It is good to hear that Michael Wood, now E Tū and on the side of television workers, is seeking to ensure that labour law is properly applied to the current proposals for Newshub’s closure. It is a case of “walking the talk” by an ex-Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, soon, I hope, to be back in Parliament. It’s probably doing him few favours to say that I’ve always considered Michael to cleave to the politics on which Labour should be focused.
However, back to the Newshub closure and redundancies. The work by Paddy Gower, Michael Morrah and others in their search for a worker-derived alternative plan for Newshub is striking. This initiative, it seems, is not at present viable, yet it is to be praised.
Age allows me to recall a previous era of workers’ responses to closures, alternative economic strategies for sectors and country, and, to speak the unspeakable, prefigurative forms of socialism. These debates were front and centre in the later ‘70s and early ‘80s in the UK and elsewhere, as the neo-liberal world view came to pass. They were in time united in the idea of an Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), taken up later in New Zealand to an extent, which combined national and industry planning with a broader politics of transition and political mobilisation. A key component of the AES was a response to plant-level restructuring that demanded a strong and active worker voice in all key decisions, including those that led to closure proposals.
The idea of worker plans for companies and plants drew on a number of intellectual strands, but particularly the Labour Process debate, from which they took as an axiom the view that management’s right to arbitrary decision making was an ideological assumption at odds with the way work and responsibility were configured in production and workplace. Such decision-making took place in a “contested terrain” in which the forces of labour and capital confronted each other. Trades unions were but the major battalions of labour in this confrontation. The “contest” took place at multiple levels – individual, informal group, section, plant and industry levels. The idea of “workers’ voice” became popular.
Underpinning this challenge to managerial prerogatives was a fundamental question about liberal democracy. The right to contest managerial power in the workplace assumed a right to challenge the economic decision-making of Capital. This was always the missing element in liberal democracy.
Limited political voice was hard-won, in the form of the vote; economic voice was never ceded by Capital; collective bargaining, one form of economic democracy, had to be fought for over generations, and at such cost. And it is always a first-line issue when the Right is in power, in a way that suffrage is not. Arguably, the cost to Capital of political democracy may be borne more easily than that arising from economic democracy. Economic democracy speaks to the creation and distribution of wealth eloquently and, for Capital, unacceptably.
This brings me back to Newshub. I doubt if Paddy Gower and Mike Morrah et al. were thinking of worker plans, AESs and the like when they proposed an alternative package. But they were acting in concert with that tradition as expertise and knowledge within the workforce was brought to bear critically on management plans, and alternatives were canvassed. Braverman would have recognised it instantly!
Why is this important? The answer is simple. It speaks to the need for Labour to consider actively, not only tax changes and switches, but also economic democracy. If we are to reverse local shifts in wealth inequality that reflect global shifts, this can only be achieved by a combination of tax shifts, and a parallel, and in many ways, more challenging, focus on power in production and distribution.
It is more challenging for it speaks to property rights at the heart of market and neo-liberal thinking, an area into which the contemporary Left is fearful to tread. The form of that focus – in particular, what beyond collective bargaining is required – is another discussion. I am certain, however, that improved collective bargaining is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for successful economic democracy.
Nigel Haworth is a New Zealand economics academic and politician. He was president of the Association of University Staff from 2005 to 2008. He was President of the New Zealand Labour Party from 2015 – 2019.
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