A few extracts from my thesis:

within the first year of the ECA’s introduction New Zealand unions lost nearly 50 percent of their members (Danin 1997: 7). This provides fairly concrete evidence that the ECA was the primary cause of union collapse in the 1990s and not the ongoing shift from a manufacturing to service based economy. Indeed, by the time the ECA had been enacted the growth of the service sector had slowed considerably. For instance, the service sector’s total share of employment only increased from 65.6 percent to 65.8 percent from 1991 to 1996 respectively (Statistics New Zealand, 2005: 132). In addition, Maloney (1998) has estimated that 80 percent of the post 1991 union decline was caused by the ECA (Gorter and Poot 1999: 81).

As union membership remains optional, free-riding remains a problem under the ERA. The problem of free-riding involves an essential contradiction for unions operating in New Zealand. The more successful the bargaining is, the greater the ability to attract and retain new members, but also the greater the incentive to free-ride (Harbridge, et al., 2002: 3). This factor greatly limits the scope for growth in union density.

Also, widespread industrial action is extremely unlikely while the government chooses not to ratify the ILO’s Convention 87 (the right of workers to organise and bargain collectively). This would require the legalisation of secondary/sympathy strikes and striking outside the period of bargaining.
In sum, the lack of increased union bargaining power evident in the available figures regarding union density and number of strikes is reflective of a legal environment which has done little to change the balance of power between unions and employers since decade of the ECA.

Hope that provides some clarification.

Labour knew this, but they never did anything because they were too scared off a business backlash.

Apathy, our nations biggest scourge (behind NZF and ACT voters).

It would depend a lot on the industries. For example, manufacturing has been relatively hard hit by this recession and it is relatively highly unionised. On the other hand, the public service, police, doctors etc are highly unionised and they haven’t lost many jobs.

Retailing has very low unionisation and has lost a lot of jobs.

Collective bargaining will generally lead to better pay and conditions – and there are loads of statistical studies to show it. This is particularly true in countries such as the US and and NZ where collective bargaining coverage is the same as union density, meaning that the possibility for free-riding is limited – meaning that non-unionised workers don’t generally receive the benefits of collective bargaining.

You can read this paper if you’re not familiar with the literature:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2555186

Non union dealt to; union members safeguarded with professional advocacy, proper selection processes and redundancy compensation if jobs are actually lost.

It’s pretty much all down to what happened in the 1990s. Australia retained there awards system/centralised collective bargaining legislation and National got rid of ours. Consequently workers here negotiate pay and conditions on a weak and individual basis, where as Australians are generally covered by a collectively negotiated contract.

You don’t have to be a collectivist to know a good deal when you see one. Although, maybe it helps.

Oh, and [quote]or maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll try to get ahead by brown-nosng the boss like a house-slave.. always believing that one day you’ll be massa and someone will be kissing your arse.[/quote] WTF? I mean… really? Did you bring the rest of the 50′s with you in your time machine?

Edit: stupid quoting mechanisms, different everywhere.