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To the Australian People-An Industrial Reform Warning from Aotearoa By Jay Ray
In
1996 I moved from NSW to New Zealand for personal reasons. One of the first
things that struck me was how depressed and beaten down were the people I met on
a daily basis. There was a culture that said there was no point in attempting to
change things because no matter what you say, the government goes ahead and does
what it wants to for big business anyway. In the Rogernomic era, GST had been
brought in overnight under a policy called ‘urgency’, which basically meant
no discussion necessary. Costs skyrocketed. Add that to the fact that state
housing had gone from tiered rents to market rents and the welfare had been
dropped back by something drastic like $30 a week and maybe you can begin to get
a sense of the hopelessness that the average Kiwi was feeling around the time of
my arrival. Workplace contracts basically meant getting a piece of paper shoved
in front of you and being told to sign or forget the job. Unions were outlawed
and the people had no way of protecting themselves from profit driven
entrepreneurs. Meanwhile New Zealand was being touted worldwide as a successful
experiment. The end result was achieved. Wages were forced down and the minimum
wage was $6.50 per hour. And that wasn’t hypothetical. If you could get $10
per hour you were lucky. Even now you can expect no more than $12 per hour for
such position as computer technicians, shop managers etc.
Unskilled workers are likely to get between $8 and $10! What’s more,
casual work on contracts became the norm and meant no holiday pay, sick pay,
public holiday pay and so on. It was more affective to hire people this way than
to bother with the few perks that were left to full timers, so they didn’t
hire them. And no comeback in the courts! So everyone was working three jobs if
they could get them, or in the case of the Maori in West Auckland, living 20 to
a house because they couldn’t. The
overall principle was the same as it is in 2005 Australia. Right now you have
very low unemployment. What the industrial reforms will do is two things. It
will force previously accepted welfare recipients such as single mums, the
disabled, and pensioners into the work force. Thus flooded with the newly
created unemployed, the employers groups can use the ‘take it or leave it,
there are many more where you came from’ approach to force hourly rates down.
The outlawing of unions then makes it impossible for any legal representation of
substance to support the workers in changing the situation. The lower end of the
workforce, that are always vulnerable, are the ones that suffer first: the
indigenous groups, migrant and unskilled workers, and women. They are then
forced out onto the job market through cost cutting measure by companies finding
that they can force remaining workers to do twice as much for the same amount
just to stay afloat and keep their job. The birth of the 60-80 hour working
week! This all happened here in
1984. Orwell was right. By 1996 the way people were coping, if indeed they were,
was taking work home, working on weekends for no extra pay, just to get the wage
that they used to get for 40 hours. They still are. Except now they have
forgotten that life could ever be different. And their exhausted!
New Zealand has become a nation of workaholics and Dunedin, that lovely
little forgotten town in the south where I live, has the highest consumption of
anti-depressants in the country. The lower the wages, the faster you go, the
more tired and more depressed you get! Country areas can’t bargain the same
sorts of pay that larger cities can. We have chronic fatigue, stress, and
alcohol consumption is up through the roof. Why wouldn’t it be? Rampant
globalization closed Dunedin’s clothing and shoe factories overnight, placing
even more on the dole, forced to look for jobs that didn’t exist. They were
made to feel bad for being on a welfare system that was engineered to make sure
that they looked frantically for work based on fear of survival. The government
knew then, as Howard does now, that it had created a situation that meant people
would never find work, just to psychologically force and keep wages down. There
is a fabulous film that did the rounds of the film festivals called ‘In a Land
Of Plenty’. All Australians should see it to educate themselves as to what
they are in for. The final straw seemed to be when the Jenny Shipley government
of the National Party attempted to shift the goal post once more with a social
responsibility paper designed to turn us against each other: dob in a bludger at
its worst. It was an attempt to make those that were pawns in this cynical game
feel bad enough about themselves that they would be able to be forced to work
for even less pay rather than have the stigma of welfare, even though there
still were no jobs to be had. It was all an economic ploy to feather the nests
of the corporations based on the false premise that what is good for them
trickles down to us. It doesn’t because they wont let it! When
the Labour government of Helen Clark secured victory 6 years ago, the country
fell about with relief on the working class level. (We now have a three-tiered
system here: the very wealthy, the unemployed poor, (neither who work) and the
middle class working poor). The next morning you could feel the relief spreading
throughout the country as hope renewed itself for just a little relief. Not a
landslide of change. We were never going to get that from a labour party whose
members were there when the first Lange/Douglas government became the original
architects of all our ills. All we felt hopeful for was a bit of a breather. A
little bit of justice! We got that. But still our young flee to Oz for a better
life. Where will you all flee to in 12 years time???? |