns. The coalition was a "pro-business government that did not see business as a cash cow," said Finance Minister Michael Cullen March 16. As a result, the law as it was finally passed was significantly amended in favor of the bosses.

The union officialdom, which welcomed and promoted the measure, has put forward similar reassurances. "I guess we're very conscious of our responsibility to make this new act work," said Council of Trade Unions vice president Darien Fenton. "The last thing we want to be doing is getting into irresponsible demands." Union officials have touted the law as opening a new era of "fairness at work."

Improvements in workers' rights contained in the ERA, however, were from the outset extremely limited. Minister of Labour Margaret Wilson explained in an article in Employment Today, "In looking at what we wanted to replace the ECA, we went back into history to see what we should bring back from the old system.... We did not find much there that we thought matched the needs of New Zealand in the year 2000: we did not want compulsory unionism back; we did not want national awards; we did not want compulsory arbitration and relativity systems, which meant that wage rises--or the lack of them--in one industry affected totally unrelated industries. So these elements of the 'bad old days' are gone for good."

Central to the ERA is a "Code of Good Faith Bargaining" between employers and unions. Parties are required to "deal with each other in good faith and must not do anything to mislead or deceive each other." The law is designed to direct workers' struggles into legal channels, setting up mediation services and an Employment Relations Authority that can investigate cases and instruct parties to resolve their dispute through mediation.

As Wilson, seeking to counter employers' accusations that the ERA would lead to increased industrial action, explained, "The new law makes it more difficult to strike. For example, there's a waiting time of 40 days after a proposal for an agreement is lodged. And there has to be a proper organization set up with which the employer can deal."  
 
Concessions to right to organize
The new law does include some concessions to workers' right to organize. Union membership remains voluntary, but unions are now the only agents that can negotiate collective contracts. It is now legal to strike for an agreement covering more than one employer. Provisions for paid stop-work meetings and union education leave are included, and union organizers are granted greater access to the workplace. The new law also states that employers cannot compel employees to do the work of striking workers. Under pressure from bosses about this, Finance Minister Michael Cullen responded that workers who "volunteered" to do other jobs should not be precluded from doing so.

The Employment Contracts Act, enacted by the National Party government in 1991, registered the retreat of the unions under the bosses' offensive of the 1980s, and gave the rulers a new weapon to use to further weaken workers' rights and the unions. Building on earlier antilabor legislation passed in 1987 by a Labour government, the ECA removed almost all remaining protective labor legislation, outlawed the closed shop, restricted the right to strike to the immediate period around the expiration of a contract, and dismantled the structure of national awards in industry.

Mass street protests by workers against the ECA in 1991 were derailed as union officials drew workers into accepting the new situation. As the bosses drove home attacks against the unions under the ECA, work hours were extended, real wages declined, and union membership plunged.

In May 1991 there were 603,000 union members, 41 percent of the total workforce. By December 1998, the number had declined to almost 307,000, or 17.7 percent of the workforce. The number of work stoppages fell to levels not recorded since the early 1930s. In 1998 there were 35 work stoppages, compared with 137 in 1990 and 215 in 1986. The number of workers involved also decreased.  
 
Longer work hours, more part-time jobs
More workers are working longer hours, and increasingly without overtime rates of pay. The number of workers laboring 50 or more hours per week increased by 33 percent between 1991 and 1996. There has been a considerable growth in casual work, and part-time employment has grown by 21 percent in the last five years.

While big-business organizations mounted a vocal campaign to pressure the government to minimize the changes in the labor legislation, ruling-class opinion has generally accepted the ERA in its final version adopted by Parliament. As the New Zealand Herald editorialized on the day the ERA was passed, "The sky will not fall in today.... [T]here is cause for confidence that good sense will prevail on both sides."

Some employers moved to strike deals with unions in anticipation of the new law. For example, McDonald's negotiated a collective agreement in February for 5,100 workers at 146 restaurants, giving most a 3 percent pay raise, and recognizing union coverage for the first time in five years. Workers had been on individual contracts since 1994 and only a few hundred had remained union members.

In a different example, The Warehouse, a large retail outlet that employs more than 5,000 people nationwide, moved to set up its own company union, "People First," in July to represent Warehouse staff. For the past nine years the company has refused to recognize the National Distribution Union, the main union covering retail workers.

Annalucia Vermunt is a member of the Meat Workers Union. Felicity Coggan, a member of the National Distribution Union in Auckland, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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