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SMASH THE ACT!

LESSONS OF THE FIGTHT TO DEFEAT THEEMPLOYMENT CONTRRACTS BILL

Workers Power, New Zealand, 1991

INTRODUCTION: LEARN THE LESSONS OF DEFEAT!

Mayday 1991 will be remembered as a day of defeat for the working class. On a day when past victoriesof the labour movement are celebrated, the national government was passing into law an Act designedto destroy the gains won by the labour movement in over 100 years of struggle. In the preceding weeksworkers mobilised in a massive surge of popular protest against the Bill and government spending cuts.Despite the latest wave of militant demonstrations, rallies, stop works and illegal strikes since thedepression of the 1930s, by May 1 the struggle to smash the Bill had been demobilised and defused.Mayday 1991 will go down in history as a day of defeat, but not of the working class. Rather, a defeatcaused by the massive betrayal of the working class by the trade union bureaucracy.The passage of the Employment Contracts Act is a major victory for the Government in its offensiveagainst the working class. It is designed to deregulate the market, severely limit the power of unions,and allow employers a free hand in setting the terms of labour contracts. Its real purpose is to destroythe organised labour movement and with it the ability of workers to resist further attacks on jobs,wages, conditions and basic rights. It will further divide workers between the few who get collectiveagreements on the bosses’ terms, and the reset who will become exposed to the full force of thederegulated labour market.The Act will intensify conflict along race and gender lines and generate racist attacks on migrantworkers, and sexist attacks on women workers. If the effects of the Act are so destructive, and workerswere prepared to strike, why did the campaign to stop the Bill end in defeat? We must learn the lessonsof this defeat to avoid another defeat in the campaign to ‘Smash the Act’.

The main lesson to be learned is that the failure to understand the causes of the current crisis leadsto anti-worker ‘solutions’ being advocated by the CTU bureaucracy and the radical left. They see thecrisis as the result of the ‘wrong’ government or ‘wrong’ policy bring about an unfair distribution of resources – high profits at the expense of low wages.

The CTU bureaucrats attempt to ‘solve’ this crisis by calls for harmony between bosses and workers viacompacts, accords and wages agreements. The radical left, such as the Communist Party, think that thecrisis can be ‘solved’ in the interests of workers short of an all-out, indefinite general strike.Workers Power doesn’t see the crisis in these terms. We understand that the crisis is one of the capitalistsystem itself. It is a crisis of capitalist production which because of its severity will lead to all out classwar. We made it clear from the outset that the Bill was the spear-head of a concerted class-wide attack

being launched by the government on behalf of the ruling class to resolve the crisis at the expense of theworking class.

For Workers Power, such a class-wide attack must be met with an equally class wide response. Todecisively defeat the National Government’s legislation, it is necessary to mobilise the entireworking class in an immediate, indefinite general strike. In raising the demand for such a‘political’ general strike we explained the need for the rank-and-file to organise independently of the state, to prepare to defend itself from the full force of the state’s repressive apparatus, todefeat the government and to fight for a workers government committed to socialising capitalist property. Nothing less than an all out strike would defeat the Bill; anything less would lead to our defeat.

We were proven correct. The CTU campaign against the Bill was not to defeat the Bill but to change it –for the worse as it turned out – to retain the CTU bureaucrats ‘bargaining role’ at the expense of workers. On April 18, the CTU leadership massively betrayed the mounting pressure from many thousandsof unionists across the country for a General Strike, calling instead for a token ‘Day of Action’ on April30.The CTU leadership was ‘rewarded’ for this act of betrayal, but the changes that it wanted in the Bill.These changes gave recognition to unions to negotiate and handle dispute and grievance procedures onbehalf of workers,

but only if the employers agreed i.e. on the employers’ terms.

