Gordon Campbell On Why Workers Get Treated As Disposable

National is SO very opposed to ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill that it is willing to waste time and money on supporting its first reading and sending it to a select committee – where more time and money will be wasted on public submissions and on committee hearings that are bound to receive saturation media coverage.

Having supplied ACT with a platform and a megaphone for its toxic, divisive views on race relations, National says it will vote the Bill down when it comes back to the House for a second reading vote, regardless of the content of the Bill, and despite whatever improvements may have been generated by select committee scrutiny.

By doing so, National will have enabled ACT to both (a) play the role of victim and (b) extract the maximum political exposure for its poisonous views. Let's be clear: there is no conflict between the coalition partners on this Bill. It is a tag-team effort to enable National to look centrist, even while it gives endless amounts of exposure to ACT, which is peddling the same “one waka” message that was central to National’s own election campaigns in 2002 under Bill English, and 2005 under Don Brash.

If Luxon is claiming to oppose the Treaty Principles Bill does he also renounce National’s previous promotion of the “one waka/one rule for all” messages that were equally polarising? If Luxon sincerely believes the Treaty Principles Bill is the wrong approach to race relations, why is he giving it so much oxygen? Surely, he can’t regard keeping an MMP promise as being more important than doing lasting damage to race relations, can he? That would not be showing moral leadership. It would be pandering to the country’s worst instincts, for political gain.

The Wild West Workplace

The workplace is not a venue where New Zealand tends to shine. Compared to other developed countries, we have a terrible workplace record of death, injury and work-related illness. The extent of migrant labour exploitation also contradicts any self-image we may have, as being a country willing to offer fair pay for a hard day’s work.

The workplace figures on health and safety are pretty grim:

As well as the 70 people who die at work each year, an estimated 750 to 900 die from work-related diseases such as cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. According to a recent report from WorkSafe New Zealand, 20 people died from work-related suicides in 2020.

There are also about 5000 to 6000 hospitalisations each year from work-related health events. And between 2022 and 2023, 35,805 injuries resulted in a week or more away from work.

This is abnormal by the standards found elsewhere in the developed world. On average each year, there are 2.3 deaths per 100,000 workers in this country, compared to only 1.6 deaths on average annually in Australia, and .8 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom during the same period.

These disparities have persisted for years. Yes, maybe New Zealand does employ a lot of people in high risk occupations such as forestry. For well over a decade in agriculture, there has also been a high incidence of death and injury from quad bike accidents, with no sign of this abating. (There were four quad bike deaths in July alone.) Between 2019 and 2023, 23 people died in quad bike accidents in New Zealand, with many of these being reportedly due to rollovers on steep, hilly terrain. Every year about 100 people are injured in such accidents, some severely.

Yet other countries are taking precautions that we are not. Since October 2021, it has been mandatory in Australia for quad bikes to be equipped with rollover bars, to mitigate the risks of death and injury from crushing and asphyxiation. Despite the higher per capita toll here, rollover bars are still only recommended.

The trust model toll

Par for the course. For the past 30 years or more, successive governments have preferred to pursue a trust model of voluntary compliance, governed by regulations that have been “light handed” to the vanishing point of non-existent. Other countries have been more willing to recognise the obvious fact that in the workplace, there are competing interests in play, from the boardroom to the shop floor.

In Europe and to a lesser extent in Australia it is not only considered desirable but essential that unions and regulatory authorities be involved in the structures of workplace decision-making. Here, such involvement is derided as red tape and regulation and as an infringement on boardroom prerogatives. Workers pay the price in health and safety.

The existence of the ACC “no fault” accident compensation system also tends to let employers off the hook when it comes to taking preventative care in the workplace. There are also wider economic repercussions from allowing employers to operate via what is still, to all intents, a model of largely voluntary compliance.

For example: in global comparisons, New Zealanders work very long hours but have poor productivity outcomes. Why is that the case? Well...by and large, most sectors of the New Zealand economy lack genuine competition, and are dominated by a couple (or small handful) of firms that find it far more profitable to milk their captive market of local consumers than to invest in the innovative new technology required to boost productivity. Keep that in mind the next time you hear PM Christopher Luxon banging on about New Zealand’s poor rates of productivity. It is his greedy donors, not the workforce, who are the core problem.

We see the results of this same inertia when health and safety regulations are tolerated only insofar as they do not impinge unduly on the corporate bottom line. The anti-regulatory template was set out in the Health and Safety in Employment Act of 1992, legislation that embedded the idea that health and safety should not be enforced by a labour inspectorate (which was promptly gutted) but delivered instead via voluntary compliance by employers.

That “light-handed” approach to workplace inspection and regulation led directly to the Pike River disaster. While fresh legislation was passed in 2015, the notion has endured that health, safety and labour compliance should be pursued only to the extent that’s deemed affordable, at shareholder discretion.

