Speech by NDU Retail Secretary Maxine Gay to the Council of Trade Unions' 'Unions and Productivity' conference, 18 March 2009
As a person touched by the socialist feminist movement in the 1970’s, there is one poster that comes to mind in terms of this meeting today. The poster has a picture of a worn out woman worker saying something like,” after you have spent the day causing inflation and unemployment, it’s hard to think of what to cook for dinner”.
Today, if you listen to the Business Round Table, the additional crime of being responsible for low productivity can also be added to the list.
The BRT’s contribution to the productivity debate is that the country’s low productivity can be completely blamed on an inflexible labour market and nothing else.
Fortunately, thanks to the CTU Workplace Productivity Education Programme, delegates from my union, the National Distribution Union, now have a much greater appreciation of what productivity is, why it is important and some ideas of what can be done in workplaces to increase it.
If Roger Kerr genuinely represents the views of the CEO’s of NZ’s biggest companies then NDU delegates know more about productivity than all those CEO’s combined.
Until the productivity courses that we ran together with the CTU, “productivity” was just one of those long words far removed from the day to day vocabulary of workers and union delegates. If we did hear the word used it was a euphemism for working harder, and longer. Our workers and delegates were inherently suspicious of the word and what it represented.
The productivity courses opened the eyes of delegates to what the word really means. Our delegates started to understand that productivity was not a dirty word and that better productivity is an essential element for better wages and conditions.
And as we discussed productivity it became very clear to where the blocks to productivity lay. We heard story after story about how workers views were not listened to by management on the job. How gains in productivity were not shared but were expropriated by the employer. There were of course some exceptions, and the fact that senior management from one of our biggest firms, Progressive, are here today shows that some progress is being made.
However, the overwhelming feedback of delegates taking their productivity ideas back to the shop floor was that there was little interest from most companies, who had not really moved on from the cost cutting low wage strategies of the 1980’s that the BRT is so enamoured of.
It has also been a salutary lesson for us that while we were discussing productivity major companies, such as The Warehouse, were embarking on the crudest form of worker exploitation under the name of Project Invigorate. Although they don’t call this a productivity programme, they will no doubt claim at the end that they have lifted productivity. And it certainly fits the BRT definition of productivity. Essentially Project Invigorate removes workers from sections of the store until the section can no longer function. It then adds a few hours back into that section and calls that the optimum staffing number. The hours of workers are radically changed and workers are bullied and cajoled into the new arrangements by a sophisticated psychological method of manufacturing consent. Those who don’t like it or simply can’t do the new hours leave. They are not replaced. We understand that The Warehouse is trying to eliminate over 600 of their 8,000 jobs through this method at a time when, because of their position in the market, sales are increasing.
So, while Stephen Tyndall is fêted as an employment guru at the job summit, The Warehouse eliminates 600 jobs.
And this brings me to my main concern about productivity over the next period.
As we sit here today discussing productivity, I feel that, to coin the old phrase, no-one is talking about the elephant in the room. The elephant in this case is the recession and the global economic crisis.
New Zealand workers are very concerned about jobs. Almost to a fault you will find NZ workers doing what they can to keep a workmate in a job. For those of us as unionists it is also pleasantly surprising to see a National Government placing employment and jobs at the top of its agenda. (A big change from the 1980’s and 90’s when cutting jobs received more praise than saving them. (“No gain without pain”)
But what does this mean for productivity? I would not be surprised to see productivity go down over this period because of the emphasis being put on keeping people employed. An emphasis that I support.
One part of our productivity seminars that delegates found most interesting was the plotting of where countries stood regarding productivity rates and hours worked. We leant that France was one of the most productive countries in the world and also had one of the lowest hours worked per capita. But we also learnt that France has one of the highest rates of unemployment.
Is that the sort of country we want to aspire to, many delegates asked.
And we also know that one of NZ’s major industries, tourism has inherent low productivity levels (and high employment levels) world wide.
Does that mean we should try and get out of tourism as a country? What would the Minister of Tourism think about that?
So, if we do work together and save jobs, continue to promote tourism and get through this recession, will we arrive at the other end and be told by the BRT and their mates that NZ productivity is even lower than ever, companies cannot afford to pay increases because of the low productivity and the only way that we can increase productivity and increase wages is for the country as a whole is to undertake a BRT led “project invigorate”, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs and creating a permanent underclass to enable those who are in work to be more productive and earn more?
For most people here, I don’t think that is the vision. Indeed I hope not. But these are real issues and real concerns if we are to become a more productive society but at the same time be a society that values full employment and that values the social cohesion that comes with that.
My socialist feminist forebears would probably tell me that such a society would have to be socialist. However, whatever we call it, I am interested in the debate of how we get there.