This ‘company unioncharter’ was a trade off for the CTU’s role in containing the upsurge of anti-government anger over theBill, and its promise to administer tame company unions under the Act!The ability of the CTU to keep its side of the bargain was aided by the role of the radical left in thelabour movement. He radical left has no understanding of what is necessary to defend the interests of workers in the current crisis. All it wants is to retain its influence over the labour movement as analternative ‘left’ bureaucracy. It confines itself to what it sees as ‘possible’ without challenging thecapitalist state, and limits the struggle to put pressure on parliament for the withdrawal of the Act. Inother words, it is prepared to ensure a solution to the crisis acceptable to the ruling class.Workers Power alone recognised the seriousness of the crisis, the life-and-death offensive beinglaunched on the working class, and responded with the correct strategy and tactics in calling for, andbuilding concretely, and immediate, indefinite general strike. We said what was

necessary

to smash theBill, not merely what the left bureaucrats and their hangers-on think is

possible

.Workers Power made it clear from the start that a general strike, if successful, would inevitably becomea

political general strike

, challenging the right of the National Government to rule on behalf of thebourgeoisie. We spelled out the tactics that were necessary for the working class to break from the sell-out bureaucracy and the radical left, to win rank-and-file control over strike action, to generalise it,defend it, and open the way for a Workers’ Government capable of resolving the crisis in the interests of the working class.In this pamphlet we give a detailed account of the lessons of the campaign against the Bill, and showhow our analysis of the crisis, government policy, and the role of the labour bureaucracy and the radicalleft, enabled us to advance a revolutionary strategy and tactics. We draw the conclusion that unless weare able to build a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class in the struggles ahead, wewill continue to suffer ever-worsening defeats at the hands of the ruling class and their agents in theworking class.

We call on all workers militants to learn the lessons of the campaign against the Bill. If you areprepared to take those lessons into the labour movement and fight an

all-out indefinite generalstrike now!

to smash the Act, defeat the National Government, and open the way for a Workers’Government and a Socialist Aotearoa, then join Workers Power!

THE CAPITALIST CRISIS

Workers’ Power sees the current crisis as a pre-revolutionary crisis. What we mean by this is that thecrisis is so serious for the future of capitalists in NZ that they must embark on an open class war to smashthe working class in order to survive. Because these attacks threaten the survival of the working class,spontaneous forms of resistance arise to meet them. However, without the leadership of a revolutionaryparty, this spontaneous upsurge will not develop into a revolutionary struggle, and the radical left willcontain the fightback so that the crisis is resolved in a counter-revolutionary way – the defeat of theworking class and the victory of the capitalist class.The crisis is therefore one of a struggle for survival, one class at the expense of the other. It is not as theradical left see it, the result of a ‘right-wing’ ideology of market forces and individual rights. Thisideology accompanies but is not the cause of the radical changes that must occur to restore profitability.Nor is the crisis the result of the ‘wrong’ government or the ‘wrong’ policies under the influence of foreign capital or the Treasury. The fundamental cause of the crisis is the capitalist system itself andgovernmental policies are simply attempts to counteract this cause.Workers Power argues that recent governments have acted as far as they could to overcome the causesof the crisis by ‘restructuring’ the economy. The most recent series of attacks from the NationalGovernment are a continuation of policies of governments since the mid 1970s, dictated by therequirements of international capital facing a growing world crisis. Because of the seriousness of theworld crisis, and NZ’s vulnerable position in the international economy, the National Government hasbeen forced to openly declare class war. This therefore means that the working class cannot resolve thecrisis in its favour by reforming the state. Our strategy must be the revolutionary

overthrow

of the stateand the replacement of the crisis-ridden capitalist system with a socialist society.To grasp this revolutionary perspective it is vital to understand the causes of crises. Capitalist crisis flowsfrom the inability of capitalism to overcome a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, capitalismmust develop the forces of production, including labour productivity, to make profits, but on the otherhand, it must destroy these same forces.In the capitalist economy, the productive working class alone produces wealth. The capitalist reaps theprofits by employing workers to work for a period in excess of that required to produce the value of theirwage (or what they need to live on). This excess labour-time produces surplus-value embodied in thevalue of commodities which is the source of capitalist profits.The most important factor determining the rate of profit is the rate of exploitation, not the wage level.The rate of exploitation is the amount of surplus value as a proportion of the value of the wage. Toincrease the rate of exploitation the capitalist relies mainly on increasing the productivity of labour,enabling workers to produce more commodities in the working day. More commodities produced in agiven time means they have less labour or value in them, and are generally cheaper. Because workersbuy these goods to live on, this lowers the value of the wage without necessarily reducing its realspending power (it will still buy the same amount of goods and services).But, to increase the rate of exploitation, the capitalist must invest more and more capital on machineswhich allow labour to be more productive. At the same time making labour more productive means

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