The workers are demanding a 6 percent wage rise and are calling on the government-owned monopoly, Solid Energy—dubbed “Squalid Energy” in one of the placards—to take steps to eliminate pay disparities across the seven mines it operates.

“We want our fair share—EPMU stand tall!” read the lead banner at Spring Creek, which is an underground mine. Pickets carried the banner on a midday march through Greymouth, a town of 10,000 people. The following day West Coast miners picketed the company’s head office in Christchurch, a five-hour drive away. The miners, who until 1993 had their own national union, are organized by the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU). Their actions have reinforced the union’s “Fair Share—Five in ’05” campaign launched earlier this year. The union is aiming for a minimum of 5 percent wage rises in a series of contracts now up for negotiation.

EPMU members have organized a number of one-day strikes in support of the campaign. Other unionists have picked up the baton, from bank workers to Tramways Union-organized bus drivers in Auckland, who have given notice of six-day strike action to begin May 5.

The miners are also demanding action on longstanding grievances that are specific to the industry. Among their demands, reported the April 22 Christchurch Press, are a “multi-employer collective agreement to cover all the mines and pay parity across the sites.”

Quoted in a union press release, EPMU miners advocate Ray Urquhart explained April 15 that “generally speaking, workers at the underground mines in the South Island earn less than do those in the North Island, and workers at open-cast mines in the North Island earn less than those in the South Island.”

Open-cast (surface) mining has increasingly come to dominate coal production in New Zealand. By 1995, before the recent boom in prices and production, it was responsible for 81 percent of the coal mined.  
 
Lead-up actions
Leading up to the national stoppage—the first in a decade—workers at several mines organized local actions. At Huntly East and Rotowaru, reported the EPMU on April 20, miners refused “to do all work except to honor an agreement to supply 15,000 tons of coal to the Glenbrook steel mill before any strike started.”

In response to the spate of industrial action that has taken the company off guard, Solid Energy chief operating officer Barry Bragg said, “we find out when guys don’t turn up for work. It’s very difficult to run the business.” The Greymouth Evening Star reported, “Mr. Bragg said the company was a good employer, and it paid its staff two to three times the national average wage, as well as shared profits, subsidised superannuation, medical insurance and life insurance.”

A week earlier, Bragg had told reporters that the Spring Creek mine “is in danger of missing the boom in international thermal coal prices.” These were “currently US$55 a tonne, up from US$25 a tonne 18 months ago.” Spring Creek has been idled since November while miners address coal seam problems, including gas leaks. “The future of the mine depends on it achieving a significant improvement in mine productivity,” Bragg said.

In response to Bragg’s claims of company generosity, Spring Creek miner Harold Gibbens told the media that “the pay parity issue is just not going to go away. The company is making good profits and we think it’s a good time for them to close the gap.

“We only want the 11 percent disparity between us and Huntly,” said Gibbens, who convenes the mine’s union committee. Skilled workers are leaving the mines to make a better and less dangerous living “top-side,” he said.

The scarcity of trained miners presents the Solid Energy bosses with an acute version of the labor shortage that has been a theme of capitalist discussion across New Zealand. Officials of the company, which is 100 percent government-owned but functions like other capitalist concerns, traveled to the United Kingdom earlier this year in search of trained miners.

“We can’t afford to wait 18 months to two years to train people. So we are better off coming to the UK and making some jobs offers,” Bragg told the BBC. The company has “a lot of projects…under way,” he said, in the context of the “unexpected boom” in New Zealand’s mining industry. The New Zealand Press Association reported in March that two weeks after advertizing in Britain the company had received 77 applications.  
 
Lucrative exports
While New Zealand’s coal industry is modest by international standards, Solid Energy has carved out lucrative export markets for its low-sulfur product among steel makers in Japan, China, India, and elsewhere. The company also supplies coal to the Huntly Power Station and New Zealand Steel’s Glenbrook Mill near Auckland.

The Huntly station also runs on 1 million tons of coal imported from Indonesia each year. As the coal miners launched their two-day strike, Bragg claimed that if the company doesn’t keep its wage costs down these imports could rise to 1.5 million tons.

According to government figures, coal-fired power plants supply less than 5 percent of New Zealand’s electricity needs. The country has no nuclear power plants. Hydroelectric river dams, by contrast, provide up to 70 percent of the country’s power. The diminishing options for more such dams has helped to draw attention to coal-fired stations as an alternative. Voices in the ruling class have demanded that nuclear power also be considered as an option.  
 
Wage campaign unfolds
Meanwhile, other protest strikes have unfolded as workers in the EPMU and other unions press their demands for wage rises of 5 percent or more. Some 250 bank workers employed by the ANZ and National banks marched in downtown Auckland April 22 as part of a daylong strike to demand overtime pay.

The bus drivers in the Tramways Union stopped work for 24 hours on April 4. Their decision to strike for a week from May 5 followed their rejection of the repackaged pay offer by the Stagecoach company. The workers “want their hourly pay lifted from $13.94 to $16 (NZ$1=US$0.72), and more rest breaks, against a previous offer of a three-year deal starting at $15,” reported the April 21 Herald.

The workers have declared that they will refuse to drive the last trip of the day if previous runs have pushed them into overtime.

According to the New Zealand Herald, union advocate Gary Froggatt said the drivers “would consider a range of tactics, including a possible ‘fare-free’ day in which they would keep driving buses but refuse to make passengers pay for their rides.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home