For example, last week, when the coalition government released its review of the rules governing the pay and conditions of migrant workers, it did so after extensive consultation with employer groups, but none whatsoever with unions. In the hierarchy of interests in the New Zealand workplace, there is no room for competition at the top. The short term interest of employers and shareholders sets the boundaries. Inevitably, the safety and wellbeing of New Zealand (and migrant) workers suffer as a consequence. Until that power imbalance is corrected, everything else is tinkering.

Labouring under an illusion

Last week, New Zealand signalled it will be allowing in an extra 1,250 migrant workers on top of the 19,500 already here – while also allowing local employers to pay them less and charge them more for their accommodation.

For the first two seasons these workers are employed, growers will no longer be required to pay them 10% above the minimum wage. Also, the existing cap on their rental accommodation on the job will be lifted, such that they can be charged an extra 15% or $15, whichever is the smaller amount.

Last week, the industry’s rationale for scrapping the 10% above the minimum wage rate was that the workers are unskilled, and need to be trained. The industry badly lacks consistency on this point. Back in mid-November 2020, the NZ Herald was sympathetically reporting the plight of growers in these terms: “A Northland farmer is seeing his crops go to waste because his expert and specialised workforce can't get into the country.” (My emphasis.) That same week, the Spinoff website struck a similar note when explaining why New Zealand’s own unemployed were not filling the job openings: “Too often billed as “unskilled,” crop picking is actually highly specialised work.”

In other words...when New Zealand horticulturalists and viticulturalists wanted to pressure the Ardern government to allow migrant workers from the Pacific into this country, they were stressing that such workers are “expert” and “skilled”- only to contradict that message now that they’re actually here. Last week – to repeat - the rationale for no longer paying them an hourly rate of 10% above the minimum wage, was that they’re so unskilled it takes two entire seasons before they’re up to scratch.

In general, that’s untrue. The statistical evidence indicates that many of these workers are already skilled. How do we know? As of 2023, of the 101,840 visas issued to seasonal workers from Pacific countries during the previous 15 years under the Recognised Seasonal Employee (RSE) scheme, those visas went to only 36,675 individuals. Clearly, many RSE workers are skilled returnees, and they deserve to be paid accordingly.

As mentioned, migrant workers facing the prospect of a reduced pay rate will now also be liable to pay more for their accommodation. Obviously, this means that many of them will have less left over to send back home to their families. Growers, no doubt, face rising costs - but some of those costs are about to be recouped from those least able to shoulder the burden.

We need to address this situation. As mentioned...as of 2023,there were 19,500 migrant labourers already in this country, and that figure is being targeted to double by 2028. Reportedly, a separate, specialised work visa is being introduced to meet labour shortages in areas like adventure tourism.

Migrant workers work in our fields, and help pick our crops. Under different visa categories, they care for our sick and aged. Clearly, the current government has little interest in mitigating the risk of exploitation. It has long been known that one of the prime sources of exploitation has been the system of bonding RSE workers to a single employer, such that they are trapped and cannot shift to a better employer and work situation.

In last week’s changes, some extra latitude now exists to retrain and regionally relocate – but only to different firms owned elsewhere by the same employer, and/or to premises co-owned by that employer. Again, the overriding interest in the change seems to be what will most benefit the employer, and not what will better safeguard the migrant worker from being exploited.

It shouldn’t be this difficult for New Zealand to do better. You’d think that if we can regularly punch above our weight on the world stage, surely we can afford to pay all of these workers 10% above the minimum wage.

On that same damn track

Casey Jones is the classic tale of workplace heroism, a railroad engineer who gave his life on a cold morning in 1900, in order to save his passengers. This 1935 revamp by Jesse James of the old tale adds some cynical twists. The grieving boy is told that he’ll get money from his daddy’s death, just as his newly well-dressed mother has done. No more “loose Mother Hubbard [gown] and stockinged feet” for her! Furthermore:

Now tell the truth mama is that a fact

Daddy got killed on the I.C.[Illinois Central] track?

Quit crying boy and don’t do that

You’ve got another daddy

On that same damn track...

For the record, that’s not how things were. Janie Brady Jones, the widow of the real Casey Jones never remarried and died in 1958 at the age of 92, having worn black almost every day for the rest of her life. She got $3,000 from the union’s life insurance policies, but received only $2,650 from the railroad company for her husband’s heroic death and for his years of faithful service, despite her having three small children to raise alone. Instead, the railroad report unjustly blamed Jones for the accident.

As for migrant labour...Like many of us, Woody Guthrie used to get angry about the stuff he heard on the radio, presented as if it were the natural order of things. One time, Guthrie heard on the news that a plane had crashed in California, killing all on board – but no worries, the newsreader had indicated, they were “just deportees” i.e. they had been migrant labourers being sent back home, after California’s picking season was over. James Talley was, like Guthrie, a native of Oklahoma:

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